Art & Dialogue: Chicago Summary by Naima J. Keith

11/8/18

There is a thriving artist community in Chicago, so I was thrilled when I was invited by Artadia to conduct studio visits with a few of the city’s most active practioners. This opportunity also allowed me to learn more about artists outside of the mission of my institution, which is focused on supporting artists of color living and work on the west coast. Since I often sit on juries, panels and recommend artists for awards, I am able to advocate for artists outside of providing an exhibition opportunity. This trip to Chicago helped me think of artists for these opportunities outside of my normal purview and expand the types of artists I may consider. While I loved meeting with all of the artists on the itinerary, below are a few highlights.

• Bernard Williams is a multimedia artist whose sculptural works explore American culture and consumption. For his car series, Williams recreates a wide variety of contemporary automobiles in plywood and paint. From racecars to electric cars, these striking works cast a critical lens on issues as diverse as corporate branding and environmental concerns. These motionless, powerless wooden cars often appear parked on the street or illuminated in store display windows, adjacent to the real cars they emulate.  
• Bethany Collins works at the intersection of race and language. Her thoughtful, often subversive pieces unfold on chalkboards, newspapers, books, and other channels of circulated text. One work presents a book with 100 different versions of a traditional American song whose lyrics shift in relation to the song’s cause. Other works play with a lack of words, erasing letters and sentences from transcribed texts and dictionaries or purposely blurring the letters to render these politicized messages illegible. Using innuendo, double entendre, and other modes of playing with language, Collins articulates important messages about history and contemporary society.
• LaMont Hamilton is a performance artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose provocative works examine the broad subject of blackness. His performances cull from history, where he invokes triggering language and loaded props such as rope. His pieces take cues from older artists and apply collaborative efforts, invoking ghosts as he probes the idea of truth. In his timely presentations, he brings important yet disturbing themes to the fore.
• Ian Weaver’s sculptures and drawings engage memory and fiction. He produces outlined maps of Chicago that depict the formerly African American “Black Bottom” section of the Near West Side of Chicago—a neighborhood that once stood but has since vanished. These maps are thus archival objects but at the same time futile tools to find that which has been lost. He delves further into the realm of the imagined with his knight pieces, works that reference a made-up group called the Black Knights which employ the signifiers of medieval nights and Black Nationalists from the 1940s. For Weaver, history and myth are interlaced in the present.

I concluded my trip with a conversation with Naomi Beckwith at the MCA Chicago, which was a real treat since we’ve been friends for years. We discussed our curatorial practice, current state of the contemporary art world and artists we’re working with for future exhibitions.

Naima J. Keith joined the California African American Museum (CAAM) in 2016 as the Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Programs to guide the curatorial and education departments as well as marketing and communications. During her tenure at CAAM, Naima has also curated Hank Willis Thomas: Black Righteous Space (2016), Genevieve Gaignard: Smell the Roses (2016) and Kenyatta Hinkle: The Evanesced (2017). Previously an Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2011-2016), her notable exhibitions include: Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street (2016), Artists in Residence 2014-2015 (2015), Samuel Levi Jones: Unbound (2015), Titus Kaphar (2014), Glenn Kaino (2014) and Robert Pruitt (2013), The Shadows Took Shape (co-curated with Zoe Whitley, 2013), Fore (co-curated with Lauren Haynes and Thomas J. Lax, 2012). Her historical survey, Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974 – 1989 (2014), traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA spring 2015 and was nominated in 2014 for a “Best Monographic Museum Show in New York” award by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA). Between 2008-2011, Naima worked as a Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, serving as the primary contact for the groundbreaking exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, organized by guest curator Kellie Jones. She has lectured at the Zoma Contemporary Art Center; Columbia University; The Museum of Modern Art; and Brooklyn Museum. Her essays have been featured in publications for The Studio Museum in Harlem, Hammer Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, LAXART, MoMA PS1, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Naima holds degrees from Spelman College and UCLA is a proud native of Los Angeles.

Art & Dialogue: Chicago Summary by Lauren Haynes

4/9/18

In my three days in Chicago, I saw a lot and went all over the city (and beyond). The eight artists I met with all work in different areas (some not even in Chicago), so there was a good amount of travel time and the whole experience was a whirlwind. I arrived in Chicago on Thursday, March 22 and immediately had a meeting with Rashayla Marie Brown. Brown was headed out of Chicago and doesn’t currently have a traditional studio in the city, so we met at a café at SAIC. We talked through some of the images on her website and projects that she’s working on right now. Brown also shared information about her most current project where she’ll be based in Atlanta and what she hopes to accomplish with it. It’s an intriguing project that I hope comes to fruition.

On Friday, Mach 23 my day started with a visit with Bernard Williams in his studio. Williams had some of his Bumper Sculptures displayed in his studio. We talked through some of his Car Sculptures and a few of his past public projects. His studio is also filled with his paintings, including his painting library project which we discussed briefly at the end of our visit. We spent a lot of time talking about a few upcoming public projects that Williams has on the books. Williams is working on a few projects for different neighborhoods in Chicago; extremely large-scale projects. I’m excited to see how these projects develop and if they lead to further outdoor commissions for Williams. My next Friday visit was with Joseph Grigley. Grigley was just arriving back in town after a trip and he shared information about his travels and we looked at images from a recent gallery exhibition as well as images of his White Noise project. Grigley also shared information about his Black Noise project and how he would like to see both White Noise and Black Noise eventually displayed together. After the visit with Grigley, I met with Ian Weaver. Weaver, who is currently based in South Bend, Indiana, came into Chicago so we could meet. Weaver and I talked about his interdisciplinary practice and much of our conversation centered on his Black Knights project. We also discussed the residency that Weaver will participate in this summer. My last meeting on Friday was with Arnold Kemp. Out of all the artists I met with during my time in Chicago, I know Kemp’s work the best as we overlapped in New York City and his work in the collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem (where I used to work). It was nice to have a chance to catch up and hear about how his time has been since moving to Chicago and taking the position of dean of graduate studies and professor in the department of Painting and Drawing. We also talked about a few recent and upcoming projects as well as ideas that are emerging. On Friday evening, I was able to attend a talk at the MCA Chicago between Naomi Beckwith and Hamza Walker around the MCA’s current exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen. It was a nice added bonus of the weekend.

My first studio visit on Saturday, March 24 was with Claire Pentecost. Pentecost has a studio at Mana Contemporary so we talked a bit about the space in addition to her upcoming project. Right now, Pentecost is focused on her upcoming exhibition, The Persistence of the Unsorted opening at the Garfield Park Conservatory on April 26. Pentecost is a 2017-2018 artist in residence at the Garfield Park Conservatory. I saw some of the works in progress and we talked about how it was all going to come together. My next visit was with Juan Angel Chavez. Chavez and I talked about some of his past installations. His studio is filled with the models from many of his projects, so although the large-scale versions no longer exist, I could see a version of the works in addition to images. We talked a lot about outdoor installations, permanence and some of the limits and freedoms that can exist when working outdoors. My last visit of the weekend was in Evanston, IL with Anne Wilson. Wilson gave me some background on a few past projects, but the majority of our conversation was around a new body of work that she’s thinking through right now. We talked about a few of her past performances and video works as well. We talked about the materials she uses in her works and her experience at SAIC with the Fiber and Material Studies program.

All in all, I really appreciated the opportunity to take part in Artadia’s Art & Dialogue. The artists I met with during the studio visits were all fantastic and really engaged in the process and they all shared a lot. With all the visits I did, I was interesting in understanding if the artists had dream projects that they hadn’t yet realized. For all of the artists, the answer was yes, but they were all working towards those dream projects. The talk at SAIC was also a highlight. The audience (mostly SAIC students) were extremely engaged and had really great questions. After the lecture, a few students expressed how much they would like to have a diverse group of curators and scholars give talks and engage with them. I feel like SAIC would be a great long-term partner for Artadia’s Art & Dialogue program in Chicago as Artadia manages to engage with diverse voices in a strong way. I look forward to hearing more from and about the artists I met with during my visits.

Lauren Haynes is Curator, Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Prior to joining Crystal Bridges in October 2016, Haynes was Associate Curator, Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem where she worked for close to a decade. Haynes is co-curator of the upcoming exhibition, The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art opening at Crystal Bridges in May 2018. Haynes has authored and co-authored several catalogues such as Alma Thomas, The Bearden Project, Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art and Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange. She has also lectured at venues around the United States including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Deutsche Bank and Texas State University, San Marcos. She is a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators and serves on the Nomination and Governance Committee. Haynes is a recipient of a 2016 Gold Rush Award from Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.

Art & Dialogue: Chicago Bad at Sports Interview with Elysia Borowy-Reeder and Ben Stone

8/5/16

Visiting curator Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Executive Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, joined Bad at Sports hosts Dana Bassett and Duncan Mackenzie for an interview with Awardee Ben Stone (2002 Chicago) during Art & Dialogue: Chicago earlier this year. The discussion touched on Stone’s Harry Caray balloon performance, his recent show at Western Exhibitions, and the role that humor plays in his work.

LISTEN HERE.

Art & Dialogue: Chicago Public Program with Elysia Borowy-Reeder

4/22/16

Presented as part of Artadia’s Art & Dialogue series, Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Executive Director at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit gave a Public Program at Rational Park co-hosted by Threewalls. Elysia’s talk centered on the innovative arts scene developing in Detroit and discussed how MOCAD has played a significant role in the development of Detroit as a highly regarded art city.

“The arts scene in Detroit has hit a turning point. For decades, the city seemed stuck with a reputation of being a post-industrial cultural wasteland. But in recent years, Detroit seems to have achieved a certain type of notoriety within the art world at large.” – Elysia Borowy-Reeder

Elysia Borowy-Reeder

As Executive Director of MOCAD, Elysia Borowy-Reeder plays an essential role in establishing the vision, goals, and strategic plans for the organization. Fulfilling MOCAD’s mission through close collaboration with key stakeholders, Borowy-Reeder tirelessly works to sustain the museum and to secure its permanent future in Detroit for generations to come.

Borowy-Reeder joined MOCAD as Executive Director in April of 2013. She is former Founding Director of CAM Raleigh and served in leadership positions at MCA Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Having curated over 40 exhibitions — most recently Rob Pruitt‘s Obama Paintings and Jose Lerma’s La Bella Crisis exhibitions for MOCAD — Borowy-Reeder will curate the largest exhibition of Sanford Biggers’ career in fall 2016. Elysia Borowy-Reeder holds two master degrees from MSU, was named a 2008 Getty Museum Leadership Fellow, and attended Yale School of Management and Antioch College.

Threewalls

Threewalls is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing Chicago’s cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice and discourse. Through a range of exhibition and public programs, including symposiums, lectures, performances and publications, Threewalls creates a locus of exchange between local, national and international contemporary art communities.

Learn more about Threewalls: www.three-walls.org

Photograph and video credits: Elysia Borowy-Reeder (Radically Yours in Detroit), March 24, 2016, Courtesy Threewalls and Artadia.

Art & Dialogue: Chicago Summary “Radically Yours In Detroit” by Elysia Borowy-Reeder

4/6/16

Image: Mobile Homestead in front of Mike Kelley’s Westland home, 2012. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Michigan State University alumna and Executive Director for Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). As Executive Director of MOCAD, Borowy-Reeder plays an essential role in establishing the vision, goals, and strategic plans for the organization. Fulfilling MOCAD’s mission through close collaboration with key stakeholders, Borowy-Reeder tirelessly works to sustain the museum and to secure its permanent future in Detroit for generations to come.

—

Radically Yours in Detroit

Radically Yours in Detroit

My talk for Artadia focused on the innovative arts scene in Detroit and how MOCAD has played a significant role in Detroit’s development as a highly regarded art city. As we head toward the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 riots—or rebellion, depending on who is telling the story—we can easily see the power of art firsthand as it revitalizes a place that has been impacted by decades of poor social mobility, corruption, and unfortunate economic choices. This is a special and unique time for MOCAD, which is about to celebrate its ten-year anniversary. We have adapted a new strategic plan that makes us both more solid and more radical in our programming efforts. MOCAD wants to lead culture and support cutting-edge work happening in Detroit. We have been called the most progressive museum in the United States.

Living and working in Detroit has dramatically changed my perspective on visual art and exhibition making, and I was fascinated to see so many elements of the scene in Chicago mirroring ours in various ways. When I visited Gaylen Gerber, a brilliant Chicago artist who was recently in the Whitney Biennial, I was finally able to ask a question I had been thinking over intensely: Can one take appropriation to such an extreme degree? Gerber will often paint a monochromatic layer over another artist’s work or an ethnic artifact, thereby confronting issues of authorship, collaboration, and perception. We agreed that he was raising important questions that go beyond modernist aesthetics. Ai Weiwei has likewise “appropriated” ancient work for his own art by painting on Han dynasty urns. Ai captures the industrial world’s disconnection from making—our loss of crafts, and even of basic respect for them—in ways that make me think about how Detroit’s industrial past might play out in the postindustrial present.

I am deeply interested in work that goes beyond the gallery system. Chicago’s Temporary Services is relevant in that respect. Its cofounders, Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer, are very engaging and very resourceful. They champion public projects that are ephemeral, and that operate outside of conventional or officially sanctioned categories of public expression. My question when visiting Marc’s living-room studio was: Is this art? (It is clear that the work operates outside the gallery system, but I no longer see that as necessarily a radical stance.) This question led to an animated discussion. There are several prison advocacy groups in both Chicago and Detroit because of their high incarnation rates, and Temporary Services has created several small publications on the topic of problem solving while serving time. The intent of Temporary Services more broadly is to support and encourage anyone who finds new ways of putting their art into the world, to increase the diversity of ideas out there, and to create challenging aesthetic experiences. This type of DIY attitude is likewise very central to Detroit’s artist community and has clear applications here.

The Chicago artist Juan Angel Chavez has a studio and gallery in front of his house. He is doing very interesting work that has meaning for the regional audience as well as a broader one. He also advocates for public sculpture. For its part, MOCAD has the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead. We consider it a public art piece that is also a domestic space in which Kelley both lived and created.

The arts scene in Detroit has hit a turning point. For decades the city seemed stuck with the label of “postindustrial cultural wasteland.” But in recent years, we seem to have achieved a certain notoriety and respect in the art world at large. Marred by decades of social immobility, Detroit has massive hurdles to confront. But it is not a cultural wasteland. From my perspective, the city’s worst-impacted years have created fertile ground for the development of entirely new artistic movements, from Cass Corridor to the birth of techno music to DIY artistic interventions. Chicago has many amazing artists, but the museums in Chicago do not champion their local talent. I believe that this is worth protesting. I hope that Chicago continues to support alternative spaces and champion the vital work happening there, as it will build in that city a greater sense of community and place.

Art & Dialogue: Chicago Summary from Tina Kukielski

9/17/15

In July of 2015 Tina Kukielski visited Chicago as an Art & Dialogue curator in residence. During her stay, Kukielski delivered a public program at Threewalls, and visited the studios of 10 Artadia Awardees. The following is an account of her stay.

Years before I would ever visit the grand city–as an adolescent–the vision of Chicago that I had in my head was one of the stockyards of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: blood oozing through the streets, toiling workers, and miserly slumlords. The image quickly vanished as we rolled up to the hipster hotel, the Acme on East Ohio, where I would be staying. Just a few blocks away was my favorite Chicago modernist landmark: the Marina City towers. There is something about those tubular corncob columns overlooking the sinewy Chicago river that screams of the utopian promise of a different jungle–the reinforced concrete jungle–signaled by postwar modernist architecture. Sinclair’s wasteland would be a distant past–at least from where I sat in the now stylish and commercialized River North.

Danny Orendorff, a curator at Threewalls, a non-profit exhibition space and residency focused on local artists, was my enthusiastic and gentle guide through the gridded city. We started north at the home-studio of artist John Neff, nestled in the tree-lined streets 30 blocks north of Wrigley Field. John, like a number of the artists I would see in their studios, had attended my talk at Threewalls the night before. This led to a series of illuminating conversations throughout the weekend about curatorial practice and exhibition methodology, and how to think para-institutionally. John was a formidable interlocutor and he shared with me some of his own curatorial and archival projects, many of which were based in pedagogical and collaborative models. In 2011, John resurrected the nearly lost archive of artist Robert Blanchon who had died in 1999 of AIDS-related causes, showing parts of Blanchon’s oeuvre alongside a body of his own photographs that echoed the elder artist’s ephemeral printing process.

John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon, 2011, installation views, Golden Gallery Inc.

As we stood making coffee in his kitchen, assemblages of found objects lined the walls floor to ceiling, a charming collection amassed during several years John spent moonlighting in thrift stores and salvage yards. I was reminded of the old idiom: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

John Neff’s apartment collection

This sentiment became a welcome thematic for the forgotten or overlooked, a position that seemed to recur throughout my itinerary, evident in Deb Sokolow‘s hilarious schematic drawings involving entertaining and twisting tales of conspiracy theories or her late uncle’s relationship to a young Lee Harvey Oswald.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 13. Oswald and Your Cousin Irving, 2013, acrylic, graphite, charcoal, tape, collage on paper mounted to three panels

And by different measures manifest too in Cecil McDonald Jr.‘s illuminating and inspiring collagist delves into the musical scores of early 20th century African American performers and musicians while working in a large studio in residence at the Chicago Cultural Center and Public Library in the heart of Chicago’s loop.

Cecil Mcdonald, Jr., Cuts and Beat, PhotoMontage, 2015, series, size varies , 2015

The impulse to retell a revisionist history was challenged further by artist Jason Lazarus’ own archival programs. His Too Hard to Keep photo blog designed as a kind of reliquary for once personal pictures now deemed too difficult to look at, or keep, would come up later in my summer when looking at photo blogs with some of my MFA students. THTK had reached a critical mass of followers and Jason had newly sent, hand-packaged submissions lying around the studio. There, in the developing Lower West Side a short cab ride from Shane Campbell’s gleaming new space on South Wabash, Lazarus was also in the process of finishing a work to be shown in the debut exhibition at SF MoMA’s grand reopening: a collection of photographs plucked from flea markets, but without their subjects evident nor exactly revealed.

Jason Lazarus, studio detail, 2015, research for installation of At Sea, to debut at SFMOMA, spring 2016

Instead the backs of the printed paper were turned toward the viewer, showing only hand-written captions in the beautiful script of another era. What the images were of, what they looked like, and from where they came would be left to our imagination.

All the driving around Chicago eventually made me carsick (my stomach is much weaker since moving back to New York), but Danny–my humble sherpa–dosed me with Dramamine and let me curl up in his backseat. I retreated back to my hotel to recover, found a snack next door at Eataly, and once rested made my way to the last gasp of the opening day celebrations of The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now at the MCA Chicago. There I ran into my friend, the critic and art historian Solveig Nelson and we too gabbed about the old and new, revisionist histories and our plans for the future.

– Tina Kukielski