Courtesy of DCASE
“Librería Donceles” strongly states the warm, grandfatherly charm of literature
Gripping Art
“Present Standard” and “Librería Donceles” make the Cultural Center all touchy and feely
Author: Stephen Urchick
Luminous Beings
"The Weight of Rage" showcases the artistic life of men in Stateville prison
Devon Daniels Self Portrait
“The work that we do has to have a public presence because otherwise these voices would stay isolated.” (–Sarah Ross, program coordinator of PNAP)
Rotten Memory
Repairing a Nation brings historical trauma back to life
Courtesy of eta Creative Arts Foundation
“The mind is like a refrigerator: it keeps memories fresher, longer.”
Black Bittersweet Memories
A spoken word blues opera tells the lived experience of Richard Wright
Eliel Sherman Storey, Courtesy of Transition East Studio
“Be young, beautiful, and black, black, black!”
Onwards and Upwards
Project Onwards showcases its creative community of artists with disabilities
Stephen Urchick
The willingness of the artists to actively experiment and abundantly create flows from the community-building that the nonprofit enables.
Young at 75
The SSCAC’s 75th Anniversary exhibit highlights long histories, new practice
Stephen Urchick
“What might have once spoken to freshly-split timbers and a new picket fence is now a fixer-up.” [draft]
Troubled Recovery
Colm McCarthy’s “Killed” documents child casualties from the Irish Troubles
Courtesy of the Artist
“I wanted to bring them back, larger than life and in color, so that people could look at them, and know their names, and know what happened to them.”
Potted Plants, Public Parks
“(Provisional) Park” problematizes houseplants at the Co-Prosperity Sphere
Stephen Urchick
For artist Allyson Packer, there’s a lot more than soil in the pot of a houseplant. “I really like to think of them as little, tiny pieces of land,” she said, “that are kind of moving throughout the city.” Continue reading
The Body’s in the Background
“Migrant Files” leaves its mark at ACRE Projects in Pilsen
Stephen Urchick
By what right does someone exhibit a doormat as artwork? Billy McGuinness’s twelve-foot wide dirt-monument gets on the wall as part of “Migrant Files,” a three-artist—McGuinness, Jaxon Pallas, Austen Brown—show currently up at ACRE Projects in Pilsen, on the basis of a pretty good idea. McGuinness’s mat began as a strip of canvas—the same stuff you’d stretch into a painting. He laid it on the floor, just past the visitor’s door to Division XI of the Cook County Jail. It ended as an intricately anonymous record of human movement over time and a self-proclaimed (although decidedly tongue-in-cheek) “high-modernist object.” Continue reading
Fantasy Writ Large
Level Eater 5.0 teleports into the Co-Prosperity Sphere
Stephen Urchick
Curator Ed Marszewski grabbed me by the shoulder. “You have no idea how seriously these kids—,” he checked himself mid-sentence, nodding at the grey heads in the crowd, “these old men take this!” Continue reading