Chicago Artist’s Month (CAM) continues, and this weekend, on Saturday, October 13, Chicago Gallery News' Saturday Gallery Tours in River North and the West Loop will feature work by select Chicago artists on view in participating galleries.  On these tours, a gallery representative leads visitors to four art galleries in River North and the West Loop.  Tours are ongoing and happen all year round, but this Saturday’s tours are special CAM events.

The Jean Albano Gallery is leading the River North tour this Saturday, which will feature Chicago artist Gladys Nilsson’s vibrant, compositionally intricate watercolor paintings.  Visitors on this tour will also get the chance to visit the Roy Boyd gallery, which is currently hosting its 40^th anniversary exhibition.  Perimeter Gallery and Addington Gallery are also taking part in the River North tour.  To participate, meet at 750 N. Franklin Starbucks by 11am. 

Gladys Nilsson, Jumping, Jean Albano Gallery

 Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery will be leading the West Loop tour, which features “Palisades,” the gallery’s first solo exhibition for Los Angeles based contemporary painter Elisa Johns.  Johns’ oil paintings display a combination of abstract, dream-like landscapes and distorted figures, which fuse together as a narrative mechanism. 

Elisa Johns, Muses, Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery

The Chicago Artists Month featured artist Jeremiah Lee’s cigar box guitars are being exhibited at the Packer Schopf Gallery, another destination on the West Loop tour.  At 3pm there will be a music performance using the instruments from Lee’s show.  The Linda Warren Projects Gallery and Mars Gallery are also taking part in the West loop tour.  To participate, meet at 215 N. Aberdeen (Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery) by 1:30pm.  These tours are free, and no reservations are required.  For more information, including the tour schedules, visit Chicago Gallery Tours. 

But wait, there’s more!  This Saturday and Sunday from 11am-2pm at the Art Institute of Chicago, you can get interactive with the art at “The Artists Studio: Mini Model Sculptures.” Build a small-scale version of your favorite public sculpture, or design your own monument for your favorite spot in the city. This is a great activity for children and adults of all ages!  Visit their website for more information.  And if sculpture is your thing, there is also a Reception and Trolley Tour of Chicago’s Sculpture Exhibit on Sunday at 3pm that spans Lakeview, Lincoln Park and Wicker Park/Bucktown.  For details about this sculpture tour, click here.

Picasso, Maquette, Richard J. Daley Center

Michael Young, Looking Up, Chicago Sculpture Exhibit

The fall gallery season kicked off this past Friday, September 10, but since no one, and I mean no one, can get around to see everything in one night, there are still plenty of opportunities to revisit galleries this fall. I stopped into Roy Boyd Gallery to see the latest installation again for myself, without the crowds. The view in the empty gallery is stunning – Firat Erdim’s tall, raw wood pillars create a kind of contemporary, elemental forest. Setting off the entire installation are Mario Trejo’s sweeping layers of paper shingles in the back of the gallery. The installation seems unusual for the gallery, but what really is unusual is the continuation of the show in the gallery’s lower level, a space typically reserved as a showcase for other gallery artists.

Several of Trejo’s works also adorn the gallery’s front walls, exemplifying his technique of using thousands of tiny random marks to create mini-galaxies. Trejo completed a project a couple of years ago called “One Million” – it consisted of at least one million hand drawn, and counted, idiosyncratic circles.  The process took him two months of working all day from 6am-7pm; he said that after the first 100,000 circles, it got easier...

MARIO TREJO: New Work

FIRAT ERDIM: Sculpture and Drawings

Exhibition thru Oct 26th

Roy Boyd Gallery

739 North Wells, River North
Tel: 312-642-1606