I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find (quality) art in public and unexpected spaces.  Art has the power to transform the mundane into the magnificent with the right piece or installation.  I experienced this first hand while visiting the InterContinental Chicago O’Hare over the summer.  While visiting the hotel for a friend’s wedding (lovely!), I was quite impressed with the quality and quantity of art found all throughout the hotel – a massive, striking sky-blue painting behind the check-in desk, large canvases around every corner, intricate installations down the hallways, etc.  I’ve since learned a bit more about the hotel’s mission to support the visual arts, and their connection to local Chicago artists and galleries. 

The hotel features an “Art Museo” – a makeshift gallery concept set up throughout different walk-through areas of the hotel – viewable by hotel guests, or visitors strictly interested in seeing the art.  Most of the work is available for sale, and complimentary gallery tours are available upon request; though, I found it just as fun to wander by myself and admire all there was to see. 

On view now through the rest of the year is Elevate.  The exhibition explores how artists attribute, glorify, and elevate the everyday [think Rauschenberg’s newspaper screenprints and Tony Fitzpatrick’s alphabet series - both on view, among many more works and installations].  The exhibition features work from six of CGN’s River North neighbor galleries: Addington, Andrew Bae, Roy Boyd, Printworks, Schneider, and Zolla/Lieberman. 

“Elevate tells us how artists see value in things easily taken for granted.  They encourage us to stop, look, listen, and enjoy,” says Art Museo head curator Martha Schneider, of Schneider Gallery in Chicago.  “Their works remind us of the power, beauty, fragility, even turmoil of our world.  Often it is the simplest everyday places or objects that spark inspiration and contemplation.”

The InterContinental team is also gearing up for Chicago: Rich Source of Young Artists, an exciting new art program debuting this fall that will feature fresh work from recent or soon-to-be graduates from some of Chicago’s top fine arts schools.  Exhibitions will rotate quarterly and pair with various local schools including The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois, and Northwestern.  The first series will open to the public on September 16, and will feature mixed media work from eight artists from Columbia College.

The program is aimed at rewarding local, emerging, hand-picked artists while providing hometown support and exhibition opportunities.  Work from these up-and-coming artists will be displayed within the same gallery space that boasts iconic masterpieces from many world-renowned artists.  The Art Museo at ICO will also make scholarship contributions to the selected school’s art programs. 

Click here for more information on the InterContinental O’Hare, and stop by for a sampling of some of Chicago's rich visual arts.

The demolition of the last high-rise building at the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects (1230 N. Burling) on the city’s near-north side, which began earlier this week, continues with a poetic public light art installation titled Project Cabrini Green. 

The installation, conceived by artist/educator Jan Tichy, is a community-based project involving 134 LED lights (one for each apartment in the building) that flicker and are visible in the evenings.  Throughout the four-week demolition period, the lights will eventually be destroyed along the famous building that houses them.

This project has been in the works for months.  Brainstorming and collaborating with 20 students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Tichy held workshops with a number of different local youth programs including Cabrini Connections, Marwen, After School Matters Creative Writing Program at Gallery 37, and ThaBrigade Stamps – Cabrini Green Marching Band. 

For the past few months, the groups discussed public and light art, concepts of home, community and demolition; which resulted in an SAIC-developed computer program that translated sound to a system of light patterns used to express some of those ideas.  With the lights now in place in the vacant apartments, viewers can watch the illuminated spaces as the light bounces and flickers between floors and units.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is partnering with the project and will be projecting live-feed footage from the site, at street-level on the corner of Pearson and Mies Van der Rohe, so the video will be visible at night.  A voice/light-activated model of the building will also accompany the installation with text and audio from the students. 

For more information on this project and to see live footage of the site, visit: www.projectcabrinigreen.org.

Now showing at The School of the Art Institute’s (SAIC) Sullivan Galleries, is Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence.  Ray Yoshida (1930-2009, SAIC BFA 1953) was one of the most vital American artistic figures to emerge from the Midwest.  Curated by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey of Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago, this exhibition is the first to consider Yoshida’s work and the impact from the academic faculty community and from teaching at SAIC, while also placing it historically at the juncture of mid-century Chicago, which was a time of transition from expressionism to pop.

The exhibition is a retrospective of Yoshida's work featuring many pieces from the artist's estate and some rare works culled from a range of private and institutional collections. The show hangs chronologically and includes Yoshida's early comic collages of the late 1960s, abstractions of the 1970s, selections from his "bathrobe" period, as well as figurative works from the 1980s including Touch and Go, which lends its name to the show title.

The show highlights some significant influences on Yoshida including SAIC faculty Kathleen Blackshear and Paul Wieghardt; his SAIC colleagues Ted Halkin, Whitney Halstead, Miyoko Ito, Thomas Kapsalis and Evelyn Statsinger; his contemporaries William Copley, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, and Karl Wirsum; self-taught artists Martin Ramirez and Joseph Yoakum; and his SAIC students Mark Booth, Roger Brown, Brian Calvin, Sarah Canright, Jordan Davies, Ed Flood, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Richard Hull, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, William Schwedler, Rebecca Shore, Chris Ware, and Mary Lou Zelazny, among others.
In addition, the first collaboration between SAIC's Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies and the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Contemporary Art, will result in a concurrent presentation of Yoshida's work and will be on view in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing through May 8, 2011.

Yoshida's influence continues with an endowed scholarship: in 2006, he and his family established the Ray Yoshida Fine Arts Scholarship with the Hawaii Community Foundation. The annual merit scholarship supports Hawaiian students planning to attend SAIC and/or major in Fine Arts. Three Hawaiian students have already studied at SAIC with support from the scholarship.

Sullivan Galleries, where the Yoshida exhibition is mounted, is the largest gallery space devoted to contemporary art in Chicago’s Loop, filling 32,000 square feet on the seventh floor of Louis Sullivan’s design for the Carson Pirie Scott department store.  The building, a National Historic Landmark, was constructed in 1899 and stands on the block of State Street, between Monroe and Madison.  Additional SAIC galleries, school departments and administrative offices are located throughout the Loop, including Betty Rymer Gallery in SAIC’s Columbus Building.  Visit saic.edu/exhibitions for details and exhibition schedules.

This exhibition runs through February 12, 2011, and is supported in part by the Estate of Ray Yoshida, Ruth Horwich, Cleve Carney, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Ray Yoshida, Untitled, c. 1970, Oil on canvas, 46" x 40", Courtesy of the Estate of Ray Yoshida.

Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence installation photo by Sara Condo. Image courtesy School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence installation photo by Sara Condo. Image courtesy School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence installation photo by Sara Condo. Image courtesy School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Ray Yoshida, Touch and Go, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 38.5 x 50”. Photo courtesy of Karin Tappendorf by David M. Ward

Ray Yoshida, Undesirable Grouping, 1975. Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 46". Courtesy of the Estate of Ray Yoshida

Ray Yoshida, Untitled, c. 1995. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. Image courtesy of the Estate of Ray Yoshida