By GINNY VAN ALYEA 

Happy new year and welcome to a new year of art. A round of openings take place this weekend, kicking off the winter art season for 2020 and spanning multiple neighborhoods. 

Much of the new work on view this weekend is very colorful, as well as a means to consider alternative perspectives of individual artists as well as canonical art history. 

Friday, January 10 and Saturday, January 11 both feature a number of openings taking place in galleries around the city, from West Town to River North, as well as Michigan Ave. and Hyde Park, as many spaces open solo as well as group shows to invite the art-loving public in to see what's new.  

Our overview of highlights from this coming weekend is below, and our full calendar may be viewed here.

See you in the galleries!

William Blake + Beth Foley: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

Opening Friday, January 10

Gallery Victor Armendariz

Perhaps inspired by presidential tweets, news headlines, and evidence of a growingly divided country, Foley finds diverse representatives of the American ideal.  

Also opening at the gallery the same night is  a show of Civil War focused paintings by William Blake.

Down By Line

Opening Friday, January 10

One After 909

Down by Line highlights the work of four Chicago-based artists with well-established practices independent of art world trends. While Tony Davis, Jason Lamantia, Paul Lamantia and Tom Torluemke create in many mediums, Down by Line focuses on their works on paper. The figure features prominently in this exhibition, which is subsequently rife with human interactions and expressions, exploring violence and conflict, as well as humor and social commentary.

Robyn O’Neil: The Tapestries

Opening Friday, January 10

Western Exhibitions

Robyn O’Neil, known for her epic magisterial drawings, will not be showing any drawings for her third show at Western Exhibitions. For the first time in a gallery, O’Neil will be presenting her tapestries, which she sometimes refers to as “yarn drawings.” The woven narratives are just as enigmatic as O’Neil’s drawings, if maybe just a little warmer. The Tapestries opens in Gallery 2, alongside the group show Female Trouble

TerraChroma

Opening Friday, January 10

Addington Gallery

This show explores various contemporary approaches to landscape painting juxtaposed in the same space with richly optical color-based abstraction. The result is an exhibition of bracing chromatic shifts, rich tactile surfaces, and deep enveloping spaces. Featuring the work of Kathleen Waterloo, Alicia LaChance, Joanne Mattera and many others. 

A.R. Ammons: Watercolors

Opening Thursday, January 9

Poetry Foundation

Well known as one of the most gifted and prolific poets of the modern era, A.R. (Archie Randolph) Ammons was also an abundant painter. A.R. Ammons: Watercolors focuses on Ammons’s abstract watercolors painted during 1977–1979, a time of intense productivity. The abstraction of these watercolors echo those found in Ammons’s poems and offer an expanded understanding of his art.

Gordon Parks: This Land is Your Land

Opening Friday, January 10

Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Focusing particularly on Parks’ images of African American youth, the exhibition This Land Is Your Land includes works from the 1940s to the 1960s, many of which are being shown for the first time.

Tentative Photo: Luther Konadu

Opening Friday, January 10

Filter Photo

Luther Konadu positions his work as one continuous documentary project centering on the way objective visual documentation ostensibly formulates public perception surrounding collective identities and historic record. Photography, with its attendant history, continues to be an evidential entity used to profile, classify, surveil, speculate, and “understand” different subjectivities and communities.

Margie Criner: Mind Over Matter

Opening Saturday, January 11

Bert Green Fine Art

Margie Criner makes intimate sculptures which contain miniature dioramas, viewable through a small window on one or more sides of the work. Her intention is to stimulate curiosity and discovery — opening up new worlds to anyone who is willing to look. At once charming, disarming, challenging and provocative, these sculptures make one work a little harder at looking, in an effort to make engagement with the artwork more satisfying.

Top image: Paul Lamantia, Tick-Tock, 2019, Drawing and acrylic on paper, 28.75 x 22.5 inches. Part of Down By Line at One After 909