GRAY Announces 60th Anniversary Exhibition

GRAY is pleased to announce GRAY at 60, an exhibition and accompanying book commemorating six decades since the gallery’s founding in 1963 by Richard Gray (1928-2018). Featuring works by sixty historical and living artists whose practices have been integral to the gallery’s vision GRAY at 60 presents the legacy and future of one of the United States’s longest running galleries. GRAY at 60 opens on Thursday, January 26 from 5-7 PM, at GRAY Chicago (2044 W. Carroll Ave.) and will be on view through March 11, 2023 before the exhibition travels to GRAY New York (1018 Madison Ave.), where it will be on view from March 31 through May 26, 2023.

GRAY at 60 pursues a single material—paper—across more than one hundred years of art history to survey the myriad ways in which artists use the medium as an index of touch and a surface for immediacy. The exhibition takes root in the gallery’s intertwined histories of presenting canonical artists alongside those reinventing the canon itself. As gallery principal Paul Gray notes, “From the beginning [of the gallery] there was the eclectic mission of acquiring, exhibiting, and dealing in the masters of the century’s first half such as Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Giacometti, and Gorky, combined with representing and exhibiting prominent mid-career artists of the time, Calder, de Kooning, Avery, and Morris Louis, as well as exhibitions for young and emerging artists like 26 year-old Bob Thompson whom the gallery presented in its inaugural show in 1963.”

Reflecting on this history, GRAY at 60 makes space for Modernist, Abstract Expressionist, Pop, Contemporary, and other expansive practices to be shown together. These transhistorical readings posit a logic for the works of Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman to hang alongside a tar paper work by Theaster Gates; for the colorful forms of Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler to enter into dialogue with McArthur Binion’s and Carrie Moyer’s; for Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to converse with Alex Katz and David Hockney; for a balance between the sculptors Alexander Calder, Jaume Plensa, and Torkwase Dyson’s impressions in two dimensions; and for Rashid Johnson’s figures to join those by Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Philip Guston.

In considering these conversions of art-making across time, GRAY at 60 finds the medium of paper a fitting ledger with which to trace the years past and those to come. 

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Art Encounter Receives NEA Grant

Art Encounter is pleased to announce they were approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to receive a Grants for Arts Projects award of $25,000.

This grant will support the expansion of ARTiculations, our in-school art and writing residency program for students in Chicago Public Schools. Art Encounter is honored to be chosen as one of the 1,251 Grants for Arts Projects awardees, totaling nearly $28.8 million in funding announced by the NEA as part of their first round of fiscal year 2023 grants. This will be Art Encounter’s first time receiving grant funding from the NEA.

Former Art Institute employee charged in $2 million embezzlement scheme

A former payroll manager for the Art Institute of Chicago has been indicted on federal charges alleging he embezzled more than $2 million in museum funds over a 12-year period by falsifying payments to employees.

Michael Maurello, 56, of Beach Park, was charged in an indictment made public Friday with two counts each of wire fraud and bank fraud. The more serious bank fraud charges carry a maximum of 30 years in prison if he is convicted.

Via Chicago Tribune