<html><head></head><body>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418403/m8nenqfaftvcnmdtmh4p.gif"><figcaption>Hull’s 2018 exhibition at Western Exhibitions featured his newer constructions alongside two-dimensional paintings</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEARichard Hull is not from Chicago, but his art distinctly is.Encouraged by a professor while attending the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1970s, he moved to Chicago in 1978 to study for his MFA at the School of the Art Institute. First drawn to the Imagists, a Chicago-based group of artists that had been active more than a decade before his arrival, Hull found his own niche quickly and enjoyed a string of good professional and artistic fortune before he even graduated from SAIC.Many artists have come to the city on their way elsewhere, but Hull stayed. “I’ve been here over 40 years now,” he says on a sunny afternoon seated in his new West Town studio. Asked what has kept him here for four decades, instead of just one, he explains, “I wasn’t going to come here but my teacher convinced me I had to. One of the reasons I stayed was because so many good things happened quickly for me, while I was still in school. Within one year I was busy selling paintings and showing with Phyllis Kind [Gallery]. I was not planning for anything like that.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418404/iat67gmrtdqdw2jaxlcv.gif"><figcaption>Hull keeps boxes filled with hundreds of Crayola crayons close by as he works on crayon drawings in his new studio</figcaption></figure>Hull considers himself fortunate that life was easy enough to keep afloat. At the time, “Things were going well, and it was kind of easy where I was living. It was cheap.” But there were other determining factors: the high-profile art dealer Phyllis Kind, who had a presence in Chicago as well as New York, admired the young artist’s work. Her art world connections led to interactions with people in other disciplines in Chicago, such as theater. Exposure to a broader cultural world of musicians, actors and writers nurtured something in Hull, and he was inspired. “It just sort of helped me,” Hull recalls, “You know, the art world is small here. You could get really ground down by it. I had access to a lot of other people and ideas.Hull almost ventured to New York in the early ‘80s, at Kind’s behest, since he was exhibiting as much there as he was in Chicago, but it was a dream never realized. “She thought it’d be good if I moved there, and I really thought about it for a while, but it just kind of slipped away. That’s what happens.”Hull’s artistic life could have advanced anywhere. “It’s funny,” he says, “I’ve been here a long time, so people think I really love Chicago, and there are things I do like, but I’m not in love with Chicago.”The art world can be its own strange universe, says Hull. “I don’t have any real complaints about Chicago, except the weather, maybe, but any complaints about the art world I won’t get into – it can be idiotic. But just leave if you really don’t like it, right?”When I ask if many of Hull’s peers in the ‘80s left for New York, he admits that a lot of people did, but certainly not everyone. Now he suspects that many artists hang around Chicago a few years longer before moving to New York. “Chicago is a lot easier. New York is hard now. Really hard. It wasn’t so hard before.”When asked by his own students, decades later, what’s the right move after graduate school, Hull says he would tell them, “Get all your shit, put it in your car and move to New York. Just go.” But he admits now he has reservations when giving such advice. “I really don’t like people leaving. I want to be around good people here, but the opportunity can be much greater there.”He confesses, “I even still think about leaving. Just because.”–<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418405/xobr9v1byl5wvtbeuy7g.gif"><figcaption>An older work by Hull from the 1980s (left) next to a newer painting (right)</figcaption></figure>It didn’t take 40 years for Chicago to make an impression on Hull. While in Kansas City, Hull says he was heavily influenced by west coast, Bay Area funk artists, such as William Wiley, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson and others teaching at [University of California] Davis, but when considering graduate school, he ultimately chose Chicago, largely because of the Hairy Who, a group of artists that had held a series of exhibitions while at SAIC in the 1960s, more than a decade before Hull arrived in 1978.“I didn’t know much about the Imagists,” Hull says, “What I’d seen, I liked, but it wasn’t as if I felt like I was going to be overwhelmingly influenced when I came to Chicago. I enjoyed the artwork, but I thought it was very different from mine. That was one of the draws – I respected the work a lot, but I didn’t feel the influence.”The colorful effects of the art produced by the Imagists did not fade; once Hull was in Chicago, he ended up exhibiting alongside members of the Hairy Who right away and reconsidering his own approach to painting.“I wasn’t trying to be like them,” says Hull, “But then after showing with them, and even owning some works, walking by a Karl Wirsum everyday will make you think differently about shapes and images. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Miyoko Ito&nbsp; – it sort of infiltrates your thinking.”Hull’s earliest work follows a linear, architectural structure, but the Imagist reverence for form, shape and color is unmistakeable now. There is three dimensionality even in Hull’s 2-D works. With so much time between his years alongside his Hairy Who peers and now, Hull says he thinks his work, particularly the pieces focused on loops that resemble expanding water balloons, is the most like the Imagists it’s ever been.Even though Hull got on with the Imagists quickly, he says he had a lot to learn technically, as well as aesthetically. He recalls, “When I was first showing things, I sold a work of art to someone, and I thought I was being really careful with my paintings – like really neat, and I didn’t have any brush marks. Then somebody hung it next to a Roger Brown, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s a fucking mess,’ because Roger’s work is so pristine. I realized that I was still pretty different from those guys just by that.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418406/e6txoh4lwfv7pwqmf5im.gif"><figcaption>Richard Hull, Dedication, 2018, oil and wax on linen, 78” H x 96” W</figcaption></figure>About a decade ago Hull once again referenced the Imagists when he began a series of works that call to mind abstract portraits, such as the busts depicted by Jim Nutt and Barbara Rossi. His mysterious figures, featuring facial outlines that emerge from the abstract in pieces and sometimes in profile, were a refutation of his reputation as an abstract painter. “People think that I’m an abstract painter and I don’t think I’m abstract in any way, if you think about the way paintings are made,” explains Hull. To him, there are also elements that are undeniably real.“I wrote a statement once (I hardly do it),” he says, “I just said, everything in these paintings is real – the paint, the materials, the shapes. They’re all real things.”Hull’s figures, while not realistic, are recognizable and deliberate. “It has to make sense to me,” he explains, “for the placement of shapes or where things go in terms of the way a head would be, or the way things are in the world, rather than just on a flat surface. I was moving towards a totally unrepresentative moment, and I wanted to pull back from that.”Building on the head paintings and drawings from a decade ago, 3-D structures continue to evolve as Hull has begun to explore sculptures and shapes in space.“I started those because I was doing the head shapes, and I was making a sort of a frame for them inside the painting. I think of them like mirrors, and I was having trouble every time I got to the end of the painting, so I would just leave the edges empty because I wanted to deal with the middle parts, the forms, and it would take me forever to get the right color and whatever activity would be happening around it, and I thought, ‘This is a pain in the ass. Maybe I should get rid of that.’ So I just cut the edges off the paintings.”Now Hull collaborates with a former student to put a drawing on medium-density fibreboard (MDF) in any shape he wants, and the cut off edges are no longer a creative end point.–<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418407/z4q384ifjcquma7sokbj.gif"><figcaption>Two recent works on MDF</figcaption></figure>Color is a consistently dominant element in Hull’s work, one that he persistently examines and adjusts. “My only color theory is you decide on a color to start with, and then you find a color that makes that better. It’s about the relationship to the color within the piece. If I add a violet next to a red, does that make the red better or does it distract from or make the red look bad? It’s color, next color. Color, next color. And I’m always kind of surprised how colorful my things are, because I never thought of myself as a very good colorist.”The colors in Hull’s paintings must have a mutually&nbsp; beneficial relationship, and the shapes, appearing over and over, layer upon layer, used in his work must be part of a harmonious composition. “It’s a kind of rhythm, really. And rhythms get interrupted. It might be my interest in music – that’s just a maybe. I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m making musical paintings.’ It’d be idiotic. No, you just get started on it, and it feels right.”Together these colorful figures, formed from repeating shapes, resemble elaborate, retro hairdos methodically constructed in a way that holds them together as well as presents a pleasing arrangement. Vibrant depictions of individual efforts to layer and shape transform the everyday into something remarkable.“I was thinking of them as hairdos more than anything really,” Hull notes, though he says it’s funny, because he’s definitely not all that fascinated with hair.–When I ask Hull what he is working on now, he points to a handful of works in progress, placed around the studio. He’s taken a break for a few weeks, as his new space has been built out, and now, in a suitably light, fresh workspace, he’s tinkering with some crayon drawings as well as finessing some underpainting, which he says he’d never done until a couple of years ago. “I put the colors under it on the canvas and then I paint color on top of it,” he explains. “It’s really gives another kind of vibrancy to the painting, and it’s related to the crayon drawing, where I put color down and it will scratch through.”Hull has used a variation of the technique going back to his older paintings, but it can be tedious. “I kind of hate doing it,” he admits, “because I’d rather be making the painting, not preparing the thing. But I haven’t been&nbsp; disciplined in doing that. Here [pointing to a work on the floor] if you get up close, you can see how the color comes through. So these are the things I’m working on now.”Though Hull says he has not been disciplined in the preparation of individual paintings, he is methodical in his experimentation overall. He says he’s considering creating more sculptures like the ones that were part of his 2018 exhibition, perhaps working on a much larger scale, though that could mean a piece that measures eight feet tall might weigh 150 lbs. Hull suspects it would just be too much, but it’s in the back of his mind.To get ready to install a solo booth with art dealer Scott Speh and his gallery, Western Exhibitions, at EXPO CHICAGO in September, Hull has been considering the various works he will exhibit, including many from the mid 1990s, juxtaposed with a few newer works, such as the crayon drawings. Despite having had a very busy year – his most recent show was at Western Exhibitions in April 2018, and he moved his home and his studio in 2019 – Hull emphasizes that, no matter what is going on, he is never one to turn down an opportunity.“That’s the advice I give my students. They say ‘How should I go about a career?’ And I say just be ready. Don’t ever tell anybody ‘No.’ They’re going to forget about you and move on.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418408/eiggb3ft6icuzqhjaxuk.gif"><figcaption>Hull’s west side studio is filled with materials and works in progress</figcaption></figure>Hull has been an adjunct professor of painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 15 years, typically with five graduate students every semester and around 30 undergraduates. While his students undoubtedly learn invaluable lessons from Hull if they listen, “Actually, he says, some of the good ones don’t, and they may be the best,” he emphasizes that education is a two way street.Is his wisdom today drastically different from what he would have dispensed more than a decade ago? “I don’t know if I’ve evolved that much,” he says.If the advice is constant, the artist is not. “Well, maybe I’ve just become more confident and able to talk now. I didn’t talk hardly at all before I started teaching. Now, I talk too much. That’s what teaching will do to you. It makes you organize your thoughts. It’s been good for me.”Hull says SAIC is an amazing place to teach. He’s long admired how much the faculty cares about students and how they are always assessing how to be helpful and supportive. The school has come to embody an ideal role in the art world, where students and teachers try and examine what others are working on and consciously be constructive, in order to continue to all push art to the next level. “It always feels good for all of us [at SAIC] when somebody does well, and a lot of people do.”Thinking about the professor who encouraged him to move to Chicago 40 years ago, Hull explains, “His name was Ron Slowinski. He had gone to school with [artist and mentor to the Imagists] Ray Yoshida in the ‘50s, and he was friends with [art critic] Dennis Adrian too, who ended up buying a couple of paintings of mine and introducing me to all kinds of people. Because of that I owe Ron a great deal for making me come here.”In a similar position now, Hull still resists the comparison to his old teacher, “I don’t think I’m quite as powerful as that,” he says. Considering what it means that someone took the time to care and give encouragement to him, and he’s now able to pass along the same gift to students now, Hull admits, “It is fun to try to help somebody. It’s really gratifying.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Richard Hull: Chicago's Lasting Impression on an Artist

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418595/jjzrqdooarhgave2dy3t.gif"><figcaption>Mariane Ibrahim. Photo: Philip Newton.</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEAThis past February word spread that another gallery would open in West Town later in the year. A continuation of the westward expansion, as it’s become known, in Chicago’s art community was not a surprise, but the news that a young, acclaimed gallery was moving to Chicago, after seven years based in Seattle, caught the attention of many in the city and well beyond.&nbsp;Known for her show-stopping booth installations at international art fairs, Mariane Ibrahim has brought her eponymous gallery, as well as her vision, to Chicago. The gallery opens its doors with a grand opening on September 20 during EXPO Art Week and the start of the third Chicago Architecture Biennial.When I walked by the gallery’s future home on North Paulina this summer, adjacent to Monique Meloche’s own still-new space, a battered front door gave no clues to the work being done behind the scenes, but a bright green plant and a posted black minimalist sign announced the gallery’s new location and hinted at the vibrancy of what is to come.CGN had the opportunity to ask Ibrahim a few questions in the midst of a busy move and renovation, while she prepares for an inaugural exhibition featuring new work by artist Ayana V. Jackson. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418596/zwdlmdqzjnartkfbhucu.gif"><figcaption>A work in progress as of July 2019.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;CGN: When did you first open your gallery? What led you to the art business?Mariane Ibrahim: The gallery was founded in 2012 in Pioneer Square, Seattle, where we launched a selection of renowned and emerging African descent artists.I was led to the art business because I noticed a lack of representation for emerging African artists, at that time, particularly in Seattle, but of course this was also true on a global scale. I launched the space with a vision to juxtapose a selection of diverse emerging artists.&nbsp;CGN: What drives the gallery’s program now? Many of your artists haven’t been widely exhibited yet.MI: Our program is driven by our commitment to our artists, and that is reinforced by our curatorial program, which is focused on furthering the development of rising artists such as Amoako Boafo and Clotilde Jiménez, whose work we displayed at EXPO CHICAGO in 2018 in a solo presentation, as well as Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, whose paintings we exhibited at Frieze this past spring. Artist Lina Iris Viktor will have her first institutional solo show in London this September, at the Autograph space.Over the years, we have worked to establish relationships with major institutions in the United States and Europe, and we are eager to continue developing opportunities for our represented artists, in addition to our global selection of art fairs where we exhibit annually. CGN: You’ve just moved your gallery from Seattle to Chicago. What are some of the biggest draws for making the move here?MI: Our decision to move the gallery to Chicago stemmed from our interest in the city’s diverse artistic community and creatives. All roads lead to Chicago. Chicago is a city rooted in its rich historical and cultural landscape, one whose authenticity is a rarity in the United States. As we continue to reflect our vision, to serve as a catalyst for our artists’ commentary on social, economic and racial disparities, we embrace societal factors present in all metropolitan cities, particularly in Chicago.&nbsp;CGN: Can you describe some of your biggest challenges as a dealer to date, as well as any successes?MI: The art market is unpredictable. There are various factors that intervene. As a gallerist, you constantly have to watch, research and adapt to every change. Our biggest challenges and biggest successes are intertwined in our risk taking. Every challenge is a learning experience, and success is an opportunity to re-assess. We deal with passion and commitment, independent of results.&nbsp;CGN: You are one of just a few Black female gallerists showing at an international level. Undoubtedly there is a high interest right now in art by African and African American artists, and by extension a young dealer who grew up in Africa. Can you talk about what that kind of scrutiny and expectation that creates for you?MI: Sadly, being one of the few is not comforting, but there were those before me, and there will be more. Karen Jenkins-Johnson has been operating for 20 years in the art world, and young gallerist Rakeb Sile from Addis Fine Art has taken her gallery to a global stage, while still operating in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.Diversity in the art world does not only apply to artists but to curators, gallerists, collectors, art critics and scholars as well. There is a growing interest in Black artists, however the choice for anyone to work with a dealer should not be defined by race, gender or religion. It must be a great fit and a mutually beneficial relationship. I certainly hope the artists we represent do not choose me for my ethnicity but because of the work I perform on their behalf. We highly serve the expectations of our artists.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418598/gs7pezjxqbyenobsrioq.gif"><figcaption>Ayana V. Jackson, Double Goddess ... A Sighting in the Abyss, 2019. Courtesy of Mariane IBrahim Gallery &nbsp;</figcaption></figure>CGN: What do you have planned to inaugurate the gallery in Chicago in September? What you will you show at EXPO?MI: To inaugurate our new space, we are pleased to present Take Me to the Water, a solo exhibition of never before seen, large scale new works works by Ayana V. Jackson. The exhibition presents a holistic survey of Jackson’s work to date, a culmination of varied discursive elements present in her career.For our second participation at EXPO, we will present a group exhibition. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418598/kqtjvssnkchedwombdpb.gif"><figcaption>Ayana V. Jackson, Sea Lion, 2019. Courtesy of Mariane IBrahim Gallery</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;CGN: What’s your favorite pursuit outside the art world?MI: I’ve always dreamed of becoming a florist. &nbsp;<a href="https://marianeibrahim.com/">Mariane Ibrahim Gallery </a>opens its inaugural exhibition on Friday, September 20, 2019 at 437 N. Paulina in West Town.&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Mariane Ibrahim: A West Coast Gallery Moves to Chicago For Its Authenticity

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417600/hwaxe6wde5skqnb6lmih.gif"><figcaption>Patrick Rouiller at work creatinga uniquely inspired mural panels to be installed in a client’s home.</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEAThe tradition of murals as public art is quite familiar, in fact going back to ancient times when people lived in caves instead of condos, but what might not be as well known is the modern murals that fill walls and spaces of private homes, at once telling personal stories and displaying unique art in one particular place. Residential murals make a very permanent statement and they also must work with spatial and architectural details, making a dramatic, one of a kind contribution to a home.&nbsp;Patrick Rouillier, a highly respected name in design–savy circles, got his start creating such murals almost 30 years ago, right after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His first full time employment was with a chicago lamp company, doing design and production and developing business skills. Though he learned a great deal, the job meant he was removed from relationships&nbsp; with clients, and he found the repetition of production painting unfulfilling. He resolved to seek work where each project would be important to the specific client.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417601/w2jev2epc9onzt7da2vq.gif"><figcaption>Sketches for a client's project must take into account the overall design and palette as well as any architectural elements.&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;It was studying scientific illustration at SAIC that fostered Rouillier’s critical eye for looking at objects as well as different periods and painting techniques. He learned to listen to what his professor, and eventually client, wanted to convey through the technical artistic outcome. “It provided me with an employable skill set from the beginning,” he says, “So I began working for and collaborating with designers and clients, listening and translating information objectively into the process of how the materials work, and then executing the artistic expression.”Beyond the meticulousness required to create personal, time consuming works that are often larger in scale and even executed on site, relationships are part of each project. “I enjoy sharing with the people I work with,” admits Rouillier, “comparing the techniques and the history of the materials, such as gilding, or explaining the steps in creating a painting.” He also savors what he says is the natural process of work and a certain amount of experimentation, or twisting a tradition’s technique.“I have been fortunate to be educated by the diverse influences of my peers and the people who have employed me over the years. I enjoy being challenged by those various relationships to consider a new way of looking at design or art I may have undervalued or been ignorant of. Every day is a chance to learn something new.”</body></html>

Patrick Rouillier: Creative Collaborator

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417520/uix5vltyjdipmgs8qmoz.gif"><figcaption>Lee and vicki caught the art bug in the 1980s when they needed something to go above their sofa. Today they have art over every piece of furniture and on every wall, including works by Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Andy Warhol, Hollis Sigler, Morgan Blair and Cindy Sherman</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAOne late February morning I found myself driving to a sleepy part of Chicago and realized how much it would be transformed soon, once baseball season started in a few weeks. I was on my way to visit collectors Lee Wesley and Vicki Granacki, where the classic graystone exterior of the couple’s Wrigleyville home similarly revealed no hint as to the creative energy that I would soon discover inside.I’d never met Vicki or Lee, but as soon as they welcomed me in, they seemed somehow familiar. Their home is first and foremost a place to live – as comfortable for the couple as well as the volume of art it contains. The antithesis of a stark white or glass cube, all angles and sharp edges, it’s distinctly old Chicago, framed inside by warm wood trim, lots of doorways and natural light. That this historic residence houses so much locally significant contemporary art makes perfect sense when I learn that Vicki runs a Chicago-based historic preservation firm, Granacki Historic Consultants, and she serves on the Emeritus Board of Landmarks Illinois and the Board of Directors of the Polish Museum of America. Lee is President of the Dr. Newton K. Wesley foundation Fund, continuing the legacy of his father’s pioneering work in contact lenses.A minute after passing through the front door and taking off my coat, I was sitting on the sofa, which is essentially where the couple’s art collecting journey began.&nbsp;It all started in the 1980s in a practical way, when the couple needed something to hang over their couch, which happened to be pink and velvet brocade. The pair had bought this distinctive piece of furniture in London at Harrod’s, the famous department store, and they had it shipped home to Chicago after their honeymoon.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417521/nk6hdrcyl2ctgoiekdvp.gif"><figcaption>Vicki still has a photo of the sofa that launched an art collection, pictured here with the couple's first purchase: Gladys Nilsson's Duplicate and Triplicate.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Vicki and Lee had long been interested in the Hairy Who –&nbsp; an artistic group formed in Chicago in the 1960s by graduates of the School of the Art Institute. Vicki says, “When our son was just over a year old we started hanging out in Chicago’s River North galleries on Saturday mornings. Our first purchase, in 1981 from Phyllis Kind Gallery, was a pinkish pastel watercolor, Duplicate and Triplicate by Gladys Nilsson, a member of the Hairy Who, whose mice-like figures could hold their own against our flowered suite.”More than 38 years and over 125 works of art later they’ve had plenty of time to carefully build a significant collection that includes other Hairy Who members and associates, such as Ray Yoshida, Don Baum, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, and Suellen Rocca. In addition, the collection includes pieces by Imagists such as Ed Paschke and Roger Brown, and Monster Roster member Seymour Rosofsky, not to mention dozens of other contemporary figurative artists – Phyllis Bramson, Joanne Carson, Robert Lostutter, Jim Lutes, and Hollis Sigler – who followed in their creative footsteps. To wander through Vicki and Lee’s home is to understand that their pursuit of art is serious and unending. Together they each have an eye for what may stand the test of time and trends.Vicki’s childhood was filled with art, in part because her father was a commercial as well as amateur artist – many of his personal watercolor landscapes are hung throughout the house. Similarly, Lee was inspired by his father, whose creativity saved himself from blindness when he invented the first commercially successful contact lens. Lee’s own research team extended that tradition with development of the soft lens. Once Vicki and Lee became parents, they worked to make art a part of their children’s lives through hands-on art projects for each developmental stage, until adulthood. Among the many works of art hung on the walls of their home, several by their son and daughter fit in nicely alongside pieces by famous artists.•<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417522/dqrgo3hmzzwslthiw3lw.gif"><figcaption>An eclectic mixture of two and three dimensional work from a range of periods is placed throughout Vicki and Lee’s main living areas. Featured here: &nbsp;two works by Phyllis Bramson: A Gender Bending Melodrama,&nbsp;(above the piano) and Lovemaking at the End of Springtime (female) (on pedestal), Yinka Shonibare’s Toy Painting 10, 2003 (above center), and Joanne Carson’s The Rope Trick Serenade (above sofa)</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;It’s not uncommmon for collectors, who may have been actively buying art for decades, to reach a natural stopping point. Vicki and Lee are not at that juncture. When we met just before March, they were preparing to head to New York to attend the spring art fairs, as they have for years. An important part of collecting for them is to continue to discover and support living artists.Lee shared a story of when they were last at The Art Show in 2017, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) at the Park Avenue Armory. It was there that they encountered the powerful works of artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, who happened to grow up in Chicago and was exhibiting with David Nolan Gallery. When the couple met the artist in the booth, they hit it off. As Lee remembers, “We just enjoyed being around him. And he has an incredible story to tell.” Lee recalled a backstory about Quinn, that after his mother Mary had died, he returned home from boarding school to the public housing apartment in Chicago where his family lived and found it empty. They had moved out while he was gone.According to Lee, “We didn’t buy a work in New York, but later we visited Rhona Hoffman Gallery here [in Chicago] for a show of Quinn’s work and when we walked in and saw each other, it was like we were old friends. When we told him we had not been able to get a work of his yet, he said he wanted us to have a cherished portrait of his mother that was hanging in the gallery.”Quinn’s narrative-driven portraits occupy a unique place on the art history timeline of Vicki and Lee’s collection, but they are also representative of the pair’s focus on contemporary figurative work that is rooted in Chicago’s artistic tradition.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417523/nx7amemy4mvymh6fdtbk.gif"><figcaption>Figurative paintings dominate Vicki and Lee’s collection. Highlights, often prime examples from an artist, span styles and decades and often reference art history. Pictured from left to right: Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Bring Yo Big Teeth Ass Here!, 2017; Jim Lutes, Dr. E. Victor (detail), 1989; Fabrizio Arrieta, 1947 (detail), 2018</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;The abundance of faces and figures throughout the couple’s home imbues each room with an energy that seems to come from not only on but also within the walls. Even in quiet moments, instead of solitude, it feels like action is happening somewhere; the collective energy made evident through color, complex narratives and examinations inspires a kind of continuous search for artistic themes and messages.Explains Vicki, “Although our Chicago collection is the strongest and most coherent, we’ve taken side trips into realism and pop art. Besides painting and drawing, there are sculptures and photography in the mix. But above all the theme remains figuration, from the real and recognizable to the stylized, illustrative, and even truly weird.”Lee adds that figurative art speaks volumes about that inspired spark found both in technology and art where human beings continually reinvent themselves.&nbsp;•Vicki and Lee frequent galleries, but as they strive to add to their collection they enjoy the hunt for rarer pieces, which are sometimes acquired at auction. The couple has maintained their interest in the Hairy Who ever since they first began buying art, but renewed interest nationally, most notably when the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an exhibition of the Hairy Who’s work in 2018, means increased competition for anything related to shows that took place during the 1960s. Yet sitting on a glass coffee table in the living room, next to a Don Baum house with a cutting board for a foundation, are the newest additions to the couple’s collection, won just last year at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers: a pair of comic books, and a flyer, published to accompany the first Hairy Who exhibitions held between 1966 and 1968, illustrated and autographed by member artist Karl Wirsum. There is also a cloth covered catalog, Who Chicago? An exhibition of contemporary Imagists, published in 1980 and packaged with an etching by Jim Nutt.Looking at this table filled with precious, temptingly touchable pieces of history and works of art, I asked if they had brought these objects out for me, or if they’re regularly so accessible. Vicki says, referring to their young grandchildren, who live locally and come over often, “We leave these out and encourage our grandchildren to touch the art. These are things they enjoy.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417525/a1lpiosfots6rohhpbcw.gif"><figcaption>Art in Vicki and Lee’s home is not off limits to anyone, even their grandchildren. Shown here: Hairy Who comic books signed by Karl Wirsum, one of Don Baum’s constructed houses, Kiki van Patton, 1988, and Keith Haring dominos and playing cards.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Despite having actively collected for so long Vicki and Lee have kept their passion mostly to themselves. Their daughter, Monica, married a man also passionate about art, and he has encouraged them to enjoy their collection through sharing it. The most significant step so far towards celebrating the assembling of these 125 plus works may is a private project to catalog each piece, noting relevant details on each work – artist, title, date, dimensions, acquisiton and so on – as well as artistic groupings. The resulting booklet, which continues to be updated and is sometimes brought along to art fairs and galleries, provides a tidy, personal summary of the works that comprise this unique collection.Before I ended my morning on the Northside, Vicki took me into one last room upstairs in their home, where, tucked away were items not officially part of the couple’s collection: watercolors, maps, and journals created by Vicki’s father, Leon Granacki, during his four years spent serving in the US Army 132nd Infantry Regiment in the South Pacific during WWII, from 1941–1945. Explains Vicki, “He rose from private to Master Sergeant, and while attached to the G-2 Intelligence Section, prepared original maps and target photos used by both ground and air troops.” Today she’s using her professional experience in historic preservation to capture and save what’s so beautiful and important about her father’s work. She says, “His small but historic contribution was to a cause larger than himself.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417526/mdsnot3sio3p7y2dxyhs.gif"><figcaption>One of the maps created by Vicki's father Leon Granacki while serving in the US Army in WWII</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;This effort, along with Lee’s work finding a home for his father’s collection of artifacts tracing the innovative history of contact lenses, also informs how they think about their art collection. Though Vicki and Lee have spent decades learning about, acquiring and living with art, ultimately they believe that they are just caretakers.&nbsp;“I’ve always thought especially about being a steward of the historic buildings that we live, work, and worship in," says Vicki. "They were built by our ancestors, and if we care for them kindly and properly, will be enjoyed by our descendants. That’s what my career in historic preservation was about. As part of our work we were always doing research – looking for maps, plans, sketches, photos and journals that identified who came before us and what they created. We would be so excited to find records kept by ordinary people of the world around them. I have this idea that someday someone else may be looking for something that I’ve taken care to collect and put in a public archive or museum and they will be just as excited to find my treasure.”&nbsp;Additional images from the collection:&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417527/axr3ehwzr3kejnna9810.gif"><figcaption>Watercolors by Leon Granacki</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417528/iorl1sywrhttanszv5vu.gif"><figcaption>Keys rest next to Outsider artist Mr Imagination's Siamese Head Portrait, Michael Nakoneczny's Untitled (baseball), and a Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417529/ssdwgik7e6bxdbhyq1wx.gif"><figcaption>Pepe Mar's Envy Headed, Mixed media collage sculpture in acrylic box; and Alison Zuckerman's Palatial Respite, 2018</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417530/btko5mogguyrmfqq3bp0.gif"><figcaption>Shown here, starting from the upper left by the door frame: &nbsp;Tony Oursler, Robert Lostutter; first row to right of door, descending: Joel Peter Witkin, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Seymour Rosofsky; second row, descending: Michael Nakoneczny, Ed Paschke, and Andy Warhol.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Stewards of Art and History: The Expansive Collection of Lee Wesley and Vicki Granacki

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418300/z5p5gsuvdvpowlxqgart.gif"><figcaption>Edra Soto, Open 24 Hours, 2018. Photo: James Prinz</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;By ALISON REILLYEdra Soto’s warmth, generosity, and kindness are apparent (and contagious). She speaks candidly about her work, her influences, and her upbringing in Cupey, Puerto Rico. Her motivations, her life experiences, and her perspectives push her audience to more closely examine their own neighborhoods, sidewalks, fences, and homes. In a contemporary art world that can often reject the participation of the audience, Soto takes the hands of her viewers and looks them in the eye. She acknowledges their bodies, their physical presence, and their memories. Her artistic and personal lives are bound together, which some might consider a great risk. However, her exceptional body of work demonstrates the opportunity for shared growth by revealing vulnerabilities. Below is an edited version of our recent conversation about her move to Chicago, her ongoing series GRAFT, and her upcoming projects. Chicago Gallery News: Can you tell me about how you grew up? Which part of Puerto Rico are you from?Edra Soto: I grew up in a middle class family in Cupey, Puerto Rico. Cupey is the biggest and most populated barrio in the metropolitan area of San Juan. Both my parents worked hard for my brother and me. My father worked for an insurance company and for the military through the air force. He traveled a lot. My mom stayed with us at home and did many jobs. She had a home nursery; she ran a commercial ceramic business with my dad at home; and she was a baker. She made amazing wedding, quinceañera, and birthday cakes. I have childhood memories of chewing hard sugar flowers and looking at my reflection in the immense mirrors she made by pouring sugar in order to create a fake pond. Perhaps that was the beginning of my appreciation for installation work.CGN: What did it feel like to move from Puerto Rico (via Paris) to Chicago?ES: I felt fortunate to have parents that had faith in me and who could help me make the move. But I also thought that I was not going to make it outside of Puerto Rico. I became a commercial artist very early in my life. During my last year at Escuela de Artes Plásticas&nbsp;de Puerto Rico I won a few awards at my bachelor’s graduation and sold out two shows at a commercial gallery in San Juan. My parents were impressed and motivated to help me transition into higher education.It took me awhile to get used to Chicago’s weather. I even did an installation, titled I Love Chicago Project, dedicated to my relationship with Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the weather. I created an alter ego in the form of a lion tamer to symbolically build self-empowerment. This was my first time bringing people together to activate a project. I invited artists I met at the school, my roommate, my boyfriend (now my husband), and whoever wanted to be a part of this project. I made posters to promote the events and opened my semi-private studio for visitors.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418301/nzejtkvkckblcrqklijw.gif"><figcaption>Portrait of the artist Edra Soto. Photo: Dan Sullivan</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;CGN: You mentioned your commercial success as an artist in Puerto Rico, but you have now moved away from the gallery/artist relationship model. How do you support yourself?ES: After grad school, I supported myself by working at a Chicago public school. Some years later, I worked at a charter school. I dedicated ten years of my life to teach high school. It was hard work, but I learned a lot from the experiences. I met wonderful students who brought great joy and pride to my life. After those ten years, I built enough confidence to teach at the college level. I’ve been a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the past five years and just recently started to teach an Introduction to Social Engagement course at the University of Illinois in Chicago. As my visibility as an artist increased, I started to get approached by colleges and universities to lecture and do exhibitions. These opportunities increased to the point where I could become a freelancer.CGN: Do you encourage other artists to follow your example?ES: Perhaps following my path is not even practical for me. I tend to live in the moment and my planning is mostly work-related, not life-related. My life works because my art works, and I try to keep that way. It is not a predictable or financially stable situation. At this precise moment I don’t feel great financial support, but I am creating projects that might bring financial support in the future. So, I’m still gambling.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418302/heuiotrjbba4qp49ml4k.gif"><figcaption>Edra Soto, GRAFT (detail), 2019.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;CGN: How has your experience as an art teacher in Chicago public schools shaped your practice as an artist?ES: Many of the methods and materials I used with my high school students became a part of my artistic practice. Structure doesn’t manifest naturally on me. When I’m telling a story, I have to make a conscious effort to keep it on track to build a natural progression. Becoming a high school teacher forced me to work with a type of structure that allowed me to keep order. To be an administrator, you have to be organized. It turns out that so much of the work I do, as an artist, is administrative. If I’m not efficient at keeping track of what needs to get done, I will miss deadlines, opportunities, and even relationships.CGN: What is your studio like?ES: My studio looks like a warehouse! My process is very embedded in my daily life. I’m less of a craftsperson and more of project manager, designer, and researcher.CGN: In 2017-2018 you presented Open 24 Hours at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). In an interview you stated, “Putting the bottles in other people’s hands is putting the responsibility of littering in their hands, which was my initial motivation for picking up the bottle.” Can you talk about your relationship with the viewer (or participant)? Why is it important for you to put the responsibility of littering in their hands and how does that relate to your motivations as an artist?ES: I consider the action of picking up garbage my civic duty. I learned this when I was in ninth grade. I forget a lot of things, but that lesson I never forget. A teacher took a group of students and me to a hallway and told us, “Even if it’s not your garbage, you pick it up, and place it in the trashcan.” The action of picking up garbage became a sign of education.This is the same model brought to life in Open 24 Hours. The work is about respect for the land, appreciation for the place you live, and the people living in it. Cleaning can become a conversation on values, from self-value, to value of a place, to others’ values.At the MCA, all the refuse that I collected in 2017 was on display to evidence what I witness daily. I designed a transactional procedure between the museum visitor and me. I created a contract that they had to sign if they wanted to acquire, or “adopt” as the museum described it, a glass bottle that I had found in my neighborhood, picked up, and cleaned. In the contract, I describe the bottle as “a piece of American history” to instigate intrigue in the meaning behind the bottles. The procedure was a strategy to elevate the desire and value of these objects. They taught me about a history that I was not aware of, so I couldn’t simply offer them for free. Through the procedure, I also asked people for their time. Perhaps time is one of the things we all value the most.CGN: You started your ongoing work GRAFT in 2013. What does the title mean?ES: GRAFT is an imaginary migration. Citing structures known as quiebrasoles and rejas found prominently in Puerto Rico, GRAFT physically interconnects existing architecture to a site-specific place while conceptually representing an imaginary transplant or migratory gesture.&nbsp;CGN: Do you keep an inventory of quiebrasoles and rejas patterns? Are the patterns in your work based on ones you have seen, or do you create new patterns?ES: I source all the patterns for GRAFT. My visits to Puerto Rico have been steadily increasing since my father passed in the summer of 2017. But I’ve been documenting quiebrasoles and rejas patterns for many years, even before I started the project.I used to make drawings of the patterns, but at the time I didn’t see great value in the gesture. Living a greater part of my life surrounded by these patterns makes me sensitive to the role they play in visual culture. Presenting them through architectural interventions becomes a way of reinstating them rather than reproducing them. The history that this project unveils explains why it is so easy to “borrow” their beauty without thinking about their greater cultural significance.CGN: Do the materials of quiebrasoles (concrete) and rejas (wrought iron) resonate with you?ES: The purpose of concrete and wrought iron to the casa criolla (common house) in the Caribbean was for protection and ventilation. These are familiar, raw, nostalgic, and even seductive materials to me, but I wouldn’t appropriate them and take them out of their original function and context.CGN: How does it feel to present GRAFT in different settings? For example, in 2013 you installed it at Terrain Exhibitions in Chicago and recently in 2018 at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami.ES: At both of these spaces the architectural interventions were remarkable in terms of visibility and audience responses. They both motivated creative thinking and negotiation of space. At Terrain it was the first architectural intervention I’ve made. At Untitled I took the opportunity to introduce photo documentation as a new element. I embedded small viewfinders in the circular spaces of the structure. By peering through the viewfinders, the audience is met with an image documenting my everyday life during visits to Puerto Rico. Photos of my childhood home, scenes from various neighborhoods, and destruction from Hurricane Maria are just some of the images viewers see. The act itself is akin to peering through the quiebrasoles and rejas surrounding a Puerto Rican home to glimpse the house behind the walls.CGN: Have you presented GRAFT in Puerto Rico?ES: Not as an architectural intervention; it would be redundant. At the Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, documentation of GRAFT was included as part of an exhibition titled Ida y Vuelta curated by Dr. Laura Bravo. I recently donated these prints to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico for their permanent collection.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418304/yfohbylnma9wwxevjohi.jpg"><figcaption>Edra Soto, Manual Graft, 2019. Architectural intervention at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. photo credit EG Schempf.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;CGN: For each iteration of GRAFT you include a literary component. Why is that important to you?ES: GRAFT allows me to expand the multidisciplinary aspects of the project and explore visibility by providing a format that can be disseminated beyond the gallery experience. The literary component creates an accessible history of Puerto Rican vernacular architecture. While quiebrasoles and rejas are popularly recognized in Puerto Rican’s visual culture, there is little exploration or research on the origin of these patterns. Contrary to the familiarity of colonial architecture, vernacular architecture has yet to be included as an exploratory subject in primary and secondary education in the Caribbean. Writers from disciplines of art history, art, architecture, and politics are invited to reflect on rejas in the contexts of their individual fields of expertise. The content is published in both English and Spanish and is available to the public.CGN: Some iterations of GRAFT include a shelter that resembles a bus stop. Why is this type of structure significant to you?ES: The elements of GRAFT are specific to each space, and sometimes I include a shelter, reminiscent of a bus stop, that serves as a bench for visitors to sit and read the accompanying publication. Bus shelters in Puerto Rico may be made of concrete, wood, and aluminum. I’ve seen a few made in concrete that integrate quiebrasoles in their design.CGN: What are your upcoming projects for this year?ES: Currently, my work is on view until June 2, 2019 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art as part of an exhibition curated by Risa Puleo titled Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly.Another group exhibition I’m part of, Art of the Neighborhood, is currently at the Willis Tower through the summer, curated by CNL Projects and Chicago Artists Coalition.I’m involved in three MacArthur Foundation cultural exchanges! One is currently at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan. The second, an exchange with Cuba, will have its Chicago presentation at the Smart Museum in summer 2019 and in Cuba in 2020. The third, an exchange with Brazil curated by Jordan Martins, will take place in 2020. A long overdue commission for the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line Western station is on its way as well.This summer I was invited to create work with a client from the Light &amp; Salt Coalition, a grassroots movement that mobilizes individuals and organizations to heal, educate, and empower youth and women in the fight against slavery. My donation will be auctioned at their summer gala.More information about and works by Edra Soto may be found at &nbsp;<a href="https://edrasoto.com/home.html">www.edrasoto.com</a>Publisher's note: In April 2019 Edra Soto was awarded the Illinois Arts Council Agency (IACA) 2019 Artist Fellowship Award. Non-matching Fellowships in fixed amounts of $15,000 are awarded to Illinois artists in recognition of their outstanding work and commitment within the arts.</body></html>

Artist Edra Soto: Mining Personal History to Create Artistic Engagement

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418009/gkj3qim8lppidhepkyvi.gif"></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAI’ve known artist Tony Fitzpatrick for about 10 years, and I usually see him in person to catch up over lunch somewhere or while taking a break at his studio on Western Ave.Recently my husband and I watched Tony on screen, where he portrays a formidable, brooding character, Jack Birdbath, who opens a surprising first scene of season 2 of Patriot, a quirky crime series on Amazon Prime. I know it is Tony in the scene before I even see him, because I can hear his low, tough guy voice struggling to explain a request to a French bank teller. In English he emphasizes that he needs a bunch of dimes. For what exactly, we find out soon enough.When I next saw Tony off screen, he explained to me that in his real (past) life, he had some first hand experience using dimes to defend himself, back when he had first had a gallery 30 years ago, called World Tattoo, in a dodgy area around 13th and Wabash in Chicago.After more than 30 years of making art, acting, and weathering a number of personal and professional challenges, at 60 years old Fitzpatrick says he is now blessed with a second act, and in part he has the City of Paris to thank for the gift of a new view and for the freedom to let things go.His current exhibition, The Absinthe Birds, on view at <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/organizations/the-dime">The Dime</a>, an artist incubator space Fitzpatrick founded, features vivid collages of birds threaded with poetry and inspired by the sights, history, and influences of Paris. The pulsating and hallucinogenic green from the show's title also is reminiscent of Chicago's own river at a certain time of year. While Fitzpatrick's roots are always in Chicago, his mind and soul took flight in his temporary Parisian home for a few months.&nbsp;Following is an edited transcript of our conversation from late 2018.&nbsp;Ginny Van Alyea: Were the dimes [in Patriot] your idea, or was that just the script?Tony Fitzpatrick: Well, I was carrying hard objects around in a tube sock just to walk home, back when I had World Tattoo at 13th and Wabash. GV: What was World Tattoo? TF: It was a gallery –&nbsp;6,000 square feet. And back in 1988/89, that was a pretty shit crack neighborhood. More than once would cars damn near run me over. So with the [tube] sock, I would take their fucking tail light out. Then they'd get out of the car, and I would be holding the sock and say, 'Come on.' They don't like to drive around.GV: 30 years later it’s pretty good material on TV. TF: I mean, I'm 60 years-old now, and I have a second act. [Patriot] has put me through almost five months in Paris. I got to take a good long look at one of the cradles of Surrealism and drink all of that in –&nbsp;take into my bones what the essence of that city was.GV: What has the influence of that stay been on your art?TF: This next body of work, The Absinthe Birds, is about love, and beauty, and sex, as well as fraudulence and failure, and the pursuit of the invisible. GV: The series that you're working on for 2019 – are those the works on the wall in your studio? TF: Those are for my book that will be out in May.The show [here at the Dime] opened on December 7 and features 20 of the 24 pieces that will be in the book. The poems are written in English, but what we're doing is working with somebody from Orleans, France to make sure that they flow in French. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418010/xfa2ar7w57n3oms9zsns.jpg"><figcaption>Works in progress for Fitzpatrick's exhibitions as well as a forthcoming book.</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;GV: I was just going to ask if you happened to be fluent in French. TF: I’m not. One of the hardest parts is making sure that everything reads right for sentences in French. When this show goes to Paris, I want the people of Paris to know, ‘I made this show for you. I love your city. It breathed new life in me as an artist.’GV: Your time in Paris affected you personally.TF: It got me away from Donald Trump's America for four silent months. I was able to shut out the noise, and that's been a big challenge for me – shutting out the grind and the filth of the absolute corrupt soul of what he has inculcated in this country. What he has awoken.GV: It's happening here, whether you’re at home or abroad. What was different about being in Paris? TF: I think I was able to take a very long view of how the way we live affects the rest of the world, and how frightening it is for other countries to see that this is a monkey driving a spaceship. This is a shaved ape. It's like they went to the zoo, found an albino gorilla, and they shaved it. Judging by what he says, they did not shave the smartest gorilla.GV: Were you in the left bank or right bank in Paris? TF: I was in the [The Place de la]&nbsp;République, right by Marianne, in the gut at the center of Paris. It's like being a poker player. You get to see the whole board –&nbsp;everybody you're playing with. I was amazed at the absolute participatory activism there was in Paris.GV: How did you find time in Paris to do your art at the same time you were filming for four months? TF: I did the ink work on a lot of [my collages]. Each one starts with a drawing. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418011/cpvzokzbtcn6ynpa2xuk.jpg"><figcaption>Tony Fitzpatrick, Sacre Coeur Pigeon, 2018</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;GV: Were you creating pieces there?TF: I had to do a lot of them in my room. I put more fucking ink stains on that carpet over there.But you know what? They love me. So I would say to the guy from housekeeping, ‘I fucked up. I dropped a spot of ink again. Here is a little etching. I'm so sorry.’&nbsp;The hotel framed up my etchings and put them in the lobby.GV: What was your day to day when you were there? TF: Work. We would go to set –&nbsp;it was all over Paris.We spent a couple of days shooting in Luxembourg Gardens, which I absolutely fell in love with. It's kind of a birder's paradise. A couple of times they had to come and get me. I’d wander off and be on a fucking nature walk. I saw kingfishers. I saw herons. I saw lapwings, which I've never seen. They're not over in America much. Plovers. Just incredible. GV: So it was a real refresh for you personally to go and be immersed in something else for so long. TF: When we came home, we'd also moved to a new house in East Humboldt Park. In fact, when we got to the airport, we had to call [my wife] Michelle and figure out where the hell we lived.&nbsp; So, yeah it was a refresh. It was nice.GV: What has changed for your artistic practice?TF: It also gave me some real perspective about going forward with my visual art career. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do anymore.I knew the night The Secret Birds opened at the De Paul Art Museum [in 2016] something would change. I looked around and my mom was so glad she was there. I thought to myself, ‘This is the last time this is ever going to happen. My mom got to see a big museum show. After this, I don't ever have to do this again.’Then I thought that way about doing gallery exhibitions too.What I'm really interested in now is making the work that I absolutely have to make and want to make. I don't give a fiddler's fuck if anybody buys it or not. I couldn't care less. But thankfully they do [buy it].GV: You’ve been doing more here at The Dime. TF: What we're building here, this room, it's kind of magical. It's not fancy. We have clamp lights. There's really no money to make this thing fancy, but people can come in here and they can look at art.Artists can sell art and they don't give up a dime, you know? This is an incubator. What we're building here isn't an art gallery. We're building a community. I keep telling all the other artists who show here, ‘The best asset that you have in the world is each other. Join together and support each other; act like a community and ignore the bullshit.’GV: Now there’s Jack Birdbath's scene with the dimes in Patriot, and here we are sitting in Chicago in The Dime. I've never asked where the name for this space came from. TF: It's an old circus trick. A Dime Museum –&nbsp;which was the original name, we thought –&nbsp;was where you paid at the circus to see the lady with the beard, or the seal boy, &nbsp;or the [vaudeville]. The freaks. GV: This is the freak show? TF: Not exactly. This was never supposed to be an open gallery. This was ... GV: Not really planned. TF: No. Not really. But we've given lots of artists their first show. It’s what I want to do.GV: You've tried to let go of a lot of things you used to worry about having to do. TF: You bet. Whenever I get an email or a query from an institution in an email, I don't even read that email. I just delete it. People who want to know where to find me? I don't give a shit. GV: It's interesting. You've had a long – TF: Career of being an asshole? Yeah!&nbsp; GV: I was going to say acting career. You've been on screen and on stage quite a bit. With two seasons of Patriot done, are you going to try to keep balancing film and art? &nbsp; TF: Patriot didn't stop me from making art. I just figured, ‘Okay, this is what’s going on now.’ My assistant Yulia&nbsp;[Kuznetsova] was here [at the studio] while I was away. When I came home, I had a bunch of works on paper started, and a lot of them became the Absinthe Birds. I just kept moving, you know? In large part we can also do that because my work's portable. GV: I'm still picturing ink on the carpet and how you and Max hauled up all of your crap up the Metro stairs. Did you just bring cases of paper, and materials, and ink? TF: I just did a lot of drawing – the paper and stuff I found there. Also, I found out half of the members of our [film] crew were artists. They pointed me around to stuff. There are good art supply stores of course. Plus I did some garbage digging. I’m sure they said, ‘Who's that large man digging through the French garbage? Why, that's Tony.’ GV: Did you get a sense of what the art scene is like in Paris? TF: Pretty cool. Street art is huge. I met a bunch of those people. We will get some of them here next year. Our show [at The Dime] on the 9th of February is an amazing husband and wife team: a Brazilian guy, Caetano Azevedo, who has lived in Paris for the last 30 years, and his wife Liza Moura, who's a French photographer. Together they have been following the refugee encampments in Paris.GV: Back to Patriot, I want to know more about the evolution of Jack Birdbath. You came up with the idea for the dimes in season two. Did you have more to do with his dialogue and character?&nbsp;TF: I think Steven Conrad obviously wrote the character with me in mind. We shot the pilot in 2015. When we went to series, when I saw the writing on the scripts for season one, I went, ‘Oh shit. They're not going to let me do this. They're going to give this to named actor.’ I knew it was a really good part. Those guys hung in there and dug in for me and said, ‘You are who we want to do it.’Everyone in the cast –&nbsp;Gil Bellows, Terry O'Quinn, Debra Winger, Mike Dorman, Michael Chernus – they're all so goddamn good. I mean I've always been a lousy employee. But I skip to work every day for Patriot. I couldn't wait to get there. I couldn't wait to be part of that mix.It was joyful, you know?Well, it's Paris. There isn't a goddamn thing wrong with Paris. I really fucking loved Paris.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="media"><oembed url="https://youtu.be/kD24ytD3O0Q"></oembed></figure>&nbsp;</body></html>

Tony Fitzpatrick on Paris and the Absinthe Birds

Tony Fitzpatrick's Second Act

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417849/oxndky8k8ysxc18xxnwy.gif"></figure>Hometown: Chicago &nbsp;Previous occupation:&nbsp;Grammar School &amp; Art Teacher &nbsp;FavoritesRestaurant: Fred’s CafeArt supply store:&nbsp;Blick &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sweater or Hoodie? HoodieCoffee or tea? Coffee&nbsp;Tell us a little about your training?BA (1968) from SAIC, painting and MFA from Northern (1978), photography. Both were worth doing.&nbsp; SAIC for the experiences and art introductions and the MFA was required for job applications.SAIC introduced me to the art world.&nbsp;There were many opportunities for experimentation in the classroom with equipment and teachers with knowledge on what was happening in the contemporary art scene at that time. The students were interesting to meet up with and from many different interesting backgrounds open to sharing ideas and techniques freely.Most of my present friends I met while I was a student: Barbara Grad, Miclelle Stone, Katheryn Kucera, Margaret Lanterman, Kieth Morrison, Johnny Shek, Mary Baber, Christine O’Connor, James Mesple, Eleanor Ferris, Ken Bowman, Linda Kramer.I joined Artemisia and that helped me to further my art education and broaden my views.I grew up in a hard working European family.&nbsp; Although my parents were unable to receive an education, they always valued learning. I was exposed to literature, music including the symphony and opera groups in Chicago.I was sent to Northwestern at 16 years old to be a math major.&nbsp; After two years I decided I did not want to continue studying. I left home at 18 and went to New Orleans. I loved the blues. Later on I enrolled at Chicago teachers college, knowing that I needed to earn a living and would not overstay for I always kept my commitments. I came back to Chicago at the beginning of classes for the summer session.&nbsp;What art has been particularly meaningful in your life?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Charcoal, oil paint, oil sticks, photography and photo transfer.<figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417850/owogmqbordsafg9mqack.jpg"><figcaption>Portugal - Small Village, 18" x 20", oil on canvas</figcaption></figure>What was the first work of art to make a lasting impression on you?&nbsp;The Scream - although this may not have been the first work of art in my life, it did strike an early interest.&nbsp;Describe your studio.I need to start with cleared space or I feel like there are too many thoughts and ideas going through my head.&nbsp; I use my paints sparingly, trying not to waste. I need my radio or books on tape connections.&nbsp;How do you know when a piece is finished?&nbsp;When it looks visually complete to me and conveys the idea that I want it to relay.&nbsp;Any tricks for getting past a creative block?&nbsp;I try doing a still life or scene from my photos that I find interesting.&nbsp; Visit some art galleries or museums in town or connect with fellow artists and talk.&nbsp;You have three minutes in an art store to take whatever you want, what do you grab?&nbsp;A new set of GOOD paints and brushes (but there also would have been different choices at different times in my life).&nbsp;What&nbsp;should we expect to see from you next? &nbsp;Influences of street art in society and its connections to the areas found in and created.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.jacquelinemoses.com/">http://www.jacquelinemoses.com/</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417851/oq9azncfl7rhz1gr1wex.png"><figcaption>Movements in the 21st Century, 36" x 48", oil on canvas</figcaption></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417852/l7nc6dtpxxym7lilibjj.jpg"><figcaption>Portugal Wildfires #2, 32" x 48", oil on canvas</figcaption></figure></body></html>

Artist Insights: Jacqueline Moses

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417829/rxtsij1henqzfkifsir2.jpg"></figure>By CGN StaffFollowing a busy end-of-year crammed with deadlines and to-dos, we are pleased to be getting back to sharing news and features with CGN readers as we await the arrival of our 2019 CGN Arts Guide in the coming days.&nbsp;First up is the return of the Artist Insights series, in which we ask various artists &nbsp;a set of questions about their practice as well as local favorites. We recently spoke with James Mesplé, a charming figure in the Chicago art community, who has been a regular visitor to the CGN office for years, always taking time to stop in and share his own book, film and art show recommendations with us.&nbsp;Mesplé’s vibrant work features signature imagery that links to the past through figures from history and literature. &nbsp;Mesplé studied painting at the University of Missouri, and after graduation he moved to Chicago in 1968 and eventually graduated with honors from Northeastern Illinois University in 1970. He has taught art at various Chicago institutions over the years, including Francis W. Parker School, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.&nbsp;Mesplé lives and works in Chicago. His most recent show from November 2018, Arcadia, was the final exhibition to take place at Printworks Gallery. He also shows his art at Jackson Junge Gallery in Wicker Park.&nbsp;&nbsp;Tell us a little about your hometown? &nbsp;I come from the Missouri Ozarks, from a small town called Nevada near Neosho and Joplin Missouri.&nbsp;It's in the southwest part of the state where Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas meet.&nbsp;Previous occupations?&nbsp;&nbsp;My first job was a summer job with the Chicago Tribune, which was followed by ten years of teaching art at the Francis Parker School in Lincoln Park. And then at the Studios of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I also conducted various workshops in watercolor and egg tempera at the Oxbow Artists’ Retreat in Michigan, as well as at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.&nbsp;&nbsp;Favorite spot to spend time in the city.&nbsp;&nbsp;A toss-up between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum&nbsp;Preferred art store.&nbsp;&nbsp;Artist and Craftsman Supply on South Wabash and Blick Art Materials on North Avenue. (I need both, since Pearl Art &amp; Craft Supplies left River North years ago.)&nbsp;Favorite Music?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I play woodwinds, so I often take a break from painting and pick up my flute to play Vivaldi, or if I want a longer break, I soak a reed and play Mozart or Beethoven on bassoon, etc.&nbsp; But while I’m working on a painting, I listen to classical music.&nbsp;In the summer, l like the free concerts at Millennium Park with the symphony or I go listen to the free string quartet at the Cultural Center.&nbsp;&nbsp;Coffee or tea?&nbsp;&nbsp;Coffee during the day, but at night, herbal tea – especially if I have detailed work to do and need control; chamomile tea is calming and makes the hand steady.&nbsp;&nbsp;Tell us a little about your training?I studied both music and art at the University of Missouri for two years (bassoon and painting).&nbsp; I transferred to Northeastern Illinois (Chicago) and finished my undergraduate degree there. I began teaching art at Francis Parker and attended SAIC at the same time, receiving a continuing education certificate while making my own art on weekends and having exhibitions of my art in theater lobbies, or wherever I could show it.&nbsp;What art has been particularly meaningful in your life?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I have done printmaking, ceramic sculpture, and even jewelry making, but my first love has always been painting.&nbsp;Trips to Europe to see the world’s great collections of paintings were something I worked hard to make happen over and over.&nbsp; It was really a continuing part of my education. A painter must see paintings to learn from them. Trips to Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Great Britain are a must for a painter – or get to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington if you can’t go to Europe.&nbsp;&nbsp;What was the first work of art to make a lasting impression on you?&nbsp;I attended Benton Grade School in Nevada, MO.&nbsp; In the front hall of the school was a large color reproduction of Thomas Hart Benton’s painting in the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. I passed it every day from first through sixth grade.&nbsp; My high school art class went on an all-day trip to see the Truman Library, and this is when I learned that the 36-inch color reproduction in Benton Grade School was nothing like the massive wall mural Benton had painted in the library. This was a revelation.&nbsp;Years later, at the University of Missouri, I got to meet Thomas Hart Benton and was exposed for the first time to the technique 'mixed' (which combines egg tempera and oil).&nbsp;Whenever I visit my sister, who lives in Independence, I try to visit his mural. Even after seeing many of the major art museums in Europe, the mural still fascinates me.&nbsp;Describe your studio.There are several easels, because I work on several paintings at the same time. I have a north light, a table to mix or grind pigments, a life-sized copy of Venus de Milo for inspiration, and a cabinet for my paints.&nbsp;&nbsp;How do you know when a piece is finished?&nbsp;I know it’s finished when it says to me “I’m alive.”&nbsp; If a work doesn’t sell right away, I often keep refining it, sometimes for years.&nbsp; I have also experienced seeing my sold works in someone’s home years later and I would have changed some small thing – unfortunately then it is no longer possible.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Any tricks for getting past a creative block?&nbsp;I’ve never had a creative block.&nbsp; If I did, I would immediately consult my sketch books, which have hundreds and hundreds of sketches with my “ideas” that I will never have enough time to develop into a painting.&nbsp; To do them all would take a dozen lifetimes.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You have three minutes in an art store to take whatever you want, what do you grab?&nbsp;I would take a tube of genuine vermilion paint or a fine sable brush (which wouldn’t work well for me, because art stores keep both items locked up!)&nbsp;&nbsp;What&nbsp;should we expect to see from you next? &nbsp;After finishing Arcadia at Printworks Gallery, which was an exhibition of small works on paper, I am looking forward to working on a new series of large paintings on canvas and panel.&nbsp;They will continue my interest in Contemporary Classics and the world of mythology.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417829/i4pmfo7gsi0bumo4nbez.jpg"><figcaption>James Mesple, Pan's Garden: The Five Senses, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in, 2017</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417830/hwwahu0670rnwlikaj31.jpg"><figcaption>Mesple's recent exhibition, Arcadia, at Printworks Gallery in River North, November 2018</figcaption></figure></body></html>

Artist Insights: James Mesple

The fall art season in Chicago, and around the world, is underway, and as we close in on the end of September, we are especially looking forward to EXPO CHICAGO, once again at Navy Pier for its 7th edition. Once the hot new fair when it launched in 2012, EXPO has grown up, expanding its international gallery roster as well as its expansive and increasingly important public and professional arts programming.&nbsp;CGN will be covering several aspects of the fair in the coming weeks, but while we're all running around trying to prepare for this year's art frenzy, we wanted to check in with&nbsp;the man beind the green curtain, the great and powerful Oz (AKA Tony Karman), about what's new and how he does it all year after year.&nbsp;EXPO CHICAGO runs Sept 27–30, 2018 at Navy Pier.Details <a href="http://expochicago.com">here</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2974/original/tony-karman-photo-by-audia.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: What's the best thing about this year’s EXPO CHICAGO?Tony Karman:&nbsp;Easy answer –&nbsp;it is the artwork that will be shown by our 135 galleries from 27 countries and 63 international cities in this seventh edition of the fair. I look forward to seeing work that is provocative, current,&nbsp;beautiful,&nbsp;and challenging—I never tire of encountering a new artist, or the inevitable moment when a work simply stops me in my tracks. &nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: What's been your biggest challenge so far this year?&nbsp;&nbsp;TK:&nbsp;Like every year, we must work to make&nbsp;sure that the world joins us in Chicago and that the participating exhibitors do well.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2975/original/2018-crownhall-kasten-7.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: Breakdown an 'Interview Marathon' for me.&nbsp;TK: Hans Ulrich Obrist’s celebrated Marathon, entitled&nbsp;Creative Chicago, will be five hours of provocative interviews with artists, architects, donut makers, writers, actors, and activists from throughout the city. The marathon [taking place on site at the fair September 29 from 1–6pm]&nbsp;will capture the zeitgeist of Chicago, further defining what it means to live, work and create here.&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN:&nbsp;How do you keep people coming back to Chicago for EXPO, now that the fair is maturing?&nbsp;&nbsp;TK: We travel&nbsp;around the world&nbsp;year-round to engage with&nbsp;collectors, curators, and arts professionals&nbsp;to join us each September, and everywhere we go, we hear how great Chicago is. We built EXPO CHICAGO on a storied tradition, and it is the collective of our renowned institutions, collectors, curators, artists, galleries, restaurants, architecture, and the people of this great city that the world is enthusiastically returning to or visiting for the first time.I do love this city.&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: Can you give me an elevator pitch for the case for art fairs today, amidst so much scrutiny and financial strain?&nbsp;TK: Galleries carry the burden for much of this industry, as they are funding their art fair participation, their artists work and exhibitions, staffing, rent, and daily operating expenses—we are ever mindful of this. However, there is something special about the convening moment of an art fair that brings collectors and curators and art enthusiasts together in one location to both experience and ultimately purchase artwork.Even with the current art fair overload, I believe if you do it right—gathering a great list of dealers and venue, a commitment to thoughtful and relevant programming, and layering the support of the cultural institutions and leaders of a city—then you have a perfect environment for galleries to succeed.&nbsp;EXPO CHICAGO benefits from all of the above, and although we cannot guarantee sales, we work hard to build a fair or exposition that hopefully does that and support the long term development of a gallery’s program. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: How many cups of coffee do you have a day during the fair?&nbsp;&nbsp;TK: I was a coffee drinker for most of my life but just changed to tea. Simple answer:&nbsp;lots. I will probably have a tea bag in my pocket at all times.&nbsp;CGN: What’s the first thing you will do when the fair wraps up?&nbsp;&nbsp;TK: Start on the next one.&nbsp;Top image: Justin Barbin, EXPO CHICAGO 2017 Vernissage.

As EXPO CHICAGO Marks 7 Years, Tony Karman Answers 7 Questions 

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417656/spaqbdesj1ojifwwkwfc.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Lauren Grundhofer Peterson serves on so many philanthropic and professional arts organizations, her love of art could qualify as a full time personal passion. She serves on the The Auxiliary Board of The Art Institute of Chicago, and is an active member of the MCA’s Emerge, The Arts Club of Chicago, ArtTable, The Art Institute’s Sustaining Fellows, as well as numerous other alumni groups and charities. She has dedicated herself professionally to art since graduating from Boston College in 2003 and receiving a Master’s Degree from SAIC in 2009. After 11 years in Christie’s Chicago office, Lauren joined Phillips in 2017 to serve as Regional Representative, Chicago and Midwest, and Associate Vice President to establish a Midwest presence for the international auctioneer specializing in 20th Century &amp; Contemporary Art, Watches and Jewelry. We asked Lauren to share her story of working in the auction world as well as insider tips for treasure hunting by auction. – GV&nbsp;Chicago Gallery News: How did you become interested in contemporary art?Lauren Peterson: I had a strong interest in the Dada and Surrealist movements as an undergraduate at Boston College. I was fascinated by how these groups of artists reacted to the issues of their day – wars, technology, science, the advent of psychology, etc. During graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), I wanted to learn what the artists of my day were examining through their practices. I still find art schools to be a barometer of the way things are heading in contemporary art.&nbsp;CGN: Tell me a bit about the focus in general at Phillips, as well as what your new role in Chicago is?LP: Phillips is very focused, specializing in works from the 20th and 21st centuries, which makes us rather unique in the auction world. We have six departments: 20th Century and Contemporary Art, Photographs, Design, Editions, Watches and Jewelry. We also broker private sales. My colleague Carol Ehlers and I have been brought on to establish a presence for the firm in the Midwest.&nbsp;CGN: Do auction houses get a bad rap in the art world?LP: Yes and no. I think in any relationship business, a person’s understanding of it is based on the experiences they have with the professionals in that field. The key to a good experience is finding trustworthy, informed and qualified individuals – a gallerist, an art advisor, a curator, an auction specialist or all of the above. Auctions are transparent, since demand dictates price, and the market speaks. Auction houses also have resources. Phillips has a team of specialists around the world, and we encourage people to ask the tough questions, as we want anyone buying or selling with us to be comfortable with the process.&nbsp;CGN: Bidding: in person, or online?LP: The online experience has been transformed since I began in this business over 15 years ago. Call me old school, but I still advise collectors to preview works in-person when they are able. Previews are what make auctions unique. You can learn a lot by looking under the hood and examining museum-quality works in an intimate way. That said, once you’ve seen the artwork in person or been in touch with a specialist to answer questions, you can bid online or even by app from anywhere in the world without any issues.&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: Estate Sales vs Auctions?LP: Estate sales certainly have a place in the ecosystem.&nbsp; The format tends to benefit the buyer because, when you are handling an entire household’s contents, some things may have been be overlooked. At Phillips, we are selective and seek out specific works to craft focused sales. Additionally, an auction is not just the day of the sale. Well before the hammer falls we are researching, writing essays, creating sale plans, organizing tours and events, speaking to the press, calling potential buyers and ensuring the best possible result for each of our consigners on the day of the sale.&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: Weirdest valuation or work you’ve encountered?LP: When you think you’ve seen it all, something surprises. That said, very early on I worked with a collector who owned a Victorian hair wreath. The sentiment is sweet – these artifacts were made from the hair of a loved one and kept as a memento, often after that person had passed.In reality, I find them pretty creepy.&nbsp;CGN: Do you have advice for anyone unfamiliar with auctions?LP: Auction specialists love to educate and we often have an art history or fine art background. If someone has never been to a live auction, go visit a local house. It’s fun to see a sale in person and they’re usually open to the public. I also encourage people to go to New York in November and May for the previews and sales to see things that may not have come to market for years and may not be seen again for a generation – perhaps several.</body></html>

A Q&A with Lauren Peterson of Phillips Auction House in Chicago

Lauren G. Peterson: A Familiar Face Gets a New Start at Phillips

Brought to you&nbsp;by popular demand, CGN has launched&nbsp;a weekly interview series similar to&nbsp;&#39;An Interview With a Dealer&#39; but with a&nbsp;focus on&nbsp;meeting&nbsp;and learning about one&nbsp;new artist. This week we feature Sandra Perlow.&nbsp;

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Age: 77

Hometown: Chicago, Illinois

Previous/other occupations: Art teacher in Chicago Public Schools;&nbsp;professor at Columbia College Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

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Favorite spot in the city?&nbsp;The Cultural Center&#39;s mosaic floors

Art supply store? Blick

Music or Podcasts? Music - Opera

Sweater or Hoodie? Sweater

Coffee or tea? Tea

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Share with us a little bit about your artistic background and training.&nbsp;

Sandra Perlow:&nbsp;When I was 8 years old my mother took me to the Art Institute of Chicago, and that trip sparked my excitement for painting, drawing, and patterns. I received my Bachelor of Art Education from SAIC because my mother wanted to make sure I would be able to make a living. I actually have 2 Master&#39;s degrees:&nbsp;an MFA from SAIC, and an MA from Illinois Institute of Design, which is sadly no longer in existence. Because of my degrees I was able to teach&nbsp;while simultaneously pursuing my own artwork. I started teaching art in Chicago Public Schools, and then I taught at Columbia College Chicago and SAIC. For over 30 years I taught courses in drawing and fundamentals of 2D design, which both influenced my own art work.

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What art&nbsp;has been particularly meaningful in your life?

SP:&nbsp;I am interested in the layers of history, particularly of the city of Chicago, and I&#39;m also inspired by architecture. You can say that shapes, images, writings and patterns of Chicago and the midwest, are meaningful to me. This translates well into my love of abstraction and collage. I hope that reflects in my work. Collage is all about layers and communication &ndash; not just people communicating with the pieces I create, but the materials themselves should communicate and interact with each other.

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Do you remember the first work of art that made a lasting impression on you?

SP:&nbsp;I don&#39;t know if I have a specific piece, but I&#39;ve been fascinated by [Pablo] Picasso ever since I learned about him and his work - specifically his Cubist period. I love how he made everything so fresh. Picasso had ideas that other people never thought about, and the way he expressed them through painting and sculpture has always inspired me. He was maybe the first artist&nbsp;I learned about who elevated the art of collage for me. Collage seemed like such a natural progression for him, and everything influenced his work. He was fearless and tried everything.

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Please describe your studio.&nbsp; &nbsp;

SP:&nbsp;My studio has 12 foot tall white walls, which are&nbsp;large enough for me to hang my work&nbsp;and then stand back and really take a good look at the piece and decide what to do next. I have a section of the studio dedicated to &ldquo;office&rdquo; things, with a computer, artwork by colleagues, a flat file for specialty papers, a couch, coffee table, and a bookshelf filled with artist books for reference.

My studio is located in the Loop. I love the location, because everything is simultaneously old and new, sloppy and clean. You see brand new buildings next to old ones, and there is always a buzz in the air.

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How do you know when a piece of yours is finished?

SP:&nbsp;It&#39;s a gut feeling. The key is to not overwork&nbsp;it and make sure it doesn&#39;t lose its freshness.

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What do you do when you feel creatively blocked?

SP:&nbsp;Usually I take a little breather. I&#39;ll step away from my work for a week&nbsp;and then ease back into it;&nbsp;little by little it comes back.

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You have $400 to spend on art supplies, what do you purchase?

SP:&nbsp;Different brushes, interesting papers, colored inks, different brands of gouache and Golden brand acrylic paints. I&#39;ve been really drawn to yellows recently, and I just purchased a tube of &ldquo;Interference Green (fine)&rdquo; by Golden. It&#39;s an iridescent green sheen that I&#39;m excited to play around with. I would probably look for more paints like that to experiment with.

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Do you have a role model or mentor?

SP:&nbsp;I wish I had one when I was younger. Years ago I was very quiet and kept to myself regarding my work. My father was a pharmacist and my mother really wanted me to be something. Her husband died when she was young and she wasn&#39;t much of a people person. I made sure to marry someone who was diligent in life and work, who was a great role model for me in working hard and accomplishing what I set my mind to.

Regarding role models in the art world, I&#39;d say Jonathan Lasker, George Condo, William Conger, and David Sharpe.

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What should we expect to see from you next?

SP: More collage inspired work, more monoprints. and I might take a course in printmaking to see what else I can combine in future work.

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Artist Insights: Sandra Perlow

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417514/ixe8btp1k5lxipedqwyp.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Brought to you&nbsp;by popular demand, CGN has launched&nbsp;a new weekly interview series reminiscent of 'An Interview With a Dealer' with the focus on&nbsp;meeting&nbsp;and learning about one&nbsp;new artist each week. This week we feature Juan Angel Chavez.&nbsp;&nbsp;Age: 46Hometown: La Junta Chihuahua, MexicoPrevious/other occupations:&nbsp;Butcher, child jockey, DJ, construction worker and art educator.&nbsp;Spot in the city:&nbsp;Any DIY skate spotArt supply store:&nbsp;Swap-O-Rama on Tuesdays or any abandoned buildingMusic or Podcasts:&nbsp;MusicSweater or Hoodie:&nbsp;BothCoffee or tea:&nbsp;Coffee&nbsp;CGN: Share with us a little bit about your artistic background and training.JAC: I went to art school but never finished. Art&nbsp;school is worth it, you just need to be in the right mind set.&nbsp;CGN: Do you remember the first work of art that made a lasting impression on you?JAC:&nbsp;The first time I was intrigued by the idea of art was when I was very little. In Mexico, we had a family friend that was connected to the environment in many ways. He built his own house. Grew his own food and traveled by foot or mule back. &nbsp;He lived like it was 1887, he never had electricity or any comforts of the modern world.&nbsp; He was Yaqui and Pima but had been living in Chihuahua for almost a century. My family knew him because my great grandfather was a close friend of his. We also knew that he knew every plant, tree, bug or rock in the mountains, for their medicinal properties. He also built perfect barb wire fences.Besides these great things, he had a knack for collecting doll heads and sticking them on top of the fence posts around his house. He collected metal cans and used the metal to make anything he needed..&nbsp;hinges, patch holes on doors or just used them as cups. In retrospect, this was my first introduction to the effect of being connected to a creative process.&nbsp;CGN: What art has been particularly meaningful in your life?JAC: I’ve always been a jealous of music, film and writing. Compared to visual art they have an advantage for reaching sentiments in a much greater form. I feel like I’m always trying to compose my work in the same format as films or songs are written. Compositions of entry points, accessible beats, profound content for observations of contemporary life.&nbsp;CGN: Describe your studio!JAC: My studio is my home. I own a building in McKinley Park. I live upstairs and the studio is on the first floor. I have a small wood shop and an office.&nbsp; That’s it!In the studio, I don’t keep a lot of materials because I find them when I need them. In the office it is just a flat file cabinet, a desk and a lot&nbsp;of models of sculptures that I’ve made.&nbsp;CGN: Anything you can’t work without?&nbsp;JAC: IDEAS, I can’t live without them.&nbsp;CGN: How do you know when a piece of yours is finished?JAC: I know a piece is done when I don’t have any interest on it. I spend lots of time thinking and my work is kind of immediate.&nbsp;CGN: What do you do when you feel creatively blocked?JAC: I go skate, a bike ride helps or just take a walk.&nbsp;CGN: Your studio is about to disappear, you have enough time to grab one item, what do you take?JAC: The small axe my father gave me. It's sentimental.&nbsp;CGN: Do you have a role model or mentor?JAC: I have had many role models throughout my life. Teachers, artist, family but I always looked up to my grandfather the most. He only had a 6th grade education but managed to establish a beer distributing business that supported 12 children and grandchildren. He put them all through university and helped them establish their own careers. He was an example of hard work and what really matters in life.&nbsp;CGN: What should we expect to see from you next?JAC: Paintings, plywood assemblages and a monstrous interactive installation coming to Mexico in 2019.&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Artist Insights: Juan Angel Chavez

Brought to you&nbsp;by popular demand, CGN has launched&nbsp;a new weekly interview series reminiscent of &#39;An Interview With a Dealer&#39; with the focus on&nbsp;meeting&nbsp;and learning about one&nbsp;new artist each week. This week, our first installment of the series features Dabin Ahn, represented by <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/andrew-bae-gallery">Andrew Bae Gallery</a>.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Age: 30&nbsp;

Hometown: Seoul / Chicago

&nbsp;

Spot in the city:&nbsp;Starbucks (2nd floor, 1003 N Rush St)

Art supply store:&nbsp;Blick Art Materials

Music or Podcasts:&nbsp;Music

Sweater or Hoodie:&nbsp;Hoodie

Coffee or Tea:&nbsp;Coffee

&nbsp;

CGN: Share with us a little bit about your artistic background and training.

DA:&nbsp;Ever since I made my first oil painting on a stretched canvas in 2007, my work has been strictly about depicting figures and objects in a realistic manner. During my BFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was encouraged to depart from my old habits and lots of fun things started to happen in my work.

&nbsp;

CGN: What art&nbsp;has been particularly meaningful in your life?

DA: It has always been, and most likely always will be, traditional painting on canvas. I surely will expand my work at some point and possibly incorporate other media, but nothing will satisfy me more than the process of making a 2-dimensional painting.

&nbsp;

CGN: Do you remember the first work of art that made a lasting impression on you?

DA: It is probably the very first painting that I ever sold during my first solo show in 2011. The 18 x 24in self-portrait was lacking in many ways, but it was a good fail as I learned what to do (and what not to do) when making a painting.

&nbsp;

CGN: Describe your studio!

DA: I do not have a studio at the moment. It has been about 2 years since I started working at home and&nbsp;I paint in my bathroom, to be more specific. While it may&nbsp;not sound like a suitable space for making work,&nbsp;there is&nbsp;ventilation in the ceiling, enough room for a table and&nbsp;stool, and most importantly I can hang canvases up to 60 inches on one of the walls. It&rsquo;s free!

&nbsp;

CGN: Anything you can&rsquo;t work without?

DA: Jerky maker. I place it near wet paintings and everything is dry in just few hours. Definitely by the next morning.

&nbsp;

CGN: How do you know when a piece of yours is finished?

DA: Since I always work with a sketch, it is easy to know when my work is complete. I just don&rsquo;t know when to stop with my sketches. I spend much more time working on my sketches than the actual paintings.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you do when you feel creatively blocked?

DA: I personally&nbsp;haven&#39;t had that experience, but taking some time away from looking at art and making art would probably work for me.

&nbsp;

CGN: You have three minutes to take anything you want from an art supply store, what do you grab?

DA: 2 x Double primed linen rolls. Both of my hands would be already full, but I&#39;d be very happy about the situation.

&nbsp;

CGN: Do you have a role model or mentor?

DA: Gerhard Richter and Jerry Saltz.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see from you next?

DA: Today is July 12th&nbsp;and my solo show opens tomorrow at Andrew Bae Gallery. I have prepared a lot and hope to see many faces at the opening and throughout the show.

&nbsp;

Dabin Ahn is represented by Andrew Bae Gallery. For further information regarding Dabin and his upcoming show please visit <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/andrew-bae-gallery">Andrew Bae Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Artist Insights: Dabin Ahn

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Michelle Graves, Chair of <a href="http://www.agitatorgallery.com/">Agitator Co-operative Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

Age: 38

Current Position: Chair of Agitator Co-operative Gallery

Hometown: Lafayette, IN&nbsp;-&gt; Bloomington, IN -&gt; NYC -&gt; Chicago resident since 2004

Current other occupations: Director of <a href="http://stateoftheartchicago.com">State of the Art</a>;&nbsp;Adobe (Certified Expert) Instructor at Digital Bootcamp, Ascend Training and Columbia College Chicago

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week:

Restaurant: Feed - Quarter dark chicken with mashed potatoes/gravy and fried okra!

Shop: Savvy Seconds and 1sts - best resale shop in town. I frequented Christin&rsquo;s shop so much, we became each other&rsquo;s ride-or-die and now travel internationally together.

Read: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli - a fascinating read on time and how it relates to physical heat and the human perspective.

Neighborhood: I currently live in the beautiful Humboldt Park area, 5 minutes from my art studio in East Garfield Park and 10 minutes from Agitator in Wicker Park/West Town.

Music: I grew up on garage punk/rock, watching bands play in basements, but my current taste is eclectic. Some current favorites across the genres are Shannon and the Clams, L.A. Witch, The Spits, Future Islands, and Motor City Drum Ensemble.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Tell us a little bit about your background and the journey that has led you to work with Agitator Co-operative Gallery?

MG: My entire background involves fine art. I was always involved with art organizations in and outside of academia. Through the years, I slowly began to gain confidence as an artist and embraced leadership skills as well as interest in business that I was surprised to possess.

I&nbsp;credit the Chicago Outfit Roller Derby team with&nbsp;giving me&nbsp;major leadership and business knowledge;&nbsp;I was a co-founding member and original Marketing Manager for them, and&nbsp;building this team, brand and organization (not to mention learning to strategize and compromise with a variety of personalities) has given me a vast amount of&nbsp;interpersonal experience that I use frequently.&nbsp;&nbsp;

In my art practice, I have applied to numerous calls for art, some of which&nbsp;have accepted me and of course some have not. To fulfill the desire of exhibiting my artwork and colleagues work, I have been involved with putting on many &ldquo;alternative space&rdquo; or non-gallery exhibits dating back to my undergraduate&nbsp;and BFA photography program and James Nakagawa.&nbsp;This kind of exhibit gave me the start-to-finish experience of putting on a show&nbsp;that includes curation, marketing, reception logistics, and quality control of the display.

In early 2017&nbsp;I was inspired by the recent presidential election to do&nbsp;something positive and maintain some sort of integrity in my life. I attempted to build a monthly meet-up community at my art studio that was inclusive, encouraged important discourse&nbsp;and was meant to be a safe space where people could&nbsp;belong.&nbsp;&nbsp;

In the meantime, while submitting&nbsp;applications for art calls, I came across a call for an art co-operative led by Larry Kamphausen and Gretchen Hasse. &nbsp;My application was accepted and we had our first meeting in April 2017. Our beginning meetings discussed&nbsp;what we wanted out of our co-operative. I brought up a quote referencing political turmoil having two forms of underground from Tom Robbin&rsquo;s book&nbsp;Still Life with Woodpecker. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun - which is to say, preserving the human spirit.&rdquo; This preservation resonated with everyone and our mission statement included this tone.&nbsp;We came to a consensus on our name, Agitator Co-operative Gallery, and I was nominated Chair. We found a perfect storefront that has been open to the public, exhibiting under-represented artists and generating discourse on important topics since September 2017.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Give us a day in the life!

MG: A day in my life is not&nbsp;consistent.&nbsp;Sometimes I wake up and teach a six-hour long Advanced Adobe workshop. Sometimes&nbsp;early on a Saturday I meet my business partner, Keith Skogstrom, downtown for an art install through our art subscription company, State of the Art. Sometimes&nbsp;Agitator has an opening and I help install and tidy the gallery beforehand. Or&nbsp;I might do yoga, go for a jog, sit in my apartment bay window on a sunny day, respond to emails, or&nbsp;do some marketing for the gallery and State of the Art. When I have my own art exhibit deadlines approaching I force myself to be at my studio by a certain time. Occasionally I travel to other cities to bench coach the Chicago Outfit Roller Derby team, or&nbsp;I have epic&nbsp;adventures in other countries. Other times I listen and stare at the sky, or moving cars, or an ant crawling by and contemplate existence.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;How would you sum up your experience with Agitator Co-operative Gallery?&nbsp;&nbsp;

MG: Through being a member of Agitator&nbsp;I have deepened my experience in communicating, planning,&nbsp;building and balancing the dynamic of a group of creative people. &nbsp;I have also really come to&nbsp;appreciate&nbsp;working with&nbsp;a variety of personalities and love finding the commonalities that bring people together.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Do you have a favorite recent exhibition you worked on?&nbsp;

MG: I have a huge affinity for physics/science theory and use this research in my art. My recent favorite event held at Agitator was an Art of Science&nbsp;lecture series led by Yoav Kashiv. &nbsp;The lecturer was Ritoban Basu Thakur who spoke on CMB and the Early Universe and encouraged questions/challenges during the lecture. There was a great turnout of both artists and physics researchers. The conversation was awe inspiring and I was excited to understand the material and participate in the discussion. This inspiration will definitely influence the work&nbsp;on display at my solo show at Morpho Gallery in August, 2018.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;What are some successes you have had this year? What about challenges?

MG: The term &ldquo;success&rdquo; has changed for me in the past six&nbsp;months. &nbsp;At the end of our roller derby team chant, right before we go on the track, I like to say, &ldquo;Success feels great!&rdquo; In this frame&nbsp;success does not mean winning according to the score;&nbsp;there are many successes throughout the game. These small (or large) successes throughout a journey are motivators. The challenges are the various tasks we face, and the successes are borne from overcoming,&nbsp;or continuing to push the self through, the challenge.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

MG: My favorite cultural pursuit outside of making art and Agitator Gallery is the pursuit of travel. Traveling has opened my eyes and my mind to an amazingly beautiful planet that contains our humanity, which is full of very interesting individual people.

&nbsp;

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at Agitator?

MG: Agitator Co-operative Gallery has a different exhibit once per month, curated by one of it&rsquo;s members.&nbsp; Our current active members are Larry Kamphausen, Gretchen Hasse, Luna Rail, Andrea Kaspryk, Karmen Elaine, Emilio Nadales and myself. The next exhibit is coming up on July 14 with work by Daphne Walsh and Danielle Owensby curated by Luna Rail.&nbsp;Our exhibit&nbsp;opening receptions are typically held on the second Saturday of every month from 6&ndash;10pm.&nbsp; We are located at 1112 N. Ashland, just south of Division in Chicago.&nbsp; Other events throughout the month can be found on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.agitatorgallery.com/">agitatorgallery.com</a>&nbsp;and current updates can be found on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/agitatorgallery/">Facebook</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/agitatorgallery/">Instagram</a>. Feel free to follow us and become one of the regulars at our fun, inspiring events!

&nbsp;

Michelle Graves&nbsp;is the Chair of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.agitatorgallery.com/">Agitator&nbsp;Co-operative Gallery</a>

Photo Credit:&nbsp;Brenda Hernandez

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CGN Interview Series, Michelle Graves of Agitator Co-operative Gallery

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Sandra Hindman, owner of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/les-enluminures">Les Enluminures</a>.

&nbsp;

Age: Perpetually young in spirit 
Hometown: Chicago 
Previous Occupation: Professor 
Current Position: Founder and President Les Enluminures (Chicago, New York and Paris)

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp; 
Restaurant: the Bella Vista (near my house in Italy, where I had the most delightful scallops this week) 
Music: Flotow&rsquo;s Martha (which I listen to when walking in the countryside) 
TV:&nbsp; I just finished binge watching all the seasons of &ldquo;Call the Midwife,&rdquo; such an interesting take on women&rsquo;s lives in the late 50s and early 60s 
Favorite activity:&nbsp; Swimming a mile a day in the outdoor Olympic pool near my house in Italy (but when in Chicago I swim at the Peninsula, great pool) 
Favorite recent trip:&nbsp; 4 days in Crete with some Italian girlfriends (amazing landscapes, wonderful food, herbs, teas, olive oil, no wonder the Cretans are the longest living people!)

CGN: Tell us a little bit about your background and how the gallery came to be?

SH:&nbsp;I grew up in Hyde Park (my father was on the Manhattan Project and at University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory).&nbsp;Although I wanted to be a famous scientist like my father, math was my worst subject.&nbsp; I suppose my mother&rsquo;s attraction to art (she filled our house with reproductions of famous paintings &ndash; in my room, there was a Renoir, a Degas, and a Modigliani -- and took me to the Art Institute of Chicago on Saturdays) was what eventually led me to art history.&nbsp; Professors at University of Chicago, then at University of California at Berkeley, stimulated my interest in medieval art, specifically in manuscripts, and I went on to get a PhD in medieval art history.&nbsp;

Following that I taught for many decades, first at The Johns Hopkins University and then at Northwestern University, where I twice served as Chair of the department.&nbsp;

One day sometime in the 1980s, sitting in my office at Northwestern, the phone rang, and it was an art dealer from Ohio, asking me to write some descriptions of medieval manuscript leaves that he was taking for display at the New York Book Fair.&nbsp; I thought, &ldquo;Well, why not?&rdquo; although I had never done something like that before.&nbsp;Fast forward, I served as his &ldquo;expert&rdquo; for a number of years, wrote catalogues for him, suggested what purchases he should make at auction, and because most dealers in my field &ldquo;outsource&rdquo; their expertise, I helped other dealers identify and describe what they had for sale or were considering purchasing.&nbsp;For me, the &ldquo;magic&rdquo; of this experience was all about living closely with the material.&nbsp; As a scholar and professor, I spent years in research libraries, but having close access to manuscripts on a daily basis was a very moving and different experience.&nbsp;

Hence, my gallery,&nbsp;which I finally opened in Paris in 1991.&nbsp;Why Paris (apart from the fact that it&rsquo;s one of the most beautiful cities in the world)?&nbsp;I already had an apartment there from my many years of&nbsp;research on French medieval manuscripts.&nbsp;But, more important, there was no dealer in my field in Paris, and besides there were always manuscripts coming available from French dealers and private collections.&nbsp;I wanted better access to these sources.

Chicago is my home.&nbsp;Although I have always had a commercial presence here, the USA side of my business operated on a very low profile out of my home for decades.&nbsp;In the past few years, I decided I wanted more visibility in Chicago.&nbsp;It&rsquo;s such a great city for the arts.&nbsp;I had seen other spaces in the One Mag Mile building, and I love the award-winning architecture.&nbsp; Within the space of a morning, I signed on for a space that had hideous&nbsp;green shag carpeting from the &#39;80s, lowered ceilings, and glass cubby-holes.&nbsp;

I saw possibilities.&nbsp;I brought my Italian architect over, and voila!&nbsp;Eight months later,&nbsp;in August 2016, we opened our Chicago premises.&nbsp;This has been a wonderful two years for us. In 2017, I gave a third of my collection of medieval manuscript leaves to the Art Institute, and in 2018 (January&ndash;May) they mounted a well-received and beautifully installed exhibition (The Medieval World at Our Fingertips) to celebrate that gift.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share a typical day-in-the-life!

SH:&nbsp;Seat 1A on an airplane.&nbsp;

Actually, I borrowed that line from a client,&nbsp;who lives between Hong Kong, London, and New York.&nbsp;But&nbsp;it&rsquo;s appropriate for my life as well.&nbsp;I live between Chicago, Paris, New York (our commercial spaces are in&nbsp;big cities) and Italy, where I have a house in a tiny farming community in Veneto.&nbsp;My mother is Italian, and I have been coming to the same area since I was 17 years old.&nbsp;I have 35 cousins here.&nbsp;So, it&rsquo;s home. It has a huge beautiful garden &ndash; I call this part of my life &ldquo;flower therapy&rdquo; &ndash; and birds that chirp so loud you can hear them when I&rsquo;m talking on the phone.&nbsp; Then, I work. I write on the computer.&nbsp; I still do many of our descriptions, contribute to our blog, write academic books (I have one on French language manuscripts that is going to press this summer in Belgium), contact clients, talk to employees in my various locations, visit museums.&nbsp; I love cooking, especially Italian and French, although I am accomplished in several different cuisines (I even taught Chinese cooking when I lived in Baltimore).&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Best sale you&#39;ve ever had?&nbsp;

SH:&nbsp;The best story concerns a work that I&rsquo;ve often described as my favorite medieval manuscript leaf showing a group of people in a verdant landscape, illustrating the month of May.&nbsp; I long admired it in a private collection in New York.&nbsp;When it came up for sale, I bought it.&nbsp;It turned out to be a page from the Sforza Hours (a masterpiece painted in Milan in the 1490s) by the Italian artist Giovanni Birago.&nbsp;One day when Birago had gone out, some of the miniatures he was working on for this manuscript were stolen out of his workshop.&nbsp;They caught the monk who stole the miniatures, but the miniatures themselves never turned up.&nbsp;The manuscript was then completed by another Netherlandish painter, and it eventually ended up in the British Library.&nbsp;

&quot;My&quot;&nbsp;miniature of the month of May turned out to be&nbsp;one of the stolen miniatures!&nbsp;So, I sold it to the British Library&nbsp;and they&nbsp;reunited it with the original manuscript &ndash;&nbsp;500 years later!&nbsp; A footnote:&nbsp;for insurance in the 1490s, they called in Michelangelo to do the appraisal, and he appraised the miniatures at the same value (then) as Leonardo&rsquo;s Virgin of the Rocks.

&nbsp;

CGN: Any major successes this year? What about challenges?

SH:&nbsp;I think the show at the Art Institute was the most significant event so far of my 2018.&nbsp; I am proud of my relationship with the museum, thrilled that I have been able to add to an already-fine collection, and I look forward to continuing association with the museum.

There are always challenges when one is in business.&nbsp;Employees come and go (we have about 15 employees in our various locations), clients too.&nbsp;Finding great works of art and placing them in great collections is always the biggest challenge.&nbsp;I am working on a few amazing projects now in this regard.&nbsp;Ask me again in 2019!

&nbsp;

CGN: One piece of advice you would send back to your younger self?

SH:&nbsp;Enjoy everything you do.&nbsp;I really feel like I&rsquo;ve done it right.&nbsp;I loved teaching, and I have students who hold positions in many renowned universities and museums.&nbsp;They remain my colleagues today, sort of like far-flung children.&nbsp;And, I love the creativity of having my own business, of thinking up projects that give pleasure and are commercially viable, of working with younger colleagues.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?

SH:&nbsp;Quality, details, historical context.&nbsp;

I personally am very interested in art for and about women.&nbsp;

My largest personal collection includes most of the works by Dora Maar during the years that she lived with Picasso (and a few Picassos that relate to Dora Maar from the same years).&nbsp; But, I also have one of the two most significant collections of Alicja Halicka (the Polish wife of the famous Cubist painter Louis Marcoussis).&nbsp;If I could own any two illuminated manuscripts in the world, I would choose the Collected Works by Christine de Pizan (British Library Harley 4431) and the Darmstadt Haggadah, the former written by a proto-feminist author at the French court and illuminated for the Queen and the latter made for and used by young German women in the fifteenth century, women are pictured in it celebrating the Seder.

&nbsp;

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at the gallery?

SH: We have many surprises for the latter half of 2018 and into 2019 &ndash; an exhibition of medieval and Renaissance rings, and an exhibition of three medieval masterpieces of manuscript illumination, the latter opening in New York at TEFAF New York in October, then exhibited in our New York gallery, before coming to Chicago in late November just in time for Christmas.

&nbsp;

Sandra Hindman is the Founder and President of Les Enluminures on Michigan Avenue. For more information regarding the gallery please visit <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/les-enluminures">Les Enluminures</a>.

&nbsp;

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CGN Interview Series: Sandra Hindman of Les Enluminures

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721420192/jky7wucd0fzyw6w4vxop.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Natasha Egan of the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/museum-of-contemporary-photography-mocp--2">Museum of Contemporary Photography</a>.Age: 48Current Position: Executive Director, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College ChicagoHometown: Santa Fe, New MexicoPrevious Occupations: Curator, teacher, gallery manager, landscaper&nbsp;5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;Restaurant: Dinner&nbsp;at HaiSous in Pilsen&nbsp; Watch: Went to Moutainfilm in Telluride Colorado—a documentary film festival.&nbsp; This year’s theme was migration with a particular focus on the global refugee crisis and some highlights were these powerful films: Soufra directed by Thomas Morgan; On Her Shoulders directed by Alexandria Bombach, Are We Listening? directed by Tim Kressin; and Lifeboat directed by Skye Fitzgerald.&nbsp; I am organizing an exhibition about this subject in early 2019 so my hope is to help bring these films to Chicago if they are not already scheduled. Listen: My most recent concert was The Sea and Cake at the Empty Bottle.&nbsp;&nbsp; Shop: I found a great Marni dress at Luxury Garage Sale on Wells. Read: This week I read Ai Weiwei’s “little blue book” Humanity edited by Larry Warsh released at the end of April.&nbsp;CGN: Tell us a little about your background and the journey that has led you to become Executive Director of MoCP?NE: I started at the MoCP in 1995 as the Assistant to the Director while pursuing my MA in Museum Studies and MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago.&nbsp; The first exhibition I organized opened in April of 1998 titled Alienation and Assimilation: Contemporary Images and Installations from the Republic of Korea.&nbsp; For many of the seventeen exhibiting artists, this exhibition was their first in the United States and today some of them are South Korea’s leading contemporary artists—such as Atta Kim (aka Kim Seok-Jung); Bae Bien-U; Choi Jeong-Hwa, and Yook Keun-Byung.In 1998, I moved to Germany and served as a freelance curator. In 2000, I was hired back at the MoCP as the Associate Director and Curator where I organized dozens of exhibitions and managed the operating budget for the MoCP. In those years I also taught in the photography department at Columbia College.&nbsp;I co-taught&nbsp;for five years a January session course for the humanities department taking students to Shanghai and Beijing for a crash course on the arts and culture of China.&nbsp;In 2011, I became the Executive Director of the MoCP.&nbsp; I continue to serve as a curator but have an increased role in administration and fundraising, while leading a remarkable staff of seven professionals and fifteen graduate and undergraduate interns from Columbia College Chicago.&nbsp;CGN: Give us a day in the life!NE: Everyday is a juggling act but when you are passionate about what you do everything usually ties together nicely.&nbsp;Today my day started on the Red Line reading the NYTimes morning report and NPR on my iPhone. Briefly reading and deleting the fifty new eblasts from galleries, museums and artists from around the world that filled my inbox during the night. When I get to the museum, my first task is to review a final report for a foundation grant. Next, I send&nbsp;a couple informal thank you emails to MoCP donors and set up a couple follow up lunch/coffee meetings.&nbsp; Next, I meet with Kenneth Guthrie, a graduate student intern working closely with me on an exhibition about the global refugee crisis for early 2019. We discuss&nbsp;developing the checklist, writing the individual artist’s wall texts&nbsp;and creating a print viewing set with works from the MoCP’s permanent collection that will complement the exhibition. We also discuss&nbsp;how a partnership with Heartland Alliance and the Transatlantic Refugee Resettlement Network could function. We ended with a conversation about the documentary films I had seen at Mountainfilm the week before.Next, I respond&nbsp;to a slew of emails that&nbsp;had been neglected for too long—some were responses to artists I had met back in March at Fotofest in Houston, admittedly, I am way behind on some email correspondence. Next, it is lunchtime. In the taxi on my way to lunch at The Kitchen with a potential new advisory board member&nbsp;I, again, briefly read and delete&nbsp;the next fifty plus art eblasts I had received over the last few hours. Several email announcements alerted me to important art openings dates, so I added certain ones to my calendar with the intent to attend as many as I can. After lunch, I walked back to the MoCP because the weather was finally beautiful.Back at the MoCP my afternoon turned to the more administrative side of my job. I met with Columbia’s finance department and in-house counsel to figure out the logistics of a new grant and then I put some time into preparing the MoCP’s FY19’s budget for review. Where did the day go? At the top of my To Do list is to write the introduction for the upcoming MoCP publication The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity and Politics which will complement the exhibition opening in October as part of Art Design Chicago, but I did not get a chance to even think about Ralph Arnold—perhaps tomorrow, as the deadline is looming. I end&nbsp;my day on the Red Line reading the NYTimes evening report and skimming and deleting the fifty or so new art eblasts that have yet&nbsp;again filled my inbox.When I got home, I made fish tacos for my family with a cucumber-mango salad, we enjoyed catching up over dinner, and I am now sitting on my sofa responding to these interview questions.&nbsp;CGN: How would you sum up your experience during your time with MoCP?&nbsp;&nbsp;NE: Rewarding on so many levels.I have been fortunate to work with a great range of colleagues and artists from different corners of our planet and they have helped shape how I perceive the world. It is invigorating to work at a small and nimble college art museum in the heart of downtown Chicago with a staff that fosters creativity. We take advantage of our medium&nbsp;specificity and work with artists who often push the boundaries of what defines photography and address a range of contemporary social and political issues from different perspectives. I have learned to be unafraid to take risks allowing the MoCP to create impactful dialogues with our students, faculty, staff and our wider international audience.&nbsp;CGN: Do you have a favorite collection or exhibition that you have worked on in the past?NE: After organizing exhibitions for over twenty years it's impossible to pick a favorite but I will say that&nbsp;working closely with artists such as Beate Gütschow, Victoria Sambunaris, and Christina Seely on their exhibitions and monographs has been deeply rewarding.The craziest exhibition I organized was in 2016 for the Dubai Photo Exhibition. I was invited to serve as the curator for the USA and Canada Pavilion and the mission was to exhibit both the masters of the 20th Century and emerging artists of the 21st Century with only eight artists total from the USA and Canada.&nbsp;Picking the artists was tricky as one cannot just borrow an original&nbsp;masterpiece from say the Metropolitan Museum of Art on short notice, particularly for an exhibition that was going to be installed in a temporary space that&nbsp;was constructed in only three weeks. I also ran into some issues with the sponsors of the exhibition not supporting some of the artists I had originally chosen, and&nbsp;a Canadian artist pull out of the show&nbsp;as a protest to human rights issues.In the end, I had seven artists and only one Canadian represented—but all masters in my book. My theme was loosely based on political and social movements through the decades starting in the 1930s to the end of the 20th century. The exhibition started with Dorothea Lange's photographs from the Farm Security Administration and I used images downloaded from the Library of Congress archive.&nbsp;I then showed Alec Soth's Songbook project, which he made in the 21st century but the photographs harken back visually and conceptually to the 1950s.&nbsp;The sixties were represented by Dawoud Bey's The Birmingham Project, again contemporary work like Alec, but about the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Church in 1963 and racial violence.&nbsp;The 70s were marked by Chicago artist Barbara Crane's series titled People of the North Portal, which depicts people exiting the north portal of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago in 1970 and 1971. Looking at Barbara’s pictures decades later one realizes, based on the fashion and diversity of the individuals, that her portfolio captured humanity in the early 1970s.&nbsp;For the 1980s I showed Meridel Rubenstein's portfolio Lowriders: Portraits from New Mexico.&nbsp;The lowriders, descendants of the 1950s cruisers, was fitting as I learned that there is also a cruising culture in Dubai along the beach but the drivers are mostly in SUVs not lowriders.&nbsp; The last two artists were more about the passage of time and family over multiple decades with Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters and Moyra Davey’s Seven project focused on her and her six sisters.Each of the artists exhibited in Dubai&nbsp;have works included in the MoCP's permanent collection, so that was another method I used to distill the 20th and 21st centuries with only seven artists.&nbsp;CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?NE: This year the MoCP received its largest cash gift of $1M from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation to support the museum’s future exhibitions and acquisitions. The Ruttenberg family’s generosity has been instrumental since our founding in shaping the MoCP and our mission: to cultivate a deeper understanding of the artistic, cultural and political roles of photography in our world today. Speaking of mission, the MoCP also collaborated with a remarkable team of volunteers this year from the Executive Service Corp to develop our current strategic plan, and in true Daniel Burnham style, we will make no little plan. Our future is bright and the challenges are exciting.&nbsp;CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?NE: I find that I’m drawn to work that is layered—visually or conceptually. I’m interested in art that is capable of communicating multiple stories depending on the life experience of the viewer. I am also interested in art that educates us about a topic with artistic and conceptual integrity. For example, the MoCP is currently showing Mohau Modisakeng's three channel immersive film titled Passages (2017) which speaks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in both a haunting and visually compelling way. For me, an artwork needs to be able to create a complex story, with irony, humor, or formal complexity.&nbsp;CGN: What should we expect to see next from MoCP?NE: We currently have a phenomenal exhibition on view organized by our inaugural Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Arts Sheridan Tucker Anderson titled In Their Own Form:&nbsp;Contemporary Photography and Afrofuturism.&nbsp; If you haven’t had a chance to see the exhibition, run to the MoCP before July 8, 2018.&nbsp; Next up, MoCP’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator Karen Irvine has organized Lucas Foglia: Human Nature opening on July 19. For the last ten years, Lucas Foglia has been poetically examining our relationship to the natural world both emotionally and scientifically.We will also have a related collection show on view upstairs organized by Kristin Taylor, MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections titled View Finder: Landscape and Leisure in the Collection with works by such artists as Ansel Adams, Terry Evans, and William Henry Jackson. And, then on&nbsp;October 11, 2018, as part of Art Design Chicago, we are very much looking forward to opening two companion exhibitions The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity and Politics organized by art historian Greg Foster-Rice, PhD, associate professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago and Echoes: Reframing Collage organized by Karen Irvine, showcasing new works by Krista Franklin, Wardell Milan, Ayanah Moor, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Xaviera Simmons.&nbsp;Natasha Egan is Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography on South Michigan Avenue. For more information regarding MoCP please visit <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/museum-of-contemporary-photography-mocp--2">Museum of Contemporary Photography</a>.Photo Credit:&nbsp;Jonathan Castillo&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN Interview Series: MoCP's Natasha Egan

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Christopher Schneberger of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/perspective-group-photography-gallery-ltd">Perspective Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

Age: 47

Current Position: Board Member at Perspective Gallery, Adjunct faculty in Photography at Columbia College and College of DuPage

Hometown: Chicago&nbsp;(born and raised in Miami, FL)

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant - Kimski in Bridgeport 
Shop - Chicago Drum Exchange 
Read &ndash; Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain (audiobook) 
Neighborhood - Pilsen 
Music - New albums by Rocket Miner and RLYR

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CGN: Tell us about your background and your involvement with Perspective Gallery?

CS: I ran the photography program at the Evanston Art Center for thirteen years and had a number of students doing exhibition level work. Some of them decided to open a gallery and brought me in to consult about the idea. Before long we had decided to have a cooperative space with 20 area photographers, hosting exhibitions of members work and photographers at large. Our programming includes a lecture series of prominent photographers and curators, a curated invitational themed exhibition, a regional juried exhibition called Vicinity, a high school juried show, and a national juried exhibition (LENS) which brings in over 1000 submitted images each year for consideration.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Give us a day in the life!

CS: My life involves a lot of teaching. My career is really as an educator in photography, and I teach classes at Columbia College, the College of DuPage, and Dominican University. So I&rsquo;m up in the morning and driving off to a school, trying to remember which one I&rsquo;m going to! When I have time away from classes, I spend it doing work for the gallery which might entail managing one of the special exhibitions we have, or coordinating something within our membership like outings or installing exhibitions.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;As a founding member of the non-profit group, how would you sum up your experience working with Perspective Gallery?&nbsp;

CS: It has been very rewarding to build Perspective Gallery from a just an idea to an institution on the&nbsp;Chicagoland photography landscape. A very dedicated group of people has made this possible, and it is my great honor to work with them. Our group has committees, and everything is done on a volunteer basis, with each member contributing to the success of the organization. When we began, we just hoped we could survive for a year, or until our first lease was up. Now we are looking years ahead and striving to become a recognized center for photography.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Any major successes this year? What about challenges? &nbsp;

CS: At the gallery we had a terrific show that I co-curated with member Stephanie Taiber called &ldquo;Shadow Fixations,&rdquo; featuring artists who deconstructed the photographic materials and challenged the nature of the medium, and featured the work of Doug Fogelson, Julie Weber, Juan Fernandez, Elina Ruka, and Jaclyn Wright. In March we had our 9th annual LENS juried exhibition which was curated by Paula Tognarelli, director of the Griffin Museum of Photography.

We&rsquo;ve also had terrific lectures by Clarissa Bonet, Glenn Hansen, and Jeffrey Wolin. As for myself, I received the award for college-wide Outstanding Adjunct Faculty at College of DuPage, and was a visiting artist at Iowa State University.

Challenges? Finding time to make work while teaching up to six courses a semester!

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

CS: Think about law school! Seriously though, it can be very enriching as a cultural pursuit, but there&rsquo;s not much money in curating and teaching.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

CS: Music. I play drums in a band called Moon, and we&rsquo;re releasing our third studio album on June 8th, with an album release show at Martyrs&rsquo; on Saturday, June 9th. I&rsquo;m also an avid music listener, and I go to shows around Chicago on a weekly basis.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see next from Perspective Gallery in 2018?

CS: We&rsquo;re looking forward to a politically charged exhibition in August curated by Jane Fulton Alt called #metoo. Jane is a terrific photographer and serves on our advisory board. We&rsquo;ll also have more lectures. I have a show in September as well.

&nbsp;

Christopher Schneberger is a photographer and board member of Perspective Gallery. For more information about the photography group please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/perspective-group-photography-gallery-ltd">Perspective Gallery</a>.

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CGN Interview Series: Christopher Schneberger of Perspective Gallery

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Ellen Philips Katz Director&nbsp;of the Block Museum of Art, Lisa Graziose Corrin.

&nbsp;

Current Position: &nbsp;Ellen Philips Katz Director, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

Hometown: I was born in Queens, New York and raised on Long Island, 52 miles east of Manhattan. My professional career has taken me to Izmir, Turkey, Baltimore, London, Seattle, Williamstown Massachusetts and now Chicagoland.

Previous Occupations:

Director, Williams College Museum of Art 
Deputy Director of Art/Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum 
Chief Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London 
Assistant Director/Curator of The Contemporary, Baltimore

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant:&nbsp;Piccolo Sogno, West Loop and North Pond, Lincoln Park

Shop:&nbsp;Turley Road, Andersonville

Book:&nbsp;Outliers and American Vanguard Art, a catalog of a 2018 exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art traveling to LACMA and the High Museum.

Neighborhood:&nbsp;Evanston! My husband and I chose to live in Evanston because we felt it was important to be part of the community that the Block serves. We admire Evanston&rsquo;s activist spirit; the City nurtures and supports its organizations and businesses and residents are unafraid to speak their mind. When we take walks in our neighborhood, the peace poles, signs of solidarity with our immigrant population, and commitment to diversity all remind us that we made the right choice of where to pitch our tent.

Music:&nbsp;Anything at the Lyric (we are season ticket holders) by David Lang, my favorite contemporary composer, or jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

&nbsp;

Tell us a little bit about your background and how your position at the Block Museum of Art came to be?

Northwestern&rsquo;s legacy in the arts is extraordinary and it has been meaningful to me to be one of its champions. In 2012, when I came to the museum, the Block was ready to become an even stronger bridge between the campus and the community. I relished the opportunity to create a new model for an academic art museum within a research university, a model that is focused on collaboration, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, rigorous research, and innovative exhibitions and programs.&nbsp;

Northwestern is on the move! It is an exciting time to be at a future-focused institution that believes the experience of art should be part of the education of every student. It is a privilege too, to be doing this work in the greater context of Chicago, one of our nation&rsquo;s great cultural capitals, along with brilliant colleagues at the helms of so many dynamic institutions throughout the city.

&nbsp;

What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the museum?&nbsp;

As I enter the museum I say hello to Aaron Chapman, our Assistant Manager of Visitor Services and Visitors Services Associate, Rocio Olasimbo and have a chat.&nbsp; Our front-line staff are our greatest ambassadors and the anecdotes they share with me about our visitor&rsquo;s responses ensure I don&rsquo;t forget what we are here to do.

&nbsp;

Do you have a favorite exhibition or collection from the past?

I am a great fan of the Ornithology Galleries at the Field Museum of Natural History, but my favorite collection in Chicago is most likely that of the Chicago Botanic Gardens.&nbsp; People don&rsquo;t think of this extraordinarily diverse collection on 385 acres as a cultural collection but it is.&nbsp; The research and conservation science that is going on in this living museum is world class&hellip;.&nbsp; Not to mention the pure joy of listening to the carillon bells now that the weather is warm.

I grew up inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.&nbsp; To this day when I walk through the front door of that museum I behave as though it is my own home.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s how comfortable I feel there. I am a great believer in getting lost inside museums so that you have unexpected encounters with works of art. I remember going to the Met and seeing a small study of Monet&rsquo;s Women in the Garden, which is now in the Musee d&rsquo;Orsay, and seeing the shadow on the back of a train on a woman&rsquo;s dress and the hundreds of shades of green and grey that composed this picture.&nbsp; I realized Monet was not painting women&rsquo;s dresses at all, he was painting the effects of light. It was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes and everything I looked at around me after that changed. &nbsp;I saw how art could be a window onto other ways of perceiving and understanding the world.&nbsp; At that moment I thought &ldquo;Wow I want to be looking through those windows for the rest of my life.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Any major successes this year? Any challenges?

2018 has been an extraordinary year for the Block Museum so far with over 20,000 visitors in just three months for the groundbreaking exhibition Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt.&nbsp; The exhibition became a true case study exemplifying our role of as an innovation hub and campus catalyst.&nbsp; In the creation of the exhibition we convened student research and faculty expertise from across the University&mdash;including contributions from classics, art history, sound arts, materials science, computer science, medicine, archaeology, and art history&mdash;all to investigate the mummy of a 5-year old girl buried nearly 2000 years ago.&nbsp; The exhibition included the first museum use of Apple&rsquo;s augmented reality toolkit, an experiment at the Argonne National Laboratory, a student sound design competition, and a class co-taught in Classics and Material Science, to name just a few of the related projects.&nbsp; The fact that our resulting exhibition was covered by Time Magazine, BBC, PBS NewsHour, and made the front page of the Chicago Tribune &ndash; is just icing on the cake, evidence of the power and endless possibilities that can come out of interdisciplinary collaboration.

2018 also saw the release of our new Strategic Plan &ndash; The Block Museum as a Frame of Mind.&nbsp; I see this plan as the Block team&rsquo;s great success, representing almost a year&rsquo;s worth of conversation, planning and stakeholder interviews. The plan lays out ambitious actions for impact over the next five years. I think our greatest challenge is keeping up with the rising tide of participation in the Block&rsquo;s program from faculty, students, and the broader community. We are living in a time when our visitors are seeking a way to understand the complexities of our contemporary world. We have a responsibility to connect to connect art to their lives so that the important contributions of artists across time and cultures resonate and are valued.

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

I am a first generation college graduate so a career as a museum director was atypical in my family.&nbsp; Of course being an art history major was great preparation but is not on its own what prepares one for being a museum director.&nbsp; Leadership is a process&mdash;learning from the twists and turns in the road, from my mistakes and, especially from the feedback of those with whom I work, have all been critical.&nbsp;

The museum field needs more diversity at the top.&nbsp; If museums are going to speak to everyone &ndash; then leadership positions need to be held by individuals with a greater range of backgrounds. I talk often to my students about cultivating the belief that change is possible. On my desk is this quote:&hellip;&rdquo;It had long since some to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them, they went out and happened to things.&rdquo; --Leonardo da Vinci

&nbsp;

What are your&nbsp;interests outside of the art world?

I have an unwieldy cookbook collection and am fascinated by global food culture. I am also a voracious reader of history and a compulsive viewer of television political commentary. My husband Peter and I have embraced Chicago&rsquo;s extraordinary cultural offerings. We are season ticket holders for the Lyric, regular theater-goers, support the Chicago Humanities Festival, and are members of The Chicago Botanical Gardens, the Field Museum, the Art Institute and the MCA. Kayaking is also a passion for both of us and we are eagerly anticipating another summer season out on the water.

&nbsp;

What do you look for in an artwork? What speaks to you?

As a curator of contemporary art, I have occasionally had the experience in a studio in which an artist&rsquo;s work struck a chord deep within me. I got disoriented and thrown off balance. &nbsp;The hair on the back of my neck stood up.&nbsp; I knew I was in the presence of something significant.&nbsp; If that experience lingers the second time I see the work, I am likely to want to do an exhibition or to write about it in order to explore that response and to understand what in the work provoked it.

&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at the Block Museum of Art?

In Fall of 2018 we are thrilled to be partnering with the Terra Foundation and with institutions around the city on Art Design Chicago, our city-wide celebration of Chicago as America&rsquo;s crossroads of creativity and commerce.&nbsp; Our exhibition Up is Down: Mid-century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl studio is the first to examine the pioneering work of the Morton and Millie Goldsholl and their Chicago advertising firm, Goldsholl Design Associates, which brought &nbsp;Bauhaus design to a broad American audience, and created some of the nation&rsquo;s most iconic brand images including the Motorola logo and the 7Up &ldquo;See the Light&rdquo; campaign. In January 2018 we will present Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, an exhibition about art and cultural exchange along the trans-Saharan trade routes connecting Africa, the Middle East and Europe during the medieval period. Loans are coming from some of the world&rsquo;s greatest museums and the exhibition is traveling to the Smithsonian&rsquo;s National Museum of African Art. This is quite an achievement for the small but mighty Block Museum of Art.

&nbsp;

Lisa Graziose Corrin is the Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Block Museum of Art. For more information about the museum&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/block-museum-of-art">Block Museum of Art</a>.

&nbsp;

Photo Copyright: Joe Mazza,&nbsp;Brave Lux

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&nbsp;

An Interview with Lisa Graziose Corrin, Director of the Block Mueseum of Art

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Executive Director and Chief Curator, Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&nbsp;of the Renaissance Society.

&nbsp;

Age: 45&nbsp;

Current Position: Executive Director and Chief Curator, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

Hometown: Bergen, Norway

Previous Occupation: Executive Director, Bergen Kunsthall (2003-2013)

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week:

Restaurant: S.K.Y. in Pilsen

Shop: Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Read: Constance De Jong, Modern Love

Neighborhood: Hyde Park, of course!

Music: Sigrid,&nbsp;an up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Norway

&nbsp;

Tell us about your background and the journey that led you to become Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society?

I joined Bergen Kunsthall as curator in my late 20s as I was finishing up my MA, and a few years later I was appointed director. During my time there I made exhibitions with some incredible artists including&nbsp;Rosa Barba, Danh Vo, Christopher Williams, Nairy Baghramian, Runa Islam, and Sergej Jensen. In the summer of&nbsp;2012 I was invited to apply for this job at the Ren, which of course I couldn&#39;t pass up, and the&nbsp;just about a year later my family and I undertook a very&nbsp;big move across the Atlantic!

&nbsp;

Give us a day in the life!

My daughters are 4 and almost 6, so getting us all ready and out of the house in the morning is often a bit of a circus.

At the office, my days usually consist of meetings with staff and other stakeholders, making plans with artists for upcoming exhibitions, fundraising,&nbsp;writing and editing texts, and of course&nbsp;lots and lots of emails! In the evenings I am frequently out at&nbsp;events with our supporters or seeing exhibitions&nbsp;at other institutions, but if it&#39;s a home night I might hang out with the girls at the playground before dinner.

&nbsp;

What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

What has been really exciting in the last year is seeing a number of artworks we have commissioned going&nbsp;out into the world. New projects&nbsp;by Kevin Beasley, Sadie Benning, and Mathias Poledna were acquired by major international museums (Tate Modern, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively), and Jennifer Packer&#39;s beautiful show&nbsp;Tenderheaded&nbsp;is currently on view at the Rose Museum of Art at Brandeis University near Boston. The Ren is a small and nimble institution that does a&nbsp;lot, so one of my biggest challenges is simply&nbsp;managing my time and a very varied workload.&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

How would you sum up your experience with the Renaissance Society thus far?

My experience at the Ren so far has been truly amazing. I feel that one of the greatest things about being a curator is just continually learning from artists, being alongside them&nbsp;from initial idea to final presentation. I also learn a ton from my brilliant team of colleagues.&nbsp;I faced a&nbsp;steep learning curve when I arrived in Chicago in terms of negotiating a new and very different cultural and professional field, but I have been humbled by, and am so grateful for, the community of support I have found around the Ren, from the generosity of funders to the enthusiasm of artists to work with us.

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

Look at art, read about art, talk to artists. Stay informed, but avoid chasing trends. And treat people well.

&nbsp;

Favorite&nbsp;pursuit outside of the art world?

I love swimming in Lake Michigan (in the&nbsp;summer) and doing anything outdoors.

&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at the Renaissance Society?

Our current exhibition, <a href="http://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/530/richard-rezac-address/">Richard Rezac: Address</a>, runs through&nbsp;June 17 and really shouldn&#39;t be missed! I&#39;m also particularly&nbsp;excited about solo shows next season with Shadi Habib Allah in the fall&nbsp;and Liz Magor in the spring.

&nbsp;

Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; is Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society. For more information about the space please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/the-renaissance-society">The Renaissance Society</a>.

&nbsp;

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&nbsp;

An Interview with a Curator: Solveig Øvstebø

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418589/fwjxrbr19y5n7d2uoueo.jpg"><figcaption>Brian Westphal and Michael Mcvickar’s open living room is filled with paintings hung salon style, complemented by contemporary furniture and design</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEADuring one of Chicago’s very snowy days this winter, I made my way down a quiet North Side block blanketed in white and pulled up to an industrial looking building that, from the outside, I wasn’t quite sure was the right address. I knew only that I was supposed to visit collectors at their Ravenswood residence. I peeked into a side window and saw someone at a desk jump up to meet me at the door, and a moment later Brian Westphal and Michael McVickar invited me out of the snow and into their art-filled home.&nbsp;After shedding my down-filled layers and meeting the couple’s cats, we first enjoyed some gourmet coffee prepared in a hidden, designer prep space just off of the kitchen. The story of how Brian and Mike’s home came to be was on my mind as soon as I walked in. While the walls are filled with dozens of contemporary paintings and other works of art, the character of the open, ground floor space is also largely defined by its industrial bones, since the building once housed a motor oil company. &nbsp;The couple gutted and rehabbed their previous home, a worker’s cottage in Roscoe Village. According to Mike, “It was a beautiful little house, but it was on a smaller than normal city lot. We basically still had this list of things that would be nice to have.”&nbsp;One day, when Mike was looking through The Chicago Reader real estate section, he noticed an ad for a small factory building for sale in Ravenswood. The listing, he recalls, had bells and whistles that both he and Brian wished their existing house had.“So,” Mike remembers, “I said let’s just go check it out. We called our realtor and came over for a look. Basically it was just a brick box.” The building was two stories, with the first floor totally open and without a kitchen. It had also been neglected. Open windows had let in water, which led to moldy floors. The walls that did exist didn’t go to the ceiling. Because the previous owners had left Chicago and not kept a close eye on things, the space had also been broken into. Graffiti tags were spray painted on the concrete pillars on the first floor.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2752/original/img-6645.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Westphal and mcvickar seated at home in front of Laurie Hogin’s painting, Fabulous Exotics</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Mike adds, “It was kind of a hard living space. We walked out, and I said, ‘No way in hell are we buying this place and leaving our really nice, finished little house.”&nbsp;Brian remembers it differently, “He didn’t say that.”“Yes I did,” counters Mike. “Brian was the one who said it was perfect and that we could do so much with it.”Eventually, of course, they did buy the building. Brian saw promise in the larger lot size and the yard. Even though there was nothing there yet, he says, “It was just grass, but it was clearly a cool space.”&nbsp;Mike admits, “Had we not previously been through a whole house construction project, I would have run out the door. But we did understand that we could probably get it to look like we wanted.”Though the project did seem daunting, a previous owner had originally purchased the property intending to live there. They cleaned up the environmental issues, such as a tow truck in the yard and old storage tanks, which were still present once the factory had closed. By the time Brian and Mike came along, the building had a new roof, as well as a new heating system and windows. They were able to move in and live in the space for a while as they began the work of putting in the first floor kitchen, as well as bathrooms and rooms upstairs. They maintained the original open floor plan and kept concrete ceilings, but they covered up some of the exposed brick in order to hang art and simplify the look of the space.&nbsp;Brian and Mike began buying art together long before embarking on their home renovation. As Mike recalls, “It was a natural evolution. First we had posters, and then Brian started buying some finer framed things.”Brian tells Mike, “You actually said, ‘I don’t want to hang a bunch of posters on the wall.’ And since we had had a good friend of ours stay with us, and he had been collecting art –”&nbsp;“Yes,” finishes Mike, “He was the first person we knew who had art. That opened the door for us to see that real people do actually buy these things.”Those regular encounters through their friend got Mike and Brian to think that they could also learn about and buy art that they loved. For Brian, he admits that they began to understand they valued their friend’s art because it made them ask questions. They were constantly curious about what it was and what made it stand out to them.&nbsp;The next step to discovering art on their own meant visiting galleries. Though they acknowledge that galleries seemed intimidating at first, mostly due to their own inexperience, as well as what they recall as sticker shock, they slowly got to know a few established dealers, such as River North veteran Ann Nathan, and little by little they overcame what Mike considers initial hurdles. Victor Armendariz, who worked with Nathan for many years, told the couple when they were starting to buy that once they got into it, they wouldn’t be able to stop, something that they now know to be absolutely true.&nbsp;“There was a piece by Jeffrey Kamberos,” says Brian, “that we had seen at least a year before we bought it, and it just so happened that it never sold. We kept talking about the piece, and after a year, we thought, ‘We obviously want this painting,’ so we finally bought it and, as Victor warned, it’s been downhill ever since.”Standing in Mike and Brian’s living room, I sensed many pairs of eyes on me. Looking around I noticed many different faces and bodies in the art on view.&nbsp; Much of the work that the couple collects is figurative, which explains their early interactions with dealers like Nathan and Armendariz, as well as William Lieberman, who each represent many figurative artists.As Mike explains, “We were definitely drawn to figurative work.” Brian adds that they didn’t set out with an exclusive collecting focus, but rather it revealed itself as a dominant draw over time. Eventually the pair decided that narrowing their collecting focus would help further develop their taste.&nbsp;Eventually both Brian and Mike had to acknowledge that they had gone beyond casual art buying. “It took me a while to say I am a collector,” admits Brian. For Mike, the label came almost out of a necessity to define their role in the art world, “Well, people will ask, ‘Are you an artist or a collector?’ So, you kind of end up owning the term collector, because we are not artists,” he says.&nbsp;Like other collectors in Chicago I have had the pleasure of interviewing, Brian shares a familiar sentiment about a life with art, “We buy what we love and we love to live with it, so that’s why we do it.” For Mike as well, he says they are not really trying to amass a collection of anything. He emphasizes, “I mean, it really just happens.”Brian and Mike continue to spend plenty of time visiting galleries and art fairs, but they also acknowledge the ease, as well as the pitfalls, of having so much art available online. For Brian, “These days its much easier with everything being online, since you can easily see and find lots of work. On the other hand you don’t have to go out as much. It’s become like anything else – it’s sort of an Amazon.com world.”&nbsp;They do still go to galleries, though they confess not as much as they used to. It’s a little awkward to admit, but Brian says, “We used to go a lot more.”Despite the lure of the comforts of home, the social aspect of the art community cannot be obliterated by the Amazonification of everything. Mike explains, “We like seeing the gallerists and artists, we like running into other collectors. It’s the people who really draw us out.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2753/original/royalty-2c-2008-2c-oil-on-panel-2c-32-x-36-2c-photo-by-tom-van-eynde-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Maria Tomasula, Royalty, 2008, oil on panel, 32” x 36”</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Now the couple says they average at least one purchase a year, their most recent being a porcelain, multimedia piece by Rodrigo Lara Zendejas. Mike interjects, “We had a party here, and we had just gotten this piece that day. William [Lieberman] and Brian [Gillham] from the gallery [Zolla/Lieberman] had told us they were going to come up sometime to help us hang it, but they came to the party and put it up right then. It was a fun example of how so many things come together in the art world.”When explaining what it is about figurative work that appeals to each of them, Mike says, “It comes down to the fact that I just don’t get abstract art. I can understand some of it, but I just find it kind of esoteric that you have to go in and you have to learn. It’s not a bad thing to have to learn the artist’s perspective of course, but I want to look at something and be able to form a narrative on my own.”Brian gets to the point: “We don’t ultimately care whether there is a meaning behind these pieces. People come over and ask me, ‘What’s this about?’ Well, we don’t know. I usually say it’s whatever you want it to be. But for us there’s resonance to seeing people, rather than the abstract.”To Mike, art is primarily visual, and it should be personally appealing, “It can be beautiful to you or not. Maybe sometimes it gets more beautiful the more you look.” He sees the attraction like a relationship, one that in order to last must go deeper than a first impression. For Mike and Brian, art must also defy its surroundings. As Mike puts it, “I just can’t stand hearing people say something like, “Where am I going to put that? Will it fit over the sofa? That’s not why you buy a piece of art.”Talking more about why exactly you do buy a piece of art, Brian and Mike went back and forth about how their own collecting journey might look to a younger generation that has been adamant about seeking experiences over things. Reflects Brian, “To me these paintings are not things, they are not objects you are going to use for a while and either dispose of, or just upgrade, later. These are things you want to live with, so in a way they are experiential because every time you walk into the room you know you are affected by what they do to you in this space.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2755/original/chapin-aleah-laugh-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Aleah Chapin, LAUGH, oil on canvas, 40” x 48”, 2011</figcaption></figure>Mike is enthusiastic about the uniqueness art brings to his day-to-day routine. “I love that I’m the only one in the world that has that painting by that artist,” he says, pointing to a striking scene of a cluster of older, nude women embracing each other and laughing, like they’re sharing secrets while posing for a candid photo in school days. He explains, “That’s an interesting piece – it’s a very inviting and realistic portrayal of these aging women together. One of them is the artist’s mother, and the others are her family friends. It was kind of a woman-power thing, years ago before all the stuff people have been addressing now. The artist, Aleah Chapin, is an amazing person. To me it’s the whole package.”&nbsp;Brian and Mike first saw Chapin’s work at the New York Academy of Arts several years ago. After wandering through the various spaces and seeing work by first and second year students in various stages of progress, they noticed a painting that a young artist who was getting her MFA, Chapin, was working on. Some time later, Brian saw another piece of Chapin’s become available through Flowers Gallery in London. The couple decided to buy it, since it had been on their minds all that time. A few months later she was announced as a finalist for the 2012 BP Portrait Award in London, and eventually she was named the winner for the piece that Brian and Mike had seen back at NYAA. “The prices for her art went through the roof, if you could even get them,” says Brian. “We loved the piece we bought, number one, and we wanted it for that reason, but it’s fun to think we did a good job identifying it early on. I’m delighted that we have this in our house.”&nbsp;For Mike, he says he loves the back-story about the painting’s subjects as well as the tale of how they found it, but ultimately he just likes how it looks. “It’s great to have that history behind the painting, but I don’t need that to appreciate this. That’s what I think I miss in abstract art – I feel like I can’t appreciate it unless I always know everything about the artist and all the elements of the work. For me hopefully any one of these works [at home] stands on their own. You can love or hate it, but you don’t necessarily need to know the details to really appreciate it.”Brian agrees, “There’s enough art out there for everybody. You can pick your own style and decide what you like. For us, this is what we love.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2754/original/img-4491.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>The Happy Garage, by Chris Uphues</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

An interview with Chicago collectors Brian Westphal and Michael McVickar

Building a Home for Art: Reviving an Industrial Space in Ravenswood

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418589/n4ateb2eqndfsiwgc0ho.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAThis past fall a creative synthesis of art and design arrived on the South Side of Chicago when Brooklyn-based artist Fabiola Jean-Louis brought her life-size paper gowns and carefully staged photographs to the DuSable Museum in Hyde Park. I met the artist herself in the spring, and we took a tour of the exhibition with Clinée Hedspeth, Director of Curatorial Services at the museum and the woman who brought Jean-Louis to the DuSable. We talked about how art and beauty can be used as vehicles for contemplating and understanding larger issues. After meeting Jean-Louis I not only looked at paper in a whole new light, but I understood the possibilities of recontextualizing multiple histories.&nbsp;Jean-Louis was born in Haiti, and she says her work is primarily informed by her Afro-Caribbean heritage, black culture and the dialogue of mysticism. By reinterpreting generally recognizable images of European (white) nobility and recreating the traditional trappings using deceptively simple materials such as paper, Jean-Louis sets up immersive scenarios though which viewers can reconnect to a violent and complicated past while reimagining a more beautiful and hopeful history. Viewers who encounter her work first see a stunning, familiar image, and then they detect the questions beneath the surface. This, for Jean-Louis, is how she seeks to rewrite history – not to change the past but to use history to challenge the present and therefore change society in the future.&nbsp;The DuSable is an institution devoted to the historic and artistic examination of the African American experience, an evolving mission that is carried out in endless ways. This latest exhibition represents a new direction for the museum. Following is an edited transcript of my conversation with both Jean-Louis and Hedspeth.&nbsp; –GV&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2745/original/conquistador.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: Clinée, when we first met you told me you discovered Fabiola’s art online at 2 o’clock in the morning. Her work was so personal to you, even through a screen, that you were compelled to contact here. Tell me how you came to collaborate on an exhibition at the DuSable Museum.Clinée Hedspeth: I wasn’t in curatorial here at the time. I was in education, but as a collector I was just in love with her work. So I sent her an email, and she responded. That was before we had a chief curator at the museum, so we kept talking, I looked at more of her work, and then all of the sudden I said, “You need to come here. Let me see what I can do.”&nbsp;Fabiola Jean-Louis: And then we started having conversations with the new curator at first, and then for about a year and a half, about a small group show with two other artists.CH: I had to climb the ladder where I could bring her in. [Laughter]&nbsp;FJL: There were changes happening at the museum and they were looking at the new face of the DuSable and what the new exhibitions would look like, and that took time. When Lee Bey came on board, together with Clinée he said, “We’re gonna make it happen.” And at that point it was like a race to get ready.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2750/original/passing.jpg" alt=""></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2747/original/dsupu7lueaartju.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: Have you had an exhibition on this scale anywhere prior to now? You must have needed a lot of time to get everything ready.&nbsp;FJL: A lot of time. The first ever show that I had with Rewriting History was when it was still very young at the Harlem School of the Arts. That show consisted of two and a half sculptures and maybe four to six prints. By the time Clinée and I started working together I had added more pieces and improved my skill set with how I was making the dresses.&nbsp;So, I got to the point where I needed to remake dresses again. Here is a dress [points] with a totally different type of paper. It’s an archival paper. The original was a newsprint. This paper just had a better flow. Also the cut of the dress is different. I wanted something that is more true to what existed, as far as shape, and the original wasn’t. So for display purposes, I really wanted the actual sculpture to have the right cut and proportion, and it needed to be redone. I also had to spray a dye onto it versus using acrylic paint.The DuSable is my first museum show, and I’m so happy. I’ve always said that it was really important to show my work in a black museum. It also helps that DuSable is a Smithsonian affiliate, since another goal for me has been to get to the Smithsonian. This is a dream come true. This is like the granddaddy of all the granddaddies.CH: Fabiola doesn’t make work catered to the space, and that’s what I loved about her work. At first I didn’t know what was done to make a piece, but once the show was going to happen I had to ask, ‘What’s the checklist?’&nbsp;FJL: It actually takes me four to five months to get one shot, because of conceptualizing, and making the dress. I had to get to a point where I could pump out a dress in a week.&nbsp;CGN: The beauty of each piece is the tip of the iceberg. There’s also the historical context and the story behind it. Are there different stories connected to each piece, or are they each different chapters of a larger story?FJL: Different chapters of a larger story. I do my research and think about history, but I’m not an academic. It’s something that I have to go and find. Also, prior to doing Rewriting History, I was a pre-med student. My career was set to become a doctor, so I’m academic in that sense, but when it comes to the work for Rewriting History it really has to start from this very organic, raw place. Sometimes I don’t even read; it’s about what I know has happened already. I think about the black experience as being non-linear, and I try to tap into as many different aspects of that story as I can. For instance, being a black woman, being Afro-Caribbean – I don’t identify as African American – personally it’s me working from those different places. I also look at the space of the black experience being African American. What does that look like and how does that relate to me? It ends up being part of a larger story, but it’s different chapters. It doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t related in some way. They’re all relative. It’s ultimately about the same thing – injustice, trauma, and violence against black bodies.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2749/original/madame-beauvoirs-painting-flyer-t580.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: When you think about the horrors of so many aspects of history for African Americans, Afro-caribbeans, black people, are you using beauty to get attention or communicate? Is there an element where beauty is a sort of mask? How do you use beauty to connect to something so atrocious?FJL: I like that word, actually. I haven’t used that word mask, and it’s making me think. I think that here beauty can be seen as a mask used to uncover something deeper, for sure.&nbsp;CGN: We do that all the time.&nbsp;FJL: That’s right, because I use beauty as a vehicle to carry my viewers through this journey and take them to a place that’s uncomfortable at some point. But mask, I think, is also very true to that. It’s also being used to uncover something that’s very ugly. It definitely speaks to my response to how I see our society being desensitized to injustice and again, violence against black bodies.&nbsp;Early on in the series when I was creating, I knew for sure that I wasn’t interested in showing the blood and the gore. Us being murdered. Even when I do presentations, I don’t include pictures that are during slavery or even in the ‘50s when black men and women are hanging. It’s so important, to me, to preserve us in some way. And I feel like every time we see us being shot and blood and all that it’s just like there’s no respect.&nbsp;CGN: Well sometimes it ends up being distracting. People just want to look at the blood and gore without thinking about how it got there.FJL: Exactly, without connecting to the actual thing or incident. So I knew early on that I wasn’t going to do that. I took my time to think about how I was going to present it, and beauty became a very clear means, because at the same time I wanted to create work that would be welcoming to different people, and not just the Black Diaspora, but anyone interested in talking about race. I want them to feel welcomed into this space to talk about it. That’s&nbsp;not to say that there’s [something] apologetic in the work at all or that I’m going to hold back from what I feel is important to the story.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2746/original/dntom7au8aettxq.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: When talking about history you said you reference historical situations you know are true, but&nbsp;you’re not relying on academic texts or timelines. The title of the exhibition is Rewriting History.&nbsp;What do you think about being revisionist? It sounds to me like you’re not trying to rewrite the past. You’re actually just trying to understand it from now going forward.&nbsp;FJL: Right. The rewriting part is not literal. It’s not for me to do, because I can’t anyway.&nbsp;CGN: You’re not rewriting it because you’re showing what happened.&nbsp;FJL: It’s more of a What if? What if I could? What if we were always celebrated? The series just shows black female bodies, black women. That’s what I’m most comfortable showing. It’s not that I don’t want to include black men in the work, but as a photographer, as an artist, I’m more comfortable working with the black female body. We’ve been disrespected, so this for me asks a question, while also remembering what actually happened.I’m a firm believer in the saying that in order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been. You have to know where you are. It’s not about forgetting the past. It is about rethinking how we see beauty, how we celebrate the black female body, and rethinking what freedom actually looks like. Is freedom always this big grand thing, or is freedom the simplicity of just sitting for a portrait? The leisure of having the time to be painted or photographed. We take the simplicity of freedom for granted. So the series is about going deeper into what freedom actually looks like, and what freedom is.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2748/original/fabiola-461x600.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: There’s another level of just considering a woman’s lifestyle – the trappings of beauty, all of the stuff that has to be out adorning, rather than just within, the body.&nbsp;FJL: We can talk about leisure and the freedom to be painted, but we also acknowledge how even those women were imprisoned, in a way. Fashion was a means to do that. They had to wear these tight corsets.CGN: You mean beauty is pain.&nbsp;FJL: The corset for me takes this on. It’s something really beautiful and aesthetic, but when we think about what it actually stands for, it’s not. It’s confining. It’s choking. The corset represents, for the black women in my works, society, racism and all the limitations that we’ve had. It’s always a dance between how fashion and the celebration of beauty and taking and owning space relates to the things that we take for granted: like fashion, a painting, or who gets to wear what.&nbsp;CGN: Tell me about your artistic process. The sculptures are each related to the photographs, and&nbsp;you said it can take months to set up a single shoot.FJL: I don’t look at other photographers as inspiration for my work. I always look at paintings. My library has just books and museum catalogues that show actual garments, if they have it, and paintings – Boucher, Fragonard, Rembrandt, artists like that. Rewriting History is me showing a contemporary way of what I think a painting looks like. I’m not a painter, even though the pieces in my photographs I’ve painted.&nbsp;I try to get a digital photograph to look like a painting. The first part of the process is looking at those master painters and doing research. Sometimes, the work is a response to what’s happening currently. Other times it’s intuition – a conversation I’m having with my ancestors.Then through that space I think about the concept I want to bring to life. When I figure that out I decide on the style and design. I’m always looking at 16th–19th Century Fashion for reference.CGN: That’s a pretty big time-span.FJL: [Laughter] Well, I think about the style that’s most appealing to me, and sometimes the dresses are going to be replicas of what was in a painting. Early on the dresses were a mixture of different periods. Now, I’m more interested in replicas. I don’t sketch anything. I just can’t operate in that space. It’s too limiting for me.&nbsp;CGN: I would not have guessed that.&nbsp;FJL: I have five notebooks for sketching that I convince myself that I’m going to use, but I just can’t do it.&nbsp;CGN: So, it’s really as you go?FJL: That’s what’s so free about it. I can add on, and it’s all about emotion. At the same time I’m also thinking about the set. I have to think about the design and how I’m going to bring the lighting in and tell the story.&nbsp;CGN: Does every piece end up as part of a photograph?FJL: Usually, yes,but not every single piece. For the DuSable they have two dress that have not been worn yet, and so there are no photographs of these pieces. It doesn’t mean there’s not going to be. I have to work backwards because I had the design and the dress already, but I want to add them into the photographs.&nbsp;CGN: Your photographs have a painterly quality, as you said. Here you photographed your daughter wearing your sculpture and props, and then you&nbsp;digitally apply a veneer that makes it not quite real.FJL: It’s become my style of photography. I just love everything that’s painterly. That in itself takes hours to do. After the photograph is done, it takes me about four days of editing to just paint and Photoshop to get it to look that way. And there’s another reason why it needs to be like a painting – that’s where we are often missing. If I go to a museum, I’m not going to see the black body in a master painting celebrated in that way. If the black body is in that painting, someone is often either enslaved, or they just disappear into the backdrop.&nbsp;CGN: Or they’re in an exotic culture.&nbsp;FJL: And fetishized in some way. So it starts there with a painting; the goal was always to have them in a museum.CGN: You want to put them where they are not.&nbsp;FJL: So I’m not very interested in a photograph really. Even though I use the camera as a tool, like a painter uses a brush, my goal is not to get something that literally looks like a photograph. I’m more interested in something that seems otherworldly.&nbsp;CGN: What materials do you use?&nbsp;FJL: I use acrylic paints. I use dyes, coffee [and] natural stain. I use handmade Japanese paper, or just a simple French craft paper. Sometimes I make my own paper. It depends on what I’m working on and the scale of it. Now my work has progressed to include furniture, jewelry and shoes. So, it’s a madness.&nbsp;CGN: You are at the beginning of your career. Where do you think you will go next?&nbsp;FJL: Rewriting History is inspired by my history and my identity. It’s about analyzing myself and who I am as a black woman, as an artist, as a mother. I’m grateful for the series because it inspired a lot of work that’s going to be an extension of Rewriting History. The work is continuous and still developing. It’s never-ending.&nbsp;&nbsp;Rewriting History is on view through May 23 at the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/dusable-museum">DuSable Museum of African American History</a>.&nbsp;Note: After the interview was conducted Clinée Hedspeth moved on from curatorial work with the DuSable Museum in April 2018 to independent art consulting and appraising. She continues to represent Fabiola Jean-Louis’s projects.</body></html>

Artist Fabiola Jean-Louis at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago

Fabiola Jean-Louis: Rewriting History Through Beauty

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with art dealer Teresa Hofheimer of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/hofheimer-gallery">Hofheimer Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

Age: 64

Current Position: Gallery Owner

Hometown: Anderson, South Carolina

Previous Occupations: Executive Assistant, Figure Drawing/PaintingInstructor, Plein Air Painting Instructor

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5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant: Herb Restaurant - great Thai food

Shop: Women and Children Book Store in Andersonville

Read: Two books -&nbsp;Paris in the Present Tense&nbsp;by&nbsp;Mark Helprin and The Italian Teacher&nbsp;by&nbsp;Tom Rachman

Neighborhood: Andersonville

Music: John Coltrane

&nbsp;

How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

TH: I had been thinking about opening a fine arts gallery for a long time and when the space I&rsquo;m currently in became available, I took the plunge.&nbsp;I am a painter and I cannot remember a time when I was not making art or in&nbsp;the&nbsp;pursuit of&nbsp;seeing other artists work.&nbsp;I know first-hand how many talented artists there are in Chicago and there are only so many galleries.&nbsp;Art needs to be viewed and experienced in real time.&nbsp;The gallery&rsquo;s&nbsp;focus&nbsp;will be contemporary painting and sculpture, primarily showcasing Chicago artists.&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Give us a day in the life!

TH: I usually arrive around 11 in the morning, make a cup of coffee and start answering emails.&nbsp; I have been spending a great deal of time on the computer and I don&rsquo;t see that letting up anytime soon.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m looking at a lot of work online and I have been trying to schedule one or two studio visits a week.&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Hofheimer Gallery has been in business for almost two months now, but we know it has taken a lot to get things going. How would you sum up your experience setting up shop?&nbsp; 

TH: Most days I feel like I&rsquo;m running around with my hair on fire.&nbsp; In three months I&rsquo;ve had to set up the business end of owning a gallery, contacting and visiting artists studios, scheduling solo and groups shows, curating and hanging the exhibitions, then hold an opening reception with the artists!&nbsp;I have exhibitions scheduled through February 2019.

&nbsp;

Is there a particular favorite memory in the process of opening the gallery?

TH: My favorite was when I hung the gallery&rsquo;s first exhibition, which was a solo show of Chicago artist, Betty Cleeland&rsquo;s&nbsp;paintings.&nbsp;Her work transformed the space and made it very real for me.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

TH: At this point, I don&rsquo;t think I would try to tell them anything.&nbsp;Instead I would&nbsp;ask them, &quot;what are you waiting for?&quot;&nbsp;There is never going to be a perfect time.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Who inspires you?

TH: I have always been inspired by artists who are in it for the long haul.&nbsp; There is something to be said for people who have chosen the arts not only as a profession but as&nbsp;a way of life.&nbsp; To continue decade after decade, to pursue a vision, hone their skills and persist&nbsp;against all odds.&nbsp; That inspires me!

&nbsp;

Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

TH: I am a voracious reader and see every performance of Hubbard Street Dance Company.

&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at Hofheimer Gallery?

TH: This summer will be group shows, in September Judith Roston Freilich will have a solo exhibition, and November will be an outstanding group of Chicago artists working in gouache.

&nbsp;

Teresa Hofheimer&nbsp;is&nbsp;the owner of Hofheimer Gallery. For more information about the gallery please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/hofheimer-gallery">Hofheimer Gallery</a>.

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An Interview with an Art Dealer: Teresa Hofheimer

BY ALISON REILLY

At first glance, Richard Rezac&rsquo;s sculptures might be described as cool, crisp, or sleek. But his careful craftsmanship and delicate choice of color imbue the objects with a warm familiarity, and their contrasting surfaces often activate tactile memories.

Earlier this month&nbsp;Rezac&rsquo;s exhibition, titled Address, opened at the Renaissance Society. Though the work in the show spans the last 20 years, for executive director and chief curator Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;,&nbsp;the exhibition is not a retrospective. &ldquo;We wanted it to be a new commission,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;a comprehensive new installation related specifically to the space of the Renaissance Society.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s colleague, Janine Mileaf, director of the Arts Club of Chicago, had a similar idea. She commissioned Rezac to create a new sculpture for the Arts Club&rsquo;s outdoor space. Inspired by the urban location of the Arts Club, the organization&rsquo;s connection to sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and his own interest in Shaker fence building, Rezac built Glen Elder.&nbsp;

&ldquo;We decided that it would be a nice collaboration to do these exhibitions at the same time,&rdquo; &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; said, &ldquo;to emphasize both institutions&rsquo; respect for his work and his role in the Chicago art landscape.&rdquo; Her deep admiration for Rezac and his rigorous studio practice is evident. &ldquo;He is one of the strongest sculptors working in the U.S. today,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Over the span of 40 years he has been true to his project and worked quietly in his very own vein. There are very few artists who show this kind of uninterrupted concentration.&rdquo;

&Oslash;vsteb&oslash;, like many others, is drawn to Rezac&rsquo;s work not only because of its formal beauty and distinct quality, but also because of the way he builds his sculptures. &ldquo;He makes them all by hand through a very determined process in which meticulous geometry and math are combined with a deep feeling for color and shape,&rdquo; she noted.

Rezac was kind enough to answer a number of questions about his childhood, his education, and his current art practice. Following is an edited transcript of our recent conversation.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="The Arts Club of Chicago hosts Rezac’s site-specific installation Glen Elder this summer. The piece is the most recent work in the Club’s Garden Project series. On View through July 2018" data-rich-file-id="2718" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2718/original/rezac-install-copy.jpg" />

Chicago Gallery News: Where did you grow up?&nbsp;

Richard Rezac: I was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska in a family of six siblings with extended family nearby. My parents enjoyed travel when they had the time and finances, so an outward look around the Midwest was an important aspect of my early years.

CGN: Is there a memory from your childhood that influenced your decision to become an artist?

RR: I had two excellent art teachers in middle school and high school. They were bright, respectful, and encouraging. As examples in their conduct and personal commitment, they were mainly responsible for me, during high school, to decide later to seriously pursue the study of art.

CGN: Why did you decide to become an artist?

RR: Largely due to these teachers, but I have also had a persistent interest in drawing since I was about six years old. That attention and outlook led to an appreciation of what it would mean to go further with other forms of art.

CGN: I grew up in Portland, Oregon and am interested in the time you spent there. What brought you to the city?&nbsp;

RR: I went to Portland to attend the BFA program at the Museum Art School (as it was known then, 1970-74), now the Pacific Northwest College of Art. One of the major benefits was its immediate connection to the Portland Art Museum with its galleries serving as an extension of the studio classrooms. The faculty were accomplished as artists and invested in education, and because the School was small, it was necessarily interdisciplinary, so I took courses in every studio area. I graduated as an artist, not as one specialized in one discipline.

CGN: What was Portland like at the time?

RR: The 1970s in Portland was ideal: open, liberal and responsible, inexpensive.

CGN: From 1980-82, you studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore and received your MFA. How did that time compare to your experience in Portland?

RR: It was also a rewarding education, and a positive time to be in Baltimore, though almost completely different from Portland&mdash;as an older, entrenched, industrial, working-class eastern city. Nature, as I had known it in Oregon and Nebraska, was a long distance from Baltimore. The most rewarding part of that place and time was the ready access to museum collections in Washington D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, which I visited frequently.&nbsp;

CGN: I studied the work of Katarzyna Kobro, a Polish artist associated with Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. I see similarities between your work and hers, because you often work on a human scale, you incorporate materials like wood and metal, and, in addition to freestanding sculpture, you sometimes hang your sculpture on the wall or from the ceiling. How do you see your work relating to early abstract art?&nbsp;

RR: I do admire her work (and saw a survey exhibition in Madrid last summer) and think that it certainly needs to be better known in this country, as it is prescient to some artists working in our time. If early twentieth-century abstraction can be seen today as an examination of some fundamental forms and their realization&mdash;in relationship&mdash;to an appropriate material, resulting in a simple, yet suggestive statement, then I agree that my sculpture, and approach, is indebted to those artists&rsquo; work. Their human-scaled size was inevitable because of the hand-forming construction and the private, rather than public, motivation.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Richard Rezac, Untitled (Ren Screen), 2016-17, painted wood and aluminum, 74 x 120 x 36.5 in. PHOTO: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2716" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2716/original/renscreen.jpg" />

CGN: Can you tell me more about Untitled&nbsp;(Ren Screen)? What inspired this work?

RR: This work is a combination of space divider, but free-floating and rather small; a wall to hang sculpture but with an area only for one. Otherwise, my reason to make it came almost first, two years ago, when invited by Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; for this exhibition. I felt the need to keep the Ren gallery space as open as possible, yet with a need to mark and divide it discreetly. Light from east to west in that space is paramount, so the underside of this screen is transparent and its primary, two-sided plane is on perpendicular axis with the only other built wall in the space. There are some details and surface treatments that match the scale and sensation of my sculpture generally, so it will hopefully be understood as an extension of the sculptures, while also being a slight architectural element, speaking to the gallery structure. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Richard Rezac, Chigi, 2016-17, painted wood and cast hydrocal, 49 x 69 x 43 in. PHOTO: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2717" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2717/original/rezac-chigi-2017.jpg" />

CGN: What is the significance of your sculptures&rsquo; names? I&rsquo;m particularly interested in Chigi and Quimby.

RR: The sculpture titled Chigi references the Italian papal family (originally from Siena). Alexander VII was one of three Popes in the Baroque period that commissioned Francesco Borromini in the architecture he designed for the Vatican. This sculpture incorporates an element that succinctly quotes the family emblem or crest, which is based on a series of overlapping mounds, as in the hillside landscape around Siena. All of Borromini&rsquo;s buildings initiated or completed during his reign contain these emblems, as a mark of sponsorship. My intention for Chigi was to join two seemingly unlike forms: the merged crib-like structure, and the volumetric &ldquo;foot&rdquo; in recognition of Borromini, not so much the Chigi family.&nbsp;

The other sculpture, Quimby, is only the second work that I have made incorporating stained glass. The first house that I lived in with stained glass as a feature was on NW Quimby Street in Portland, and the designs in the several rooms were comprised of a simple grid surround, resembling the fragmented version in this sculpture.

<img alt="" data-caption="From left to right: Richard Rezac, Zeilschip (knot), 2014, nickel-plated cast bronze and cast bronze, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in.; Zeilschip (gauge), 2016, Cast bronze and nickel-plated bronze, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in.; Zeilschip (lunar distAnce), 2015, Cast bronze and painted cherry wood, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in. Photos: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2719" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2719/original/zeilschiptrio.jpg" />

CGN: I&rsquo;d also like to know more about the series of sculptures with Zeilschip in the title. Can you tell me more about the material you selected for each one?&nbsp;

RR: Zeilschip is a Dutch word meaning sailing ship or sailor. The four works are based on a ceramic tile, oval in shape, that I saw at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It depicted sailing vessels in port, with the water line level, but the oval set askew. I was intrigued by that subtle disjunction, and so I ultimately made four related works. All are cast bronze volumetric forms, but each has a different surface treatment (one is nickel-plated), and all have a separate &ldquo;instrument&rdquo; or notation on its left side. These small additions complete the sculpture, re-balance it visually, and add a geometric, faceted form. These configurations were all determined by the two sets of axis of the oval: true verticals and horizontals&mdash;one set within the oval, and one set on the wall itself. The coordinates from all points at the periphery of the oval (which resembles an iron cross) in some way converge to spell out the element attached to its left side.

CGN: You have said, &ldquo;Like an architect has a drawing to begin building, I have a drawing to initiate the sculpture with some reliability.&rdquo; Can you talk about your relationship to drawing and sculpting?&nbsp;

RR: For me it makes perfect sense to draw first, to explore possible ideas&mdash;whether that starts with a conscious source or improvisational. I can then adjust the particulars in the drawing over time, and eventually decide if I want to see it as a sculpture. I have never made a sculpture without going through this drawing phase first. For years these drawings have resembled traditional architectural drawings in their showing plan, elevation, and sometimes section in alignment, so it is easy to interpret these images as three-dimensional.

CGN: How involved are you in the installation of your work for exhibitions?&nbsp;

RR: Extensively. Since 1977 I have installed all of the solo exhibitions that I have had, and I have usually been involved in the actual installation of a work in any group show, if it occurred in a city in which I was living.

CGN: How would you describe your studio?

RR: It is on the first floor of the building I live in, a former dairy store, so my studio space is not so large, but the layout is efficient, somewhat compartmentalized, and perfectly suited to my needs. It has good natural light from three directions and is segmented into three areas: for building sculpture, for drawing, and for something in-between, such as painting.

CGN: Does Chicago architecture influence your work?

RR: When I moved here in 1985, the architecture of Chicago came as a revelation the first time that I looked closely at the invention and importance represented by this history. There is an affinity, naturally, to sculpture. Primarily, I gravitate to the street level detail or isolated fragment, but I have not actively used or incorporated, any aspect of local architectural forms or buildings proper. &nbsp;&nbsp;

CGN: If you didn&rsquo;t live in Chicago, where would you be?

RR: Hard to imagine at this time in my life. This is a great city, in my experience, and offers everything I need.

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Richard Rezac&rsquo;s Address is on view at the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/richard-rezac-address">Renaissance Society</a> until June 17, 2018&nbsp; &bull;&nbsp; <a href="http://richardrezac.com">richardrezac.com</a>

 
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Sculptor Richard Rezac at the Renaissance Society in Chicago

An Outward Look: Richard Rezac at the Renaissance Society

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with art dealer Aron Packer&nbsp;of Aron Packer Projects.

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Name: Aron Packer

Hometown:&nbsp;Chicago

Previous occupation: Record Store

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5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant:&nbsp;Bite Cafe 
Shop:&nbsp;Any Dollar Store 
Read:&nbsp;The Hunting Accident by David Carlson and Landis Blair 
Neighborhood:&nbsp;Rogers Park of course 
Music:&nbsp;The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams

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How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

AP: My parents had a big influence on that.&nbsp; My mom, Marilyn Packer, was a printmaker and painter and was pretty aggressive for not having gone to art school.&nbsp; I remember her tying large paintings on the top of our station wagon and driving them down to the Art Sales and Rental Gallery at the Art Institute or a gallery she showed at in Old Town. A little later, my folks were on the Exhibition Committee at the Evanston Art Center where she had studied and modeled for Paul Wieghardt and Nelli Bar.&nbsp;&nbsp;

My father Davey Packer was an industrial designer eventually becoming an exhibition designer, and I would always see him tinkering at his drafting table working on booths for the consumer electronics show and trade shows, things like that.&nbsp; He was very particular in how things looked and were arranged.&nbsp; They both were starting to attend local auctions buying American Folk art and ethnographic art.&nbsp; He was always interested in natural creativity alongside modern design.&nbsp;

My mother bought into an antique quilt shop which eventually was run more like a gallery.&nbsp; American Folk Art quilts have the breadth and graphic quality of contemporary painting.&nbsp; They were visually vibrant and exciting to me.&nbsp; I started to follow my folks to antique shows and flea markets.&nbsp; I bought a few quilts and eventually was comfortable enough to consign some to her.&nbsp; They sold and I was kind of hooked.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s more to it than that, but that is how I got interested in showing and selling art.&nbsp;

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Share a typical day in the life!&nbsp;

AP: I am on my computer almost all day&hellip; emailing and trying to make a dent in all my to do lists.&nbsp; Show-hang weeks are the most fun. That is my blank canvas.&nbsp;

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Best sale you&#39;ve ever had?

AP: We sold an engraved (scrimshawed) boat by Michael Dinges to Aurora University a few years ago.&nbsp; It hangs from the ceiling and has to do with our sinking ship economy among many other things.&nbsp; It looks like a classic lifeboat and is made of vinyl siding over a constructed frame.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s made with materials one would buy at Home Depot.&nbsp;

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Successes you have had this year? What about challenges?

AP: My most recent success was being head of sale for an Outsider and Folk Art auction at Leslie Hindman.&nbsp; It was the first one they have done there&hellip; I am no longer there but that was a great year in my art life. A challenge at the moment is letting people know that since September I have a permanent pop up space they can come and see 5 days a week.&nbsp; Getting a good job I love in the arts would tie with the aforementioned.&nbsp;

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Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

AP: Thumbs up and down on art fairs&hellip;. They are too expensive for a dealer like me, but I actually loved doing them.&nbsp; An empty booth is a challenge.&nbsp; But hard to sell artwork that is made by under the radar artists&hellip; which is mostly what I like to show.&nbsp;

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Who inspires you?

AP: I would have to say teachers of all kinds&hellip;&nbsp;grade school, high school, art and music and everything else.&nbsp; We&#39;ve got to support those folks and they don&rsquo;t get paid enough.&nbsp;

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What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?&nbsp;

AP: I am a huge fan of music in general.&nbsp; I play banjo and am in a band called Sinner&rsquo;s Friend.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s comprised of a gallerist, artist, architect and yogi.&nbsp; I played classical guitar and went to college for that&hellip;. worked in a record store after high school which got me into all sorts of music.&nbsp; Over the years I&rsquo;ve gone to hundreds of concerts.

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What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?&nbsp;&nbsp;

AP: I often look for artwork that I wished I could have done myself&hellip;. But I don&rsquo;t have that kind of focus.&nbsp; I also like what I call raw power work, which sometimes can be found in certain Outsider Art.&nbsp; Where someone is so driven to make something they will do whatever it takes to get a piece done with whatever materials are on hand.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not always pretty per se.&nbsp;

And I do love paintings of many genres and histories.

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What&rsquo;s coming up next at Aron Packer Projects?

AP: We have a one on one conversation with Maria Tomasula happily grilling Jason Lahr about his current show.&nbsp; On June 9, we start a show with Ben Blount.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a letterpress, print, and book artist.&nbsp; Letterpress is new for me so I&#39;m pretty darn excited about it. &nbsp;With this show we will be part of a print crawl on June 24th generated by Spudnik Press.&nbsp;

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Aron Packer is&nbsp;the owner of Aron Packer Projects. For more information about his exhibitions please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/aron-packer-projects">Aron Packer Projects</a>.

Top image credit: Background artwork&nbsp;by artist Bruce Riley

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