BY LAURA MILLERAlibi Fine Art is a young gallery dedicated to photography - one of the few in Chicago that focuses exclusively on the medium. Located in Ravenswood on the city’s north side, Alibi is owned and operated by Lisa Janes. New to gallery ownership as of spring 2014, Janes continues to push the photo-centric mission of the gallery forward while aiming to highlight the work of often overlooked artists. Janes shared some insight with Chicago Gallery News about her new role at the gallery as well as her own interest in photography. - LM<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/510/original/installation-1.jpg" alt=""></figure>Q: Tell me about your background and your interest in art.&nbsp;A: I am originally from Alaska, but I have lived all over the country since I left for college. I studied art at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. After receiving my BA, I completed the professional photography program at the New England School of Photography in Boston. I arrived in Chicago to take over the gallery last spring.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Are you an artist?A: I am an artist myself, though I rarely exhibit my own work. &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Alibi Fine Art was established in July 2010 by Adam Holtzman (now one of Alibi’s represented artists), and you took ownership in the spring of 2014. How did this transition come about?&nbsp;A: Before I took ownership of Alibi last spring I was curating at a small gallery in Urbana, IL. Adam and I are old friends from school, and I had asked him to consign some of Joseph Sterling’s work to the gallery for an exhibit. During our collaboration he came up with the idea to turn Alibi over to me before he moved his family back to the east coast. It was something I had always wanted to do, and it was an opportunity I could not pass up.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: The gallery has focused on photography. Will you continue to feature photography exclusively moving forward?&nbsp;A: I intend to continue to exclusively concentrate on photography. It is the medium I know and love best, and currently there are very few galleries in Chicago dedicated solely to it. I took Alibi on because I liked Adam’s selection of artists and the direction he had taken the gallery in up to that point. Deviations are inevitable, especially as I add new artists to the Alibi roster and explore potential collaborations with other organizations, but I aim to maintain the core characteristics established early on. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/509/original/other-pictures-installation-8.jpg" alt=""></figure>Q: The CGN office regularly receives questions from artists about how they can get dealers to look at their work. Do you also get this question often, and are you open to reviewing new submissions even if you’re not seeking additional artists?A: I do get this question frequently, and I am sympathetic to it. Unfortunately I do not have time to respond to the numerous inquiries I receive, so I am not open to looking at unsolicited art, especially not in person. I jury and review portfolios through events such as Filter Photo Festival, and I encourage artists to take advantage of similar opportunities if they want their work to be seen by gallerists and curators. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: You recently moved the gallery from Montrose to your current Ravenswood address. How is your new space?&nbsp;A: The new location is working out well. Most of Alibi’s regulars have found me by now, and I have gotten a lot of new foot traffic from events such as the Ravenswood Art Walk. Sharing space with Manifold Chicago provides good cross-disciplinary traffic and the closer proximity to Lillstreet Art Center has benefited us as well. &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: How important is foot traffic to you and the gallery?A: I place slightly more importance on those who seek the gallery out because they tend to be the most loyal enthusiasts for the medium, however, I have had a lot of luck with repeat visitors who began as walk-ins.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: What new shows do you have scheduled this spring?A: Coming up is David Akiba’s homage to Harry Callahan in the spring, followed by Dan Farnum’s color photographs of urban youth in Michigan. Plans are in the works to participate in more art fairs in 2015. Farther down the road I would like to work with artists from disadvantaged backgrounds to provide a way for them to show work that would otherwise go unseen.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Do you have any big plans for the year ahead?A: A current professional goal is to find interesting ways to spotlight my artists through social media, events, and collaborations.&nbsp;&nbsp;Alibi Fine Art 4426 N. Ravenswood (60640) Tel 773-454-1512 F-Sa 12-6; and by appt. <a href="http://www.alibifineart.com">www.alibifineart.com</a>

CGN interview with dealer Lisa Janes of Alibi Fine Art

Dealer Profile: Lisa Janes, Alibi Fine Art

By KEVIN NANCE

The artistic sensibility of Chicago architect Carlos Martinez&rsquo;s collection is best described as &ldquo;eclectic.&rdquo; Within the 3,000-square-foot Gold Coast condo he shares with his partner, Michael Tirrell, Martinez has amassed a significant modern and contemporary art collection that juxtaposes abstract and figurative work, often hung in pairings that emphasize the contrast. The art, in turn, exists in a kind of creative tension with the highly traditional interior architecture of the building, an upscale 1897 Holabird and Roche apartment complex that was one of the first of its kind in Chicago&rsquo;s Gilded Age. &nbsp;

A native of Cuba and a resident of Chicago since 1982, Martinez is now a principal at Gensler, a leading architecture firm, specializing in interior design. His taste for mixing periods and styles is evident at the couple&rsquo;s Astor Street condo (which, they were happy to discover, was once occupied by L&aacute;szl&oacute; Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian painter and photographer who founded the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology). Rich wood paneling, molding and floors, a massive mantelpiece and bookshelves form a striking old-world backdrop for the art, much of it by Chicago Imagists Ed Paschke and Roger Brown. &nbsp; &nbsp;

Chicago Gallery News recently sat down for an interview with Martinez, his dog Blue snuggling beneath a blanket at our feet. Here&rsquo;s an edited transcript of our chat.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: How did you get started as a collector?

A: It all started 28 years ago, which is when I made my first &ldquo;serious&rdquo; purchase&mdash;the first time I went into a gallery and bought something. It was a drawing by David Kotker, a young, up-and-coming sculptor here in Chicago who was doing some really big pieces. Zolla/Lieberman had a show of his studies for the sculpture, which were really wonderful, almost de Chirico-ish. A lot of David&rsquo;s pieces were sort of perverted&mdash;the line drawing I bought has a kind of S&amp;M quality. It&rsquo;s really beautiful.

&nbsp;

Q: You still have it?

A: Yes. I&rsquo;ve never decommissioned a single piece. And then one day, David decided to get married, have a kid, and stop doing art. He was very well-known at the time&mdash;he was a darling of the art community here&mdash;but he&rsquo;s not so well known now because he quit. I think I paid $600 for the drawing.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: Which was a lot of money then.

A: Oh yes. But it was a birthday present to my partner, Michael. So from that point, for every Christmas and every birthday, I would buy a new piece, occasionally more than one. We&rsquo;ve been together for 28 years, so that&rsquo;s how the collection happened.

&nbsp;

Q: Had you been single, would you still have been collecting art?

A: Yes, for sure. I would have bought it for myself. (Laughs.) I&rsquo;ve always loved art. My mother used to say when I was a kid, &ldquo;When you grow up, I think your house is going to be like a museum.&rdquo; (Laughs.)&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: And so it is.

A: Yes, although I don&rsquo;t think of it as a museum. (Laughs.) The other thing that happened was that around the time I bought that first piece, I did a project here in Chicago with a wonderful curator and art consultant, Emily Nixon. She&rsquo;s extremely knowledgeable and has her own company, Nixon Art Associates. I told Emily, &ldquo;Christmas is coming up and I want to buy a present for Michael. He has heard of this guy here in Chicago, Ed Paschke. Can you help me get a Paschke?&rdquo; She said yes, she knew of a great piece by Paschke at a gallery in Michigan. I went to see it and loved it, but then she said, &ldquo;Let me show you these other pieces also.&rdquo; They were these two black-and-white drawings, &ldquo;Hubert&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tudor&rdquo; [1976]. And there they are [points to the drawings over the mantelpiece]. And then she said, there&rsquo;s another piece, which I also loved. And I told her, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to buy them all.&rdquo; So that was the beginning of the whole Paschke thing. Michael and I really love his work, and over the years, when something comes up at auction, I often bid on it. Roger Brown was the other artist who Michael liked in particular.

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="496" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/496/original/martinez-copy.jpg" />

Q: You have several pieces by both artists, I see.

A: I think there are about a dozen Paschkes and nine Roger Browns. We also have several other classics&mdash;a Motherwell, a Nevelson, a couple Picassos. There&rsquo;s an Ellsworth Kelly, which is one of my favorites. It&rsquo;s funny, because everything is either highly abstract or completely figurative. Michael says, &ldquo;If we go into another room with faces looking at you&hellip;&rdquo; Paschke is always a face, you know.

&nbsp;

Q: What was it about Paschke&rsquo;s work that appealed to you?

A: Michael had met Paschke, and one of the things he really liked was how down-to-earth Ed was. I started reading about him, and I liked the story behind the art. When Ed did one of his early pieces of a female entertainer, he got some criticism for &ldquo;exploiting&rdquo; women. The story I was told was that the next year, he came out with this series of &ldquo;Hubert&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tudor&rdquo;&mdash;there was a third piece, which I&rsquo;m tracking&mdash;about male entertainers, some of whom were transgendered. Ed was having a dialogue with the art community and its narrative around his work. I thought that was wonderful. I was on a panel recently and somebody asked me, &ldquo;What inspires your work?&rdquo; As an architect I look to the social construct of the time&mdash;what&rsquo;s happening in the world, in popular culture. That was also the lens Paschke used in his art. The fact that he was a Chicagoan was also important, and that he was part of this school, the Imagists, with Roger Brown.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: What was the connection with Brown? Did you meet him?

A: I never met Ed Paschke, and Michael never met Roger Brown. Part of what we like about Brown is that many of his paintings are about buildings and the people in them. Everybody thinks, &ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re an architect, so of course you like Roger Brown.&rdquo; It was Michael who was mesmerized by his depictions of glowing windows in the black-box buildings. He really connected with that, and I loved it too, because I love Mies van der Rohe, and we lived in a Mies building on Lake Shore Drive at the time. I also like how Brown depicts the sky.

&nbsp;

Q: Those pillowy skies&mdash;

A: Pillowy, yes. Or they look like drapery. He was even more outrageous than Paschke with his critical commentaries. We went to a Brown show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery and saw the piece &ldquo;The Jim and Tammy Show.&rdquo; I loved it, in part because here again we are dealing with popular culture in the context of fine art. I can&rsquo;t say I understood it; in fact I wondered, &ldquo;What the hell does it mean?&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Q: You knew who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were?

A: Yes, although politically, I had absolutely no affiliation with their mission. I showed it to Michael and said, &ldquo;We should get this, it&rsquo;s so cool.&rdquo; He said, &ldquo;That is the most horrible thing I&rsquo;ve ever seen in my life.&rdquo; (Laughs.)

&nbsp;

Q: It has a camp sensibility.

A: Super-camp. It&rsquo;s about religious fanaticism, of course, but also the scandal they had. So about three years ago, that piece came up at auction, I think at Leslie Hindman, and I said, &ldquo;I have to get it. I was destined to have that piece.&rdquo; I gave it to Michael as a Christmas present. He got a big laugh out of it.

&nbsp;

Q: I see you also have a print by Le Corbusier, which makes sense given the architecture connection.

A: Yes, I bought a book about his lithographs in 1979 when I was an architecture student. I bought it at the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, and probably paid $20. The book now is worth $800, which is what a copy sold for recently at auction. I loved the lithographs.

&nbsp;

Q: He&rsquo;s not so well-known for those, is he?

A: No, but they&rsquo;ve become very collectible. The Peninsula Hotel has six of them. When one of the lithographs came up for auction at Leslie Hindman, I said, &ldquo;I need to have this piece.&rdquo; I had a business trip and had to be out of town, so I told Michael, &ldquo;Could you please go to the auction and bid on this piece?&rdquo; The day of the auction, I called home and Michael said, &ldquo;I feel terrible. I got to the auction a couple minutes late and didn&rsquo;t get to bid on the piece. I&rsquo;m really sorry.&rdquo; I was so disappointed. A few months later, Christmas Eve comes, and we were going to have dinner with Emily Nixon. We got in the car to go to dinner, and Michael said, &ldquo;I forgot something,&rdquo; and went back inside. He took a long time and I was getting upset. Finally we went to dinner and came home and were having tea. I said, &ldquo;Wait a minute, there&rsquo;s something different.&rdquo; There was the Le Corbusier piece, framed and hanging on the wall. That was really nice of Michael.

&nbsp;

Q: And kind of wicked, also.

A: Absolutely.

&nbsp;

Q: Your architecturally traditional apartment sets up an interesting dynamic with contemporary art hanging on the walls.

A: I always loved the idea of the contrast between classical architecture and modern furniture and art. In Spanish, the word for furniture is mueble, and the word for real estate is inmueble. Literally, what&rsquo;s movable is mueble and what&rsquo;s fixed is inmueble. The terminology clarifies the fact that some things you take with you, and other things stay behind. To me, architecture is designed for the ages, but furniture and art reflect where you are in time. So coming to this classical apartment was about creating a tension between the two things.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer.&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/kevinnance1">Twitter @KevinNance1</a>

&nbsp;

Image picture at top: Martinez shows off works by Paschke and Roger Brown alongside various artifacts.

&nbsp;

A collector interview with Carlos Martinez

A Classic Setting for Eclectic Art

By KEVIN NANCEArt collectors often claim that they buy art solely because they love it, not because they consider it an investment. But for Paul and Linda Gotskind, a Chicago couple who’ve spent the past quarter-century thoughtfully amassing an impressive collection of contemporary art, they see a work’s monetary value, now and (potentially) in the future, as a necessary part of the decision-making process.“Most people would probably say that they don’t have the money thing in the back of their minds, but they do,” Paul Gotskind says in an interview at their River North home. “We buy art mostly because we like it, but when you’re buying something that costs a lot of money, you’ve got to think about the investment part of it. I’m not saying we buy things because they might go up in value, but at the same time, I don’t want to lose every cent we’re putting into it, either.”Linda is even more definite on the subject. “For me, it’s part of my portfolio,” she says. “I’m not in a position to spend several million dollars on something and ignore the possibility that it could be worthless at some point.”The Gotskinds’ unapologetic practicality with regard to art and money stems in part from the fact that they both spent most of their professional careers as stock and commodities traders, he at the Chicago Board of Trade and she at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. &nbsp;(Paul remains an active stock trader, working from home; Linda, a teacher before entering the financial industry, is retired.)&nbsp;Their understanding of the fiscal realities of art collecting also affects the art they buy and how they buy it. They deal primarily with established galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago (including the Richard Gray, Alan Koppel, Kavi Gupta and Rhona Hoffman galleries). “We’ve occasionally bought pieces from galleries whose reputations we weren’t sure of,” admits Linda Gotskind, “which might not have been the best decision.” And rather than take risks on emerging artists, the couple prefers to collect work by mid-career artists “who’ve made a move for themselves,” as Paul puts it. “They’re associated with good galleries, they’ve sold at auction, they’re in museum collections.”Also hovering in the background of their art-buying choices is the fact that with his first wife, Paul Gotskind built a significant collection of work by blue-chip artists such as Picasso, Dubuffet, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly.&nbsp;At the time of their divorce, Gotskind and his ex-wife chose to sell the entire collection rather than make the difficult decisions that would have been necessary to divide it. “If we hadn’t sold it, that collection would have been worth a small fortune today,” he says wistfully. “Now I’m paying the same amount for younger artists that I was paying for blue-chip artists back then.”*<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/430/original/gotskinds-2-copy.jpg" alt=""></figure>The Gotskinds’ collecting is also largely about their own emotional investment. Showing a visitor around their 2,800-square-foot condo recently (they also have a home in Laguna Beach, Calif., where they keep the other half of their collection of about 100 pieces), they take obvious pleasure in the work. They are unusually knowledgeable about each piece, having developed relationships with many of the artists and learned more than many collectors do about the art-making processes involved. Their collection is consciously integrated with family heirlooms and photographs. “That’s my best art,” Linda says proudly of a framed portrait, “My grandkids.”Both Paul and Linda know what they like (primarily painting and sculpture, the latter often with a textured, tactile quality) and what they don’t. “Conceptual art is something we’re still working on,” Linda says. “Something that needs an explanation, that you have to study up on, is not what I’m normally drawn to—although when you walk around with a curator, that’s all they’re drawn to.” Most of all, they’re drawn to quality. “We’re big fans of buying one of the better pieces by an artist,” Paul says. “I’d rather buy a lesser artist’s better work than Andy Warhol’s worst piece.”Along the way, the Gotskinds have developed fairly specific affinities: for African-American artists, including Rashid Johnson, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Jack Whitten and Theaster Gates (“Black artists are having their time right now,” Linda says); women artists (including Rosson Crow, Wangechi Mutu and Elizabeth Neel); and Chicago artists (including Gates, Angel Otero, Dzine and William J. O’Brien).“Paul and Linda have an extraordinary eye,” says Tony Karman, who enlisted the Gotskinds as investors in Expo Chicago, the annual art fair at Navy Pier. “They are very active on the contemporary art scene, not only with leading galleries but as people who collect artists who have gone on to great careers. One of the best parts of their collecting ethos is that they don’t use an art adviser; they share the experience of finding artists they want to collect, and they stay true to their curatorial vision.”Perhaps the Gotskinds’ biggest problem now as art collectors is that they’re essentially out of display space, though they continue to actively collect. Virtually every possible place to show art in their two homes is filled.&nbsp; Lending pieces to museums (which they do frequently, including recent loans to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and other institutions) only solves the problem temporarily.“It’s a question we don’t have an answer to yet,” Paul says a smile. “We’re working on it.”One possibility is to sell some work at auction, which, so far, they’ve done only sparingly. Another option is to donate some artworks to museums, but that still leaves something to be desired. “The pieces the museums are the most interested in are the pieces we’re most interested in,” Linda says, “and I’m not ready to give them up just yet.”Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1

Collector Profile: Linda and Paul Gotskind

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417943/nzmy38pedy2ltbzyotye.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;By KEVIN NANCEIn the community of art dealers in Chicago, Kavi Gupta stands out as one of the busiest and most ambitious. From his base in his eponymous gallery at 835 W. Washington, Gupta surveys an expanding mini-empire of exhibition spaces that now includes a branch in Berlin as well as two satellite spaces in Chicago (219 N. Elizabeth in the West Loop and 2108 S. California in Pilsen); in September, he plans to open a fourth Chicago space, a store specializing in art books and small editions, next door to the main gallery.Over the years, Gupta has represented a core group of midcareer artists from Chicago—including Theaster Gates, Curtis Mann, Angel Otero, Melanie Schiff and Tony Tasset—but casts a wide net in terms of marketing them around the globe. More recently, his stable of artists has diversified in terms of geography, but Gupta’s approach to selling their work has remained consistently international.&nbsp;Chicago Gallery News recently visited Gupta, 45, at the Washington Boulevard gallery, where he also lives in a rooftop apartment with his wife, Jessica Moss, associate curator of contemporary art at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Following is an edited transcript of our chat.&nbsp;What drew you to become an art dealer, and what was your preparation for it?I started out collecting art. My family in India are some of the biggest collectors of contemporary Indian art. My father, Raj Gupta, was an architect and an engineer, who moved here in 1964 and worked with Bertrand Goldberg on Marina City. I was born in 1969, and our life was about architecture and design. I was an art history minor at Northern Illinois University; I was an investment banker after college but was spending all of my money on art. I went to get a master’s at the business school at the University of Chicago, and they allowed us to work with other departments. I chose the art history department, and that really propelled me into thinking I wanted to do something with art. I wanted to be around art, I wanted to be around artists, and I wanted to show what I was collecting. In the late ’90s, I found a building in the West Loop, a boarded-up crack house on Peoria, for a dollar a square foot. I called right there and said, “I’ll take it.” I built that space over two years, and I later bought the building across the street. As the West Loop developed, the value of those spaces went up, and we were able to leverage that into buying this building.&nbsp;Fifteen years later, you’ve got a ton going on.Yes, although the busyness, for us, isn’t really defined by how many people are walking through the door. We’ve positioned ourselves as a gallery that’s based in Chicago, but we don’t quantify our success based on things happening here. I just had a meeting with the staff, and they’re so busy that they can’t fathom how they’re going to get everything done. But it’s to do with all the things we’re doing around the world—collectors from everywhere, artists from everywhere. We’re a global gallery that just happens to be located here.&nbsp;The majority of our artists are Chicago artists, but we’re promoting them around the world.It’s not about foot traffic.Right. In New York, it’s about dealing with who walks into the gallery; that’s their day. Our day is meetings and conference calls and research for artists and flying everywhere. Somebody from the gallery’s on the road all the time. We’re very proactive on behalf of artists, and that means not sitting here waiting for that client to come into our door. So our guys are out there talking to collectors, talking to curators, talking to art writers, pitching ideas and getting in front of them. If you look out my office door, you’d see two people packaging catalogs and other people writing proposals for museum shows. We have one person doing nothing but PR for specific artists. We have two people, who are artist liaisons, going to artists’ studios, talking about their practice, and talking about what’s coming next. It’s a constant back-office function and a high level of activity with a global focus.What was the thought process behind opening the Berlin gallery?It was part of this same thing we’ve been talking about. Berlin is a cultural capital, a place where curators and artists live and spend time. It’s about thinking; it’s about looking. And it’s a place where new art always comes from. For me Berlin has always been that place in Europe. It’s also very affordable, so it was a great place to make a European foothold. We wanted to reach out beyond Chicago and establish a beachhead for our Chicago artists, to have a different audience come and see the work, increase its recognition. It’s been very successful. We also use Berlin as a way to find new artists from Germany and elsewhere. Because it’s so affordable, artists come from all over the world and have studios there. There are artists from every city in Europe, as well as from Japan, China, and India. So it’s important for us to be there and see what’s really happening in contemporary art today.You also have multiple spaces in Chicago. You just opened a new one on Elizabeth Street, for example.That’s right, and we have a third space as well, an 11,000-square-foot building in Pilsen. The idea, basically, is to build opportunities for our artists. A lot of them work in large scale, and I wanted to give them the impetus to do that if they wanted to. We did a large show of Roxy Paine pieces, Apparatus, in the Elizabeth Street space that won the AICA [International Association of Art Critics-USA] Award as the best gallery show in the country; it took up two rooms and 5,000 square feet. It was a museum-caliber show, one of the bigger productions a gallery has ever done in Chicago. We also produced a Tony Tasset piece for the Whitney Biennial that was 80 feet long.&nbsp;So you have three spaces in Chicago - you’re opening a fourth - and you have one in Berlin. That’s a lot.It happened by need; it wasn’t really a conscious decision. Our gallery here isn’t that big, and we don’t have storage. At one point I was renting a storage building for $8,000 a month, and one of our collectors, a banker, said, “That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you go buy a warehouse, and your mortgage will be half of that for a bigger space.” So we bought the Elizabeth Street building, an 8,000-square-foot cold-storage facility that we renovated, and yes, the mortgage is less than half. And the space turned out so beautifully that we decided to start doing exhibitions there. And then the Pilsen space, a former auto garage, turned into the storage building.So it’s not about establishing an empire.Oh my gosh, no. We’re way too exhausted for that. We’re just working very hard for our artists, and we have to do what they need. We’ve only grown to fill that need.&nbsp;Will you keep expanding in the near future, or stay the same size?We don’t plan things that much; we’re just going with the flow. We do plan to open a kind of small bookstore and editions gallery, which has been a dream project for a while. It’s going to open next to us in this building in September. A lot of our artists are producing small editions, along with monographs or art books, so the new space will be a place to show those. We also want to be able to do lectures and artist talks there, to bring a criticality to the shows we’re doing. &nbsp;&nbsp;Is there some through-line, some shared quality in the artists you choose to represent?Well, there’s a regional focus to some extent. We like to find and promote artists from Chicago; it’s a big thing for us. We’re really proud of having found a program here and taking it global. Another area of common ground is that we’re interested in artists who develop a narrative through process. They’re very interested in the process of making things, and they make a hint of a narrative. Or there’s some personal statement that’s being made.&nbsp;As opposed to something that’s purely abstract.Right. Another area we’re interested in is artists with a little bit of a social practice, a social narrative—who are making, not so much a political commentary, but are looking at the world and responding to it. This September, for example, we have shows by Mickalene Thomas and Glenn Kaino. Both of them deal with issues they’ve been grappling with, including race, gender, political structures. Mickalene’s show is mostly done in cast bronze and has to do with her history with her mother, who was a flamboyant African-American socialite in the ’60s. Mickalene also produced a film about this, “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman,” that was broadcast this year on HBO; the film will be shown here in the gallery. Also this fall we’ll be doing Glenn’s Leviathan, his first major show in many years, in the Elizabeth Street space.Which artists have you had the longest professional relationships with?Angel Otero, for one; we started working with him before he had finished grad school. Tony Tasset, who had a show here this summer, we’ve been working with for many, many years. We’ve added four or five new ones—including Mickalene, Glenn, Roxy, Jessica Stockholder and McArthur Binion—but most of our artists, we’ve been working with for close to 10 years.Back in the days of the Hairy Who and the Imagists, Chicago artists had a kind of group identity, a set of shared aesthetic concerns, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.&nbsp;The good thing about being removed from New York or L.A. is that there, artists do tend to become slightly homogeneous; they develop schools that emerge pretty regularly, and the schools themselves push an aesthetic. Here, I think the artists don’t tend to group in those ways. Everyone has a unique practice, and we look at each artist as an individual here. I can’t think of anything that really ties them together, but I think that’s a good thing.&nbsp;&nbsp;Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer + photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1</body></html>

Kavi Gupta: Taking Chicago Artists Global

BY LAURA MILLER

I first met James Mespl&eacute; one day several years ago, when he stopped into the Chicago Gallery News office after visiting Printworks Gallery. He dropped off a catalogue from his upcoming show and shared a first hand explanation of his conceptually loaded work. Since that visit, and on many others, I&rsquo;ve been pleased to gain knowledge and history from the congenial, insightful Chicago artist.&nbsp;

Mespl&eacute;&rsquo;s intricate paintings link the past to the present through portrayals of historical imagery, mythical figures, and surrealist landscapes; fine details and vibrant, saturated colors fill his canvases. References to pop culture and modern themes dot his work along with the occasional glimpse of the artist himself.&nbsp;

Mespl&eacute; studied painting at the University of Missouri in his home state, and following his move to Chicago in 1968, 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. Mespl&eacute; lives and works in Chicago where he is represented by Printworks Gallery, and his work is included in numerous public and private collections. - LM

Image shown at top of page:&nbsp;James Mespl&eacute;, Calliop&eacute;, Muse of Epic Song and Poetry, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 7 &frac12;&rdquo; x 9 &frac12;&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Clio&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of History, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 7 ½” x 9 ½”" data-rich-file-id="444" height="546" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/444/original/clio-web.jpg" width="682" />

<h4>LM: How long have you lived in Chicago?&nbsp;</h4>

JM: I&rsquo;ve lived in Chicago since 1968. I was 19 when I moved here, and I&rsquo;m from a small town in the Ozarks called Nevada, Missouri. I had visited my brother in New York and my sister in Chicago in previous summers, so when I decided to leave the University of Missouri to finish my education, I chose Chicago.&nbsp;

<h4>Tell me about your recent summer exhibition, Mythic Faces &amp; Figures, at the Chicago Cultural Center and your upcoming fall show, Muse, at Printworks Gallery.&nbsp;</h4>

Mythic Faces and Figures at the Cultural Center included my larger canvases in egg tempera and oil, a mixed technique of painting that I originally learned from Thomas Hart Benton, whom I met through my teacher Fred Shane.&nbsp; This process gives luminous, brilliant color, which I very much like. &nbsp;

Muse, my Printworks exhibition, is a series of 33 new collages, made with a variety of water-soluble media, including ink, watercolor, gouache, casein, and acrylic painted over paper collages. Most of the works are small and intimate. The Muses inspire us in the diverse arts. Many people know about the nine Muses but few know their names or attributes. I hope everyone will stop by the gallery, see the exhibition, and pick up the free catalogue, which is really a small guide to the Muses. Once you know their names, you will see them pop up in works by writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce. The Muses can take you on a journey to both the past and the future.

<h4>I always enjoy hearing your stories. Can you share a noteworthy memory about a triumph you&rsquo;ve encountered throughout your years as an artist?</h4>

In 1987, I was commissioned by Chicago City Ballet to create sets for Chicago!, a new ballet to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the city of Chicago. The premier was at the Chicago Theater on State Street. I couldn&rsquo;t miss the chance to put a monumental image of a golden Venus on the top of the Sears Tower (now Willis). It did not go unnoticed by the critics. This led me to produce a painting with similar images, which was included in my first international invitational exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York in 1988. The title of that exhibition was Classical Myth and Imagery in Contemporary Art. In the art world it is certainly true that &ldquo;one thing leads to another.&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Terpsichoré&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Dance, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="445" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/445/original/terpsichore-web.jpg" />

<h4>Your work is loaded with vivid representations of classical figures, and nods to historic symbolism.&nbsp;Can you elaborate on your interest in mythology and historical subject matter?</h4>

I have always been interested in the narrative in my painting, and in my music as well. My preference is classical music. I like a beginning, a middle, and an ending. For me, it is rather like sex&mdash;the foreplay, the act of pleasure, and the climax. Remove any one of these three parts and something is definitely missing. Sometimes, in narrative painting, the story is only suggested and the viewers complete the action in their minds. These stories have as many different endings as there are viewers. We get out of a painting what we personally bring to it.&nbsp;

I love mythology because the narratives are always open to various interpretations. Often multiple meanings exist simultaneously, both mundane and profound; exoteric and esoteric. My interest in mythology began at an early age, encouraged by my grandfather, who shared with me the stories he learned from his father and grandmother. I find many similarities between his Osage (Native American) stories and the Greek Myths, since both deal with the forces of nature, the sky, the earth, and the creatures that live upon it. Carl Jung, of course, would claim archetypes exist in all cultures.

<h4>What do you find unique about Chicago&rsquo;s art community?&nbsp;</h4>

I find it a nurturing place to work because it is not market-driven. Art, whether a novel, a painting, or a symphony requires time, energy, and isolation in order to bring an artistic creation to completion.&nbsp;

Chicago provides a wonderful cocoon in which art can develop and mature before it emerges and takes its flight from the artist&rsquo;s studio. Other cities around the world have provided the same conditions for the development of art at different times, but the muse is fickle; she never stays in any one city forever. Chicago&rsquo;s location in the middle of the country was in the past a detriment, but it is now looking more like an asset, as people move away from the edges of the continent. For many Americans, the Great Lakes, the Prairie, and the Mississippi are still terra incognita, but in the new century, this is going to change. What will the art of the new century look like? Only one thing is certain. It won&rsquo;t look anything like work from the 20th century, which looked nothing like work from the 19th century, which looked nothing like work from the 18th century, etc., etc.

<h4>Are you in the middle of any big projects?&nbsp;</h4>

I am starting a new series of egg tempera and oil paintings on panels, which incorporate gesso relief in both the picture plane and the frames. The nature of the subjects and narratives are top secret at this time.&nbsp;

The twelve paintings will take me two years to complete. They should be ready for exhibition in the fall of 2016.

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Melpomené&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Tragedy, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="446" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/446/original/melpomene-web.jpg" />

<h4>Do you have a favorite place in Chicago?</h4>

I love the conservatories at Garfield Park and Lincoln Park, and the Chicago Botanic Garden in Highland Park. I have been sketching plants in all these places since the early 1970s. At that time, when I was still teaching, I used to take my Francis Parker art students to the Lincoln Park conservatory to sketch.

<h4>What books /authors /poetry do you find yourself re-reading every so often? Any classics or old favorites that have really influenced you or your work?</h4>

Shakespeare, Edith Hamilton on Mythology, and Harry Thurston Peck&rsquo;s Classical Literature and Antiquities. Elise Paschen commissioned me to create a painting for the cover of a book of poems entitled Bestiary (Red Hen Press). Her poems, which draw upon her Osage heritage, I found both provocative and powerful. I reread Bestiary recently and found that her poems release a torrent of emotions and images, which any artist could draw upon for ideas.

<h4>Tell me about your studio practice. What is the typical evolution of one of your paintings, for example? How long will you work on a piece, and do you have a set plan when you begin or do elements develop as you work?</h4>

My normal practice is to get up, have breakfast, go out for a good coffee, and get back to start work by 9:30am or so and I work until 6pm, with a 30 minute lunch break. Often I return to the studio after dinner and work until about 10pm. My works begin with small thumbnail sketches that get transposed into small drawings, which are then gridded up to canvas size. The large paintings usually take about two months from beginning to completion. As I work on the pieces, often my plans change and I add or take away elements in the composition. Sometimes, I move on to a new work, only to return to an older work.

<h4>Describe your studio. Is it Organized and tidy, or more of a hodgepodge?&nbsp;</h4>

My studio fluctuates from being organized and neat to a hodgepodge, as I move to the completion of a project.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Erato&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Erotic Poetry, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="447" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/447/original/erato-web.jpg" />

<h4>What inspires you to produce work? Do you have a long list of ideas ready to go, or do you wait for a spark of some kind?</h4>

I have dozens, probably a hundred, sketch books full of ideas, quick sketches done on my travels to museums and intriguing places here and abroad. I refer to these constantly, and one sketch may inspire several works. However, I have come to the conclusion that I would need several lifetimes to make use of all of my sketches. Sometimes, ideas happen in dreams, and I get up and sketch them down before I lose them. Daydreams are easier.&nbsp;

<h4>Are there artists, past or present, whose work you really admire?</h4>

An early influence was Ivan Albright, whose paintings I first encountered in the Art Institute when I visited as a grade school student. In Missouri, I gained much from two of my earliest teachers, Fred Shane and Thomas Hart Benton. In Chicago, I was inspired by the Imagists, especially the paintings of Ed Paschke, who later hired me to give egg tempera workshops to his students at Northwestern. And I studied under Karl Wirsum, at the SAIC. And, of course, I am influenced by numerous Old Masters, especially Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Martin Schoengauer.

<h4>You have a history of teaching at various educational institutions. How was your experience with teaching? Any comments on how the landscape has changed in art education, or on the current state of art education?</h4>

I taught full time for ten years at the Francis Parker School, and part time at the studios in the School of the Art Institute.&nbsp; I enjoyed both, but teaching never left me with enough time for my work.&nbsp; I have been away from teaching for years, so I cannot speak authoritatively on the current situation.

CGN interviews artist James McNeil Mesple

Artist Insights: James McNeill Mesplé

By KEVIN NANCE

In 1986, two young brothers, ShanZuo and DaHuang Zhou, visited Chicago to attend an exhibition of paintings they had created together in their home country of China. The brothers&rsquo; unique partnership&mdash;they collaborated on large canvases on which their sensibilities melded into a cohesive, though not always seamless, whole&mdash;had already made them rising art stars in Beijing. In Chicago, it was an even greater curiosity, in part because Americans think of visual artists as the ultimate individualists working in isolation, chasing intensely personal visions that no one else, not even a sibling, could possibly share.&nbsp;

Two painters, one painting: How could that work?

Twenty-eight years later, the Zhou Brothers are still in Chicago, still raising eyebrows with their seemingly counterintuitive process of making art as a team. The difference now is that piece after piece, exhibit after exhibit, they&rsquo;ve proved the wisdom and fertility of their collaboration. They are fixtures of the international contemporary art scene, their paintings fetching prices starting in the six figures in the United States and Asia. (They also create sculpture, the largest examples of which currently sell for up to $8 million.)&nbsp;

The brothers also loom large in realms beyond the art world, making paintings as a form of performance art in front of business and political leaders at gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2000. In 2011, President Obama commissioned the Zhou Brothers to create a painting that he presented to China&rsquo;s president, Hu Jintao, in a private ceremony attended by the brothers at the White House.

But even as the Zhou Brothers&rsquo; career has expanded into most corners of the globe, they have anchored themselves in Chicago, specifically in the South Side&rsquo;s Bridgeport neighborhood. They live and work in a former Polish social club, which now contains a vast, airy, light-filled studio where they create their paintings, often working on up to 15 large pieces at once. (Sometimes the brothers paint with the stretched canvases lying flat on the floor, sometimes standing up, sometimes both at different stages.) And two blocks away, the Zhou B Art Center, a sprawling complex of galleries, artist studios and event spaces established by the brothers at 1029 W. 35th Street, is preparing to celebrate its tenth anniversary this fall.

&ldquo;Chicago feels like home,&rdquo; ShanZuo says in a recent interview in the garden of their Bridgeport complex. (DaHuang is the younger of the pair, although both brothers, who keep themselves fit and favor stylish, form-fitting outfits and hipster hats, appear significantly younger than their actual ages, which they declined to reveal.) &ldquo;At first we didn&rsquo;t intend to remain in Chicago, but once we got here, we felt like we need to stay,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;Chinese artists are a little shy, a little humble, singing very deep. In America, it&rsquo;s more powerful, more direct.&rdquo; He smiles. &ldquo;Here you show your muscle.&rdquo;

*

In their earliest artistic efforts in China, the Zhou brothers trained and painted separately, but they came together as a team in 1973. &ldquo;At first it was just for fun,&rdquo; ShanZuo says. &ldquo;Collaboration among scholars and calligraphers is a tradition in China, so we thought we would try.&rdquo;

But the brothers quickly realized two things. One was that their collaboration wasn&rsquo;t always fun. As part of the process, each brother has the freedom to cancel out&mdash;to &ldquo;destroy,&rdquo; in their blunt terminology&mdash;what the other has done by altering, augmenting or erasing it entirely. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s totally free to do anything,&rdquo; ShanZuo says, &ldquo;I am free to do anything, including to cover over what he&nbsp;did.&rdquo;

From the start, then, their collaboration was rooted at least as much in conflict as in harmony. When they paint, the brothers&rsquo; separate identities neither merge nor disappear; rather, they engage in a dialogue, one responding to the other, and sometimes the conversation can become a bit heated.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Sometimes he gives you a surprise,&rdquo; DaHuang says of his brother. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re working very smoothly, developing something, feeling very comfortable with it, and then he comes in and goes&nbsp;pah-pah-pah-pah-pah! And everything is destroyed. It&rsquo;s hard to take sometimes. You respect his talent, but it doesn&rsquo;t mean you don&rsquo;t get angry.&rdquo;

But out of that destruction and those sometimes raw emotions also came something unexpected: a new form of art-making that produced results that neither brother could have accomplished on his own.&nbsp; &ldquo;At the beginning, we knew it was interesting, but we didn&rsquo;t know how&nbsp;special it was, how important it was,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;But more and more as we worked together, we realized the value&nbsp;of the collaboration. People think we have&nbsp;the same idea and bring harmony to it before coming to the canvas. That&rsquo;s wrong. The value of&nbsp;the collaboration is that it opens up things that couldn&rsquo;t happen any&nbsp;other way. When you paint by yourself, no matter how great a painter you are&mdash;Picasso, whatever&mdash;you won&rsquo;t have the courage to destroy your own painting. You&nbsp;think you are always right. But two people together, they don&rsquo;t care. You paint something amazing, but he destroys it, because he sees it differently. And with this kind of fighting, something comes out in the painting&nbsp;that&rsquo;s never happened before. It&rsquo;s a mystery, and it creates a new magic.&rdquo;

The greatest mystery, perhaps, is that for all the struggle implicit in their creation, the paintings often arrive at a place of harmony, or at least a balance of elements, however precarious. Sometimes the balance has the feeling of competitors battling each other to a draw; other times, a natural order is achieved, like planets threatening to collide but slipping, at the last moment, into alignment.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s quite unique, what they do,&rdquo; says Kuiyi Shen, Director of the Chinese Studies Program and Professor of Asian Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Shen is also author of the introductory essay in Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration, published in 2004 in connection with an exhibition mounted by the Chicago Cultural Center and the Elmhurst Art Museum. &ldquo;They start from differences, from their own places, and then there&rsquo;s a competition&mdash;a confrontation, actually. But gradually, the two sides get together, and that results eventually in harmony.&rdquo;

Sergio Gomez, curator and director of exhibitions at the Zhou B Art Center, often finds himself awed by how the brothers repeatedly manage to find equilibrium. &ldquo;What makes it work for them is their culture of trust,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Sometimes when you see them together, you have a sense that they&rsquo;re connecting in a language besides the verbal. Many times they fight, but at the end, the whole comes together and it turns out to be incredibly beautiful.&rdquo;

As ShanZuo puts it, &ldquo;Sometimes after a while, you both see something, and it&rsquo;s good. You stop right there. The painting is done.&rdquo;

*

The Zhou Brothers&rsquo; work has evolved considerably over the decades. &ldquo;As artists, when you start to feel like you satisfy yourself, you always pursue a different thing,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;You always look for the best way to make your art go further, go beyond.&rdquo;

&ldquo;When you&rsquo;re young, you think you can do everything,&rdquo; his brother adds. &ldquo;But it takes a long time to find your own style.&rdquo; DaHuang nods. &ldquo;The most important thing is what kind of artistic language you create for yourself.&rdquo;

Their first collaborations in the 1970s were often representational and narrative-based, inspired by Chinese folklore&mdash;one early painting, currently on display in their dining room, shows a mythical beast being slain&mdash;and primitive cave drawings. In the &rsquo;80s, the brothers pushed their engagement with 5,000 years of Chinese art history into the realms of modern art, producing work that, while grounded in tradition, increasingly responded to the international art world in a way that combined the ancient and the cutting-edge.

After settling in Chicago, the brothers spent the &rsquo;90s soaking up influences from their new environment, producing a body of work that was both heavier in texture and more abstract. In those paintings&mdash;several of which remain on view through Oct. 4 at the Zhou B Art Center as part of an exhibit called Zhou Brothers: American Period&mdash;minimalist figures (often secret self-portraits) are prominent, strolling through somber color fields illuminated by lightning flashes of vibrant red.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Zhou Brothers&rsquo; paintings have become almost entirely abstract, decorative and free-flowing, most traces of narrative and the figure having been eliminated. Texture is more important than ever, the canvases rougher, the paint thicker and more three-dimensional. The paintings are more gestural, more intuitive and more concerned with a fluid kind of movement, than before&mdash;a fluidity not of things but of emotions, reflecting their philosophy that &ldquo;feeling is liberty.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Our work is not about thinking, it&rsquo;s about feeling,&rdquo; ShanZuo says. &ldquo;When we paint, something is flowing there, you just have to feel it. It&rsquo;s like tai chi [a Chinese self-defense discipline now used primarily as exercise and stress reduction]. It doesn&rsquo;t look powerful, but the power is there.&rdquo;

Accordingly, the brothers engage in a minimum of chatter when they paint. &ldquo;Originally we talked and planned,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;Later we realized we don&rsquo;t have to talk too much.&rdquo;

ShanZuo nods. &ldquo;The painting itself,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is the conversation.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Image shown at top of page:&nbsp;The Zhou Brothers, DaHuang Zhou and ShanZuo Zhou, in their Bridgeport studio. Photo: Kevin Nance, 2014

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1

&nbsp;

The Zhou Brothers: Four Decades of Collaboration

Realizing Realism: Gwendolyn Zabicki

By KEVIN NANCE

*This profile was published in the May-August 2014 issue of Chicago Gallery News

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="Tom McCormick and Janis Kanter at home in Hyde Park. Painting: Mary Abbott, &quot;Imrie,&quot; 1953 o.c., 71 x 74&quot;" data-rich-file-id="213" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/213/original/tomjanisvert.jpg" />If the secret of a happy marriage is compromise, Thomas McCormick and Janis Kanter are one of the happiest couples on Chicago&rsquo;s art-collecting scene. Despite their significantly differing tastes&mdash;he leans toward mid-20th-century abstract painting, mostly by deceased artists; she favors contemporary work by living artists in various media, photography in particular&mdash;McCormick and Kanter have blended their interests and, along the way, created one of the city&rsquo;s most eclectic yet surprisingly harmonious private collections.

Over their 22-year marriage, this Chicago art-world power couple&mdash;he owns the Thomas McCormick Gallery in the West Loop, while she chairs the board of directors at the Hyde Park Art Center&mdash;have learned how to negotiate with each other on their joint acquisitions. Sometimes it&rsquo;s a matter of one bending a bit in the other&rsquo;s direction. Other times it&rsquo;s a matter of one spouse recognizing that the other&rsquo;s enthusiasm for a particular work of art is so primal, so unshakable that resistance is futile.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I would say the decision-making is heavily weighted to one side of the couple,&rdquo; McCormick says with a smile, pointing his chin in Kanter&rsquo;s direction during an interview at their sprawling historic home, a 1904 Holabird and Roche mansion in Hyde Park that they bought and refurbished five years ago. &ldquo;One of the first expensive pieces we bought together was at the Chicago art fair at Navy Pier a while back,&rdquo; McCormick recalls. &ldquo;I step out into the corridor and here comes Janis walking towards me. She&rsquo;s got that look, and I know I&rsquo;m in trouble.&rdquo;&nbsp;

His wife doesn&rsquo;t deny it. &ldquo;If I don&rsquo;t like it,&rdquo; she says with a twinkle in her eye, &ldquo;it doesn&rsquo;t get very far.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Or it goes in my man-cave upstairs,&rdquo; he offers. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all me, straight down the line. She walks by there on tiptoe.&rdquo;

&ldquo;On occasion I walk in and go, &lsquo;I could really do something in here,&rsquo;&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;And then I think, &lsquo;I need to be out of here.&rsquo;&rdquo;

In all seriousness, McCormick&rsquo;s willingness to accede to his wife&rsquo;s judgment has grown over the years, in part because his experience has taught him that her more experimental tastes and instincts (&ldquo;I definitely like things that are weirder,&rdquo; she says) are more on target than might be initially apparent. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a little bull-headed,&rdquo; he admits. &ldquo;But Janis helps me see things that I would turn a blind eye to otherwise. I would be much more inward-looking, much more of an old fart about all this stuff if I weren&rsquo;t married to her. More often than not, what happens is that we&rsquo;ll get something that I&rsquo;m not crazy about, and then six months or a year later, I really love it. It grows on me.&rdquo;

One of the earliest examples of this was the piece Kanter fell in love with at Navy Pier all those years ago: a photo-collage by the Scottish artist David Mach of a Chicago River scene, which now hangs in their entrance hall with a small collection of Asian ceramics beneath a chandelier of Murano glass. McCormick&rsquo;s initial hesitation about the Mach piece was that it was so large, and as his wife says, &ldquo;Wall space is at a premium in this house.&rdquo;&nbsp;

That&rsquo;s true despite the fact that the house is a rangy 8,000 square feet. &ldquo;Some people with eclectic collections display them salon-style, but Tom and Janis don&rsquo;t do that,&rdquo; says Kate Lorenz, executive director at the Hyde Park Art Center and a longtime friend of the couple. &ldquo;They hang things with space around them, so everything kind of breathes.&rdquo;

___

Husband and wife came by their respective collecting knowledge and practices via distinctly different routes. McCormick, who studied printmaking at the University of Kansas, is a largely self-taught collector who began acquiring (and sometimes reselling) antiques, especially furniture, oriental rugs, paintings, prints, textiles and ceramics, as an undergraduate. &ldquo;If it&rsquo;s not nailed down, I&rsquo;ve probably bought and sold it,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I never did cars, but you never know.&rdquo; By 1992, when McCormick moved from Kansas City to Chicago and married Kanter, he had narrowed his business model to dealing in paintings, but continued to collect most of the other genres he had loved as a teenager.&nbsp;

She, on the other hand, had grown up surrounded by art as one of three children in a collecting family. Her parents, Chicago tax attorney Burton Kanter and his wife Naomi, began with little money (&ldquo;They used to frame pieces of wallpaper,&rdquo; their daughter recalls fondly) but, as their fortunes improved, collected work by local artists and, eventually, blue-chip pieces by some of the biggest names in the international art world. Eventually the senior Kanters amassed a collection of about 1,200 artworks.

But Burton Kanter in particular never lost interest in contemporary and local artists, often developing relationships with them that proved mutually beneficial. &ldquo;He was a patron,&rdquo; his daughter says. &ldquo;Artists would come to my dad and say, &lsquo;Hey, Burt, I really want to do this body of work for the next year. Is there a chance that you could support me for this amount of money, and you&rsquo;ll get the first six pieces of your choice?&rdquo; &nbsp;

After their father&rsquo;s death in 2001 at the age of 71, Kanter and her two brothers inherited the family collection, which they have since culled down to about 500 pieces. About a third of the McCormick-Kanter collection, displayed in their homes in Hyde Park and Sawyer, Mich.,&nbsp;

is from the Kanter family legacy, and includes pieces by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann and Andy Warhol, including ten works from Warhol&rsquo;s &ldquo;Myths&rdquo; series.&nbsp;

Another third features works by artists represented by the McCormick Gallery, including mid-century abstract expressionists such as the 92-year-old New York painter Mary Abbott, as well as Chicago artists such as Dawoud Bey, Roger Brown, Tony Fitzpatrick, Richard Hunt, Judy Ledgerwood, Laura Letinsky, Wesley Kimler and others.

The final third includes works jointly acquired by McCormick and Kanter, with the latter&rsquo;s taste&mdash;her special emphasis on large-scale photography, including a series of commissioned portraits of their daughters, Tatum and Reese&mdash;a bit more apparent. Several of these works were acquired at art fairs or through the Hyde Park Art Center, often as a result of Kanter&rsquo;s passionate and sometimes rather sudden attachments to them. &ldquo;She tends to be pretty sure about things very quickly,&rdquo; Lorenz says. &ldquo;Just the other day, a show was going up in one of our galleries and she was breezing through. By the time she got to the end of the hall, she had essentially bought something. We hadn&rsquo;t even put the price list down, but something shook her, and she was ready to add it to her collection.&rdquo;

McCormick is a more deliberative buyer and more attentive to the price of an artwork than his wife. But he is not without his own all but uncontrollable enthusiasms, including a passion for elegant Mexican serapes (McCormick has 40 of them in his man-cave, displayed on a rack system with hand-cranked dowels that he designed himself) and various artworks featuring dragons.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a dragon guy,&rdquo; he says helplessly, then recounts what happened one year at the Armory Show in New York, when he spotted a ceramic sculpture featuring the mythical creatures by the mid-career Chinese artist Li Lihong. McCormick had lusted after the piece since seeing it on the cover of Art + Auction magazine two weeks earlier; now, beholding it in the gleaming porcelain flesh, he could barely contain himself.&nbsp;

Within minutes he was on the phone to his wife, who calmly told him: &ldquo;Tom, just get it.&rdquo;

___

It&rsquo;s difficult to quantify the McCormick-Kanter collection, which consists of a core group of about 150 paintings, prints and photographs divided between their two homes, plus hundreds of other objects, including collections of textiles, antique oriental rugs, Italian art glass, Asian (especially Japanese and Chinese) ceramics, salt-and-pepper shakers, Mexican and Arts &amp; Crafts pottery, art furniture and a wide variety of sculpture. The remarkable thing about the works on display in Hyde Park is that despite the fact that they are arrayed in fairly close proximity and often grouped together in juxtaposed fashion, they cohere far more than they clash.

&ldquo;Janis has an eye for design, and the house itself is such a platform,&rdquo; Lorenz says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an amazing house that they&rsquo;ve refreshed and put a new palette on, and it holds art wonderfully. When you walk in and see an Andy Warhol next to a young photographer next to a ceramic pot, it all makes sense, because it&rsquo;s all held together by the house.&rdquo;

It&rsquo;s held together, too, by a couple who have assembled their collection the way they&rsquo;ve nurtured their marriage: by knowing when to bend and blend, when to stand firm, and when to tell each other to just get it.

*Publisher&#39;s update to the print edition:&nbsp;Artworks from the Kanter family collection are owned by Art Enterprises, Ltd.

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. <a href="https://twitter.com/KevinNance1">Twitter @KevinNance1</a>

Collector Profile: Janis Kanter and Tom McCormick

Artist Insights: Vera Klement

BY LAURA MILLER

Juan Angel Ch&aacute;vez is a passionate and active member of Chicago&rsquo;s art community.&nbsp; The artist was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and currently lives and works in Chicago where he teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has exhibited his work internationally and has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards from notable organizations including the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and 3Arts, just to name a few. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, &quot;NEPTUNO&quot;, 2011, interactive sculpture. Top image: LA ESPERANZA, street installation, 2005" data-rich-file-id="82" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/82/original/7juan.jpg" />

Tell me about where you&rsquo;re from and your transition to Chicago.

I&rsquo;m originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, and I moved to Chicago when I was 13 years old. At first I suffered from severe culture shock. I was in 7th grade, and I didn&rsquo;t speak English.&nbsp; I came from a place where the emphasis was on farming and ranching, and my school&rsquo;s agricultural curriculum focused on breeding cattle and growing apples. At first, Chicago was suffocating, and I wanted to run back to splicing fruit trees and vaccinating cattle.

After a year of living in Uptown/Andersonville, I adapted and gained confidence as I explored the city. When some of my neighbors started to get involved with the Latin Kings, at my mom&rsquo;s first opportunity she enrolled me in art classes. She encouraged me to apply my talents through a constructive form, and I owe a lot to her and the teachers she roped into her art class conspiracy.

The real assimilation into Chicago culture happened when I discovered skateboarding, because it gave me space and freedom. It made me think of the urban space as a landscape and not confinement. I&rsquo;ve grown with the city and now feel like I&rsquo;m a part of Chicago. I go back to Chihuahua quite often, and I love going there, but after a few months, I&rsquo;m ready to feel the energy of the city again.

Please discuss your visual arts studies and how you&rsquo;ve honed your practice and technique over the years.

My art studies are a bit complex. I think my mother had a lot to do with that because, aside from enrolling me in art classes, she had my high school teachers register me for SAIC&rsquo;s early college programs as well. I attended SAIC for my undergrad on a scholarship, but my career was short lived when I was asked to leave the school. I had an issue with writing in English, and my scholarship was revoked.

I decided to get involved in as many positive and creative endeavors as possible. I started working with the National Museum of Mexican Art, and I got involved with community public art. I took skateboarding more seriously and began to hang out with DJs, graphic designers, graffiti writers, and rave promoters. I&rsquo;m partly SAIC schooled and partly street schooled.&nbsp;

How and when did you first start exhibiting?

In 2001 I was very involved in public art. I was painting murals and mosaics in schools, and I didn&rsquo;t really see the value of exhibiting my work. I started putting up relief sculptures on boarded up buildings all over the city to try and change the idea of advertising space with something more whimsical. I didn&rsquo;t have a goal with that series - it was just fun! Shortly after, I was nominated for the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation&rsquo;s Individual Artist Award, and I won it. That really changed my perspective and marked the direction of my work.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, SPEAKER PROJECT, Interactive sculpture, 2007" data-rich-file-id="160" height="454" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/160/original/juan3.jpg" width="670" />

Your mixed media art has many components. I particularly enjoy the carpentry elements in your large wooden pieces. Talk about the significance of the materials you use &ndash; what are you drawn to working with, and why?

I view the use of materials and objects as contemporary artifacts ingrained in the quest for survival, exploration and establishment. Carpentry to me is not just construction; it represents components of methods or processes that signify shelter and navigation in the establishment for survival. It is really interesting for me to see materials that reveal an essence of history in their texture and shape.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, SPEAKER PROJECT, Interactive sculpture, 2007" data-rich-file-id="159" height="444" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/159/original/juan4.jpg" width="666" />

Tell me about your studio practice.

My two kids take a lot of my time, so I work out of my home studio at night. At first it was hard to adapt to working at home, but I&rsquo;ve made some interesting changes and this new process has made me think in more detail about my projects. I make everything small scale now and that helps with materials, budget, labor, space &ndash; plus I don&rsquo;t get stuck with storage issues. &nbsp;

Chicago&rsquo;s public art is one of my favorite things about this city. You have work on view at various CTA stations as a part of the city&rsquo;s public art initiative. How do you feel about having work displayed at these locations?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;m a big fan of the public art in Chicago as well, and I&rsquo;m honored to be a part of the city&rsquo;s collection. The work I&rsquo;ve done for the CTA has immortalized my art in the city - I love that!&nbsp; I would love the opportunity to make another public art piece, and I still think about making more public art, but I don&rsquo;t know how my new ideas would apply. New work would be very different than VIDA SIMPLE at the pink line, for example.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, ﻿GIANT, street installation, 1999" data-rich-file-id="161" height="605" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/161/original/juan1.jpg" width="426" />

You are one of many commissioned artists involved in the Hyde Park Art Center&rsquo;s&nbsp;Not Just Another Pretty Face program.&nbsp;(This year&rsquo;s show runs thru March 30, 2014.) Would you share comments on the program?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;ve done NJAPF three times; it&rsquo;s been lots of fun and great works have come out of it. Cultivating relationships between artists and patrons is an excellent idea. HPAC is not afraid to try new things and neither are their NJAPF patrons. It&rsquo;s very liberating to try and reinvent the wheel when considering portraits.

Are you in the middle of any big projects?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;m gearing up for larger projects this spring and summer, but this winter I&rsquo;m trying to focus on the creation of smaller works with a new direction. I&rsquo;ve always done very large projects that have an immediate result, but I want to try and focus on pieces that take longer to make.&nbsp;

How do you see Chicago&rsquo;s art community?

Chicago is a very vibrant city, and I love being a part of its art community. Emerging artists are making really inspiring and amazing work, and the creative energy in this city is more intense because of that; it keeps me on my toes.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, NO SHOES NO SHIRT NO SERVICE, Found materials installation, 2013" data-rich-file-id="162" height="454" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/162/original/juan11.jpg" width="680" />

<a class="btn" href="http://www.juanangelchavez.com/">www.juanangelchavez.com</a>

Artist Insights: Juan Angel Chávez

BY FRANCK MERCURIO

William J. O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s first big solo museum exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 2011 helped cement his reputation as a skilled ceramicist. Standing out from the 100 ceramic works were O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s &ldquo;busts&rdquo;&mdash;highly expressive, human-like heads that carry a wide range of cultural references from 19th century face jugs to rubber Halloween masks. These pieces read as engaging psychological portraits, but they also showcase O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s accomplishments in the medium of clay.

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &lt;i&gt;Untitled&lt;/i&gt;, 2007. Collection of Dana Hirt. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Tom Van Eynde, courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York." data-rich-file-id="77" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/77/original/90e1cwob284.jpg" />So, it may be surprising to learn that the 38-year-old, Chicago-based artist is well versed in a variety of media&mdash;besides ceramics&mdash;including assemblage, painting, drawing, and metal sculpture. Examples of each genre are presented in O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s first comprehensive museum exhibition, William J. O&rsquo;Brien, opening January 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

&ldquo;The work in the studio was nothing like the stuff I saw in the [Renaissance Society] show. He had all these other incredible bodies of work,&rdquo; says MCA curator Naomi Beckwith who organized the O&rsquo;Brien exhibition. &ldquo;What I wanted to do was to bring the breadth of his works out to the public.&rdquo;&nbsp;

O&rsquo;Brien first exhibited at the MCA in 2005 as part of the museum&rsquo;s 12 x 12 series (now called BMO Harris Chicago Works). He was also included in the MCA&rsquo;s group exhibition Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today in 2012.&nbsp;&ldquo;Bill is clearly someone, institutionally, who we&rsquo;ve been watching for some time,&rdquo; says Beckwith.

O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s current exhibition is the latest installment in the MCA&rsquo;s &ldquo;ascendant artist&rdquo; series&mdash;which has featured such notables as Rashid Johnson, Amalia Pica, and Paul Sietsema. As the word &ldquo;ascendant&rdquo; implies, these exhibitions present artists who are not quite at mid-career, but are on the brink of fame. Says Beckwith, &ldquo;We&rsquo;re catching people on their way up.&rdquo;

O&rsquo;Brien is the first Chicago-based artist to be showcased in the MCA&rsquo;s ascendant artist series. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really great to feature someone located here [in Chicago], someone who&rsquo;s already showing in New York,&rdquo; says Beckwith. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s nice to come home and look at the talent that&rsquo;s right under our noses.

In addition to being represented by the Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, O&rsquo;Brien is also represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Almine Rech&nbsp;Gallery in Paris.

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &quot;Untitled&quot;, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman" data-rich-file-id="78" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/78/original/ec339002.jpg" />The physicality O&rsquo;Brien brings to his art is a constant that runs through each genre he tackles.&nbsp;&ldquo;He has such a bodily investment in the work that he produces,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;You can see him really working across the page in the drawings. You can see him wrapping, molding, reshaping, breaking and sticking things together in the assemblage work.&rdquo;

Representative of the physicality of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s process is the layering of textures in his work. His ceramic busts are heavily textured, often featuring knobs of clay protruding from glazed surfaces, giving a kind of bumpy, nubby appearance. Some of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s &ldquo;paintings&rdquo; are assemblages constructed of layers of detritus&mdash;packing materials, old clothes, sticks&mdash;all covered in a unifying pigment. His metal sculptures are created by welding a series of planar elements together, giving the impression of texture through layering. Even O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s drawings are multilayered.&nbsp;A counter-balance to the &ldquo;masculine physicality&rdquo; of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s pieces is his interest in color, pattern, and na&iuml;ve forms&mdash;qualities that are often associated with feminist artists, outsider artists, and/or artists of color.

<img alt="" class="right" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &quot;Untitled&quot;, 2008. Collection of Larry and Marilyn Fields. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Tom Van Eynde, courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. " data-rich-file-id="80" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/80/original/3de77wob380.jpg" />&ldquo;There is almost a kind of feminist gesture there,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;where you see his work moving from the decorative, associated with women&rsquo;s work, to something that feels like abstraction. You see his work veering from quilting and textile to assemblage.&rdquo;&nbsp;

This push-and-pull between masculine and feminine, art and craft, high and low is evident throughout all of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s works. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s thinking about those things that have been dropped out of art history,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;while using those things that have been valued by art history.&rdquo;

In September 2011 a fire almost completely destroyed O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s studio and the studios of three other artists in an Avondale warehouse. Many of his works were lost. Luckily, enough works survived in the galleries and in the hands of collectors that the current MCA show could still be mounted. New pieces have filled the gaps, including a large-scale, site specific installation that Beckwith describes as &ldquo;totemic objects&rdquo; exploring the idea of &ldquo;monuments to feelings.&rdquo;

When speaking of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s likely reception at the MCA, Beckwith stated, &ldquo;He&rsquo;s been teaching at the School of the Art Institute for a while. It&rsquo;s going to be amazing to have his students here [at the MCA] alongside his colleagues. Clearly, he has a collection base and group of supporters here in the city. It&rsquo;s nice to have what feels like a big family hug around William at this time.&rdquo;

Accompanying the MCA&nbsp;exhibition will be a monograph, William J. O&rsquo;Brien, co-written by Beckwith and Trevor Smith of the Peabody Essex Museum, which will include a creative writing piece by local critic Jason Foumberg. The monograph will include a checklist of the 140 objects to be displayed in the MCA exhibition.

For more information about William J. O&rsquo;Brien (both the exhibition and the monograph), visit <a href="http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/">www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/</a>

William J. O’Brien at the MCA

By KEVIN NANCE

When Peter and Eileen Broido moved from the west suburbs to a highrise condo overlooking downtown Chicago in 2004, it wasn&rsquo;t the spectacular view of the Chicago River and the Loop that was the primary selling point.&nbsp;

&ldquo;It was the wall space,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;That and the size of the freight elevator.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="Peter and Eileen Broido: “The fun for us is finding art, putting our money where our mouth is.” Artwork pictured: Lari Pittman, &lt;i&gt;Ephemeral and Needy,&lt;/i&gt; 1990, 82 x 66&quot;. Photo: Kevin Nance " data-rich-file-id="81" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/81/original/peter-and-eileen-broido.jpg" />He smiles when he says it, but he isn&rsquo;t kidding. The Broidos needed plenty of room to display their impressive collection of contemporary art, which currently consists of nearly 180 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces on view. (An additional 50 artworks reside at their adult children&rsquo;s homes on the East Coast, with about 30 more pieces in storage.) And the freight elevator was of real concern. Early on, a recently acquired 10-foot-wide panoramic photograph by Gerard Maynard missed fitting into the elevator by a couple of inches. The building management suggested that the piece could be hoisted by crane to the Broidos&rsquo; balcony more than 30 floors above the riverbank, but in the Windy City this seemed like too much of a risk; in the end, they donated the photograph to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Another acquisition, a large painting by Chicago artist Judy Ledgerwood, made it into the elevator but couldn&rsquo;t be brought through the apartment door because the corridor outside was too narrow; the painting&rsquo;s frame had to be broken down and reassembled inside the apartment.

Such are the adventures of one of the city&rsquo;s most prolific art-collecting couples, who have spent the past 40 years in daily dialogue with art. They&rsquo;ve feathered their 2,600-square-foot nest with works by Chicago artists (Ledgerwood, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Curtis Mann, Tom Friedman, John Pittman and Stephanie Brooks, among others) and others from elsewhere in the United States (John Baldessari, Jane Hammond, Jenny Holzer, Byron Kim, Chris Martin, Bruce Nauman,&nbsp;Jon Pestoni, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Zak Prekop, Richard Tuttle, Kehinde Wiley, etc.). Most recently they&rsquo;ve begun branching out to Europe, with emphasis on works by German artists such as Frank Nietzsche.&nbsp;

Abstract painting dominates the collection, which also includes a smattering of mixed-media work, notably a large painted collage on a sculpted metal and canvas substructure by the Argentine-American artist Fabian Marcaccio. A group of works on paper&mdash;including works by Nutt and Tuttle&mdash;take refuge in a bathroom, where they&rsquo;re shielded from the natural light that otherwise suffuses the apartment.

Most of the pieces were acquired soon after their creation and early in the artists&rsquo; careers; the Broidos collect only what they like, not what they think might appreciate in monetary value. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t do it as an investment,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;The fun for us is finding art, putting our money where our mouth is, and seeing what happens. And it&rsquo;s been OK.&rdquo;&nbsp;

The Broidos rarely sell their holdings (though they do sometimes trade one piece for another), instead choosing to donate to museums. Beneficiaries of their largesse include the Museum of Contemporary Art (where the Broidos are longtime supporters and members of MCA&rsquo;s Merge, a collecting group), the Akron Art Museum and the Elmhurst Art Museum, which displayed several Broido-donated works this fall as part of Inventory, an exhibition of EAM&rsquo;s collection.&nbsp;

&ldquo;What strikes me about Peter and Eileen&rsquo;s collecting is that they&rsquo;re focused on emerging artists,&rdquo; says Staci Boris, EAM&rsquo;s chief curator. &ldquo;They like to seek out new artists, not people who have a track record or are well known. They enjoy the discovery aspect of it, the process of figuring out who is interesting and who has a future. They&rsquo;re unique in their vision, and they don&rsquo;t follow trends.&rdquo;

Along the way, the Broidos have become fixtures on the Chicago art scene, mixing with artists, curators, gallerists and other collectors with an ease born of an engagement sustained over four decades. As Eileen Broido puts it with a smile, &ldquo;We&rsquo;re kind of part of the woodwork in Chicago.&rdquo;

The Broidos&rsquo; collecting journey began soon after they moved to the Chicago area in 1969. (Originally from Manhattan&mdash;where he spent much of his undergraduate years at Columbia University visiting art galleries at a time when you could pick up a Jasper Johns painting for $500&mdash;Peter Broido was a surgeon at Central DuPage Hospital for many years; his wife was a nurse.) Although they lived 30 miles west of the Loop, the young couple came into the city most weekends. &ldquo;We spent a lot of time on the Eisenhower Expressway,&rdquo; he recalls with a smile. One day they were walking down Michigan Avenue and turned east on Ontario, where they were met with a scene that reminded them of Disney&rsquo;s Fantasia: a row of people coming out of an art gallery carrying small paintings.

&ldquo;It was like those walking buckets from&nbsp;The Sorcerer&rsquo;s Apprentice,&rdquo; Peter Broido recalls. &ldquo;The Phyllis Kind Gallery had had a show of Roger Brown paintings, and people were taking their pieces home with them.&rdquo;&nbsp;

The Broidos were enchanted. They didn&rsquo;t buy a Brown then&mdash;though they would do so a half-dozen times in the years to come&mdash;but they met Kind, who introduced them to the Hairy Who painters, including Wirsum, Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, along with other Imagists including Brown and Ed Paschke. &ldquo;That was fun,&rdquo; recalls Eileen Broido, who was so enthused that she went back to college, studying art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and, later, the University of Chicago.&nbsp;

In the next two decades, the Broidos amassed one of the city&rsquo;s largest and most significant collections of Imagist painting, focusing on works that combined figurative and abstract elements. Over the years, however, they began to feel that the Imagists were stuck in a bit of a rut. The turning point came with a Paschke retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989-90. &ldquo;We looked at it and said, &lsquo;Ed Paschke is repainting Ed Paschke,&rsquo;&rdquo; Peter Broido recalls. &ldquo;We started looking critically at what we were buying, and basically all of those artists were painting the same things. They hadn&rsquo;t really moved on. And we decided it was time for us to move on, too.&rdquo;

Although the Broidos continued to buy some work by Chicago-based artists, often from Chicago galleries (they maintain relationships with the Rhona Hoffman, Kavi Gupta and Shane Campbell galleries to this day), they began to make an increasing percentage of their acquisitions in New York, forging relationships with dealers in Chelsea and, in later years, on the Lower East Side. And while their earlier purchases had featured the figure, more and more the Broidos concentrated on purely abstract works.

&ldquo;Abstraction just seemed to wear better,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;If you go back and look at abstract art from the &rsquo;40s, the &rsquo;50s, it still looks pretty fresh. Hans Hofmann, my God! Those are just fabulous paintings. They still sing.&rdquo; On the other hand, his wife says, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just hard to find anything incredibly new with the figure.&rdquo;

In the 1990s, photography and conceptual art came to the forefront of the art world, but the Broidos largely stuck with painting. Conceptual art they found &ldquo;a little boring,&rdquo; Eileen Broido says. And photography? &ldquo;The problem with photography is in some ways the same thing that&rsquo;s true with figurative art,&rdquo; her husband says. &ldquo;What are you going to do with it that&rsquo;s different today? You need to make your mark in some way, and another sunset isn&rsquo;t going to do it.&rdquo;

As the Broidos developed their taste in art&mdash;they rarely disagree; &ldquo;After 45 years of marriage, we&rsquo;re pretty much the same person,&rdquo; Peter Broido says&mdash;they also established patterns in the manner of their collecting. They often visit art fairs&mdash;they&rsquo;re regulars at Art Basel Miami and NADA, and say they have enjoyed the first two years of Expo Chicago at Navy Pier&mdash;but almost never buy at the fairs. &ldquo;What I find art fairs most useful for is making connections with dealers I&rsquo;ve never met before and seeing work that we haven&rsquo;t seen,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;I probably will never buy anything out of a fair, because we don&rsquo;t like making snap decisions.&rdquo;&nbsp;

For similar reasons, the Broidos tend to avoid making studio visits with artists with whom they have no prior relationship, because of what they experience as an implicit pressure to buy. &ldquo;I like talking to artists, because I think they&rsquo;re terrific people,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But I really don&rsquo;t want to go to their studios, because you feel pressured. It isn&rsquo;t even overt. It&rsquo;s subtle, but I just don&rsquo;t want to be in that position. If we went out on a tour with 100 people, I&rsquo;d be thrilled to go to artists&rsquo; studios, but I don&rsquo;t want to be there one-on-one.&rdquo;

&ldquo;We do sometimes go after we&rsquo;ve purchased a piece,&rdquo; his wife adds. &ldquo;We were just in Berlin and went to Frank Nietzsche&rsquo;s studio. His dealer said, &lsquo;You&rsquo;re here, Frank&rsquo;s here, why don&rsquo;t you stop by and say hi?&rsquo; We did, and it was interesting to meet him. But there was no pressure, because we had already bought a piece from him.&rdquo;

The gregarious Broidos especially enjoy discovering new artists by talking with gallerists&mdash;which explains their increasing preference for smaller and emerging galleries on New York&rsquo;s Lower East Side. &ldquo;Nowadays if you go into the galleries in Chelsea, and if the dealers are there, they&rsquo;re certainly not out where you can see them,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;On the Lower East Side, the owners are there. They&rsquo;re young and energetic and enthusiastic and intelligent, and they really enjoy telling you about their art, which is the way it used to be when I was younger. It&rsquo;s fun to see that.&rdquo;

And so for the Broidos, the fun continues. The day after their interview with Chicago Gallery News, they were off to Miami for another round of art-fair visits, combing the aisles in search of new artists to collect. Fortunately for them, they still have a few square feet of open wall space.

Collector profile: Eileen and Peter Broido

BY KEVIN NANCE

<img alt="" data-caption="Øvstebø is right at home in her new role as executive director of The Renaissance Society. Photo by Kevin Nance" data-rich-file-id="73" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/73/original/solveig.jpg" />

When Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; first received a phone call from The Renaissance Society in Chicago about the possibility of her becoming the institution&rsquo;s new executive director&mdash;replacing Susanne Ghez, who was retiring after 40 years in the position&mdash;the timing could hardly have been worse.&nbsp;

For one thing, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; had recently accepted a new term as director of Norway&rsquo;s Bergen Kunsthall, which she had led for nearly a decade and which was expanding with additional gallery space and a new office for her. For another, she was three days away from giving birth to her daughter, Ella. As she recalls now with comic understatement, &ldquo;It was not a time when I was looking for a new job.&rdquo;&nbsp;

But the Ren, as the renowned art space on the University of Chicago campus is known, was persistent. Six weeks after the first call, a second one came. &ldquo;We had a very short list of people we wanted for the job, and Solveig was on the top of that list,&rdquo; says Canice Prendergast, the member of the Ren&rsquo;s search committee who took the lead in communicating with &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very difficult job to fill, because we need to have one of the best curators of avant-garde art in the world who also happens to be very good at running an institution like ours. It&rsquo;s rare to find someone with both qualities; the group of people who do is very, very small. The new director also has very big shoes to fill, since Susanne essentially created the Renaissance Society and turned it into a world-class institution. But given Solveig&rsquo;s track record, we thought she was the ideal person to fill those shoes.&rdquo;

This time around, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; found herself intrigued. She knew of the Renaissance Society&rsquo;s high regard on the international art scene, having hosted some of the same artists whose work had been shown at the Ren. The two organizations&rsquo; structure and practice were similar; they were both non-collecting institutions focused on temporary exhibitions of cutting-edge art. Most important, the Ren&rsquo;s search committee emphasized that she could concentrate on presenting art exhibitions largely free from the complicating factors&mdash;audience and sponsor expectations, commercial and market forces, political considerations&mdash;that plague her peers around the world.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Sometimes those factors can become so important for an institution that there&rsquo;s not enough space left for what&rsquo;s really interesting to me, which is the art production and the communication with the artists,&rdquo; she says in an interview at her office, where she took over from Ghez last fall. &ldquo;They convinced me that this is a place where art comes first.&rdquo;

In her new job, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; says she plans to increase the Ren&rsquo;s profile locally by expanding its outreach efforts, which could include a satellite gallery to supplement the institution&rsquo;s smallish 3,200-square-foot exhibition space in Hyde Park. (She has no plans, however, to support a move away from the University of Chicago campus in search of larger permanent quarters. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not on my to-do list,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;and I have a big to-do list.&rdquo;) She also wants to publish exhibition catalogs and other publications on a larger scale and within the timeframe of the exhibition in question (as opposed to the current practice of publishing some catalogs after-the-fact).&nbsp;

In addition to her duties overseeing the Ren&rsquo;s administrative operations and strategy, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; is also its chief curator. Her first outings in Chicago begin this month with a show of new work by the German artist Nora Schultz (January 12-February 23), followed by an exhibition by the Canadian artist Christina Mackie (April 27-June 29). These will be the earliest demonstrations of &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s vision of the curatorial role as closely tied to artistic production in the early stages of the creative process. Last year, for example, she spent four days in Schultz&rsquo;s empty studio in Berlin in conversation with the artist, acting as a sounding board and filter for her ideas. &nbsp;

&ldquo;This institution is not just a passive space where we show artworks that have been seen elsewhere,&rdquo; &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; explains. &ldquo;Instead of picking artworks that have been shown in museums or biennials or galleries, I am asking the artists to present works that they are producing with us, that are completely new, that maybe are based on ideas that the artist hasn&rsquo;t been able to try out yet. This is a place where they can experiment with new ideas, and so in dialogue with us, new works can come about.&rdquo;

Although it was not a factor in her decision to accept the new job, there was an additional circumstance that made &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s move to Chicago seem, in hindsight, somehow inevitable: She was born here. In 1972, her parents moved to the Windy City, where her father, a professor of theology, served a two-year stint as pastor of the Norwegian Memorial Church, also known as the Minnekirken, a Norwegian-speaking Lutheran congregation in Logan Square. The family went back to Norway when their new daughter was 18 months old, never to return.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a strange thing,&rdquo; muses &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;, 40. &ldquo;My daughter is now the same age I was when we lived in Chicago the first time, and I am now the age my mother was when we were here. And because I was born here, I am a U.S. citizen, but never had an American passport. I thought it would be hard to get one, but I went to the embassy and brought my birth certificate, and they gave me my passport, just like that.&rdquo; She smiles. &ldquo;And here I am.&rdquo;

Solveig Øvstebø at the Renaissance Society

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="87" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/87/original/img-2560.jpg" />

BY MARY DEYOE

When you walk into Ann Nathan&rsquo;s gallery you feel like you&rsquo;re floating. The gallery sits about a half story above street level, and when you stand at one of the enormous picture windows looking out at those passing by, you are in another world. I imagine that is just as Nathan intended it.&nbsp;

For more than 30 years in Chicago, Ann Nathan has run a gallery. She began in 1980 in a 200-square foot space she rented from the ceramicist Ruth Duckworth. &ldquo;The space was tiny. We showed jewelry and ceramics, and we used every inch of space. The pedestals opened up and doubled as storage space,&rdquo; Nathan recalls. For several years the gallery existed there before a couple of moves, then survived a fire and relocated and rebuilt in her current space on Superior Street. &ldquo;Although many galleries have since opened further south and west, I think this area will always survive because of its location.&rdquo; The galleries are close to the L and blocks from Michigan Avenue.&rdquo;

When talking about how she has thrived for so many years, Nathan admits she has always had a simple approach. &ldquo;I am open to showing what works.&rdquo; This is, though, limited to figurative art and realism. &ldquo;When we started everyone was showing abstract work, but I was never interested in doing what everyone was doing.&rdquo; This perspective has freed Nathan to show a diverse range of artists and styles. The work, by artists from around the world, ranges from the dreamy paintings by Christina Haglid to the bold and dynamic sculptures by the long-time Chicago artist Michael Gross. &ldquo;Michael&rsquo;s work is unique and strange,&rdquo; Nathan said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s sculptural, functional furniture.&rdquo; This is another trend you&rsquo;ll find at Nathan&rsquo;s gallery. The furniture pieces are always functional. In fact, when we met, Nathan and I sat and talked on two beautifully carved wooden stools.

In regards to how the gallery and art landscape has changed in Chicago, Nathan seems unfazed. &ldquo;Chicago is a welcoming place, but every space is different.&rdquo; Nathan believes you have to pick work you like and show what you like to show.&nbsp;

Nathan and her gallery staff are certainly welcoming to visitors, a trait that has undoubtedly helped in the gallery&rsquo;s success throughout the decades. While you explore the work in the gallery and move from a gigantic charcoal portrait by Mary Borgman to playful, smiling nude sculptures by Esther Shimazu, you feel transported, at least for a little while, to a place far away from Superior Street.

An Interview with Art Dealer Ann Nathan

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418167/itdrdtvw7b68klneai3i.jpg"></figure>By KEVIN NANCEThere will be no special exhibit, no monograph, no hoopla whatsoever commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Richard Gray Gallery this fall. “We spent a lot of time thinking about that, but didn’t come up with anything that needed to be done,” gallery director Paul Gray says one recent morning in his office at the John Hancock Center. “Fifty years is a substantial achievement, I recognize that, but we looked at things others have done on major anniversaries, and none of them inspired me to devote time to that. We started work on a publication, but it seemed self-indulgent and not very meaningful, so we canceled it.”So, this fall it will be business as usual: two major openings (new paintings by Alex Katz September 20–November 2, 2013,&nbsp;followed by a show of older works by David Hockney at Frieze Masters in London and later in Chicago), participation in large international art fairs (including EXPO CHICAGO at Navy Pier) and the usual whirl of buying, selling and brokering transactions of mostly blue-chip work by famous artists to deep-pocketed clients in the Windy City and around the world. The gallery’s clients now include more than 10 percent of the Forbes 400 list, including nine members from the Chicago area, as well as similarly high-rolling collectors and museum curators from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. In 2012, sales were just under $100 million.The decision to avoid anniversary-related festivities is both typical of Paul Gray (who took over management of the city’s most successful gallery from his father, Richard Gray, nearly two decades ago) and telling. The younger Gray, now 58, is known for his preference for a tightly focused business strategy, concentrating on a single niche of the art market—the high end—rather than the more eclectic approach once favored by his father, who dealt in antiquities, tribal art and works on paper in addition to the early and mid-20th-century paintings and sculpture that have always been the gallery’s primary stock-in-trade.“My father always wanted to be sure that there were many opportunities for success in the course of the year, but I felt that that was making us more mediocre on all levels, that we were spreading ourselves a little thin,” says Gray, whose hair, elegantly tailored suit and even his argyle socks are visual reminders of his family name.&nbsp; “I wanted to be more of an expert in something, so I decided to specialize in more expensive art, regardless of medium, and I wanted to relate to collectors who were a little further along on thedevelopment timeline—collectors who were really knowledgeable and demanding, and who would be appreciative of whatever we could bring to them.” If it can’t be done well, in short, Paul Gray doesn’t want to do it, including anniversary celebrations.The Richard Gray Gallery opened on November 4, 1963, at 155 E. Ontario. The elder Gray—his son was 9 years old at the time—had worked for his own father for several years and had been casting about for a new direction.&nbsp; Trained as an architect, he’d long been interested in the visual arts, particularly painting and sculpture, and he’d married into a family of art collectors.&nbsp; When a friend suggested that he open an art gallery, it struck him as an opportunity to combine business with pleasure.“Maybe because of my architecture background, I had a particular interest in draftsmanship, prints and drawings,” says Richard Gray, 84. “When I opened the gallery, I had the idea that I’d be handling that kind of thing, and that’s what happened. I started out by representing established and emerging artists primarily working on paper.” Quickly, however, Gray sold works by a number of painters and sculptors, including Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Louise Nevelson, Hans Hofmann, Fernand Léger and Jim Dine, an impressive list that would eventually grow to include Hockney, Josef Albers, Joseph Cornell, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, among many others. Gray also made significant forays into aboriginal and African art.“My standards were about trusting my own eye, my own sense of aesthetics,” Gray recalls. “It wasn’t the particular style or period that interested me; it was the individual work of art.”&nbsp;Demonstrating a talent for networking with artists and clients, Gray quickly established a reputation as the Chicago gallery with the deepest bench, the longest reach and the highest ambition. “They were the best gallery in Chicago, as far as I was concerned,” says Dine, still one of the Grays’ most-shown artists. “Richard has a tremendous eye and a great world view, and he was really the only truly international gallery in Chicago for a long time. I was very pleased to be there.”&nbsp;For most of his youth and early adulthood, Paul Gray gave little thought to the prospect of joining the family business. He was mildly interested in visual art—like his father, he had dabbled in painting and drawing in high school—but lacked a deep or abiding passion for it. As his father went about the business of making the gallery into a success, the younger Gray was no more absorbed by the process than most young people are in the careers of their parents. “I was raised around the art world and didn’t totally take it for granted, but I didn’t idolize it in any way, either,” he recalls. “It certainly wasn’t preordained that I would go into this field. I didn’t even think about it until I was nearly 30.”After five years as a theater producer on the East Coast, Gray returned to Chicago to attend graduate school at Columbia College and began working at his father’s gallery one day a week, hanging art, making follow-up calls to artists and clients, and generally learning the business. It was a ground-up apprenticeship that eventually led to his succeeding his father as managing partner in 1994. (Richard Gray maintains a presence at the gallery, where he keeps an office from which he manages his personal affairs, but he no longer plays an active role in its management.) Paul Gray opened a New York branch of the gallery in 1996. In years since then, he gradually phased out many of his father’s initiatives, including separate departments for tribal art and prints and drawings, as part of his overall strategy to pursue a narrower and potentially more lucrative focus on the market’s highest strata.As part of that process, the younger Gray also represents fewer emerging or even mid-career artists than his father did. There are exceptions, such as Jan Tichy, a Czech-born new-media and video artist who moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. “Jan is very busy, but he doesn’t have a large commercial market at this point, and he doesn’t have any commercial impact on our business,” Gray says. “But I took him on because I find his work compelling.” Still, Tichy is the exception that proves the rule.“Of course Paul had his own notions, his own particular tastes, some of which were different from mine,” Richard Gray says now. “But he’s done extremely well, building a first-rate reputation, not just in Chicago but internationally. I was absolutely happy for him to do his own thing.”In at least one respect, Paul Gray is a chip off the old block. Just like his dad, he quickly showed a flair for cultivating professional and sometimes deeply personal relationships with clients and artists, despite—or perhaps because of—the latter group’s reputation for eccentricity and prickliness. “Artists play a special role in culture, because they’re the bravest, most adventurous, the most willing to bare their souls in public,” he says. “They have a lot to teach us, and that’s why people are drawn to their work. On the other hand, I think most artists would acknowledge that they’re not the easiest people to be close to, because they’re pretty uncompromising and pretty self-involved; they’re focused on making that next discovery in their work. They can be social, but they can be highly antisocial also, and that’s one of the things I respect about them.”Gray has formed a particularly close relationship with the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, best known in Chicago for his Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, and to whose portfolio Gray now assigns two full-time staff members. About the same age, Gray and Plensa initially met at the artist’s first show in Chicago in 1996. “We hit it off in two seconds,” Plensa recalls. “Since that day Paul and I have grown together, developing a beautiful friendly relationship. Richard and his wife, Mary, really embraced me as one more member of their family, and I consider Paul a brother, even though he insists on teaching me to swim in any ocean despite knowing that I can only swim in the Dead Sea.”Paul Gray has also proved adept at the delicate art of connecting some of the world’s richest art collectors with each other, acting as a go-between in private transactions involving large egos and even larger sums. In his biggest such coup several years ago, Gray brokered a deal between Los Angeles mogul David Geffen and Chicago hedge-fund billionaires Anne and Kenneth Griffin. The Griffins, regular clients of Gray’s, were interested in acquiring a Jackson Pollock; Geffen, also a client, was interested in selling one—for which purpose Gray introduced the two sides. “Over lunch at Geffen’s home, Ken Griffin’s eyes kept drifting toward a very, very important Jasper Johns painting on the wall nearby,” Gray recalls. “When we left the house, he said to me, ‘I think that painting is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.’”The Griffins didn’t buy Geffen’s Pollock, but after a week of intense negotiations overseen by Gray, the Griffins purchased Johns’s False Start (1959) for $80 million, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist at the time. (The Griffins have since loaned the work for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.) In the process, Gray’s reputation as an experienced liaison between collectors buying and selling art to each other was cemented.“It used to be that any serious art collector in Chicago would come by the gallery at least once a month, but that rarely happens now,” says Gray, who recently moved the gallery to a larger space with higher ceilings on the Hancock Center’s 38th floor. “Now we largely go to the collectors as advisors and curators. It’s part of the evolution of the business.” <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/organizations/richard-gray-gallery--2">The Richard Gray Gallery</a> keeps evolving right along with it.&nbsp;Image: Paul Gray, photo by Kevin Nance</body></html>

CGN interviews Paul Gray of Richard Gray Gallery on the occasion of the gallery's 50th anniversary in 2013

50 Years: A Milestone Arrives Quietly at Richard Gray Gallery

A young doctor quietly living on Chicago’s North Side fell into collecting art 20 years ago. Like many devoted collectors, he says at first he didn’t know what he was doing, but it’s been a passion ever since. Within his Modern-looking condo, surrounded by faces of all colors and shapes and contortions, one is struck by the number of works by Outsiders - those curious and inspiring artists who are compelled to create art using any means and materials necessary in an effort to express the thoughts within them. Through learning about his own tastes and interests, this collector has discovered the pleasures of meeting artists in unexpected places and the fun in sharing the unconventional with friends at home. -GVCGN: Tell me how you got started collecting works of art? Is your focus different today? DR: The first work I bought was at auction, at Kass/Meridian, probably 20 or so years ago.&nbsp; Unfortunately I was caught in a bidding war - with my roommate at the time! I ‘won’ that battle, only to find I owned a work I knew nothing about, by an artist I had never heard of, but for which I had fought feverishly. That lesson in impulse buying taught me to research, take my time, enjoy the process of discovering what type of art I liked and how to go about finding and collecting it. Much of the art I acquired in the beginning of my collecting days was during travel - I’d pick something up when I was in Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, or London. Eventually, as I formed stronger opinions and learned a bit, I gravitated to Outsider/self-taught artists. I also like to support local artists, and in particular the younger artists who have come from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.You have focused on figurative work as well as Outsider art. What is it about these genres or view points that attracts you? I’ve tried and failed to come up with a unifying theme for the art in my collection, and in the end I’ve realized it’s not important to have one. You hear so often (because it’s true!) that you should collect what you like and what you want to live with, and that is always what I’ve sought to find, whether it is work by self-taught artists, contemporary trained painters or photographers, or furniture designers. I have collected paintings, drawings, some sculpture, furniture and woodwork from various eras - really a hodge-podge, but ultimately from this chaos comes a space in which I love to live. I am constantly changing it to accommodate new additions. The Outsiders appeal to me because they were not beholden to the market or to a perceived audience of collectors, gallery agents, professors, and so on. I think in many ways you are able to see their pure creativity. I have collected works by Lee Godie, Charles Steffen, Jim Work, Henry Darger, Paul Estrada, and Anna Zemankova - some of these artists participated in the established art world and some did not, but all of them have communicated absolutely unique visions.Please highlight any favorite pieces or collecting experiences. Are there lessons you’ve learned through observing and buying art? I found an artist in Hanoi whose work I loved several years ago. She was represented at a gallery there but lived outside Ho Chi Minh City, so I spent a day trekking miles past the finished roads on the outskirts of the city to find the compound where she and her husband, a sculptor, lived. With blond hair, blue eyes, and the biggest nose in Vietnam, apparently, I certainly stood out wading through those fields, so I trailed about ten kids with me by the time I reached the artist. She and her husband hosted me for hours, showing me how and where they worked and looking through all their art - it was really a great day, and I think that was one of the experiences that really hooked me. Part of the joy of collecting is the process, of course, and learning about the lives and influences of the people you meet along the way. Many of the works that mean the most to me I acquired in artists’ studios, or on the streets in destinations like Lima, Peru and Mexico City - places outside the complex that has grown around the art business, such as the mega-fairs and galleries.Are there any reactions to the works in your collection that have surprised you, such as&nbsp; candid responses from friends or family? My friends think I am nuts, particularly when they are evaluating the latest Outsider&nbsp;acquisition: ‘So, he was schizophenic, or&nbsp;bipolar?’ and ‘You paid for that, or you found it on the street?’ or, ‘Can I sell you what my kid did in school last week?’ I think to most people there is more respect for art that comes from traditionally trained artists, or from recognized galleries, or for more figurative work. In my house there is no relationship between a work’s monetary value and how it is received by a casual observer who is over for dinner. In fact Henry Darger’s work inspires the least positive reviews, though when a guest learns the back story it intrigues them enormously and changes many opinions. Along those same lines, not everything in my home is really family-friendly, and Darger is a good example of that; his reverse image with hermaphrodite Vivian Girls only comes out at more festive dinner parties!

Collector Profile: An Eye for the Outsider

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418551/iohwygw7hbjneagcjfz3.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;By&nbsp;LAURA MILLERFrom the May-August 2013 print edition of Chicago Gallery NewsChicago artist Angee Lennard wears many hats. &nbsp;When she’s not creating her own work, you might find her teaching art classes or getting involved in various collaborative projects and residencies – both locally and abroad. Additionally, Lennard founded Spudnik Press Cooperative in 2007 and continues to oversee a wide range of community programs that are offered at the vibrant West Side space.&nbsp;&nbsp;What’s your Chicago story – why and when did you move here? I grew up in Michigan on a potato farm and moved to Chicago to attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2001. Even though I was raised close to Toledo and Detroit, living in a huge city required a lot of adjustment, but I’ve gotten quite used to the quantity and quality of cultural events here and don’t see myself moving anytime soon.&nbsp;You graduated from SAIC in 2005 with a BFA with emphasis in print media. Are you still connected to SAIC now? Very much so. I’ve worked with interns from my alma mater, and I’m in regular contact with the staff and faculty in the Print Media Department, since they send students to Spudnik Press and donate work to our annual silent auction. &nbsp;I’ve been a guest artist in classes and at a few career-focused events. It’s rewarding transitioning to a peer of my former instructors.&nbsp;How did you start teaching? Marwen and Spudnik Press are the two organizations I consistently teach with. My desire to teach developed out of a frustration that contemporary art is often inaccessible to much of the general public. Art can often be very self-referential and hard to engage with without some education (formal or otherwise) in visual communication/thinking. I felt a big disconnect between my peers at SAIC and my neighbors in Little Village. My teaching works toward shortening this divide.&nbsp;&nbsp;Spudnik Press is a community print shop that offers open studio time, classes, residencies and exhibitions; it has evolved to be an impressive space with many offerings. How is Spudnik today different than how you first imagined it to be in 2007? I opened Spudnik Press with the intent to do exactly what we still do: offer affordable and approachable access to printmaking. However, the scale of what the shop is today was unimaginable to me in 2007. When I started out I knew the communal aspect of a print shop was the most important factor. Through running the studio for 6 years, I have a much more holistic understanding of what it means to run a community space. We bridge a variety of communities, i.e., youth programming overlapping with residency programs; writing classes alongside printmaking classes.&nbsp;&nbsp;Spudnik Press is associated with&nbsp;Chicago Area Artists Residency Programs (CAARP), and you’ve also been an artist&nbsp;in residence at AS220 in Providence, RI&nbsp;as well as Ragdale in Lake Forest, IL. Please share the impact of residency&nbsp;programs to you and other artists.&nbsp; CAARP began very organically about two years ago. Based on shared member experiences we set some goals, such as cross-promotion, collective advertising, and hosting collaborative exhibitions. While many residencies take artists away from the distractions of everyday life, urban residencies ask artists to interact with the community and often host local artists. CAARP has allowed me to be better connected to similar residency programs - residencies that are parallel to what we offer, and are therefore more relevant.&nbsp;The two residencies that I have completed have instigated substantial shifts in my work and allowed me the focus to develop new lingering ideas. I’ve also done “self-imposed” residencies, which I find useful. Last year,&nbsp;I spent a week in a cabin on the Mississippi River and created my first animation.&nbsp;&nbsp;What’s your favorite method of&nbsp;printmaking for your own work? &nbsp; My favorite process is intaglio (etching.) It offers just the right amount of control and unpredictability, and makes me feel a little like an alchemist. My technical skills are strongest for screenprinting, simply because I have had more opportunities to teach and print professional jobs and consignments.&nbsp;How do you balance your own studio&nbsp;practice and how is your work impacted?&nbsp; It is very difficult to maintain a studio practice while running Spudnik Press and teaching, but my students definitely inspire me. Young artists often approach art with such fresh perspectives and eagerness that I often leave class ready to take more risks myself. My newest body of work investigates the relationship between emotional thinking and logical/rational thinking that I believe stems from the tension between the work I do as an art administrator and as an artist. Honestly, the only way I make new work is through residencies and through participating in projects with strict deadlines. Otherwise, my art would always get pushed to the back burner.&nbsp;&nbsp;Are you in the middle of any big projects at the moment? This summer I will head to South Africa as a volunteer teaching artist with Dramatic Need, and I suspect I’ll be working on my own projects while I’m there. I’ll spend three weeks in a town called Viljoenskroon teaching animation with my partner, Colin Palombi. I’m also working on a collaborative project called Ten by Ten, a unique opportunity for visual artists and music composers to collaborate in a meaningful, shared creation. I’m working with composer Randall West to create a print and original score investigating synesthesia to be released this fall.&nbsp;How would you describe Chicago’s art scene? I don’t feel qualified to summarize the whole scene, but where I interact it seems to be tangible, good-humored and relevant. Chicagoans seem to make work that has craftsmanship, and is physical or tactile, often ironic or lighthearted, sometimes even silly. What I love about this city is that so many people make work that has importance beyond the gallery setting - work that speaks to social and political issues, or work that is digestible even by those without a degree in art.&nbsp;Angee Lennard <a href="http://www.spudnikpress.com">www.spudnikpress.</a><a href="https://www.spudnikpress.org">org</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Artist Insights: Interview with Angee Lennard of Spudnik Press

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418168/kxmplluyyata1q2gabbc.jpg"></figure>By Laura MillerLaura Letinsky’s subtly haunting photographs stick with you. The scenes in her work convey ease and elegance, yet they are conceptually loaded with references to art history, literature, music, and writing. The viewer is asked in changing ways to consider what her images signify to them. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Letinsky attended the University of Manitoba and Yale’s School of Art before migrating to Chicago, where she is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Chicago. She is represented locally by Valerie Carberry Gallery, in addition to other galleries in the U.S., Canada, and Germany.LM: How does Chicago compare to other cities where you’ve exhibited or where you’re represented?Laura Letinsky: Chicago is a great community. There’s a bit of self-consciousness about being smaller than New York or L.A., with all the negative associations of provincialism and its insecurities, but Chicago is fantastic in that its scale is big enough to be stimulating, challenging, and diverse while still being manageable on many levels. I can live here and manage to make art, teach, have kids, space, a garden, friends - that is, a life that is full and rich. Every place has benefits and challenges but I find Chicago a really productive and fabulous balance.LM: As a University of Chicago professor is there any sound advice that you adhere to personally that you’ve shared with a student?LL: I recently had a critique with a student who was setting up a stranglehold on the possibility for experimentation and learning and seemed at odds with her larger interests. I encouraged her to toss out the division between her art and the rest of her life and to instead revel in the places where she drew fun and enthusiasm, skepticism and challenge; to venture to places she didn’t necessarily know vs. well-trod ground. Art that is about art exclusively is to me relatively narrow. There are artists for whom this makes sense, but I’m most thrilled when art makes me see differently - seeing understood here as knowledge.LM: In your Ill Form and Void Full series the incorporated collage elements add layers of complexity to the work and blur the lines of space and perception: What is real? What is a photo of a photo, or a copy of a copy? What is missing? What might the viewer add? How did this series came about?LL: In 2010 I began work after a year’ hiatus. A number of events had conspired such that I stopped making pictures, uncertain of whether I would be able to continue; knowing I couldn’t continue as I had. A crisis of belief? For years the question, what is a photograph had driven my practice; if anything and everything is ripe as photography’s subject, and given the unrelenting volume of images, why make pictures? What do they do? I now understand the answer has to do with what they are - that is, pictures are how they exist in our world, how we produce and consume them.For the series I decided that to use images, mine and others, indiscriminately with objects, digital downloads, and scans permitted a kind of promiscuity that felt right. It’s a way of negotiating my ambivalence for this medium, a deep and abiding love and irrevocable loathing. To focus this inquiry around home and food portends a potent array of issues including consumption, sexuality, need, want, labor, gender, etc.LM: What are you trying to set the stage for when you’re assembling scenes for your photographs? A specific mood or memory?LL: There’s not really a mood or memory as there was with the earlier manifestations of my still-life work. In this series I am feeling my way around, trying to find a way to set up ideas, ambivalences, conflicts, resolutions, relationships, that bespeak of “home”.LM: Still lifes have such a loaded history. Are there any specific artists you see your work referencing/ influenced by/ commenting on?LL: When I first began my references were the Northern European still life masters, particularly Pieter Claesz, in front of whose work I still get weak-kneed. Later I turned to others in this era, as well as Chardin’s scenes of food, in the Renaissance’s religious and allegorical paintings, Modernists who used the still life precisely because of their disregard for its domesticity, i.e. its familiarity. Stronger for me now are a range of artists whose work explores the tensions between the personal and public sphere: Jessica Stockholder, Richard Tuttle, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mickalene Thomas...For the last two years, writing and music have had more impact for my practice than visual references.LM: How do you feel about including your work in magazines that usually celebrate the perfectly polished? Are you breaking any rules, or maybe starting a new trend—&nbsp;celebrating the imperfect?LL: My pictures are never going to be widely accepted; they are not the new paradigm. I’m grateful for those who appreciate my sensibility, but the aspiration of perfection along with its inevitable failure and dissatisfaction is perhaps too deeply ingrained.Commercial work is really interesting and hearkens back to pre-modernist artistic practice in which we were hired guns, producing work for clients, the church or other patrons. The notion that art if informed by commerce is somehow impure is a modernist invention which, while it served some purpose, is a pretty impossible conceit. &nbsp;LM: Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?LL: Just the usual aspirations for deep and abiding fulfillment of all my wishes and desires, some altruistic, other pretty petty...Family and friends, first and foremost.LM: Any big plans coming up for 2013?LL: I’m really excited about my shows at the Denver Art Museum and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. I’ve also got some travel planned to Istanbul, Guadalajara and Mexico City, maybe Oaxaca, and Beijing. I really want to go to India and feel that I’m taking a circuitous route. I’m looking forward to delving back into the studio so as to continue in the direction I’ve begun.</body></html>

A 2013 Chicago Gallery News interview with local photographer Laura Letinsky. 

Artist Insights: Laura Letinsky

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418552/ya0ji1hcey0eohvobrwv.png"></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAAt the busy northside intersection of Lincoln and Diversey, floor to ceiling windows on a&nbsp;corner flatiron building reveal a seemingly&nbsp;out-of-nowhere art gallery, filled with unusual toys and bright figures displayed on the high walls. Inside visitors find quality work by both established and emerging artists in the fields&nbsp;of modern pop, illustration art and character/toy design. Everything within Rotofugi Designer Toy Store and Gallery is devoted to the unusual. Below is my conversation with co-founder Kirby Kerr.&nbsp;–GVCGN:&nbsp;How did the gallery, and Rotofugi Designer Toy Store, get started and how did you come to focus on toys and modern pop?KK: My wife and I opened Rotofugi in July 2004 because we found this thing called "urban vinyl toys" that no one in Chicago seemed to have. In August 2006 we were lucky enough to take over the building next door to our toy store and officially open Rotofugi Gallery as its own space, giving us more room to do regularly scheduled exhibitions. Before moving next door, our first exhibits were held in the back half of our store and ranged from customized toy shows to more traditional paintings and drawings. While we loved showing work in our store, we began to ache for more space after nearly two years of exhibits in the increasingly cramped space.The gallery was, to be entirely honest, almost an accident. When we were first starting out we called ourselves "Rotofugi Designer Toy Store &amp; Gallery" primarily because we wanted to get across the idea that the toys we were selling were not just toys, but art toys. What we quickly found out was that if you put the word "Gallery" anywhere as part of your name people will ask if they can have an exhibit in your space. So, in some way, we accidentally became a gallery space in addition to selling toys.Our focus has always been on showing artwork that we love. In our earliest days we booked a lot of exhibits with friends and customers of the store, and then progressed over time to inviting some of our favorite artists to exhibit in our space. In large part that philosophy has held true...we show things we personally love. These days it's a combination of modern pop, illustration and artwork by folks&nbsp;who are somehow involved in the designer toy world. Our curator, David van Alphen, joined us in 2008 after having owned/operated DvA Gallery for several years. We had long admired the way David curated his own space so when the opportunity arose, we were happy to join forces.CGN:&nbsp;What do you tell or show people who come into the gallery for the first time?KK:&nbsp;We're pretty hands off, preferring to let the work speak for itself. We like to think we've got a unique situation where the gallery gives context to the toys and vice versa. Of course if a visitor wants to talk about the work we're always happy to provide as much information and background about the artist as we can.CGN:&nbsp;Do most of your artists also work as&nbsp;(or with) designers?KK:&nbsp;It's really all over the place. Some are full-time artists, others work in graphic design or even toy design by profession, and many are professional illustrators.CGN: How do you see your gallery in relation to the overall Chicago art scene?KK:&nbsp;I've always struggled with our place in the Chicago art scene. On one hand we're often exhibiting nationally or internationally known artists. On the other hand, because we work in a lesser-known niche, the audience for the work tends to be rather small within Chicago. I'd like to think we're adding a layer of variety and showing work that would otherwise not have a home in Chicago and giving exposure to artists in a positive atmosphere.&nbsp;CGN: Does Chicago have a unique place within the modern pop and illustration art scene?KK:&nbsp;Chicago is home to a number of fantastic modern pop artists and illustrators, many of which we've shown over the years. In particular, we're big fans of both Jeremiah Ketner and Travis Lampe, two Chicago-based artists who have made a good impact with their paintings. Another Chicago artist we love,&nbsp;Jay Ryan, is probably the closest to having help put Chicago on the map, not necessarily for "modern pop" but as a gig-poster artist, another art form we absolutely love.CGN:&nbsp;Describe the scene of your typical&nbsp;openings.KK:&nbsp;It's hard to generalize, but they are for the most part pretty casual affairs. Given the nature of our combined toy store and art gallery setup we tend to be pretty family friendly (no alcohol) and we almost always arrange to have the artist available to meet with fans at the opening.&nbsp;CGN:&nbsp;Are most of the works shown in the gallery humorous or sinister? &nbsp;KK:&nbsp;A little of both actually! We do often show things that could be seen as humorous, but we don't specifically seek that out. A few of our favorite artists tend to explore dark themes too, like Daniel Danger and Derek Hess.CGN:&nbsp;Is the client market for works exhibited in the gallery different than in the designer toy store? &nbsp;KK:&nbsp;Yes...and no. We do have several good clients that purchase artwork but aren't into the toys, but also have many that buy both. In a lot of ways we see the toys we sell, when everything "clicks," as just another way for an artist to reach their collectors. Of course not every toy meets that goal, but we're constantly looking out for artists that are doing interesting things within the designer toy niche.CGN:&nbsp;Do you ever deal in the secondary market?KK:&nbsp;We've toyed around (sorry, pun not intended) with selling a few items on consignment for customers, but for the most part we avoid the secondary market...we're interested in what's new and fresh, not what's hot on eBay.CGN:&nbsp;In the toy store are you essentially&nbsp;selling highly collectible novelty items for adults, or sophisticated toys for kids? Do most of your clients get hooked early on?KK:&nbsp;For the most part the toys we sell are intended for adult collectors, though you're right, many of our good customers are younger kids or teens who appreciate the design elements. I can't say that we intentionally try to hook customers, but collecting toys is definitely an addiction for many... a&nbsp;fun addiction for sure!&nbsp;CGN: Are most of your collectors new to the&nbsp;contemporary art world?KK:&nbsp;I'd venture to say that a majority of our gallery clients are fairly new to collecting original works of art. We see a lot of people starting out with toys and collectibles that later become regular gallery patrons as they seek out unique examples of artwork. In a lot of ways it's not dissimilar to people starting out collecting inexpensive prints and "graduating" to buying paintings. In the end we're just trying to offer good art and design across a spectrum of media and prices, at least that's what we aspire to!</body></html>

CGN's interview with Rotofugi's Kirby Kerr

Dealer Profile- Rotofugi Gallery: Where Toys and Art Meet

By GINNY VAN ALYEA&nbsp;Linda Warren’s past 10 years in Chicago have gone by quickly: the gallery will officially turn 10 this June. Thinking about how she got started, as well as what’s ahead, Warren was in a reflective mood when we spoke in the fall. Though she accidentally got into the art business when she was living in L.A. over a decade ago, nurturing artists’ careers came naturally to someone who lives for today. Her passion for nurturing artists’ careers has given her a personal framework with which to build a successful gallery program, and it has led to some new and surprising projects at home and around the country. -GVWhen Linda Warren was working in production in the Los Angeles film industry in the 1990s, an artist friend asked her to store art in her home after being evicted from his studio. She was more than willing. When Warren started casually showing the artist’s work to film colleagues and selling it, she figured she was just helping everyone out. Soon, another artist asked if Warren would show his work as well. She recalls, “I would get excited and bring a painting to someone, just as a friend—I started out as a conduit from the artist to the buyer, and that really continues today.” Despite never feeling truly passionate about the film industry, she says it was a good living through which she made a lot of contacts. Transitioning from the film world to art didn’t happen overnight. Aware that a lot of the film people she worked with were counting on her for employment, Warren eventually converted her entire Silverlake Hills home to a gallery and began to balance her dual role. The result was what Warren remembers as an “apartment gallery on steroids,” filled with hundreds of people and crazy events. Looking back on the experience, she says she can’t believe she allowed it.In the midst of managing her new profession, Warren reconnected with a man she had known when she was in law school nearly 20 years earlier. After seeking Warren’s advice on acquiring artwork for his home on the north shore of Chicago, the couple decided to reconnect for good. Warren closed the L.A. space and moved to Chicago to marry her former love as well as help raise&nbsp;his four young boys. She put new gallery plans on hold, but it was tough to wait: “I dropped an insanely different life and became a suburban housewife. When I finally opened the gallery here in 2003 I was just ready—I knew this was what I wanted.”In L.A. Warren had reached out to artists and friends and was used to having people come to her. When seeking a space in Chicago she gravitated to the West Loop, where she says he liked living in her own little world. Linda Warren Gallery opened in 2003 and became a Fulton Market destination, showcasing art by a variety of media. She remembers, “When I first moved here Paula Henderson—she was my inaugural show here and I represented her in L.A.— introduced me to some collectors who quizzed me, ‘What are you going to specialize in?’ I just looked at them like, ‘What do you mean’? It’s my energy and money. Why would I constrain myself? I’m going to go with what resonates for me.’ People can take it or leave it.”When working with artists, Warren wants to show quality, as well as what she responds to. She’s ambitious but realistic about the overwhelming volume of work out there, much of which is admittedly poor quality, but a great deal, she says, is also good but simply overlooked. She confesses, “I’m very open to looking at everyone’s art who submits. Maybe other people try, but I absolutely do look at everything; it’s exciting to me. I have a box under my desk of stuff I just like. If I can help an artist, I’ll do it, though this year I might have just 6 shows, and that makes it harder for an artist to have a show here. The ones I work with have to let me do what I do.”Warren favors evolution versus planning in her life. She says, “I view my entire career in this as something that happened very naturally. I don’t plot. Setting just an exhibition schedule is even a struggle for me.” Her attitude is that hard work can make up for planning: “I quit law school to go to Israel, and there I became a citizen and became immersed in day to day life. You don’t think much about tomorrow there—that life sort of fit with me. If I’m alive tomorrow that’s great. I’m a hard worker and I’m passionate about what I do. That’s the key for anyone.”Since moving to a larger gallery space around the corner on North Aberdeen in 2011 and becoming Linda Warren Projects, Warren says business has changed in surprising ways. The space accommodates two exhibition spaces now, Gallery X and Gallery Y, and outside the gallery Warren has taken on a handful of substantial corporate art consulting contracts. Warren is candid about the biggest difference between selling art out of the gallery and working on corporate collections—the financial reward gap is vast. Though she says she’s always been out of the mind-set that she loves the gallery business enough to lose money, now she’s pleased that the corporate work is feeding the business and supporting some overhead.Warren’s current project has been taking her to Cleveland for the better part of two years, where she’s been working on a corporate collection for Eaton Corporation’s new world headquarters. “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” she says, “I got the call when I was out walking my dog. They showed me renderings of the building and they didn’t have a specific budget, but they asked me to come up with a contract based on several scenarios. They wanted it to be reflective or their business.” Warren’s own vision was what the company wanted. Tasked with curating the art for an 800,000 square foot space for 1,000 employees (there are 90,000 worldwide), Warren began with a PowerPoint presentation of 150 artists. When the back and forth began, she says, “They flipped out. They liked 100 out of 150. I didn’t really know what they were going to go with it—it was a crapshoot. We went from there to find out what they loved. A lot of work also had to be commissioned, since we were dealing with 50 and 30 foot walls. We’ve got great work from Emmett Kerrigan, Juan Angel Chavez, and Lora Fosberg, among many others. Warren is now close to the project’s final frontier and can finally see how things are shaping up. It is difficult to begin with just drawings, she admits, but it’s great when you realize it’s been two years and you’re already installing all that art.Warren works hard to support her family as well as her artists. Whereas most dealers today say they have no choice but to travel and participate in art fairs, Warren says she usually does just one a year, though in 2012 she didn’t do any. Art fairs remind Warren of the film industry. She explains, “There’s this insane amount of work and exhausting energy required. You might just be talking to people that are not that interesting. It’s exhilarating if you’re selling, but if you’re not, it’s depressing. I know it’s important to artists. It’s just an energy that I cannot stand. The point of what I’m trying to do with my life is to help the art. How I do that might not be how everyone else would, but I want everyone to succeed. I guess it’s ‘please don’t rely on me only.’ I’m not going to be a slave to it either. &nbsp;Looking ahead, perhaps to the next 10 years, Warren still wonders how to balance her life with the gallery. She acknowledges, “The kids are more independent now, so everything’s going to change. What’s going to happen down the road? I don’t know. I envision doing thing much more internationally. I want the gallery to keep going, and it would be great if I could have one big project every couple years as well.”Warren’s husband has always said the longer you’re in the business the more likely you’ll succeed. To Warren, “I know now that it’s true. It takes a lot of time to get it going in this business. I literally don’t have a strategy. It’s going to take time to understand my aesthetic and it’s changing like everyone else’s. That’s how it’s always going to be. It’s a ton of work and it can be a grind, but I just love it.”&nbsp;

CGN interviews gallery owner Linda Warren. 

Linda Warren Gallery turns 10 in 2013

<html><head></head><body>By GINNY VAN ALYEACollectors Anne and Mark Siebert bought a house in suburban Naperville 21 years ago, and though they like their quieter pace of life 30 miles outside of Chicago, they have become devoted city gallery visitors.&nbsp;After first meeting artist Peter Max one day at a suburban mall, they were so delighted with the personal experience that they started venturing downtown in search of more. They found a community ready to teach and welcome them with open arms, and many of those relationships have become two-way dialogues with artists and dealers that have opened up their world and shown them that art can indeed change your life. - GV&nbsp;Sitting down over coffee and pastries in their tidy kitchen, Mark and Anne tell me when they first realized how eye-opening art could be as a part of their day-to-day life. Mark admits&nbsp;that the first spark ignited in a suburban shopping mall in the late 1990s when they wandered into Merrill Chase Gallery, where painter&nbsp;Peter Max was having an exhibition.&nbsp;Mark laughs and remembers thinking, “‘He’s a really famous artist. Let’s go in.’ So we met him. And we actually bought something.”To Anne seeing an artist’s passion in person was a revelation, and she wanted more. The couple plunged headfirst into what would become an art collecting addiction. Seeking art in gallery spaces in the city, they ventured in by train and introduced themselves to dealers, attended dozens of openings and panel discussions, as well as BFA and MFA shows at the School of the Art Institute Chicago.&nbsp;They got know a number of artists, such as Dan Addington (also a dealer), whose piece was the second one they purchased in River North (Ron Clayton, represented by Addington's gallery, was the first), and William Conger. The dealers they met, like Ann and Roy Boyd of Roy Boyd Gallery, Frank Paluch of Perimeter Gallery, Myra Casis and Meg Sheehy at Zg Gallery, and William Lieberman of Zolla/Lieberman all took the eager new collectors under their collective wing to help them learn. Coming to downtown galleries to see what was new soon became an escape from a structured 9-5 life.<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418568/vumr3ezel9tc4glo8kf5.png"><figcaption>The Sieberts lounge in their colorful corner. From left to right: Paul Sierra, Su-En Wong, John Buck, Sarah Hicks (on glass table), Willam Conger (on wall in back corner)</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;To learn more about this new scene, Mark and Anne started going on the free River North Saturday Gallery Tours when they began over a decade ago. Mark recalls, “We continued to go on the tours even after we started to collect. Any space we go into, if you want a direction to explain about the gallery or the artists, they’re more than happy to do it, but on the tour you get so much more additional background. Even with artists we’re familiar with, when we hear the dealer talk we learn something we didn’t know before.”The Sieberts approached their newly discovered passion for art like dedicated students and did their homework.According to Anne, “Neither one of us has a background in art, but once we went to River North, that was it for the malls. We were captivated. Our tastes changed really quickly—they’re changing still even now.”*The Sieberts have lived in the same house in Naperville for 21 years. Having made some updates over the years, their most significant change seems to be the addition of artwork to almost every wall and tabletop.&nbsp;According to Anne, “Everything else is pretty bland in our home—it’s all beige and black, so we’re not limited by colors. We fall in love and make it work.”Their collecting approach is very straightforward, “There is no formula where we think, 'OK, now we have to get this type of art or that type.' We try to keep things different—various materials and mediums, young artists as well as established—in order to have a range.”<figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418569/odjavf08p6kszbz5wenq.png"><figcaption>The Sieberts' neutral living room is a showcase for sculpture, ceramics, and colorful paintings. Works seen here from left to right: paintings by Jamie Adams, and William Conger; on the table: William Lieberman, Ruth Duckworth, and Jay Strommen; on pedestal and sideboard: Josh Garber.</figcaption></figure>Connecting with artists has been a particular source of engagement for the couple. “We’re proud of the fact that we support local Chicago galleries. We have purchased art from 13 Chicago galleries, and many of the artists in our collection are local. We treasure our relationships with all of the artists that we’ve gotten to know,” says Anne.&nbsp;About sculptor Josh Garber Mark shares, “We have lunch or dinner with him, or he’ll have us out to his studio. Sometimes he runs ideas by us. At an opening after he’d just found out that he was a finalist for a commission for the City [of Chicago], he was sketching and asking what we thought. It was fascinating to be in that kind of discussion with him.”&nbsp;Anne says they even give him a little feedback when he asks, “I think Josh lets us in on the process. He shows us prototypes—sometimes we snap them up. That’s a lot of fun for us. I think when artists are surrounded by other artists maybe they forget how unique their talents are. As non-artists, we want to tell them how phenomenal their gift is. I think they need to hear it. And anyway, I’m not sure anyone could even stop us from telling them ‘fabulous job!’ I think artists are thrilled with each chance to talk to interested people. They’re all so willing to share with us.”William Lieberman says there’s something special about the relationship with Garber, “Anne and Mark both elevate his process. Josh is so into it—his whole existence revolves around his art. They make him feel it’s really important. They help artists feel good about who they are.*Nearly every piece in the collection has a backstory that the Sieberts are eager to share. A painting by Betty Cleeland, black with scattered bits of red and yellow, hangs in the family room by the TV. Anne tells me that they ended up buying the work when the shuttle Columbia exploded in 2003. The Sieberts watched the news before heading into the city to visit Roy Boyd Gallery. “Betty says you’re either looking through the end of a microscope or a telescope. The painting was a reminder of the mysteries of the universe and the need for space exploration. It especially struck us on that day.”In a tiny room off of the hall is one of Nicholas Sistler’s diminutive works. Mark explains it is based on erotica from the Weimar Republic in Germany, commenting on what many women had to do to make ends meet after WWI. The charged scene is almost too small for the casual observer to see, but Anne clearly recalls a day when a plumber, finishing up some work in the house, had his nose practically in the piece, astounded at the small scale of discovery of a naked woman in a compromising position.&nbsp;She remembers, “I was torn whether or not to pretend to be shocked. His expression was priceless.”•Mark is an insurance attorney, and Anne is a biologist turned textbook representative. She explains, “What we do certainly colors our experience. We tend to be very black and white and analytical in the way we evaluate things. Collecting art has sort of given us the gray. That artistic element is an interesting layer for us that’s added a dimension that didn’t exist before we started collecting. It wasn’t a part of how we used to think.”Looking ahead, Anne reflects, “We plan to be with this art for quite a while, but we get the&nbsp;sense that it will exist beyond us. Since almost all of our works are originals, we lend whenever there’s a request. All an artist has to do is ask. They are also invited to come here to visit their art anytime too, since it’s a part of them."&nbsp;</body></html>

Chicago gallery news features art collectors Anne and Mark Siebert. 

Collector Profile: Anne and Mark Siebert

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418577/jrn2it4pa7jhnqh7zglc.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Born in Prague, artist Jan Tichy lives and works in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC). This fall, several impressive projects coincide at area art institutions throughout Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Expo Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Richard Gray Gallery. CGN's Laura Miller met with Tichy to hear about all that's happening for the artist-educator this season.&nbsp;LM: Tell me about working with the Museum of Contemporary Photography for the past year on a project involving their collection.&nbsp;JT: Last year MoCP curator Karen Irvine asked me to consider new ways of interpreting their collection of more than 12,000 images and to create an exhibition that would explore it from a different perspective. MoCP was one of the first museums to upload digital images of their collection to their website as a way to connect with the public. I realized soon that the access and search tools are quite inappropriate for an interaction with this amazing digital archive. So, I considered ways to improve the access to the online collection and decided to create a think tank of Chicago MFA students (Columbia College, SAIC, UofC, UIC) that would bring updated perspectives on how to identify and develop strategies for better online interaction. We introduced applications, web design strategies and interactive elements that will hopefully give better access to a greater community.&nbsp;While coming to work at MoCP I realized that the museum itself is not really accessible/ visible from the street, despite its prominent Michigan Avenue location; many Chicagoans don't even know about it. So, I proposed to establish a digital gallery on the outside of the museum. Two large monitors will be installed on MoCP's exterior walls at the corner of Michigan and Harrison. The digital galleries will display exhibitions from the collection, curated specifically for that purpose by a wide range of curators from around the world. My exhibition there this fall will explore the collection using my own time-based tool of video and projection and will hopefully expose some hidden jewels.&nbsp;What else can we expect from you this fall?&nbsp;At Expo Chicago I'm really excited for the U.S. premier of&nbsp;Things to Come&nbsp;(1936-2012), a three-channel video installation made from 80 seconds of never before exhibited film footage that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy created in 1936 in London. H.G. Wells commissioned Moholy-Nagy when working on an exhibition design for his show at Loyola University Museum of Art three years ago. It took me sometime to realize the potential hidden in these film snippets; using Moholy-Nagys analog techniques in digital media with the initial H.G. Wells criteria, I hope to bring new life to it.&nbsp;I have older works in group-exhibitions this fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Richard Gray Gallery. For the Art Institute of Chicago's Ando Gallery, I'm working on a site specific installation to coincide with an exhibition of contemporary Japanese garments from SAIC's Fashion Resource Center. Outside of Chicago I'll be participating in this fall's Architecture Biennale in Venice in the Israeli Pavilion and working with No Longer Empty in NYC.&nbsp;You've been involved in several large-scale collaborative projects with local college students, community members, and art institutions—2011's powerful&nbsp;Project Cabrini Green, 2009's Lighting the Crown Hall at the IIT, now the MoCP project, among others. How do these collaboration evolve?&nbsp;As an artist and educator I believe in a creative collaboration between faculty and students as one of the models of successful art education, a theory that Moholy-Nagy was practicing in Chicago 60 years ago. I also share the belief, formulate and practiced by curator and educator Mary Janes Jacobs, that in the contemporary art world, art school offer a great platform to develop professional art productions.&nbsp;Project Cabrini Green is a good example of how this model benefits students, the institution and the community as well as an artist and a commercial gallery. The project required huge amounts of time and involvement. Together with Efrat Appel we collaborated with 25 dedicated students and faculty from SAIC to develop and create all the different layers of the project and worked with over 100 teenagers from four after school programs in Cabrini Green to create the content. It wouldn't be possible without the active support of Richard Gray Gallery and the administration of SAIC. Including the MCA and CHA there were over 200 people involved in the project.&nbsp;How did you make the transition to Chicago?&nbsp;It was actually very easy, maybe because I moved from Prague to Jerusalem when I was 19. During my MFA studies at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, I participated in a collaborative project in Helsinki initiated by SAIC. Eventually I was accepted to their Sculpture program. I finished my MFA at SAIC in 2009 and stayed to teach at the Department of Art and Technology Studies. I fell for Chicago from the beginning, and the city was kind to me. I had the extraordinary opportunity to create projects for a few signature buildings like Crown Hall, the Hancock, Spertus, Montgomery Ward, and Cabrini Green. There are more under way (Chicago Cultural Center in 2014.)After living, working, and exhibiting around the world, how do you find Chicago for art?&nbsp;The way Chicago is built—physically, socially, and culturally—there's space and opportunities for many cultural activities, and plenty of people want to do things. I serve on advisory boards of ACRE and threewalls, non-profits that provide the local art community with accessible spaces and rich programming. These organizations, like many other independent art spaces, apartment and pop-up galleries, are the vital source of culture for the community and an important spawn of the next generation of cultural producers.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Artist Insights: Jan Tichy

Douglas Dawson Gallery is a serene art destination hidden behind a steel entry wall off of Morgan St. in the heart of the Chicago's meat packing district. When you walk up the stone walkway under the cover of the wood trellis you are aware that you are about to enter a gallery unlike any other in the city. The gallery turns 30 at the end of this year, and for the occasion gallery directors and partners Doug Dawson and Wally Bowling spent some time over tea one rainy summer morning to talk about running a contemporary gallery that deals in ethnographic art and ancient artifacts. Unique challenges face them as they try to reach the next generation of collectors while managing new realities of sourcing and authenticity, but the two have relied on experience and perspective to get them where they are today. - GV&nbsp;Doug Dawson credits his entry into the gallery business to a potent combination of naïveté and terror. 30 years ago, when he moved to Chicago from a political collective in northeast Iowa, Dawson had never been in an art gallery. He admits,&nbsp; I very naïvely decided to open one. In retrospect&nbsp;it all seems like great strategizing, but in fact it was dumb luck. &nbsp;His timing was also fortunate, since he happened to rent a River North loft space in 1983&nbsp;when the area was just beginning to buzz. Dawson reflects he was delighted to find himself suddenly in the middle of what was fast becoming the hot contemporary art neighborhood of Chicago.Today, the gallery has been in the West Loop for seven years. Dawson has seen many changes since opening the gallery three decades ago, but one constant has been the gallery's focus on tribal art. When he first opened he used a contemporary gallery model to hold openings and complementary activities like lectures, as well as thematic exhibitions. Dawson credits this structure with helping him reach a larger, more energized audience of contemporary collectors than just those who collected tribal art. The contemporary juxtaposition, he explains, means that someone who encounters an ancient piece doesn't have to have expert knowledge about Burkina Faso; it doesn't matter if you've never heard of the Ashanti tribe. A new context can dispel insecurities, and, Dawson says, help fill in the gaps later.To continue to offer new contexts and to keep things fresh, the gallery occasionally showcases contemporary art, working with artists who see the ancient work in new ways&nbsp;–&nbsp;a strategy Dawson explains complements other pieces in the gallery. He says,&nbsp;"As much as we need to keep our clients interested we need to keep ourselves interested. In dollars it s a small part of the business, but in interest it generates a lot. It's harder and harder to do shows just on ethnographic art, so this helps fill our openings calendar as well as put older works in a new light." Many of Dawson s collectors are also interested in minimalism, conceptual art, even antiques, so parallels are easily found. &nbsp;Dawson and Bowling cross boundaries in other practical ways as well. Dawson explains, "We participate in contemporary art fairs – we actually prefer them to tribal art fairs. If you interview our collectors most will tell you they're contemporary art collectors. Collecting tribal art has a long and dynamic history that surprises many people. As Dawson says, "In fact, early French artists were collectors of this material too – they were affirmed and inspired by it. Their own art was ratified by it. Interestingly there has been a major paradigm change in that relationship. If you look at French artists in 1915 they were looking at tribal art and seeing in it issues they were dealing with in their own art. Today it's just flipped completely - it's understood and evaluated by looking first at 20th Century art. People come in and say&nbsp;'That looks just like a Giacometti,' for instance. That's how it's validated."All these overlapping interests would seem to indicate a broad audience for tribal art, but Dawson admits that engaging a young audience with this material can be challenging today. He says, "There's less interest in non-western culture. Young people don't travel like our generation did. There's a kind of ambivalence now. And tribal art certainly isn't cool. Someone can spend $200,000 on a pre-Columbian textile, for example, take it home, put it on the wall, have a party, and 98% of the people there will have no idea what it is, let alone how much they've spent. It doesn't make the kind of impact that contemporary art can for people who collect by the numbers. You can't brand it."Another challenge that affects Dawson's market, as well as the antiques market he says, is what he sees going on with interior design. He notes, "All dealers are loathe to admit that's a really major engine in the art world but it is. Trends in interior design now seem very conservative, very corporate. We hear young people aren't really using interior designers anymore. They buy a loft and put in a TV screen bigger than the house we grew up in, a Crate &amp; Barrel sofa&nbsp;and lots of electronic toys. That's kind of it." When asked to think about how&nbsp;much best-selling furniture and art at chain&nbsp;stores appeals&nbsp;to these same transient younger people, Dawson discussed how so many pieces&nbsp;are in fact inspired by, if not copies of, originals&nbsp;from far flung countries or long ago eras. As he sees it, "If people feel they can obtain an apothecary coffee table that looks like it came from a remote village in South East Asia with the click of a button – and free shipping – why would they seek out a well-traveled dealer who's actually gone to the trouble to procure the real thing from a real village?"&nbsp;Dealers, and individuals, he points out,&nbsp;used to have to travel much more to pursue such treasures. But Bowling adds that even if you travelled that way, especially on your own, you wouldn't necessarily buy&nbsp;such things anymore.&nbsp;He says, "So it's kind of a catch-22. When we used to travel more, it was more readily available. You'd get excited about pieces in-situ. People just got excited about the third world, but now it all looks very western. Villagers are wearing t-shirts shipped from the US.&nbsp;There are no ceramics.&nbsp;Instead, you see Michael Jackson's face printed everywhere. It's a different perception of the world now, generally."The number of younger collectors who frequent the gallery is small, but Bowling cites a handful who are new to tribal art. He believes,&nbsp;"If you know you want to collect something, pre-Columbian ceramics are amazing. A lot of people think because of the age, prices must be out of reach; we do have to reflect the market, but if you look at what goes at the major auction houses today, these things are much less than contemporary counterpoints, and they have some history."Dawson thinks any younger collector should first be curious. He advises, &nbsp;"Don't expect to buy right away, but do look and wonder on any kind of level&nbsp;–&nbsp;aesthetic, technical, historical. When we were younger we used to go to so many galleries and just see and absorb.&nbsp;He is frustrated by art students who come in but don't really look at pieces in the gallery. He's lectured classes in the space, only to have no one come back, and he wonders where they are getting their messages.&nbsp;For me the ideal is being curious and asking questions, wondering about the people who made these things. It broadens my idea of human experience. That's what art is. I think it's important people know about the world."A museum experience is naturally a quite different from&nbsp;the one a gallery provides, especially in a field like tribal art. Locally, Dawson looks to the Art Institute and its excellent collection. He says the head of the department that deals with tribal art is probably the best in the United States, but it still remains a department that has a very low profile in Chicago. He says,&nbsp; "There s no energized community around this material here. That affects business. There are some other dealers in Chicago who are participating in the same market that we are, but no one is doing international shows and seeking the same national level. &nbsp;I'm not demeaning anyone, but it would be nice if there were more galleries dealing in this kind of art in order to give people something to compare."These awareness challenges are all the more reason that visitors should be attracted to Dawson's space and unique field. In the gallery visitors encounter prime examples of tribal art as well as moving insights into world history. Bowling, a trained architect himself, points out that the space was designed to look like the houses their clients might have. Small rooms and spaces allow you to discover things. He says, "There's an intimacy that you don't get in a museum. You can look at a piece here and respond in your own setting."&nbsp;Dawson says visitors are invited to come in, touch things, ask an expert questions. It's a rare point of access. &nbsp;Dawson and Bowling have gone to great distances to give clients that kind of up-close access, traveling the globe to art fairs and remote destinations to bring the best of the world s tribal art to collectors. Their specialty also involves regularly going through hoops. One of the primary obstacles demonstrates how recent issues of our own security have resulted in newer challenges off dealing in tribal art. Dawson says, "The Patriot Act really has become sort of a nightmare in the art business, where everything is suspect. Dealing with the Federal Government, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Customs – to get a clarification of what you can and cannot do, it's become almost impossible."Dawson and Bowling say they travel a lot less than they used to, partly because of the recession, and partly because they haven't needed to replace inventory as often. Bowling says they do more domestic travel and less foreign, and that the overseas trips they do take now are&nbsp;more for pleasure. Still, they manage to travel about a quarter of the year, but art fairs largely dictate their schedule and destinations. Recent ventures to&nbsp;South America, Asia, and throughout Africa&nbsp;would make any globetrotter envious. Trips usually involve seeing contacts, visiting museums, and staying up to date with other collections. &nbsp;Travel is often not when acquisitions are actually made, since as Dawson points out, objects are almost never come from the country of origin. He explains, "We buy things that have impeccable provenance and authenticity, and to do that we must spend a lot of time going through a great deal of steps. We have a good museum business, and it's more and more difficult to sell to museums now because of concerns about provenance and authenticity. For instance, we're more likely to look to buy things from this country or Europe than we are from Mexico or Peru or Indonesia."Authenticity is a serious matter, particularly since Dawson has a strong museum business.&nbsp;"Not long ago,"&nbsp;Dawson says, "we had a large prehistoric African terra cotta figure and the head had been broken off. In that world of African archeological ceramics there's a lot of forgery - mixing of pieces and reconstructing things. The client wanted to be sure we had the right head for the body. We sent it to a firm&nbsp;in suburban Chicago for a host of tests, like thermoluminescence, which determines when a ceramic was submitted to a certain temperature. Both the head and the body came out equally correct in that test. Then, they ground up samples from both parts and those came out perfectly. They X-rayed. Then, they drilled into a point where the ceramic hadn't gotten hot enough to carbonize organic material, and they found animal hair that had been used as a bonding agent. These pieces are 2,500 years old. They pulled a hair out of the head, and a hair out of the body and did DNA tests. The hairs came from the same female goat. Ultimately they said it was&nbsp;highly likely – the most definitive statement they'll make – that the two parts were made at the same time, from the same lump of clay, by the same person. We will go that far to determine authenticity."Regarding their base in Chicago, Dawson says it's a double-edged sword: "We do have some Second City syndrome here, where people will prefer to buy things in New York or Paris, particularly in the art world, since that has a sort of cachè.&nbsp;That said we have been here for 30 years. Chicago is a great city that draws a lot of people in for numerous events."&nbsp;He admits to a familiar dealer quandary, "We couldn't survive in Chicago just on Chicago. It's because we've developed a national reputation that we can do what we do here. But I think that's true of everyone. That's what keeps everyone open in this city." Dawson says that above all they've enjoyed a great run in Chicago. Most of the obstacles they've faced have in fact been in place from the beginning, and here they still are after three decades. He concludes, "For our space, this is a protected manufacturing district, so we are able to have this sculpture gallery and to make the gallery a destination. Obviously we could not have all of this in too many other cities."<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/douglas-dawson-gallery">Douglas Dawson Gallery</a>

An interview with Douglas Dawson and Wallace Bowling for the gallery's 30th anniversary

Douglas Dawson Gallery: 30 Years of Tribal Art

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418577/hnmzoc6jsgvyqprlnabe.jpg"><figcaption>Contemporary design and furniture complements the art - pictured here a range of works, including a sculptural piece by Nick Cave</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAThe label 'collector' can convey the notion that buying and acquiring art is an insular pursuit, reserved for insiders wih connections and expensive taste. Collectors Marilyn and Larry Fields prove that a passion for collecting and living with art can begin at any age, and their shared enthusiasm is a lesson to anyone interested in learning about contemporary art and the artists who create it. Their story of how they filled their lakefront high-rise home with works by some of the greatest contemporary artists of our time in a few breath-taking years is a unique inspiration. The art the Fieldses have collected complements striking design pieces from the 1940s and '50s and fills&nbsp;their home&nbsp;with style and their life with&nbsp;meaning. Their private home gallery, located in an adjacent condo,&nbsp;is devoted to exhibiting works from their collection on a rotating basis. On a rainy afternoon, I enjoyed keeping up with the Fields's frenetic conversation and sharing their passion for the art and artists who have touched their lives. –GV&nbsp;To walk into the home of Marilyn and Larry Fields is to enter a tranquil,&nbsp;expansive art space. Stepping off of the elevator onto their private floor, I encounter&nbsp;a towering collage of hundreds of photographs that&nbsp;Jason Lazarus scoured from the photo-sharing site Flickr;&nbsp;each image&nbsp;depicts someone's&nbsp;personal experience&nbsp;during the Iraq war. This was just the first of many powerful pieces I would see. Seated with&nbsp;Marilyn in the couple's round living room, overlooking Lake Michigan, she explains,&nbsp;"We certainly live with art&nbsp;24/7. It's really become our passion."Married for 34 years, the Fields say they've always bought art. If something was visually appealing, they'd buy it. Larry says that at one point they were interested in posters and art glass, picking out a piece here or there, but he admits, "That was mostly haphazard—nothing really made a collection." They&nbsp;aimed&nbsp;for a new level in 2000&nbsp;after putting a down payment on a condo in a Streeterville&nbsp;building designed by French architect Lucien Lagrange. They didn't move in for five years, but in that period several decisions affected their collecting savvy: they became very involved with the Museum of Contemporary Art— Marilyn joined the Women's Board in 1998, while Larry became an MCA trustee around 2004 – and they began attending an annual art extravaganza, Art Basel Miami, in 2002.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418578/bhbvu7ogjhkntgj7nmaz.jpg"><figcaption>The Fields's apartment overlooks Lake Michigan</figcaption></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2288/original/fields1.jpg" alt=""></figure>The Fields' home is a balance of art, architecture and contemporary design. Though Marilyn and Larry collect as a team, their roles at home&nbsp;are different. Marilyn has taken great care to develop the character of the home through furniture and design, collecting 1950s modern furniture as well as pieces by 1940s French designers Jean-Michel Frank and Andre Arbus. When they finally moved into their apartment in 2005, Marilyn describes opening up the art and furniture as, "One of the most exciting moments—we'd bought all of these beautiful pieces and they'd been in storage for years." For Larry, "We looked at which pieces had dialogue with each other. It's fun buying, but it's even more fun installing."&nbsp;Each piece in their collection exists in relation to the others around it. According to Marilyn, "We love how each piece&nbsp;speaks to the other. We try to make it all work. But most important, it has to appeal to us."Larry wants to know, "What's the contextual idea? How is it somehow related to society today? Is it process oriented? When you meet an artist, they can open up your eyes to a way you haven't seen the world." Marilyn says: "We've grown tremendously and become more sophisticated collectors because of the MCA. Meeting the curators and artists, you really take so much more from the art that you're buying. It's given us a different type of focus. We've also met so many amazing people and made many friends in the art world, including other collectors."&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418579/iqej5hrgss0wip2locqp.jpg"><figcaption>A pair of works by Kara Walker and a painting by Ed Ruscha displayed in the Fields's sitting area</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;The Fields have collected art from many cities in many countries, but they feel a great deal of pride for the City of Chicago, as well as an obligation to support it art community. Larry and Marilyn agree that the time seems to be right in Chicago for a boost for some artists and galleries. Larry point to success stories of young artists like Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Angel Otero, and William J. O'Brien, each of whom have work in the Fields' collection. To Larry&nbsp;because of the international attention these artists have recieved, he suspects that people who may have been previously reluctant to purchase work from a Chicago gallery (instead of say, in New York) may now have more confidence buying art here. Larry says he and Marilyn try to support younger artists when they're getting started; for instance they have acquired a piece from each of Gates' series. Larry states, "It takes a village to support artists here: galleries, art schools, non-profits, museums—they all work together to create a nurturing experience."&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418580/xxewgf2voim2nogyx3l6.jpg"><figcaption>Mark Bradford's sculpture featuring a switchblade embedded in a rock recalls Sir Lancelot's sword in the stone&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;The couple credits the opening of Millennium Park in 2004, followed by&nbsp;the&nbsp;Art Institute of Chicago's&nbsp;Modern Wing in 2009, with finally drawing a more international crowd to the city. Larry explains, " I think Anish Kapoor's 'Bean' [Cloud Gate] in Millennium Park has become sort of symbolic of a new city-wide pride. It has drawn people to the city just for this kind of art experience." Marilyn adds, "That was not something that used to happen. The amount of funding the community raised was pretty incredible. The gardens, Jaume Plensa's&nbsp;Crown Fountain—it's all perfection. " Larry hopes that what has been successful about Millenium Park could someday be done to update other sites in the city as art showcases, such as the iconic Navy Pier.&nbsp;Navy Pier will in fact be transformed for a weekend this September when EXPO Chicago debuts, returning an international contemporary art fair to a much-loved venue. Marilyn recalls that during Chicago's art fair heydey in the early 1980s, Vernissage was the party for the premier contemporary art fair in the world. As part of the MCA's Women's Board, which is once again hosting Vernissage on September 19, she remembers, "There was Art Basel in Switzerland, but not much else. From 1982 here until it ended in 2004 it was really phenomenal. Galleries who came from around the world were very, very disappointed when it ended. The thought of bringing it back to Navy Pier, where everyone's heart was, is exciting, and many of those original galleries are coming back." To run a successful fair here again, this is a critical place for a certain scene, and Marilyn agrees that Vernissage is an important element that will get people excited about the return of the fair.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418581/iahrznme3mornpkvtifd.jpg"><figcaption>In the gallery space a John Baldessari painting dominates. A hidden room features a closet and a kitchenette covered 360° in acrylic resin. Also pictured is Erin Swinson's sinister sculpture of a small deer struggling with a shadowy cape.&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Having discussed collecting, art in Chicago, and the upcoming EXPO, Larry relished the opportunity to introduce me to his favorite works, so I made a concerted effort to keep pace as he rattled off names of artists and the story behind each piece. Both Marilyn and Larry have personally placed each work of art, but they've also largely kept the experience of others in mind when deciding where certain works should be. Certain spaces are meant for quiet pieces, such as one of Sol Le Witt's minimalist cubic constructions placed in a window overlooking the back of the MCA. Nearby is a subtle Fred Sandback installation, as well as a work by Italian painter Lucio Fontana. On a bench in the entryway is a commissioned book by Deb Sokolow, featuring an amusing conspiracy story about Larry –&nbsp;who works as a cattle futures trader –&nbsp;and some cows mysteriously being found in a warehouse on the west side of Chicago. Marilyn calls it a clever homage to Larry.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418581/alt468jlnitkcwytkecx.jpg"><figcaption>Pictured in center: Mark Tansey's Utopic</figcaption></figure>In the tranquil entryway, muted by opaque green glass panels, a handful of large-scale paintings are meant to make a dramatic first impression. Mark Tansey is a favorite of the couple. His&nbsp;Utopic, in his signature inky blue, looms on the wall opposite the front foor, featuring a dreamy scene from Anna Freud's study. Larry notes that the hermaphrodite statue picture on the chaise actually exists in the Louvre. Freud, Marx and Nietzsche are looking down from inside their portrait frames, psychoanalyzing her sexual identity.&nbsp;In the Fields' long, open dining room, four 1970s-looking photographs by Richard Prince are lined up opposite a wall of windows overlooking the Lake. Larry excitedly explains&nbsp;the placement, "When we have dinner parties, the guests at the table can pick their favoite lady. The ladies are all looking to the left, to the east, in the room. What are they looking for? Love. We made sure to place Robert Indiana's&nbsp;LOVE sculpture at the east end of the buffet to create a story line for everyone."&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418582/sw1vetni2puqpv9eiiex.jpg"><figcaption>A view of the Fields's second gallery space adjacent to their main living space.In the foreground a soundsuit by Nick Cave.&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Larry tells me that they move works around in the apartment's private gallery about 2-3 times a year, whereas most art in the main apartment stays put. An initial impression of the gallery is of whimsy and interaction, exemplified by Anish Kapoor's target-like, shiny whirlpool, which draws your attention as you enter the room. Set into the wall itself, the viewer has the sense of&nbsp;falling down a rabbit hole to infinity—it's like having a Millenium Park&nbsp;"Bean" at home, without the crowds.&nbsp;&nbsp;Groupings, common in the gallery space, are evidence of Larry's fondness for curating. Marilyn explains, "He really loves delving into each work of art and sharing all the stories." Larry puts works together according to a&nbsp;theme, such as surface, era, concept, or global geography. He enjoys seeing how things go together and how they speak to each other. One group focuses on an African American aesthetic, showcasing Mark Bradford's bags of soccer balls, as well as a flag by David Hammons, and pieces by Rashid Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Lyle Ashton Harries, and Kara Walker. Larry is undeniably proud of all of the works in the collection—it's as if the artists are his children and he's the proud parent. Art conjures up different things to different people, and as tour guide Larry offers his own insights while also allowing&nbsp;others to say how a work's message might appear to them. He reflects, "I think art can leave a personal space to think about what it means to you."&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418583/yksyeb3d6azkhygicefo.jpg"><figcaption>A work by Anish Kapoor</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;The Fields are frequently generous with their time as well as their knowledge, leading tours of their home for groups interested in contemporary art. Marilyn admits that though she's a very private person, "I want someone to come here and really learn –&nbsp;to think this is it." Larry adds, "As an art collector, I think you have a responsibility to know the art and to also open up your home and be able to share it and help others see. You must know about the artists and understand their work and why it's here."Of course, the ultimate goal of collecting is appreciation and enjoyment. Together Marlyn and Larry agree, "It's about not taking yourself too seriously. That's what it's all about—fun."#<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418584/ox8j86zkjci0kxmbfvfy.jpg"><figcaption>Larry paired Maurizio Cattelan's marble Everyone is Broke with Tony Tasset's colored rocks.&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN interviews local art collectors Marilyn and Larry Fields. 