New Exhibitions Start April 29–30 (Pt. 1)
Rodger Bechtold and Mary Jo O’Gara: Painted Short Stories
Exhibition Begins April 29
Anne Loucks Gallery
Gina Litherland: Braids of the Past
Exhibition Begins April 29
Corbett vs. Dempsey
All the characters in Litherland’s luminous paintings inhabit liminal spaces, whether they’re lodged inside a tree trunk, on a penumbral coastline, or mysteriously hovering a few feet above the ground. Hers are ecologically-minded images, but they’re rooted in a unique vision of our shared planetary and symbolic atmospheres.
Opening: Friday, April 29, 5 – 7 pm
Weinberg/Newton Gallery
With photographic and painted depictions of homes, the exhibition initially positions housing as a place that can be abandoned – sometimes, unjustly stolen. Architectural collage demonstrates housing as a temporal exercise in which influences and precedents engage in dialogue with future spatial thinking. Silent home movies and idiosyncratic sculpture subsequently suggest that housing is a productive place in which intimate moments, lifelong memories, and nurturing meals are made and shared.
Opening: Friday, April 29, 7:30 – 9 pm
The Art Center Highland Park
Fiber-Fashion-Feminism is a deftly curated exhibit of fiber artists from all over the country. Curator Caren Helene Rudman reached out to some prominent names in the genre, notably Anne Wilson, a Chicago-based artist in the Art Institute of Chicago Art Institute’s Fiber & Material Studies Department and a leader in the field. Each of the nine selected artists, Nneka Kai, Jennifer Markowitz, Laura Morrison, Marty Ornish, Maria Pinto, Nirmal Raja, Katrin Schnabl, Yana Schnitzler, Ginny Sykes, bring a unique perspective to the work.
Kelly Boehmer: Growling Stomach
Opening: Friday, April 29, 5 – 8 pm
ARC Gallery
Boehmer’s soft sculptures display a tragic sense of humor. Using art history as a starting point she creates tension and anxiety through sewing the work by hand, with raw, anxious stitches of red thread. Her old sculptures are cut up and are incorporated with upcycled taxidermy to make new work.
John Heliker: Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s
Exhibition Begins April 29
Corbett vs. Dempsey
This rare exhibition of the artist's work is drawn from a small collection of works on paper from a prime period early in his career, when he was drawing and sketching actively alongside Social Realist contemporaries including William Gropper and Ben Shahn. Like those artists, Heliker was politically active on the left, and starting in the late 1930s he made drawings published in New Masses, the Marxist magazine, and joined the WPA Federal Art Project as an easel painter.
