By CGN Staff

Last weekend marked the official, and this year unconventional, start to the fall arts season, when many of the area's galleries opened new exhibitions and held socially-distanced public receptions around the city. This week, more new exhibitions are beginning. We are highlighting several for you here, though at this time these spaces are not hosting opening receptions. 

Thank you for using CGN as a guide to art throughout the area. Please remember that we are adding new shows and events to our calendar daily and we have resumed our weekly highlights of area events. Note each space's public hours carefully and keep an eye on CGN's calendar of events, since events are subject to change. You can read past show previews here.

Leasho Johnson: Only when it's dark enough can you see the stars

Begins September 19

FLXST Contemporary – Near South Side 

Working in a multiplicity of mediums, Leasho immortalizes the dynamic energy of the Dancehall and engages with black stereotypes and spectrums as expressed in Jamaican/Caribbean cultural practice. His characters often merged specific materials with new narratives around gender and identity whilst utilizing both traditional and contemporary approaches around ancestral and personal stories. His interest sometimes comes from reinterpreting/interrupting the historical imagery of the British Empire with contemporary realities. His work centers the contestations and tensions in western culture around sexuality and seeks to explore contemporary meanings in context to historical truths.

Unexpected: Lisa goesling & Deanna Krueger

Begins September 16

Fermilab Art Gallery – Batavia, IL

Spontaneous creations lead to unexpected results. While Lisa Goesling and Deanna Krueger use different materials, they both approach their art with a sense of wonder. What evolves is an energy that is not only seen but also felt.

Richard Hunt: Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze

Begins September 17

Art Institute of Chicago – Loop

This exhibition draws its title, Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze, from a monumental bronze sculpture that exemplifies Hunt’s recent practice. Over the last six years, he has engaged in a durational approach of continually adding, removing, and reshaping the work, investigating the meaning of bronze both in relation to its mythological and material attributes, as well as its inherent transformative possibilities. This massive bronze is complemented by two other large-scale stainless steel sculptures, as well as a selection of smaller-scaled bronzes, all of which were completed in the last 20 years. Together, they represent the range of the artist’s engagement with metal, spatial occupation, and the notion of the base, as well as the ways in which objects are in dialogue with bodies and the built environment. In the installation on the museum’s Bluhm Family Terrace, the scale of the sculptures coalesces with the Chicago skyline.

Claudia Wieser: Generations

Begins September 19

Smart Museum of Art – Hyde Park

Generations is a seven-year survey of the distinctive, multi-faceted practice of Berlin-based artist Claudia Wieser. Drawing upon the history of art, design and architecture—from the democratic stage of ancient Roman forums to the esoteric principles of Bauhaus craftsmanship—Wieser’s practice carefully stitches together a constellation of elements. Influenced by the modernism of Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, who embraced spirituality as part of their aesthetic processes, Wieser broadens their ideals, using spatial installations to consider the coexistence of abstraction and physiological experience.