News from Around the Art World: June 25, 2018
Barrels of Fun: Christo Erects a Brilliantly Colored Pyramid as Tall as Egypt’s Sphinx in London’s Hyde Park
The artist Christo is known for making the impossible possible. In 2016, he allowed hundreds of thousands of people to walk on water when he erected floating piers in the middle of Italy’s Lake Iseo. In 1983, he and his wife Jeanne-Claude surrounded 11 islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with floating fabric the color of Pepto Bismol.
By Naomi Rea, artnet News
‘They Force You to Look Without Judgement’: Watch Nick Cave Describe the Origins of His Trademark Soundsuits
If you visit the Park Avenue Armory in New York sometime this month, make sure to bring your dancing shoes. The artist Nick Cave has transformed the massive drill hall into a cavernous disco where New Yorkers are invited to boogie their anxieties away. On select evenings through July 1, the installation also hosts transporting performances during which a cast of dancers don “Soundsuits,” the ecstatic, wearable sculptures that have made Cave famous.
Via artnet News
From the community: Art Design Chicago: ‘Sculpting a Chicago Artist’ comes to Oakton July 12
Oakton Community College's Koehnline Museum of Art will display the works of a world-renowned Chicago sculptor and the influences of his teachers as part of Art Design Chicago. "Sculpting a Chicago Artist: Richard Hunt and his Teachers, Nelli Bar and Egon Weiner" opens Thursday, July 12, and runs through Sept. 14 at the college's Des Plaines campus, 1600 E. Golf Road. The public is invited to a free opening night reception from 5 to 8 p.m.
By Community Contributor Oakton Community College, The Chicago Tribune
Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers?
IN 1966, TWO BROTHERS, Alonzo and Dale Davis, set out from Los Angeles on a road trip across the United States, seeking out other artists of color like them. They meant for the trip “to broaden our limited art history experience,” Alonzo says, since African-American artists had been conspicuously absent from his curriculum at Pepperdine University, or Dale’s at the University of Southern California. “We drove from L.A. to Mississippi, up through New York and Chicago, and somewhere between all those cornfields, we thought: it’d be interesting to own a gallery.”
By Janelle Zara, The New York Times Style Magazine
‘Worker Cottage Parklet’ art installation honors Chicago’s working class history
Chicago’s past is right under our feet. Just below the trendy bars of Milwaukee Avenue, markers of the street’s former life as a working-immigrant thoroughfare — hand-hewn granite cobblestones and streetcar ties — lie in their final resting place buried underneath the street’s modern pavement.
Some of those granite cobblestones will be allowed to see the light of day again as part of Chicago artist Lynn Basa’s newest public art installation, “Worker Cottage Parklet,” which will be installed July 18 on the corner of Milwaukee and Wood. Commissioned by Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area #33 for $80,000, this is the largest public art commission in the history of the Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods.
By Jane Recker, Chicago Sun Times