News from Around the Art World: September 25, 2018
Art Gallery by Tadao Ando Set to Open October 12 in Chicago
A stunning new space for art will open in Chicago next month. Wrightwood 659 is Tadao Ando’s second project in the city for the same client. The 35,000-square-foot gallery is located just a few doors down from the Pritzker laureate’s first project, a house for media mogul and philanthropist Fred Eychaner completed twenty years ago in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. While the house was the Japanese architect’s first free-standing building in the United States, Wrightwood 659 is a conversion of a four-story 1920’s apartment building.
By Josephine Minutillo, Architectural Record
Chicago resurrects its master craftsman
With their striking wealth of detail—stained-glass windows with frolicking animals, wood incised with geometric patterns, classical bas-reliefs, brick studded with tile—Edgar Miller’s riotously decorated artists’ studios in Chicago have earned comparisons with landmarks such as Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in south Los Angeles or Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona. Yet Miller (1899-1993) has been largely overlooked in US architectural history.
By Nancy Kenney, The Art Newspaper
‘3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980’ Review: A Celebration of the Weird
‘Weird” is a word that’s lost a lot of currency over the past couple of decades. Things that used to mark a person as someone who played outside the lines—tattoos, facial piercings, and clothes that make wearers look as if they’d just escaped a burning building—now wax normal. Even the official slogan of the Independent Business Alliance of Texas’ capital city is “Keep Austin Weird.”
By Peter Plagens, The Wall Street Journal
Want to Get Rich Buying Art? Invest in Women
Once, when asked about discrimination against female artists, the Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner said the bias was as old as Judeo-Christian history. Brushing aside the weight of that realization, she added, “There’s nothing I can do about those 5,000 years.” She painted anyway, as have women throughout the ages who have continued to create despite official disdain. Centuries and decades later, it seems their persistence may be finally paying off.
By Mary Gabriel, The New York Times