By GINNY VAN ALYEA
This week's round of updates from what galleries are doing during stay-at-home contributes to the variety of ways people are thinking about how to share art and engage collectors, artists and supporters from afar. Each offering here can bring you the joy of art while hopefully inspiring you to support local spaces in any way you are able. There are opportunities to view as well as to create.
Also, we want to share with you an initiative to come together to support Chicago art spaces. EXPO Chicago and other area art leaders are committed to uniting the local scene, #chicagogalleries connects commercial, artist-run, and non-profit spaces across the city to contribute to an ever-evolving landscape of online documentation and diverse digital programming. Follow the hashtag across social media platforms for the latest Chicago-based programs.
Here for you are more ways that area arts groups and businesses are sharing art with you during this stay-at-home period.
Jason Pickleman is asking you to send your mail art to Lawrence & Clark. Why? The only art shippers with a crew of 600,000 is the United States Post Office! Let’s use ‘em! Mail art must be no larger than 4.2”5 x 9.5” (a standard business envelope). Pickleman says he will try to post everything that arrives, as well as go through his archive of past Mail Art shows and post some of personal faves. Mail art has a rich history of individual eccentricity and spontaneous generosity, and now is the time to make and share art. The shelter-in-place order is making the future of Lawrence & Clark uncertain, so this might be the last hurrah. Step up, it will only cost you 55¢. If you don’t have a stamp, DM Jason your address and he will mail you one. More info via Facebook
This week staff would have been hard at work at KAM preparing the MFA exhibition, and the galleries would have been full of students deploying the collection in their coursework. Instead, KAM is forging new bonds over the Internet and having interesting conversations about how to serve the community and to share work in new ways. Over the past few weeks, the museum's educators have added to their resources for learning about art. Here are a few of the activities you can access through the KAM website:
Lesson Plan: Create your own comic
Art for Kids: Landscapes and Seasons
Art for Kids: African Gallery Animals
Collection Coloring Activity #1
Collection Coloring Activity #2: Home and Community
Explore All | Teaching Resources
Beginning with the debut issue of CAC@Home sent in March, the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC) offers a broad spectrum of timely opportunities for public engagement, through and beyond its temporary suspension of in-person activities.
Alongside one-time-only CAC Live events featuring architecture experts, design practitioners, acclaimed authors and industry leaders, CAC Live also engages the organization’s corps of more than 600 docents and volunteers through online talks and virtual tours, stories to inspire Chicagoans to explore their own neighborhoods while spatial distancing, and submissions to CAC Recommends—the CAC’s new weekly roundup of media endorsements for design lovers.
Coming up: Saturday, April 18 is Women of the 1893 World's Fair (also April 21)
Read the full details here.
Brushwood Center
Brushwood Center is still striving to build a community around nature and the arts and is highlighting a different nature-inspired artist each week and sharing their story with you. This week they feature nature artist and printmaker Carrie Carlson of Orland Park, IL. She has degrees in Biology and Art, Scientific Illustration and Printmaking and she recently began a PhD in Art + Design Education at Northern Illinois University. Since 2001, she has been a full-time high school educator in the south suburbs of Chicago where she has split her years between the science and art departments; teaching Drawing, Painting, International Baccalaureate Visual Arts, as well as Biology, Biomedical Sciences, and Horticulture. She also teaches a variety of adult art courses at the Morton Arboretum including linoleum block printing, drawing birds, and field sketching. Watch a linocut demo here
If you've been busy cleaning closets and looking at the contents of your home after so much quality time with it, maybe you want to offload some of it.
Hindman Auctions is pleased to offer virtual consultations and remote appraisal services with specialists via phone or video appointment. They are currently welcoming consignments in all categories for upcoming sales.Contact them to discuss including your property in one of the spring auctions, and to schedule a time to talk with a specialist.
Hindman Chicago – 312.280.1212
chicago@hindmanauctions.com
While the Museum remains closed the recent exhibition, Eternal Light: The Sacred Stained-Glass Windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany, has come to an end. As these majestic windows quietly come down to make way for the installation of another beautiful exhibition for our reopen, we contemplate the motive behind their creation – the art of uplifting images in vibrant colorful glass to conjure strength, compassion, meaning, and hope in extraordinarily difficult times.
Museum staff got together with our partners at Big Foot Media and Picosa to bring the exhibition to you – a virtual journey through glass accompanied by the pastoral music of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
“Color is to the eye what music is to the ear.”
~Louis Comfort Tiffany