Author: Ashley Cook

Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulkokaitė: -Lalia The Renaissance Society May 3–4, 2025 By John Thomure For the Renaissance Society’s latest installment of their performance art series “Intermissions” Giulia Terminio performed an expanded monologue titled -Lalia, which was written and conceptualized by Dorota Gawęda and Egle Kulkokaitė. Terminio channeled the Slavic demonic entity, Południca, recounting a poetically sinister monologue. The performance took place simultaneously in twin locations, occurring on a specially built stage as well as in a small theater as a livestream. This was the primary conceit of the piece—the audience was encouraged to flit between the fourth-floor gallery space and a small screening room on the third floor in order to have a unique experience and interpretation of the multimedia performance. By interweaving the languages of theater and film, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė approximate the digitized existence which dominates our culture. The line between material and online reality continues to grow thin. The audience was caught in flux between the two experiences of the Terminio in person and the Terminio on screen.         The stage was divided in two, separated by a narrow alley with the audience viewing the performance in the round. One side of the stage had a blank white wall equipped with utilitarian coat hangers and a simple wooden stool. On the opposite side, the wall was a deep maroon and adorned with a large convex mirror at its center. Terminio crawled from the hallway into the gallery, dressed in ragged brown pants and a white button-up shirt. Her face, painted red with makeup exaggerating her features, bore a childish grin corrupted by her yellow cat-like contact lenses. Her appearance and movement immediately evoked the Południca as a droning soundscape rang out a forbidding, dissonant harmony. Terminio clutched a camera in her hands and set it into different positions and angles. She launched into an erratic pantomime as a voiceover monologue began recanting parables, riddles, and vignettes of ecological disaster.           Terminio’s movements descended from diverse performing practices like Butoh, Bouffon, and cinéma vérité. The camera transformed from a passive viewer to an active one, sometimes creating impossible situations for Terminio to perform in. Particularly notable was when she set the camera in an overhead position and began performing while lying on her back. From the live audience perspective, she took on an insectile posture, struggling on her back with her arms flailing in the air. Yet, from the livestream video perspective Terminio appeared upright, defying gravity in a clumsy fashion. These two versions happened at the same time, though, depending on the perspective, generated two disparate interpretations. We did not see the objective truth of an action, but a subjective manipulation. This is an on-going issue of our digitally mediated existence—events online, on the news, or told through word of mouth come with biases, redactions, and ideologies attached. Gawęda and Kulbokaitė took a Brechtian approach to addressing this fact by letting the mediation process play out in front of the audience. The meditation itself was obvious and therefore transformed into a critical commentary of how ecological evidence of climate change is presented to us.           The monologue was compiled from a variety of sources and alternated between English and Polish, all structured around the refrain: “Drive your plough over the bones of the dead.” 1 Repetition is key in the monologue with stories being told and then told again immediately afterwards. There was a cyclical nature to the stories orbiting around the constant interplay of the Earth and humanity. The Południca, according to the monologue, appears to “stop people and ask them difficult questions to engage them in conversation. If anyone fails to answer a question or tries to change the subject, she will cut off their head or strike them with illness.” 2 Only those who are honest survive the encounter. However, can we be honest about the impending ecological disasters and incremental meteorological shifts which will lead to mass displacement, infrastructural decay, and agricultural devastation? 3 Furthermore, is art equipped to really comment on such a perplexing, nuanced, and globally relevant issue?             Unfortunately, the performance of -Lalia I attended was plagued by technical issues which undermined Gawęda and Kulbokaitė’s intentions of critically examining ecology and media. Early on, Terminio accidentally knocked the camera from its tripod resulting in the lens shattering and the camera battery flying across the room. She pressed on and deserves credit for her commitment to the performance, folding this mistake into her mischievous, trickster persona. Yet, this contributed to a larger issue as the camera eventually died and effectively neutered the livestream element.           While sitting in the screening room and watching the livestream image cut to black, I was confused initially. The music and voiceover continued uninterrupted, obscuring that this was an unintended disruption. After all, this could be a dramatic aesthetic choice. Considering the existential element of any conversation about climate change and the impact of our industrial societies, the cut to black could become significant whether as a call to disconnect from the mediated reality and confront the material reality in front of us or as a symbol of the meaningless void which serves as the backdrop to life on Earth. Yet, after several minutes it became clear that this was not a dramatic choice. I left the screening room and headed to the fourth floor, but I noticed that others in the screening room were confused as to whether to stay for some big reveal or follow me out the door.         Now, mistakes happen. They are part of the excitement of performance art in a way. Mistakes are par for the course; however, this means that any institution hosting a live performance must have some way of coping with these accidents. It was disappointing that the Renaissance Society did not do more to direct people from the now defunct screening

Charles Burnett: Killer of Sheep Gene Siskel Film Center, April 18-30, 2025 By John Thomure The new 4K restoration of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is essential viewing for any lover of American cinema. Burnett’s debut feature was selected as one of the fifty films to initially be preserved by the Library of Congress. It has been lauded by critics as historically and aesthetically significant since its premiere in 1978. However, like many of Burnett’s films, it struggled to find distribution due to his extensive use of jazz and blues standards culled from his family’s record collection. Unable to pay the copyright claims for the music, the film was unfortunately trapped in limbo for decades. Killer of Sheep is not solely important for its portrayal of life in Watts County, Los Angeles, during the 1970s, but also for Burnett’s communal approach to production. His aim was to empower his community to represent and express themselves. The extras in one scene would hold boom mics or lighting equipment in others. Adopting these strategies and methods from Italian Neorealists like Robertio Rossalini, Burnett treated filmmaking as a tool for social change. Rossalini’s films like Rome, Open City, and Paisan were shot on location in the streets, used non-actors, and displayed scenes of the struggles facing working class people in post-fascist Italy. Killer of Sheep emerged from the same impulse nearly two decades later. Burnett’s juggernaut debut feature film is just as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.         Killer of Sheep has an elliptical structure which primarily follows Stan, his wife, his teenage son, and his young daughter. Their stories are interspersed with vignettes of neighbors, friends, and other community members. Overall, it paints a portrait of the people and places Burnett grew up alongside. He cut through to the reality of their situation by juxtaposing the strain of adulthood with fun, chaotic, and lackadaisical depictions of childhood.         The film opens with a flashback of an elder son being chastised by his parents for not defending his younger brother. The camera lingers on the boy’s weeping face (a running motif throughout the film). This culminates in a stern slap delivered from the father and he instructs his son that once he and his mother die, his brother will be the only person left for him in the world. It is a stark introduction in its unflinching honesty and establishes the central thesis of the movie: family is the only thing you really have in life.         Burnett transitions to a shot of Stan drinking coffee in his kitchen, unable to sleep due to increasing anxiety and depression. Stan trudges through life in a daze. In contrast to everyone around him who is expressive and vibrant, Stan is muted and restrained in his actions and speech. His wife laments that he used to smile and be vivacious. He hasn’t been the same since taking his current job at the abattoir. The grueling work certainly might be wearing him down, but really it seems like society itself is grinding him down to the bone.         Stan’s weakening resolve drags everyone around him further down, as we see his wife desperately attempt to connect with her husband again. Their most romantic interaction of the film is the most revealing and tragic. In the darkened living room, husband and wife slow dance together. No dialogue is uttered between the two, only unreciprocated glances and awkwardly loving touches. You can feel the chemistry and understanding in their familiarity with each other’s bodies. Yet, the gestures of romances are executed mechanically like a routine. There is no more passion. These two are grasping at the memories of their love. It is heartbreaking.           Killer of Sheep portrays numerous perspectives of adult life. Some people like Stan work hard while others consider work to be a sucker’s bet. Instead, they are willing to do anything to survive and get ahead. In one instance, we see Stan approached by some acquaintances who proposition him to take part in a robbery. Stan rejects their advances until his wife angrily interrupts them. She chastises them for their duplicity. The two men counter that they live in a duplicitous society. They aren’t bad men; they are just ahead of the curve; they’ve adapted to their environment. Who are we to judge how another person survives in America? This cutthroat attitude towards life doesn’t emerge out of a vacuum. It is a lesson learned in childhood–which Burnett reveals throughout the film as well.           The most iconic scene of adolescence shows some children leaping overhead from one roof to the next. They soar above it all, seemingly not weighed down like the adults around them. Killer of Sheep documents childhood as a time of great joy, pain, and boredom. Proof positive is a moment when the boys build up a tower from discarded planks pulled off an abandoned building. The boys sit on a wall and hurl rocks at their construction as music swells and a turn of the twentieth-century jazz standard proudly sings “That’s America, to me!” This fleeting moment displays Burnett’s mastery of film editing as it puts into stark contrast the work ethic and initiative the boys show in their casual recreation with the desolate future they face growing up in the United States.         The boys find all manner of ways to pass the time, fighting, biking around aimlessly, and participating in poorly judged and ill-conceived handstand contests. At times, fun gives way to fear or pain such as a moment early on when a group of boys have a battle in an abandoned lot. The scene opens with the frame cut in half by a rotted wooden board, an errant hand gripping it in place. A mischievous face peeks out, ducking the rocks hurled at him. Other boys join in a makeshift

Rhona Hoffman and Carl Hammer Galleries: Fifty-year Stalwarts of Chicago’s gallery scene close shop. Chicago has lost two galleries this spring that were part of the backbone of Chicago’s contemporary art scene for the last fifty years. Our editorial advisor, Tom Mullaney had compiled a brief history of each gallery summarizing its contribution to Chicago’s cultural milieu. Happily, both galleries will continue online to help nourish Chicago’s art community going forward. Rhona Hoffman Gallery: The Voice of Late Twentieth CenturyContemporary Art in Chicago.         On the evening of March 14, 2025, close to 200 attendees came to view “Not Just A Pretty Picture”, the final opening at Rhona Hoffman’s Gallery at 1711 West Chicago Avenue.         Museum directors, curators, artists and collectors had come to pay tribute to Chicago’s top female director on her gallery’s 50th anniversary—half a century of exhibiting a whole host of the leading artists of the twentieth century.           Rhona founded the gallery with her then husband, Donald Young, in 1976 and then went solo in 1983. Their artistic roster in the first year included Sol LeWitt (also present in her final show) Donald Judd, and Robert Ryman. The next year included the same three artists along with Gilbert and George, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Tuttle. It was an auspicious start.         Over the years, Rhona represented a galaxy of art stars. For the gallery’s 40th anniversary, she published a 513-page catalog of the current and one-time artists she had represented. Featured on the list were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Dawoud Bey, Julia Fish, Leon Golub, Jacob Hashimoto, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Martin Puryear, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Michael Rakowitz, Fres Sandback, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Nancy Spero, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kehinde Wiley. In the decade since, she has taken on artists Derrick Adams, Brian Maguire, and Amanda Williams.           Rhona has maintained loyal and long-standing relations with her artists. She told this writer that the only artist she had a difficult time with was Scott Burton.         She has been an ultimate art world survivor due to a variety of factors: a solid grounding in art history, her openness to a broad range of art genres, and a very keen eye.         Rhona is quick to dispel any notion that she is exiting the art world. She told Ginny Van Alyea of Chicago Gallery News, “Segue is a much better term as it implies transition within the gallery’s program.”         While she recently turned 91, Rhona intends to curate shows and sell art from her home, according to gallery director, Elise Siegenthaler. Chicago will not lose her vast wealth of knowledge and expertise,and she has donated several paintings and the gallery’s archive to the Art Institute of Chicago. CARL HAMMER: Pioneer Advocate of Outsider Art by Tom Mullaney         When Rhona Hoffman opened her gallery in 1976, Carl Hammer had been teaching English at Evanston High School through the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War. However, he and his wife would take road trips on weekends in search of folk or “grass roots” art. After several years, they decided to open a gallery.         So, in 1979, twelve years before the founding of Intuit Gallery (now a museum), they opened Hammer and Hammer/American Folk Art in the Breskin Building at 620 N. Michigan Avenue, home to a number of art galleries including Richard Gray. Hammer moved west to an historic building at 742 N. Wells Street and was part of the original 16 galleries that constituted the River North Gallery District. He remained in that district until he closed the gallery this April after 45 years         The term “Outsider” wasn’t used yet and was referred to by a variety of terms, for example, folk art and self-taught art. In 1972, Roger Cardinale, a professor at the University of Kent coined the phrase “Outsider Art” as a synonym for art brut. Since then, the term has come into use to mean art produced by an untrained artist and/or an artist using highly unusual materials and techniques.           Hammer thought of himself as an outsider, having had no formal art training. He mounted exhibits by noted Outsider artists as Henry Darger, Lee Godie, and graphic artist Chris Ware. He had a hard time selling such work in the early years but, eventually, the art world followed.         In his second year, Hammer was invited to show at Art Expo. He filled his booth with work by the newly discovered, self-taught artist Bill Traylor. He sold nearly everything by the artist, who had become an international art star.           But he told Chicago Gallery News that “art fairs have replaced the older notion that clients establish loyal relationships with galleries and purchase work because they identify with the aesthetic of a particular gallery.” That is Hammer’s preferred model. He not only showed outsider art but also represented more academic artists such as sculptor Neil Goodman, Mary Lou Zelazny, and Vanessa German.         Hammer had inherent curiosity, combined with affection for artists and collectors. The genuine fellowship that he and his gallery director of 37 years Yolanda Farias developed made visiting the gallery a particularly pleasant experience. No wonder Hammer survived for more than four decades. Hammer’s gallery records have been donated to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Tom Mullaney is an editorial advisor to the New Art Examiner. He served as managing editor of the magazine from 2016 to 2020.        

Life after Death: The case for Donald Judd A sculptor’s appreciation. by Neil Goodman Along with Richard Serra, Sol Lewitt, and Carl Andre, Donald Judd (among others) is known as one of the defining pillars of minimalist sculptors of his generation (1928–1994). Although originally New York City-based, he began looking elsewhere in the 1970s, principally to expand the scale of his work independent of the incumbrancers of a more traditional gallery or museum setting. Beginning in 1973, Judd started buying properties in the little-known West Texas town of Marfa, and by the time of his death, owned 300,000 acres there as well as numerous buildings, including a massive former army artillery shed. Several of these buildings also house monumental installations by his contemporaries, including Dan Flavin, Richard Irwin, John Chamberlain, and others. Initially funded by the Dia Art Foundation, current Judd administration at Marfa is supported by both the Judd and Chinati Foundations. Collectively, they are the caretakers that oversee both the exterior landscape and buildings that encompass Judd’s studio, home, workshop, and outdoor and indoor installations. A complete overview on Judd’s work in Marfa would be more suited for a book, as his sculptures and properties are one of our countries most massive permanent installations devoted largely to the work of one single artist.           Marfa’s inconvenient location is equally its charm (getting there is half the fun), as it is a rite of passage. At best, it is a three-hour drive from El Paso, which also includes going through a U.S. border patrol. The topography has a lunar quality—bleak and desolate—but with a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western charm. Another significant landmark within proximity would include Big Bend National Park. Marfa is also known for the Marfa lights, flickering orbs that hover over the nighttime landscape about nine miles out of town—their origins unknown. Earlier claims to fame include the 1956 filming of Giant, with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as more recently There Will be Blood and the Coen brother’s movie No Country for Old Men.           I was always curious about Marfa, although my interest in Judd was more historical—as a textbook page turner on the long chapter of contemporary art. I found Judd’s boxes rather monotonous, and if they reflected the period, they seemed quite unable to transcend it. They were the personification of serious art, and as rigid and emotionless as the material they were made of. Growing up in Northwest Indiana, stacked steel boxes were part and parcel to the landscape, hence the Judd boxes seemed right at home with me, yet of limited aesthetic interest. They were of their time, and unlike the work of Richard Serra, seemed unable to surpass their generation.           First thoughts are not always second thoughts, and if I was initially tepid concerning Judd’s work, the impact of walking into his massive indoor installation was a quick game changer. Housed in a large, vaulted, glass-encased pavilion (formerly an artillery shed), it consisted of one hundred fabricated aluminum boxes, each 41 by 51 by 72 inches. The sculptures were at once dimensionally consistent, yet subtly distinct, as they were bisected by slight shifts of internal planes diagonally, horizontally and vertically. If they first seemed identical, they were far from it—as their differences counterbalanced their similarities and time spent among them amplified their uniqueness. The spacing between the boxes was equally considered, and the distance from each other was measurable, repeatable and consistent. Paralleling the pleasure of looking was walking through the massive installation, as you were always near and far, close to each box, yet incrementally further from others. Light from the massive windows created another dimension, as sculptures, depending on their position and time of day, could be either brightly illuminated or enveloped in shadows. The exterior landscape was a vital partner in the experience of the sculptures, as you were always looking out and in, and the flat desolate west Texas landscape was the quintessential counterpoint to the enormous installation.           If the Chinati installation was the realization of a complete and succinct vision, the “Block” at the Judd Foundation showed a much broader picture of Judd’s work and domestic life. Located in what was once a two-story house with two large hangers (a former office of the U.S. Army) and surrounding grounds, Judd’s sculptural opus is represented through early, middle, and late works. The culmination of the “Block” is a breath-taking installation of several of the wall-mounted vertical boxes juxtaposed with aluminum floor cubes. If they had seemed overly familiar in museum settings over the years, they are reinvigorated in this context and, in my view, a perfect pairing of his life’s work. The compound also contains Judd’s massive library with his collection of more than 13,000 books. The spartan yet considered living quarters are a revealing snapshot of Judd’s domestic life and the objects and artifacts that he both collected and lived with. Equally, the relationship between buildings and courtyards is clearly thought out and creates a symmetry between interior and exterior space. As with any comprehensive body of work, some sculptures are preferred over others. Yet taken in mass, the “Block” powerfully clarifies my understanding of his work and the ideas which generated his sculptures.           Paralleling this accomplishment are corollary questions regarding a project as massive and enormous as Judd’s in Marfa. Can smaller more succinct installations or objects communicate with power, or is bigger always better? Secondly, what is the responsibility of passing forward one artist’s work to the next generation for eternal care and maintenance? Although these questions remain just that, they are easily applicable to many of today’s most prominent contemporary artists as well as the generational future of Judd’s work at Marfa.         Although one can hold differing thoughts simultaneously, there is something about going to Marfa that conjoins them. It is a

Offline with the Art Right by Erik Orup I.D.E.A.Informed Discussion Engagement Area From time to time, the New Art Examiner gets a piece that is not strictly a review. This forum allows for an individual author to expound on a certain topic that is related to the visual arts without the constraint of a formal article or review.   A few weeks before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast wanted the audience at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in Manhattan to know that they were drunk. Anna Khachiyan explained why she and her co-host, Dasha Nekrasova, were qualified to comment on contemporary art. “As art hoes, you’re in touch with artists. You’re in touch with collectors, art handlers,” she said.         The duo had joined art critic Dean Kissick to discuss his Harper’s Magazine essay, “The Painted Protest.” Its title recalled Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book savaging the art critics of his day, “The Painted Word,” itself excerpted in Harper’s.         While Wolfe took aim at an establishment top-heavy with theory at the expense of art, Kissick speaks into a void of serious experimental thought. In his telling, contemporary art—art delivered from modernism into the enchanted labyrinth of postmodernism—had reached a cul-de-sac. What seemed like an endless universe of possibilities had shrunk to tedious, identity-driven narratives, motivated by various flavors of indigenous nostalgia, dully recapitulated by descriptions on the gallery wall.         For Kissick, a few creators—Rember Yahuarcani and Susanne Wenger—had blown the windows off with new, hybrid forms—showed you the stars again. Most, though, stuck to the script. “I have seen too many shows which have the same basic premise,” he told the Red Scare girls. “It doesn’t feel that urgent”—Dasha took drags off her vape.             I showed up minutes before the panel started, hustling up Eighth Avenue from Penn Station. New York is the best, perhaps the only place offline where I could assess the “Art Right,” first at the SVA Theatre, and later at the National Futurist Party in Brooklyn.         On the SVA Theatre stage, there was a lot more provocation than thoroughgoing right-wing sentiment or, for Kissick, what seemed to be the real enemy—formal conservatism.         Anna of the Red Scare girls pushed back against the claim that social justice ideology has stultified art, linking it instead to competition on the Internet and social media.         The art world, Kissick said, is no longer a source of guiding narratives; today it’s “downstream of Internet discourse” on social justice. He comes close to calling Louis Fratino kitsch. He reassures his audience that no great white male artists are waiting in the wings.           Kissick’s salvos against nostalgia seem rather wedded to his own nostalgia, though not for some variant of western traditionalism or high modernist discipline. He misses the contemporary scene of fifteen years ago—a freer and easier postmodernism, too inventive to settle for pastiche, too expansive and questioning for solemn adherence to progressive verities.         It’s of a piece with the vision of architect Robert Venturi, for whom “messy vitality” bested “obvious unity.” “Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged,” Venturi wrote in 1966, setting himself against Mies van der Rohe and other high priests of architectural modernism.         In 1970s Las Vegas, spiritual antecedent to the grotesquely commercial, dopamine-inflaming Internet of today, he found vitality in what he called an “architecture of inclusion.” Visually discordant signs and casinos hang together in an order embracing seeming opposites—”continuity and discontinuity, going and stopping, clarity and ambiguity, cooperation and competition, the community and rugged individualism.”         Venturi contrasts the radical break—Le Corbusier’s Paris Plan, or what he doesn’t cite, the Italian city of Latina, created by the fascists after they drained the Pontine Marshes—with his “more tolerant way” to architectural revolution—“to question how we look at things.”         The Harper’s talk opened with an AI-generated song about Kissick: mildly funny, postmodern play, a rhizome of the Internet that found its way to the stage. Another, slightly edgy choice for the listener to “dirtbag left” podcasts; another tendency to be tolerated, Karl Popper’s paradox under no great strain. *****         Through the cloud of sidewalk cigarette smoke, one train, then another, then a short night walk to an undisclosed location in Brooklyn. The kids, and many few middle-aged adults, were playing with ideas.             Deep inside a church, underneath a balustrade, Rachel Haywire was hosting the National Futurist Party’s Manifesto Salon. It doubled as the pre-launch party for Haywire’s new Chelsea art gallery, Fiume—” a Futurist space heralding in a new rising class of artists for the regime ahead.”         Before I showed up, a Fiume artist, Canadian painter and X shit-poster Giovanni Pennachietti, delivered remarks by video, the projector magnifying his fez to the size of a clerestory window.           Drinks, food, a few dozen people. More drinks meant more courage to read manifestos from the balustrade, sometimes in pinched tones, at other times in bursts of thunder. On average, the crowd was further to the right than the audience at the SVA Theatre, or perhaps just less beholden to residual late-20th-century pieties. Less white, more autistic; still, not so far removed from the Red Scare universe.         Writer Nic Dolinger declaimed humorously on a few themes, including the annexation of Greenland. He compared the party to an early punk show where everyone who attended went on to found a band.           If there’s visceral and deeply felt nostalgia in this world, it’s for an older era of right-wing creativity online. On a more conceptual and theoretical level, there’s a search for grounding in

“Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa” Art Institute of Chicago, December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025 by Ed Roberson The Art Institute of Chicago has thrown its members and the city itself a very interesting challenge in its exhibition “Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa.” African artists and scholars have continually been deeply dismayed by much of the western mind’s inability to define Africa beyond the framework of slavery, colonialism, and victimization. Nefertiti to Cleopatra to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Lil Nell out on the ice seems to be the extent, the whole of Africa, to many people. They hold this view despite there being a long world history of repeated accounts of trade, diplomatic, cultural, and intellectual exchange with the rest of the known world.         The launchings of the impressive fleets of China’s Admiral Zheng He (c.1371-1433) on his visits to East Africa, and the Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle’s diplomatic court exchange visit with the Somali Emperor, plus tapestries and drawings of giraffes and other exotic animals sent as gifts of exchange between kings and emperors across the world are part of any evidence of African history. The Menil Foundation’s ten volume coffee table-size format survey, “The Image of The Black in Western Art” is hard to imagine being overlooked by anyone not blind, yet few libraries can name it as one of their hot lists.           There is the economic story of how colonialism and its operant capitalism victimized and dispersed certain vital African systems, but it seems that the more prescient, productive, and effective story is of what these dispersed systems carried away, the story of how they reconstituted, across uncharted time and territory, these systems into sustainable, productive, and competitively successful ways and worlds of life.         The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition projects the images of our shared world life for the past one hundred fifty years as a shared Black Planet. On a planet whose locations are designated not from anything there, not from anyone there, but drawn up arbitrarily from some special interest (usually economic) of someone from someplace else, the question is where is anyone or anywhere? The answer is in what people are doing where they happen to be.         The inhabitants of planet earth are all migrant, dispersed. The latest dispersal from Africa by colonialist economies however has powerfully, through its shared qualities of system, been able to swiftly reconstitute itself, and re-disperse or resituate itself throughout the world’s cultures as a unified system within itself—un-bordered, un-located, even un-cultured.         The Pan-Africanism exhibition challenges people unable to even envision Africa, with the prospect of an even larger Africa projected. Even further, in its curatorial method, the exhibition challenges the viewer with the ubiquitousness of its evidence.         From pots and pans to finely turned ceramic; driftwood come alive as a conjure woman, a tree vine with a woman shaped inside; scraps of wood hung as ancestors, as if an inheritance genealogy carved into a granary door; abandoned junk door panels as abandoned openings, failed entries lined up or barricaded, giving witness from megaphone wired speakers; these are the matter of this exhibit. This is all immediately recognizable as what the stuff of our daily lives reconstitutes to say to us of what is going on. The who-what-and-where carries on in a mode that is decidedly Pan-African modelled.           The exhibition points out that what Picasso and others took up as “primitivism” into geometry and cubism, then into something else in their ongoing study, was and is the ongoing study of African systems carrying the dispersal of their symbol languages. Paris was a local instance of the Pan-African century. Lois Maillou Jones, in her Veve Voudou II,1963 was still breaking down the lines of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as were many of the popular covers of print, for example: Elisa Larkin Nascimento’s Pan-Africanism and South America: Emergence of A Black Rebellion, 1981; Mohhammed Khadda, 1st festival culteral panafricain 1969; Ibou (Ibrahima)Diouf, poster, Des Arts Negres, 1-24 Avril 1966, Dakar, Senegal, 1966.           This problem of how to carry on and continue with what we have, with what has escaped, of course, has its political and theoretical levels evinced in the textual argument of these art works. The argument developing within the symbolism and graphology also has its own story. One line to follow between three examples of these works is one of the more interesting social arguments surrounding image and use.           Take these works: John Strollmeyer, Caribbean Basin, 1982; Batoul S’Himi, Untitled, from the series World Under Pressure, 2011; David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990, and Chris Ofili, Union Black, 2003. One of the significant qualities of African art is the mysteriousness of the ordinary object, the embodiment of the spiritual possession in the owned object. In John Strollmeyer’s, Caribbean Basin, the common material, a washbasin, is, as commonly, rusted at the bottom: but the rusted out areas draw the specific map of Cuba and other Caribbean Islands. Untitled, from the series World Under Pressure, is Batoul S’Himi’s pressure cooker, an advanced system of cooking that relies on containment and force to cook. The vessel has a hole in it—not softly rusted but sharply cut out is a map of the world with its raw etched borders as if blown out—an image of containment and its release. David Hammon’s African American Flag and Chris Ofili’s Union Black are examples of the spiritual force of color taking over the power of a flag and resettling the meaning elsewhere. The spirit of one meaning of a thing taking over the force of that object with a different meaning here is different than simple metaphor or metamorphosis. Here it seems to have hold of a particular agency to it—more soul than formality, more spirit.

“Uncanny” National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. February 28–August 10, 2025 by Emelia Lehmann These days, many things may give us feelings of anxiety—the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, the pace of political and social change, the ups and downs of American life (and the stock market). Writing during another period of dramatic reform, Sigmund Freud penned his famous 1919 essay The Uncanny, or “Das Unheimlich” in German (which directly translates as the unhomely), to describe the feeling of anxiety induced by experiencing something both familiar and alien. This idea, which built on earlier writings of German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch, became widely popular in literature and art, particularly within the artistic movement of Surrealism. There, artists explored the uncanny through artmaking, often at the expense of women who were frequently positioned as the “other.”         A new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. simultaneously embraces and pushes back on this legacy. Simply titled Uncanny, this exhibition showcases works by women and female-identifying artists dating from the 1930s to present day, centering “women’s authorship of uncanny narratives…” and “revealing how women artists use this framework to regain agency and probe feelings of revulsion, fear, and discomfort.” While the works are indeed unsettling, there is a strange beauty and honesty to artworks that guide our visceral reactions into revelations about the lived experiences and perspectives of women.           Filling the museum’s second floor, the exhibition is laid out in a circle with works clustered according to common themes: doubles, masks, dolls, nature, abandonment, surrealism, bodiless heads, and headless bodies, to name just a few. The themes blend into each other, challenging viewers to question their reactions to each work. Why do we find a photograph of a deceased granny in her coffin unnerving? What is it about a set of twins holding hands and smoking cigarettes that sets our teeth on edge? Where do mannequins and dolls get their creepy appeal? A criticism might be that the show overwhelms visitors with its extensive scope —although I suspect that is precisely the goal.         While focusing on the female perspective and production of uncanny artwork, the exhibition also engages with the psychological underpinnings of uncanny first articulated by Jentsch and later Freud. Gallery labels provide historical and theoretical contexts that help visitors situate themselves within the larger themes of the show. Some artists also interrogate Freud’s influence in the genre directly and indirectly. Welsh painter Julie Roberts depicts the psychologist’s study in her work Sigmund Freud Study (1998), showing his carpet, desk, chair, lamp, and couch in contrast against a bright, monochromatic yellow background. Noticeably absent is Freud himself, with the focus instead on the built environment where his theories took shape. The central positioning of the study as an object surrounded by empty canvas gives the viewer a feeling of looking into a dollhouse, seeing an interior chamber that is meant to be private. The act of looking at (or into) this work becomes uncanny—studying the study—as well as perhaps a rebellion against Freud and his intrusion into his subjects’ psyches.           While Roberts explores the uncanny through the absence of the human being, other artists embrace the physicality of the body. English conceptual artist Gillian Wearing fills a room with her photographic portraiture with subjects ranging from famous historical figures to her family members. These representations seem normal enough, but there is something unnerving about the eyes and the rigid pose of the faces. The ruse is revealed in Sleeping Mask (2004) with a gallery label describing Wearing’s process of crafting highly realistic masks to transform herself into the other people present in the room: Mona Lisa, Albrecht Dürer, Meret Oppenheim (another artist featured in this exhibition), her sister and, creepiest of all, herself. Upon closer inspection, the masks gape slightly at the eyes, nose, and jawline, revealing slivers of Wearing’s real face underneath even as she wears the faces of others.           Also utilizing portraiture and photography, American artist Marlo Pascual’s works (all untitled) complicate and subvert identity. Pascual collected vintage photographs of women from thrift shops, which she edited, enlarged, and adhered to Plexiglas© to transform these discarded images into unique sculptures. Her subjects’ identities are not known, and Pascual further complicated their personhood by shattering or distorting the Plexiglas© to hide their features. Spread out on the floor of the exhibition, visitors must carefully navigate these objects. In this way, Pascual’s work calls attention to the space that these women (previously two-dimensional images) now take up as three-dimensional objects while simultaneously obscuring their personhood. The awkward posing of the figures in the images also begs the question: did Pascual’s interventions make these images uncanny or were they already uncanny?           Humor, or rather dark humor, emerges as a theme across several works as artists confront stereotypes and challenges of womanhood. American visual and performance artist Martine Gutierrez’s Body en Thrall, p112 (2018) at first appears like a picture we have all seen a thousand times online or in a magazine: a scantily clad woman posing seductively and gazing longingly at the camera against a background of flowers. No, this is not a Kardashian! While some might be tempted to avert their gaze, Gutierrez cheekily draws attention to the woman’s chest. To achieve the perfect female figure, she has tucked melon halves into her bikini top, replacing soft human skin with the scaly texture of the fruit. This work is a masterpiece in calling out the unrealistic beauty standards found in media today. Experiments with texture also emerge in works by Meret Oppenheim, a German-born Swiss artist most known for her contributions to Surrealism. Her 1936 work Object, exhibited here as a 1971 print called Pelztasse (or Fur Teacup) after a photo by Man Ray, transforms the smooth, regular surface of a teacup, saucer, and spoon

Elisa Harkins: Wampum Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 1, 2025 by John Thomure Elisa Harkins’s most recent performance, Wampum, at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a bold statement of history, resistance, and celebration. The title refers to a form of currency used by Cherokee people as a symbol of agreement. As the title implies, Harkins delved into her own Cherokee and Muscogee identity to bolster and elaborate upon her story and her community’s traditions. A night that began as a unique interpretation of Indigenous Futurism blossomed into a searing exclamation of resilience. Indigenous Futurism is nomenclature referring to a wide variety of artists, writers, and thinkers who generally use technology and science fiction imagery to assert the presence of Indigenous people in the contemporary world.1 The evening was split between two performers: Kalyn Fay and Harkins herself. In spite of how disparate their musical styles were, their individual on-stage charisma and lyrical content united Fay and Harkins as a solid bill.         Kalyn Fay is a folk singer of Cherokee and Muscogee descent. She was accompanied by violinist Olivia McGraw, a close collaborator. Their minimal folk duet was a tender maelstrom. The intertwining guitar and violin accented each other so delicately, like the interplay of charcoal lines adding definition to a watercolor pastoral. Lyrically, Fay expressed the alienation of a person longing for the comforts of home while adrift in the world in a way that was reminiscent of Joan Baez or Vashti Bunyan.            Wampum had a network-like structure. Not only did the concert have distinct parts, but there were also a multitude of events which culminated in the performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Harkins conducted a hand-drum construction workshop at the Center for Native Futures and invited the participants to appear during the concert to perform, tying this craft back into Wampum’s interpretation of pop music. Like pop music, hers was built upon the driving beats and rhythmic vocal delivery of the drum circle chorus. Additionally, a zine was given out to the audience prior to the performance containing the lyrics for each song in Indigenous languages as well as English—highlighting the bilingual nature of Harkins’ project. The concert itself was a moment of clarity, during which every one of these events came together to reveal the larger image.         Harkin’s performance covered so much ground; it had an operatic quality. Wampum embodied the rich visuals and light shows of pop concerts and utilized projected animations, precise lighting changes, and back up dancers to enrich the music. The sounds of her music were an amalgam of eighties and nineties number-one hits, which spanned genres from R&B to House to Techno. She sported a variety of costumes specifically suited to each song. The costume styles took silhouettes and aesthetic cues from prairie dress but embellished them with technicolor panache and iridescent fabrics.           Cate Owis was the most stridently political song. Harkins called for an uprising against an oppressive state, against U.S. colonialism, and against ignorance. A driving beat and confrontational delivery kicked off the performance. For Pony, back up dancers acted out a cowboy cabaret as Harkins strutted across the stage, her vocal delivery a reserved groove which punctuated each word. Deadly seemed to have the most autobiographical lyrics. It was about the day-to-day life of a Native woman—independent and strident in her identity. She makes her own decisions and makes her own way in life. Her message was one of self-actualization and celebration of life as a form of creative resistance.           However, the most impactful portion of the evening came towards the end of the concert. Harkins introduced an interesting twist on the pop conventions she had been experimenting with as she brought out Danny Wesley to perform two Indigenous hymns. Harkins and Wesley explained to the audience that these songs have been preserved across generations; sung on the Trail of Tears, a violent forced migration of sixty thousand Indigenous people to Oklahoma. Afterwards, she brought out members from her hand-drum workshop (The Good Medicine Gang) and invited them to perform as a drum circle.           Harkins’ performance drew a line from drum circles and hymns to contemporary pop culture. Pop music is rooted in these long-standing traditions and communities—part of the legacy of innovative Indigenous musicians from Link Wray to Ronny Spector. Wampum inverted this dynamic by reclaiming the conventions of pop music and expressing the realities of contemporary Native life. Harkins’s traditions formed the solid core of Wampum, which branched out to connect the dots to ethnomusicology and community building. The concluding inclusion of the hand-drum circle as well as the hymns revealed the essence of Harkins’s vision of Indigenous Futurism.           Harkins’ performance exceeded the limits of a pop concert and transformed into a testament of Indigenous solidarity. Behind the veil of vibrant spectacle was interwoven messages of resistance, family, and survival. Her interpretation of Indigenous Futurism is more subtle than references to classic science fiction, because she suggests that Indigenous people will always have a place in the world, regardless of what society they are living in. Their traditions will be adapted into new forms and take on new appearances yet will never relinquish their historical significance. Elisa Harkins is living proof of that.   John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.   Footnote: 1 Whitepigeon, Monica. “Indigenous Futurism Ushers in New Perspectives of Past, Present, and Future,” Native News Online, July 18, 2020, https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-entertainment/indigenous-futurism-ushers-in-new-perspectives-of-past-present-and-future

“Magical Realism—AI Photography” Perspective Gallery, Chicago January 30–March 2, 2025 by Rebecca Memoli Photography is a medium that is constantly transforming with advances in technology. It is not surprising that more photographers are embracing artificial intelligence as an artmaking tool. The artists in Perspective Gallery’s exhibition “Magical Realism—AI Photography”employ artificial intelligence in a variety of ways to create photographic works. It was curated by William Harper who teaches Alternative Image Capture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although AI can generate an image to appear like any medium, all the works in the exhibition have a photographic element to them. The photographic style creates a sense of realism that can be warped to the whim of the artist.         William Harper curates but also contributes to the exhibition. His series Dangerous Games uses his AI photography to depict children playing in dangerous scenarios. Barbed Wire Capture the Flag is full of feral-looking kids, some screaming and running, others bloody and entangled in barbed wire. With a massive budget, these pictures could have been created using child models on a set with makeup and special effects. By using artificial intelligence, Harper can explore lofty scenarios without needing thousands of dollars to create them. He considers AI to be a democratizing tool, however the low-cost aspect of AI artmaking is also part of what makes it controversial.           Some of the artists in the exhibition approach the use of AI with cautious skepticism. In Doug Rosman’s series Leisure Time, AI is used to envision a dystopian future where human enjoyment and leisure are performed within large datacenters. Crowds of people mingle inside a large datacenter with billows of cables lining the ceiling like curtains in a theater. In Leisure Time 4, the people are sitting on lounge chairs as though sunbathing at a pool, but there is no pool. Rosman used text-to-image prompts in an open source program called ComfyUI to create this work. In the simplest terms, he types a description of the image he wants, and the AI creates it. For the Leisure Time series he prompted the AI to combine the setting of a datacenter with a leisure activity like sunbathing. He doesn’t make any edits or changes except for upscaling the resolution to be suitable for printing. For Rosman, asking the AI to create a datacenter is like asking for a self-portrait. These images represent the way human life may become shaped by AI rather than AI being shaped by humans.           The results of a text prompt in an AI image generator are often unpredictable because it is the AI’s interpretation of what you have asked it to create. Navigating that unpredictability for some artists can be collaborative. The role of AI as a collaborator is examined by Alan Perry whose Dreaming Machine pictures are accompanied by the text prompt used to generate the image. For the prompts, Perry uses text from an ongoing writing project called Gross Gloss, a stream of consciousness style narrative that has a fantasy role playing game feel to it. Perry’s images produced by AI have a dark mystical tone to them, enhanced by the inclusion of old books and antique objects. They do not look photographic but instead feel like Renaissance paintings, a stylistic choice that was made by the AI software.           On the opposite side of the spectrum, Michael Meyers uses AI as more of a tool than a collaborator. The work is created with no text prompts and instead he uploads two pieces of his own artwork such as paintings, drawings, family photos, etc., and combines them using Midjourney, an AI image generator. He then works back into them “like a painter” using Photoshop. What Fit (also called Babel)is comprised of several smaller images and drawings organized in a grid. To Meyers, the individual pictures were like people and their relatives. By organizing them in Photoshop, the grid becomes a structure that he likens to the steerage on a ship. The collage style of Meyers’ work makes it feel less AI generated, as it is not attempting to be realistic. However, it does have text that, upon closer inspection, is nonsense. In human made art, text often has more purpose than just to function as a visual element, so recognizable words are used that add to the meaning of the work.           The artists in Magical Realism approach artificial intelligence from different angles. It is interesting to see AI generated images in a gallery rather than on a screen, although it would have benefitted the exhibition if more care was put into the presentation of the physical work. The track system used to hang the work detracts from it because many of the works don’t hang well on them. For some of the artists, the final presentation seemed to be an afterthought with mismatched framing styles or missing glass. Because it is more uncommon to see AI art in a gallery, the decision of how the work is shown should be deliberate.         The conceptual framework for artmaking still relies on a person to build it. There are also still many limitations to AI image generation, such as its difficulty in producing coherent text or realistic hands and limbs. These “tells” can’t be unseen and serve to undermine the work. Artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it can truly take the place of an artist. However, just like photography, the technology will advance and eventually become engrained into our everyday lives. Rebecca Memoli is a Chicago-based photographer and curator. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MFA in Photography from Columbia College. Her work has been featured in several national and international group shows.

Owen Fu: “Own Alone” P●P●O●W, New York, January 31–March 8, 2025 by Paul Moreno I had just emerged from the subway and was having an unpleasant phone call as I walked toward P●P●O●W to see the exhibition of Owen Fu’s work “Own Alone.” It was the Thursday after Ash Wednesday and I was telling myself I was not going to smoke. As I stood outside the gallery trying to smooth the wrinkles of my phone call, I became fixated on the painting P●P●O●W had placed in the window. Untitled (so proud) is a depiction of a man, with a bald head and glasses, smoking. It is almost more of a large drawing; dark lines on dark linen canvas that is left mostly unpainted or maybe has the slightest wash. The figure, seated in a metal tube chair, is unclothed but encoiled in a black cord that starts outside the picture and ends in a lightbulb held aloft by a small ghost. The mark making is spare, efficient, and confident. Small dots are scattered throughout the picture: black ones are flies and a pupil of the smoker, two orange ones glow in the lightbulb, and a red one marks the burning ember of the cigarette. I was seduced by the image.         As I moved through the show it took some time to realize where I was in the world the artist created with these paintings. Fu cites a 1983 queer coming-of-age novel, Crystal Boys, by Chinese writer Pai Hsien-yung as a source of inspiration but also calls on his own experience of queerness, his experience of immigration to the US from China, and a merging of Eastern and Western painting traditions to inform the pictures in this show. Knowing this added an interesting layer to the paintings; however, they are not dependent on this knowledge. Fu’s works are beautiful, mysterious, and so intriguing that they convey meaning even without exposition. He has skillfully painted a world of ghosts and men who slink through woods, steal away into saunas, and pierce darkness with points of light.           Many of the paintings are washed in layers of dark translucent paint, which give the linen a beautiful inky quality, spotlighting the painter’s understanding of material and light. The Bird, the Shadow, and the Thorns was a standout among these. The painting’s middle of the night atmosphere is illuminated by a snowman-shaped spirit with glowing orange eyes. The spirit has twig-like arms; upon one of these a wispy black bird is perched and over which a delicately painted thread is draped. The spirit has a red glower of a mouth that almost seems to be sliding away. Lastly, the spirit wears a crown of thorns which ties the painting to the long legacy of depictions of Christ, but this painting does not feel confined to Christian allusions. This crown does not feel like a device for fleshly torture or psychological cruelty. These thorns are simply a fact or a memory from another existence. This crown is a scar that tells a story about a wound that has healed.           The dark paintings also include a remarkable pair of small pieces hung one over the other. The two paintings are beautiful examples of both eroticism and abstraction. They require a moment to reveal their narrative elements: The upper painting shows a torso half covered by a shirt as that torso connects at the belly another body, in what Roland Barthes, in Pleasure of the Text, called jouissance. Dark washes of paint enhance the natural beauty of the linen, and delicate line work, used sparingly, conveys the narrative’s crucial moment. The lower painting portrays only the shirted torso. The top half of the painting is nearly black, depicting only the subtle shifts of shadow as the shirt is lifted to reveal the belly, fingers, a ring, a navel. I again refer to Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text: “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” These paintings are called Untitled (Peach) and Untitled (Mango) which, in itself, amuses me.           A large triptych, All Things Grow, is found opposite these two small paintings. This large work is the most mysterious in the show, the most difficult to read. The environment of the scene is a dark forest green that merges into a deep sapphire blue as you scan from right to left. There is no visible horizon though there is a sense of ground and sky. The black silhouettes of trees and figures emerge from the dark and are sometimes backlit by large globular orbs of blue-gray, sallow yellow, and an ashy green. Here and there the generally smooth surface of the painting is built up with charcoal-like bits. In the center a bright red object glows, a couple of yellow tadpole shapes move about. There are glowing white dots of eyes. It is a pleasure to look at and requires some playfulness to interpret—this is a winning combination in a painting.           The show also contained a few brightly painted pieces which, like the smoking painting in the window of the gallery, contain figures deftly rendered into a monochromatic field. One is the blue of a window lit by television light, one is crimson, one is a mossy green. The green one is the most mysterious and the least explicit. Untitled (Holy Matcha) portrays a figure, knees to the ground, bent at the waist, head bowed, arms splayed. It is unclear if this a moment of agony or ecstasy, of prayer or tumult, but the bending of the body is felt by the viewer. A vertical stripe runs almost the entire length of the painting. It could be structural, like a pipe, or it could be fluid itself, like water or paint being poured. There is a circle between the figures knees which could be a pool, but it