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“Sarah Whythe—And the Space Between” by The Adoptea, Chicago Art Department by Michel Ségard Five artists have formed a collective to help them cope with the phenomenon of being uprooted from their native culture by virtue of adoption—something partially familiar to this writer, being a first-generation immigrant. They call themselves The Adoptea. The Adoptea are working to change the “sugar-coated narrative of adoption.” In their pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition, the group states that they “encourage civically minded work through critical discussion and ask participants to think about and examine questions of belonging and the politics around adoption.” “Sarah Whythe—And the Spece Between” is just the kind of show for which the host venue, Chicago Art Department (CAD), is known.           The first piece upon entering the front gallery of CAD is by Sarah Whythe, an interdisciplinary fiber artist and painter. Whythe is the co-curator of the show along with Maya Ortiz Saucedo. She grew up in Viginia and Texas before coming to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago. Her work in this show focuses on the complex, and sometimes fraudulent, paperwork involved in adoptions from China. In Grain of Salt, she presents us with two vertical sets of shadow boxes filled with photos and documents, all encrusted with varying amounts of salt that obscures their contents. According to the paperwork in the shadow boxes, she was abandoned when she was two days old. At 21 months, she was adopted from Jiangxi Province, China, and brought to the United States. The sides of the cases are upholstered with fake Chinese silk, emphasizing the questionability of the contents inside. She states on her wall text: “What does it mean when you can’t even trust the paperwork that validated your existence within the system? Who are you? and who am I?”           Solpheria presents us with about two dozen sketches held together with various tapes and stickers with images on them called The Self Is Constructed Not Found. The whole ensemble has the feeling of a teen girl’s bedroom decorated with sketches of Barbie-like idols, trinkets, and the occasional idyllic landscape. Embedded in this collection are little emojis and soft swirls that extend onto the wall. It is all very cute and adolescent. The pamphlet accompanying the show states that Solpheria is inspired from early internet culture, the Chicago DIY scene, and personal intersectional identities. They claim that the work is created “to serve as a focal point for self-reflection.” But that would be for a limited audience. To this octogenarian, it shows an adolescent female struggling to find their identity in a jumble of social media imagery. The work does not really reflect upon the unique struggles of being an adoptee.             Jazmyn Yun Babler presents us with a video of a woman braiding her hair. Titled Self Organizing/Stuck in the Unknown, the piece indirectly addresses the theme of the show. The person doing the braiding is struggling to keep the individual bunches of hair together as the braid remains unfinished. The low resolution of the video, along with it being shown on an old CRT TV, enhances the struggle and the occasional tangle of hair that interferes with the braiding. This is a metaphorical interpretation of Whythe’s piece Grain of Salt and gives us a more emotional sense of the struggle and frustration of an East Asian adoptee.           In her imagery, Quin Steinmetz takes a more direct approach to being an adoptee. In both Self Portrait and Buy a Baby, she bluntly depicts the corrupt, clinical, merchandising system of adoption from East Asian countries. On the wall text, she refers to the “red thread of fate” which comes from the Chinese proverb about the unbreakable red thread between two people fated to meet. It implies that: “In the American sense, the red thread connects the orphan child to a deeply footed, and unbreakable, thread that remains connected between the child and their birth mother forever, even if they never meet again.” Steinmetz’s images show just how brutal this can be. A self-taught painter, her less than perfect execution adds to the tension of content.           Maya Ortiz Saucedo is the co-curator of this exhibition. Their installation, Sediment, consists of a video monitor laying on a bed of sand, all under a large plywood panel that is held up at an angle with cables from the ceiling. The video depicts Saucedo trying to upright the panel with her back. The angle at which it is displayed is the angle at which they were able to right it. The black and white painting on the panel, called Margin of Error, includes the words “Child in sta_e custody” and, beneath it, the same phrase written backwards along with other fragments of text. Behind the text, but in front of a man in the background, is a skeletal figure—not quite a body, not quite a skeleton–seemingly pulled up by a thin gnarled hand. This is perhaps the most powerful image in the show (along with Buy a Baby). Here we see the underworld-like, dark side of the adoption process. The video installation symbolizes Maya’s attempt to get out from under this shady process. But the painting is more powerful than the installation and could easily stand on its own.         This exhibition is part of a popular trend that focuses on shows emphasizing social issues over aesthetics. It has a rather make-shift appearance brought about by unsophisticated facilities and the slight disrepair of the CAD space, along with the wide variety of technical skills of the participants. This further places the focus on content rather than aesthetics. It is hard to critique such a show; one is left to judge the skill at which the social issue is communicated/portrayed without judging the legitimacy of the issue.

Rectangles of Negativity A review of “Dust Jacket,” works by Nick Schutzenhofer, at Mickey, Chicago by Curtis Anthony Bozif There is a work of the negative in the image, a “dark” efficacy that, so to speak, eats away at the visible.1      – Georges Didi-Huberman The significance of images is on the surface.2       – Vilém Flusser   There is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans have evolved to see and that we call visible light (roughly 750–380 nanometers). At one extreme is an even narrower band we call violet (roughly 430–380 nanometers), the shortest wavelengths our eyes can perceive. Beyond that is ultraviolet light; shorter still are X-rays; and, at the far end of the spectrum: gamma rays—the stuff of radioactive decay, supernovae, and quasars. Nick Schutzenhofer’s spare but deep palette—on display once again in his third solo exhibition at Mickey in Chicago—is dominated by this color, poised at the very limit of our perception. It permeates the room and unites a body of work remarkable for the variety of materials and techniques deployed in its creation, as well as the ways it interrogates, even antagonizes, visuality as we know it today.           A rectangle of negativity, full of emptiness, frontal, obtrusive, and imposing, it featured prominently in Schutzenhofer’s previous solo show and has become somewhat of a signature motif for the artist. Centered all the more for being slightly off-center, in Untitled (53 x 66 ¾ inches) it presents as a plum-gray stain around which orbits a constellation of gestural marks the hue of a Concord grape’s waxy bloom. To the right is a spasm of slashes, dabs, and daubs that coalesce to become a figure, if just barely. Pressed precariously between the void and the edge of the canvas, on the cusp of oblivion, it reminds me of a Michelangelo non finito, abandoned in its struggle to emerge from the stone in which it is trapped, as much as it does the poor astronaut in Stephen Hawking’s example of how a black hole warps space, time, and the mind. As they approached the event horizon, the boundary of the region from which not even light can escape, time would slow down for the astronaut, though they wouldn’t notice it at first; but as they were stretched and crushed, disintegrating into a stream of subatomic particles, to the distant observer, the astronaut’s image would remain frozen. “Thus, by jumping into a black hole one could ensure that one’s image lasted forever, but the picture would fade very rapidly and grow so dim that no one could see it.”3         It is this painting that beckons to me from across the gallery. The void within the picture upon the wall inside the room: if not infinite, it is still some kind of regress that I fall into. Containing both figure and void, the representational and the non-objective, it is the crux of the exhibition, and it nearly brings me to tears.           There are other paintings, of course. In Untitled (48 ½ × 58 ¼ inches), the rectangle of negativity is an area of wash, a zone of erasure. It is set within a field of marks whose juice-like fluidity contrasts their conspicuously mechanical application. The ribbony strokes, one right after the other, of about the same width and length, hang vertically, while the marble-dust ground radiates as if behind amethyst crystals. Dilute as it is, the paint pools, throwing into stark relief the rich crenulation of the sewn and impastoed substrate, much like a rubbing might. A draftsman at heart, Schutzenhofer half-jokingly describes his method as “six months and fifteen minutes.” By this he means that the majority of the time he spends on a painting is in preparing its surface. Compared to the deliberateness with which his substrates have been built, what happens on top, the drawing, appears utterly spontaneous, almost evanescent.           The painting’s neighbor on the wall is the smaller Untitled (27 ⅛ × 34 ½ inches), a seemingly half-finished genre scene in which one figure, eyes closed, dissolves into a shadowy chair, while another figure stands awkwardly against a pushy block of alizarin crimson. In such proximity, the rectangles of negativity in the two larger paintings become figures in their own right, or signs for figurability as such. In the blankness of the rectangles lies the figure’s potential: the possibility of figure and ground; in the residue the rectangles frame: the figure disfigured, reconstituted, dispersed, becoming ground—more regress.           Two paintings, both untitled and measuring 53 × 67 inches, are distinct for the encaustic in which they are encased. Each features a quasi-floral motif inspired by Édouard Vuillard’s depiction of wallpaper, wherein pattern as ground envelopes the figure; or dissolves the distinction. In one, the floral motif is partly obscured by a piece of cardboard—a literal object interrupting the pictorial space—that seems to have absorbed some kind of an accident in sap green; in the other, the floral motif hovers over a caliginous blob, a lava field of mars black, ultramarine, lavender, and periwinkle—a hot mess. In this pair, chaos, if it doesn’t reign, at least has more of a say in the matter. Clumsy and disorganized, they’re less successful individually and for that reason are supported rather than complemented by the works with clearer internal logics in their approach to material, process and form.           If there is a way in which the brute materiality of Schutzenhofer’s art can seem self-conscious, even over-determined, it may have something to do with how it calls forth the digital—and, by extension, Big Tech—if only by sheer contrast, a point I will return to later. In Untitled (18 ½ × 22 ½ inches), itself the size of a rectangle of negativity, the organic overflows the grid. A structure of repeated cells, removed by the artist, has created a crumbling

Dinorá Justice: “Entwined” Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA by Emelia Lehmann Tucked inside a former chapel of the neo-Gothic Church of the Covenant on Boston’s Newbury Street is a charming contemporary art gallery, Gallery NAGA. The ornate stone church exterior belies the cozy and simple exhibition space inside—indeed, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled through a trefoil arch doorway into the gallery one cold November night. Nothing is more Boston than making innovative use of old places and things. Founded in 1977 as the Newbury Associated Guild of Artists (hence, NAGA), the female-owned Gallery NAGA has been supporting and promoting New England and Boston-based contemporary artists for almost 50 years. Their current exhibition, “Entwined,” showcases new work by Brazilian-American artist Dinorá Justice, on view from November 6 to December 20, 2025.         Since 2016, Justice has been working on a series called Portraits that reimagines depictions of female forms in the canon of Western art history. For centuries, male artists have been painting women in revealing and provocative poses, creating adaptations and derivatives of their peers and predecessors—from Titian’s Venus of Urbino (c. 1534) to Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814). Building on this tradition, Justice revisits famous works of art and uses swirls of color and patterns to reposition the female form into an updated, contemporary context. She also replaces elements such as furniture, tapestries, and interior settings with nature-based surroundings motivated by her interest in ecofeminism.           In “Entwined,” Justice pulls inspiration from her recent residency in Vienna and her engagement there with Gustav Klimt paintings. She adapts the Austrian artist’s opulent paintings (which often position semi-naked female forms in sensual situations), reconfiguring his well-known style with her own collage-like technique of painting. Where he used gilding and patterns to create richness and complexity, Justice introduces her own references to Brazilian textiles, jewelry, and flowers. While her paintings contain obvious references to his famous works like Death and Life (1910/1915) and The Kiss (1908-1909), Justice melds Klimt’s perspective with her own to offer a new lens into art historical interpretation today.           Portrait 92, After Klimt (2025) illustrates Justice’s process of adapting historic works for a modern audience. Those well-versed in Klimt’s oeuvremay recognize the allusion to his 1905 work, The Three Ages of Woman. To start, Justice created a warm marbled background full of movement to serve as the backdrop of her work. She preserved the outlines of Klimt’s three female figures, painting in hair falling over their foreheads and shoulders, and using layers of floral and geometric patterns to map out the curves of their bodies. The shape of a figure’s hunched shoulders and protruding stomach are brought into view, as are the press of a head against another in a close embrace—just as in Klimt’s work. However in Justice’s work, the figures are only ever silhouettes, lacking the folds of skin and facial features. Viewers might imagine any woman—any person—occupying their nebulous forms.             During his lifetime, Klimt was notorious for his erotic (almost pornographic) imagery. Justice’s technique complicates this interpretation by blurring the lines between figures and obscuring their more sexual elements. Portrait 102, After Klimt (2025) features what look to be a pair of figures locked in a tender embrace, adapted from Klimt’s The Kiss (1908-1909). However, as with Justice’s other works, the forms lack any recognizable features and their faces meld together through the swirls of the green and pink marbled base. Instead, a hint of their embrace is brought into focus through the bright yellow-and-red floral pattern that encircles them like fabric and the defined waves of their hair woven with flowers.             Other works show a clearly defined figure—with continued references to Klimt’s paintings and the stories that inspired him. Portrait 101, After Klimt (2025) copies the overall subject of Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901). The front-facing silhouette, the dark cloud of hair, the shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a gold armband and choker necklace, and the male head clutched in the figure’s hands all recall Klimt’s painting. However, Justice’s use of bold colors and vibrant patterns diffuses some of the violence and sexuality that pervades Klimt’s work, where a half-naked Judith exultantly holds the decapitated head of Holofernes to her hip. In Justice’s painting, Holofernes’s head becomes an obscure object carried by a mysterious, faceless figure framed by cheerful sunflowers. Who is this person? And what does she hold in her hands?           Many of Justice’s works are more akin to portraiture—missing, of course, the identifiable features of the sitter. As a viewer, I wondered whether Justice had individuals in mind as she painted these works. Two favorites are Portrait 103, After Klimt (2025) and Portrait 99, After Klimt (2025). Both depict a feminine figure set against a backdrop of flowers, her womanly form created through the illusion of draping floral textiles. Justice introduced material items sparingly to further build the identity of these two women—a choker necklace, a headscarf, some bangles along a wrist, a ring, an earring articulating the delicate (and otherwise invisible) shape of an ear. Despite this, they remain unknown—perhaps even universal—figures, representing any and all women.         Justice’s practice of reimagining great works of art to reclaim female form is fascinating and, as a viewer, I enjoyed the thrill of recognition when I spotted the parallels and transformations of Klimt’s work within hers. Once her technique is understood, the works may seem a bit formulaic—marble the canvas, trace the outline of figures, paint plants, flowers, patterns, and jewelry to define an arm, neck, head… etc. But despite the obvious references to famous works by male artists, each of Justice’s paintings are unique and present a view of a strong female form emerging against the backdrop of a wild and chaotic world. She challenges representations of the female form that have so long dominated the

“Open me: Miguel Ângelo Rocha” Galeria 111, Lisbon, Portugal Works of Eduardo Luiz CAMB—Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito “Across the open field” AINORI Contemporary Art Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal by D. Dominick Lombardi Picturesque, eccentric, famed, friendly, Lisbon is a unique cultural gem. While here on a curatorial project, I asked one of the artists I was working with, Luís Almeida, which is the one gallery I must see while in Lisbon. His response: Galeria 111.         “Open me: Miguel Ângelo Rocha” is closing in two days so it’s now or never to get over to Galleria 111. A quick Bolt ride (like Uber) from our hotel to an exhibition of mostly large scale, assembled sculptures spread out along walls and floors like otherworldly octopi, the exhibition feels world class and powerful. The works are composed of extra thick to thin plywood cut into shapes that appear arbitrary, wire, hefty wood dowels, beeswax, clothing, and thick braided rope like I haven’t seen since high school gym class, and are all inexplicably situated in space.         All of the sculptures initially come off as puzzling and profound. Matthew Barney and Josef Beuys immediately come to mind here, based on the rugged versus intimate rawness of each work. Using a limited color palette of yellows, light browns, white and gray, Miguel Ângelo Rocha’s (Lisbon, Portugal, 1964) enigmatic sculptures manage an extensive range of shifting segues loaded with visual effects, conjectured motion, and slippery narratives that lean toward complex emotion, while the visceral effect hits more in the brain than the gut.             For instance, in Accattone 1 1/2 (2025), the narrative hinges on the two gaping yellow holes in the center of stuffed supine shirts accompanied by a foreboding yellow cape-like form that commands from above. Are we witnessing the theft of souls orchestrated by a dominant being? Behind all this are two white shirted, headless sentries that intensify the drama of what reads as an unstoppable ritualistic setting. Conversely, the winding white 3D bands that spread out like untamed wings on both sides of the composition give off a more psycho-spiritual feel, connecting the narrative to ancient, hallucinogenic states of ritual. Accattone, which is also the title of a classic 1961 film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, portrays a pimp who ends up on skid row, eventually becoming a beggar. Is this the artist’s intended reference? Possibly. However, the tension or angst of aggressively altered states seems far more otherworldly.           In Envelope (2025), there are reverberations of the influence of Modern Art represented in the middle by a classic wooden, abstract assemblage, versus the two flanking clusters of yellow balls reminiscent of some of the decorative elements at the National Palace of Pena that, in this instance, imply Conceptual Art. This battle of the titans is set against two-way pointing polyester fabric (a fully open envelope?), as the three main elements offer no concrete conclusions. As I observe gallery goers, I see more gravitation toward the sides of this vast composition due to the familiarity of the rounded and repeating forms than any lasting connection to the central element. Conversely, to my eye, the central object that recalls the heyday of Modernism takes the cake due to its quiet confidence of what it stands for.         On an adjacent wall is Station 2 – Anchor (2024), which looks like the violent unraveling of a powerful spirit presence released from a flayed open body as it breaks away from unwanted containment. The addition of a pooling galvanized chain that collects on the ground, the backing of a spread open straight jacket at the back and the absurdly long crutch that yields to the floor, bending outward, all create an extraordinary escape to freedom on both atomic and multiverse levels.           A bit of humor breaks through in Station 5 – Open Me (2025) where a very abstract, flagrantly extrapolated face of a woman wearing a wildly broad smile, albeit crazed, takes note of us bystanders. Perhaps this is the way many of us feel today, somewhat or very paranoid as we experience an out-of-control world that is well beyond fair and compassionate.           Around the corner from Galeria 111 is the institution CAMB—Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito, where the collection accrued by Galleria 111 and Manuel de Brito, who founded Galeria 111 in 1964, displays works from their collection. Today, the paintings, prints, animated films and mixed media works of Eduardo Luiz (Braga, Portugal, 1932-88) are featured in an impressive survey of meticulously rendered art.         As noted in Maria Arlete Alves da Silva’s essay, Luiz was the consummate outlier. Disheartened and bitter about the state of humanity, the foibles of politics, and the art world at that time, Luiz fought back with his own unique brand of Trompe L’Oeil where actual objects and a slightly stylized type of precision painting created stunning compositions.           Luiz’s feeling about the way in which his art was received by critics and the general public can be summed up in one pointed composition, where 3-D facsimiles of fecal matter is served up on a doily in Homenagem a um Critico (1966). This work, which needs no explanation, is a treatise on his anger, a need for revenge and mad self-aggrandizement that pretty much derailed his career. It is also a clear illustration of the artist’s overall temperament, which is characterized by Silva as “Intransigent, confrontational, sarcastic, ironic, theatrical, he sometimes violently hurt those around him.” Or as Eduardo Luiz suggested, he was like “a loose stone on a sidewalk,” which in Lisbon is saying a lot. With all this said, Luiz’s art remains today as a symbol of sticktoitiveness, to an artist with a particular vision that never wavered despite all the negative hubbub.         On

“I am California” “David Kimball Anderson: Bakersfield Standards” Bakersfield Museum of Art, September 25, 2025–January 3, 2026  by Neil Goodman Yeah, dig all my gold, soak in my springsConquer my mountains if that’s what you needI am California, can’t you see?Wherever you roam, you’ll always want me –John Craigie   Bakersfield, California—known for oil production, agriculture, and manufacturing—is about 135 inland from the Pacific Ocean, located in the central part of the San Joaquin Valley. If you live on the coast getting to Bakersfield is a bit of a challenge, as the roads are mostly two lanes, with large areas of semi-mountainous terrain intersected by gullies, valleys, and steep turns. Closer to Bakersfield, the landscape flattens, with long planar stretches of farmland. Small towns pepper the landscape, as the worker community sustains the rural economy.        Bakersfield is also noted for as having one of the largest Basque communities in the country. One Basque restaurant in particular (the Pyrenees Cafe), was popularized by Guy Fieri in his show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” The Bakersfield Museum of Art (BMoA) is equally a bit of a surprise. If we see California through the lens of its largest art institutions, it is refreshing to visit a smaller venue, with a focus on artists most closely linked to their region. Bakersfield is becoming a bit of a hub, as cheap rent, large spaces, and a new contemporary art gallery are attractive for artists looking to leave Los Angeles or San Francisco. Also, an active BMoA board, along with the recent addition of museum director Gilbert Vicario and longtime curator Victor Gonzales, promises a strong direction and increased visibility. In short, Bakersfield is a destination, a land defined by backbone and brawn, with a strong work ethic, and far removed from California’s coastal glitz and glamour. The title of David Kimball Anderson’s show is “Bakersfield Standards.” (A standard is a song of established popularity that has become a core part of the repertoire for a particular genre.) The “Bakersfield Standard” is a hybrid country western genre popularized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. In Victor Gonzales’s catalog essay, he mentions that Anderson’s steel supplier was based in Bakersfield. Although Anderson both lives and works in Santa Cruz, California, the many years of long and frequent drives to Bakersfield became both a source of and inspiration for many of the works in the exhibition. In this way, the road traveled was his “Bakersfield Standard.”            The show is complex and broad. It covers several decades of work and includes nineteen sculptures. Although subjects differ, the material is largely weathered steel, with the occasional addition of neon and cast bronze. To quote the artist: “ Steel is nothing more than dirt in a more sophisticated molecular arrangement, and steel wants to do nothing more than to go back to being dirt.” Perhaps this feeling of metal as both static and active is the essence of Anderson’s work. Embedded in each sculpture is a history of what it once was and what it is now.           The exhibition is housed in two rooms. The smaller entry room segways to the larger space, and although connected, they are distinct. The first gallery is dominated by the sculpture Hawk. An abundance of thin steel bars, twiglike like in circumference and irregularity are perched on a bucket-container at the top of a pole. . On one hand, Hawk is strongly industrial; on the other, it is equally a crown of thorns with the associated religious reference. It is raw, and without the context of the museum for aesthetic support, it would be part and parcel of its indigenous landscape. Flanked by Hawk is Nest in Fan and Barn Owl. Both sculptures, made from originally utilitarian objects, are returning as shelters to the natural world. These works have a kind of Rauschenberg feel, as found objects that are recontextualized. A perceived lack of manicured refinement in the sculptures is deceptive, as there is a keen eye and craftsmanship behind the work with clear aesthetic decisions made.           Water 2025 is in the second, larger gallery space. The sculpture’s “tank” is framed by weathered wood. Metaphorically, the armature has a certain pagoda feeling, like the entry to a Japanese shrine. Particularly in arid environments, water is life. Both the catalog and exhibition include a photograph of the original found object, as a companion to the exhibition sculpture. Anderson’s reinterpretation of the original structure? is quietly recontextualized, as source and inspiration are deftly woven into the piece.           Like Water, the sculpture Trough alludes to a past with a specific function, yet within the museum context, the interpretation is open-ended. As a trough can be filled or empty, the consequences are dramatically different. As a water basin, it is life and sustenance; empty and discarded, it is a remnant.           In the sculpture Pomona to Famosa, a four-point post and lentil construction supports a worn engine, as well as a neon tube that illuminates the back end of the sculpture. Although the references suggest early California Hot Rod culture, the sculpture has an embedded story that is personal yet evocative of the passing of time, where permanence is transient and histories that have been forgotten are remembered.           Of the many works in the exhibition, Cherry is perhaps the most atypical in its use of color, combination of text and object, and largely made by hand status as opposed to being constructed of found materials. Its calligraphic and atmospheric quality stylistically evokes Ed Ruscha in some respects yet also departs dramatically with Ruscha’s aesthetic with the incorporation of sink and faucet. The double spickets in the sink have an oddly sexual quality, and given the combination of cherry and faucet, the work echoes a certain Robert Gober or Duchampian quality. The placards relate the work to rural

Where Dreams and Fairytales Become Nightmares: The Art of Eleanor Spiess-Ferris A review of “Drinking The Moon” Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, Illinois, July 10–September 19, 2025 by Diane Thodos I’m an inward traveler, and I’ve traveled deeper and deeper into my inner thoughts over the years…. It’s not whether you show. It’s that expression, getting that feeling, getting your adventure, getting your images, getting your ideas out somewhere and struggling with those issues. That makes you alive. – Eleanor Spiess-Ferris 1 I love to entice people into my work with pretty colors and fabrics and lovely birds. Then once they are in, I hit them over the head with a baseball bat to make them see what I’m getting at! – Eleanor Spiess-Ferris  When your demon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey. -Rudyard Kipling 2   Shallow Waters, 2010. Oil on canvas 40 x 52 inches. Photo courtesy Eleanor Spiess-Ferris. At first glance the painting Shallow Waters (2010) attracts the eye with brilliant aqua blue and a bright custard yellow. A stately woman stands tall, wearing a skirt filled with water that seems to resemble a birdbath that is whimsically inhabited by different waterfowl. Her torso, which wears a sumptuous orange garment with a collar of elaborate ruffles placed on a fantastic bodice of quilted squares suggests the lavishness of a Shakespearian costume. But looking deeper reveals a darker cast to the scene. The woman’s face expresses something between sorrow and sternness as she tries to precariously balance herself in high-heeled shoes on a tiny chair. The birds have menacing teeth and glaring eyes, expressions that are positively reptilian in their aggressiveness towards the viewer. Beneath her watery skirt her naked pudenda is exposed and random daubs of paint, like some improvisational painting palette, disrupt the scene—throwing its spatial logic into chaos. The narrative draws the viewer into a psychological undertow, to a place that speaks of suffering, anger, and protection from harm. For all its lyrical color and sweet floral motifs, the scene becomes a fairytale gone bad, revealing danger for the woman in a precarious situation. There is a kind of rot below the surface of what is presented about her life. The decorative effulgence of the scene betrays it’s irony, implying there should have been happiness and the protection of innocence where there was none.         Much of the esoteric symbolism in Eleanor Speiss-Ferris’s self-invented narratives come out of intense memories of her experiences growing up on a small farm in New Mexico from 1941 to 1953. Most of my childhood was spent in a wild apple, plum orchard that grew behind our house on a small farm. It was here that I discovered an imaginary world beyond the real. I felt the weight of the seasons, the migration of birds, and the never-ending thrust of insect life. 3         This haven, known to her as “The Bramble,” became a refuge from loneliness and a place for imagination and play as a way of trying to make unconscious sense of her experiences and family relationships growing up. Her mother was emotionally distant, “a thwarted person” who had exhausting duties raising four children and running the farm. For Eleanor, escaping outdoors and into solitude became her private refuge. Alternatively, she came to admire her flamboyant and rabble-rousing suffragette aunt who championed the rights of Native Americans and Hispanic people. Her father, who became the chief justice of the New Mexico Appellate court, came from a family with strong progressive socialist beliefs. Unlike many men of the 1940s and 50s he was an early feminist, being very supportive of his daughter’s artistic desires and challenged her to think deeply and critically. He was also a whimsical storyteller who invented tales about imaginary creatures, an influence that directly inspired Eleanor’s own fanciful myths and self-invented narratives.         A significant turning point in her life happened when she encountered Mexican folk on the themes of suffering and death. The Catholic Penitente Brotherhood, known for rituals of self-flagellation, created ritual carts that seated a large carved skeleton, used as a reminder of death’s dark power during Easter ceremonies. She saw one of these “Death Carts” at a relative’s gallery in Taos where she was also deeply impressed by a folk-art wood carving by Patrocino Barela, depicting a helpless rabbit being devoured by a snake. “Was I either the snake or the rabbit? Was the skeleton coming for me or was I the skeleton?” 4 This expressive art liberated Eleanor. “It gave me the permission that I do not have to make pretty pictures.” It allowed her to go to places that were uncomfortable and dark, places where suffering and mortality met. “The more bleeding Jesuses and Santos [suffering saints] there were, the more I devoured it.” Traumatic childhood memories of violent storms, and even a dangerous flood that nearly swept her away, explain the ominous presence of approaching storms, tornadoes, and floods in her paintings. “I like to have things that are dangerous. I like the unsettling feeling of danger.”   The Flood, 2024–2025. Gouache on paper 22 x 22 inches. Photo courtesy Eleanor Spiess-Ferris.         As a young woman, Eleanor often confronted the inescapable threat of groping and sexual harassment. “You could not get off the school bus or go to the swimming pool without experiencing it. All my life there’s been a lot of sexual harassment. Terrible! Awful! You couldn’t do anything about it because nobody was going to believe you!” These hardships she faced alone as a young woman are poignantly expressed in one of her recent paintings, The Innocent (2023), a meditation on her perception of the sexual violence against women embedded in today’s emerging ultraconservative political environment. A devil pounces on a young woman in a white gown and pins her to the bottom of a boat. He mercilessly bites her face as he prepares

Still-Life, Playful-Life: A Visit to Frank Trankina’s Studio by Samuel Schwindt “I still can’t make an abstract painting!” Frank Trankina jested a little into our conversation at his studio. As I took my first looks at monumental displays of paintings within paintings, whimsical toys fantastically collided with art history. In one, Arnold Schwarzenegger ganders at quasi-Barbara Hepworth and Constantin Brancusi sculptures; in another, fictional history paintings glaze imaginary mansions; in another, post-modernist paintings are dogged in a sterile white-cube gallery; in another, superimposed limestone portraits cascade textiles rife with trade; further along, Godzilla is monumentalized in a still life.           Fleeting tokens, soaked in potential energy, are ready for realization in Trankina’s work. The seeming detritus of play—bobbleheads, action figures, folksy objects—stand resolute, poised to be immortalized in these still lifes. Trankina’s practice sleuths the quotidian and transforms it into wink-wink paintings that question performance within art spaces: where the limited space for playfulness daggers into the experimental         Trankina’s studio’s large windows could easily produce greenhouse light in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. He haphazardly installed coverings to mask, demure, and dramatize, cocooning his production space. Free-standing spotlights punctured a cacophony of excavated ephemera, oil paints, and in-progress paintings. Darkened in the far back left were bobble-heads, a lizard ceramic head, toy superheroes, and other unidentifiable characters from an origin story that is perhaps, only a memory of a memory. A scrap area shyly slumps in the back-right of the studio: cardboards, woods, textiles, tapes. The centered performance stage is a statuesque easel marred with paint. Remarkably organized brushes in canisters and oil paints with all their caps securely fashioned are ready to produce. It’s an academic approach, I will say: Trankina is a professor at Northern Illinois University in painting. The ethos of a clean studio is on full display. The necessities of painting from life are all around, although with some irreverence.           But whether it is Schwarzenegger or a 17th century Dutch still life as inspiration, he combines the academic with the wistfully playful.         With his healthy respect for painting techniques and lineage, it is apt to begin with Trankina’s training. His mentor Ray Yoshida, a prominent Chicago Imagist, nurtured his burgeoning collecting process of toys and secondary market objects. “I was lucky enough for him to become my friend,” Trankina said in an interview. He began collecting figurines and folk objects from Midwestern antique, thrift, and flea markets, even before he arrived at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1992). Then in graduate school, he and Yoshida probed the street markets: soon realizing collecting vernacular objects could integrate into his paintings. Trankina believes it is a remarkably Midwestern experience to claim these sources— in opposition to attitudes on the East Coast at the time. “We were kind of outcasts,” Trankina said. Jim Nutt even took years to make an impact in the New York City scene, along with other imagists to “see their day in the sun,” he said. With fond memories of Roger Brown, Barbara Rossi, and other founding members of the Imagists, Trankina remarked on an “honor of his lifetime”: his work joined the Kohler Foundations’ “Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values” exhibition, and after, their permanent collection.         Among these sources, Trankina had the “cheap seats” subscription to the Chicago Opera in the 90s. Jim Nutt always played Operatic scores during his classes at SAIC (“they’re always rather long,” which was necessary for the long studio days, he said). When I remarked on the categories of Opera’s he witnessed, we jumped between comedy and drama—making light of versus making solemnity of.         In the incidental sourcing of the conceptual and aesthetic, Trankina always returns to recreation married to a disciplined realism (although Trankina laughed later that he’s not even sure what “realism” means in its overuse). “That’s the play, the play” Trankina said, as he gestured to the figurines, “and serious play.” The duality of the serious and whimsical humors his influences, I scribbled in my hard-to-read handwriting.           While holding the toxic green, ceramic, lizard head, as we talked, I worried about a limiting comedic reaction to his paintings. I confessed my fear that humor critiques can tarnish an artwork. Really, it’s “irreverence,” Trankina said. I scrawled in my notebook: “paradox.”         Trankina then interrupted: casting a yellow spotlight onto an in-progress work in the center of the room. Large, parallel, and flattened pink destabilized foreground, middle ground, and background in it. Drooping funerary flowers wreath a toy turned to face a blank wall. The dual godzilla silhouettes are dialectical pairs. A marble figure reminiscent of Hellenistic greek sculpture fades into the background of army-green (Trankina and I remarked, though, how much we both hate green).         The painting is about “flatness,” he said. And it demonstrated a fear he and I both have when mentoring young painters: their unacknowledged luring into digital images as source images. It’s the painter’s job to do the translation of the real to the pictorial, we agreed. This disregard to sourcing can alter the painter’s mixology—something Trankina is hyper-aware of even in the history of still lifes.         These battling painting techniques and subsequent mentorships are pervasive in painting history. Still-life painters have always been evolving as inventors of devices: the 1630s-40s Golden Age of Holland saw a twisting of the naturalism of their subjects. Soon more interested in illusionism, painters like Anthony Claesz II and Hans Bollongier drifted away from their predecessors. With fantastical light and drama almost reminiscent of baroque painting, they collaged disparate flowers and objects.1 This germinated from an earlier hodge-podge approach of creating small studies of different objects, due to economic and environmental concerns. In flower still lifes, many flora were perennials: and, as in with Tulipomania,2 highly prized and expensive. Painters would have

Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s by-passing-upon Closing performances for Crystal Mslajek and John Marks’ Permanent Fixture Roman Susan, Chicago, August 9, 2025 by John Thomure Walking up on Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s by-passing-upon, the looming Red line reverberated above the loosely structured groove being played by Will Greene, Deidre Huckabay, Jeff Kimmel, Lia Kohl, and Sam Scranton. The performers traversed the street, shifting the sonic environment, while weaving between the audience and architectural nooks. As the swinging rhythm evolved, each performer altered the groove through subtle improvisations. The positions of the performers shifted as they played, sometimes attracting towards each other or repelling away. The performers steadily migrated inside to the gallery, visible and audible from both the front door and back-alley window.           The music corresponded to a score, plastered on the sidewalk and building walls, divided into four parts comprising both musical notation and fragments of theory, questions, and instructions. Examples of these fragments from the score include “might we mingle the commons back together,” “curb stop: a shut off valve in water pipes running from a water main to a building, also marking the division between publicly and privately owned pipes,” and “embellish… solo-ish.” 1 As the ensemble settled inside the building, the groove slowly wound down, being performed more quietly and slowly until the melody seemed to disintegrate.           A second performance was by the artists Crystal Mslajek and John Marks. Their installation at Roman Susan, Permanent Fixture, contained several films located around the gallery which rotated through a series of close ups and wide shots of architectural facades, interiors, and details culled from the surrounding neighborhood. Performing in the alley behind the gallery, Mslajek played piano delicately and drenched in reverb while softly singing. She was accompanied by Marks who mixed field recordings from the neighborhood into an ambient cloud of sonic textures. A seagull in the distance, gurgling water gushing onto pavement, and the soft staccato of passing conversations seemed to shimmer into existence for only a few seconds. Mslajek and Marks’ duet was routinely consumed by a chorus of the train’s guttural rumbling and metallic screeching breaks emanating from above.           Both offerings were regrettably underwhelming. I found their language and framing to be divorced from their execution. In particular, the use of terms like ‘improvisation’ and ‘site-specific’ ultimately promised more than the resulting works delivered.         Lundberg’s score, in my opinion, did not embrace the communal qualities embedded in improvised music enough. Its essence was fragments of academic discourse interjected into musical orchestration. In watching the performance, the viewer is never really invited to question any of the socio-economic issues raised by the sporadic quotes and thoughts positioned between the musical notations. This stands in stark contrast to other forms of improvised music which either creates a spontaneous composition that cannot be reclaimed or experienced live (in that a recording of improvised music becomes a fundamentally separate artwork once captured) or an invitation for the audience to participate in the music making itself, erasing the barrier between performer and audience.         The questions presented such as “can we muddle the commons back together?” were insufficiently answered by the conventional presentation of musicians performing in front of an audience. In unpacking the question of muddling the commons back together, the suggestion is that in bringing together a plethora of disciplines to address a particular issue, new perspectives and solutions can be found. However, what disciplines were brought together here? The piece was a dialogue of musicians responding to a composer—the de facto relationship set forth by the Western classical music tradition. The actual performance was antithetical to the radical suggestions of examining public versus private space or the role infrastructure plays in a community and, thus, undermined the intentions laid out by Lundberg.         Mslajek and Marks also seemed overly constrained by musical conventions to the detriment of the execution of their piece. The sounds Marks utilized in their work were culled from the neighborhood surrounding the gallery. Yet, in listening to these sounds I began to question: can one distinguish the sound of a particular street? Does the sound of a particular street evoke that specific location, or does it really evoke the sound of every street? There are particularities to consider: a busy downtown street versus a fairly suburban street by a college campus. However, the question still stands, could one identify the neighborhood just from hearing the sounds of the place? The answer was inconclusive. From my perspective, there was nothing sonically unique to any particular place to be found in Marks’ ambient musique concrète (experimental music created from recorded natural and man-made sounds). Regarding Mslajek’s soft piano and singing, I am still unsure how this rendition connected to the ideas of place and community which the pair claimed to be discussing in their work in this installation and presentation. Again, I think the ideas behind the artists work were far more compelling and interesting than their execution.           The shortcomings of the performances called to mind Miwon Kwon’s book, One Place After Another, which discusses the history and theoretical discourses of site-specific art. Kwon states that site-specific art “…can be mobilized to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialization of places.” 2 This site-specific project is not generated by and for the local community, but it involves a process in which the artist adopts the site as a material through which they impose their own ideas upon the local community. Both Lundberg and Mslajek and Marks’ work seemed to fall into this category unfortunately, using the language and form of site-specific projects to impose their own meaning upon a place instead of addressing Roman Susan’s particular location and the underlying socio-political, environmental, and historical issues inherent to the site. John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing

“Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler” Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus, Ohio May 24–November 9, 2025 by Sean Bieri When Carol Tyler asked a colleague in 2005 why there were no female cartoonists featured in the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition in Los Angeles that year, she was told there were “no women of significance who had a large enough body of work” to justify their inclusion. (Looking at the list of men who did make the cut, there’s a nerdy debate to be had about that assertion. Lyonel Feininger’s comics career was brilliant but brief and obscure; couldn’t he be bumped to make room for Dale Messick? And as much as I love Gary Panter… more worthy than Lynda Barry?) The comment led Tyler to paint a portrait of herself in a frilly dress á la Queen Elizabeth I, with a crow quill pen for a scepter and an ink pot for a crown. Liz had said she was “married to England”; Tyler declares herself “married to comics.” This royal self-portrait greets visitors to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s exhibition “Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler,” a retrospective of the cartoonist’s long, unique career—plus a preview of her upcoming book—that confirms Tyler as a brilliant and singular figure in the canon of graphic narrative.         Tyler was wed to comics in more ways than one. Her late husband was underground cartoonist Justin Green, author of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), usually cited as the earliest and most influential example of autobiography in American comics. (The story of their turbulent relationship is beautifully told in John Kinhart’s 2023 documentary Married To Comics.) Binky Brown follows Green’s teenage surrogate as he wrestles, in humiliating detail, with puberty and “impure” thoughts while saddled with the twin impediments of a 1950s Catholic upbringing and what would eventually be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The comic was something of an “hallelujah” moment for a number of cartoonists, the genesis of a slew of self-deprecating, warts-and-all confessional comics to follow by the likes of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb. As a painting student at Syracuse in the early ’70s, Tyler’s art had already tended to be narrative, but the revelatory experience of reading Binky Brown pushed her definitively toward making comics.           The exhibition comes with a zine-like “keepsake booklet” drawn by Tyler to guide the visitor through the phases of her oeuvre. The first stop is the giant plywood cutout head, another self-portrait, with a matching hand holding a pencil that reminds the viewer why it’s important to “Write It Down, Draw It Out”: “So you don’t forget!” jots the pencil. All around the gallery are coffee cans and cigar boxes full of ink bottles, pens, and other art supplies from Tyler’s home, along with journals, weathered furniture, and personal memorabilia that help immerse the visitor in the world of her graphic novels. Early works of art are tacked up on the wall, including a small handmade book inspired by a tattoo Tyler spotted on someone’s arm, entitled “The Wanda Comic”; it was the first time she used the word “comic” to describe her work.           Next stop is “Bloomerland,” a section featuring original art from her 2005 book Late Bloomer—an apt title for a twenty-year retrospective that was nevertheless a revelation even to folks who were hip to alternative “comix.” It collects Tyler’s earliest published work—short pieces originally seen in anthologies such as Weirdo and Wimmen’s Comics in the ’80s and ’90s— along with new material. In “Bloomerland” as elsewhere in the show, Tyler’s work is largely concerned with family matters, from her childhood being raised by the “Greatest Generation” in northern Illinois, to the joys and struggles of bringing up the daughter she has with Green, to chronicling the lives of her aging parents. Tyler’s sharp but humane sense of humor, and an unflinching honesty that even the notoriously unrestrained Crumb called “shocking,” are on display here. In her first published piece in Weirdo, Uncovered Property (1987), a naive nine-year-old Carol, in full view of her family, flashes her non-existent breasts at a city inspector in a desperate attempt to persuade him to install a water main (her teenage sister told her this would “drive men wild”). But that’s just the punchline—the real fun of the story comes from Tyler’s observations of family dynamics, mostly sibling antagonism and parental exasperation. A one-page cartoon from 1988 called Anatomy of a New Mom depicts Tyler’s post-pregnancy body like an “Operation” game board, with a belly of “uncoagulated jello,” “mashed potatoes” for brains, and a hand basket of “relics”—“creativity, solitude, focus, spontaneity”—from “pre-baby days.” (Tyler dedicated Late Bloomer to “anyone who has deferred a dream” due to child-rearing, illness, or loss.)           The old underground comics were usually black-and-white, but when color later became an option, it allowed Tyler to bring her painterly sensibilities to her comics. In the one-pager Once, We Ran (2004) Tyler delicately applies watercolors to her loose ink work to nostalgic effect, in a flashback to a summer day spent with her daughter, shopping at yard sales and running across hot asphalt in matching skirts. There are two pages here from Just A Bad Seed (1996), in which Tyler uses gouache to render an anecdote about calming her young child’s fear of the “evil” sunflowers bobbing outside her bedroom window. The six panels on each page are nested in frames of richly hued, slightly menacing flora, and a glowing night sky that recalls Van Gogh, who also contemplated sunflowers.         Tyler’s comics are often as formally inventive as they are beautifully crafted. The “Bloomerland” section closes out with a philosophically minded collection of illustrations entitled My American Labels (2004), a rumination on midwestern American values in the form of nine produce can

Diane Simpson: Ageless Relevance EXPO Chicago 2025, one-person show at Corbett vs. Dempsey booth by Michel Ségard I first saw Diane Simpson’s work at Artemesia Gallery in 1979. It was a show of some large constructions for which she has since become famous. In 2019, the Whitney Biennial featured Simpson in a room to herself on the first floor of the museum. That exhibition included a spectacular, large, almost stage-set piece called Window Dressing: Background 4, Apron VI(2003–07). What stayed consistent over those 46 years is the source of her forms, in the artist’s words: “clothing structures, furniture, utilitarian objects and vernacular industrial architecture.”           It was quite a surprise to see examples of her early works on paper presented as a one-person show at this year’s Expo Chicago. Corbett vs Dempsey used their entire booth space for Simpson’s work. These are pieces that are not often seen. They give us an insight into Simpson’s consistency over a nearly a half-century practice. (Simpson turned 90 on April 25, the day after Expo Chicago opened.)         Simpson’s staying power can be attributed, in part, to her attitude toward feminism. The same year she was showing her large sculptures at Artemisia, Arc Gallery across the street was showing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Chicago’s approach was highly political and historically-focused, while Simpson, using a more abstract, contemporary approach, showed how a woman could easily infiltrate the male-dominated sculptural scene. Her pieces are most often based on the form of clothing, articulated by an architectonic structure. This makes her work less overtly political and allows for broader interpretation on the part of the viewer. Simpson was also influenced by Margaret Wharton, one of the founders of Artemisia and noted for her sculptures made from chairs. While never using the original object, Simpson’s deconstruction of it has similarities to what Wharton did to chairs.             This exhibition’s early works on paper date from 1975 to 1981, mostly from ’75–’76. The most striking to a viewer in this century is the Armour Pattern series from 1975. These collagraph prints look like deconstructed pieces of Japanese armour that are symmetrically arranged and superbly colored—something you rarely see in works by Simpson. They have a vaguely Imagist feel to them, with their hard edge and compositional symmetry making me think of works by Karl Wirsum. But significantly, they bring Simpson’s works to life in a way we are not used to seeing in her mostly monochromatic sculptures.             There were also three pieces that showed the development of shapes in oblique projection perspective. They inform the viewer about how Simpson’s sculptures acquire their form—for example, one (in an homage to Wharton?) is in the shape of a chair. These pieces are mixed media collages, dating from1976–77. Interestingly, in spite of being “drawings” they all have a sculptural quality.             Samurai #1 demonstrates how Simpson’s flat forms fold into a finished piece. We are presented with both a framed print of the flat forms and a finished sculpture. This was an especially pleasing presentation for those (like this author) who are particularly interested in the geometry and assembly of forms. It is fascinating to figure out which piece goes where and into which slots and to see how Simpson “slants” the arced pieces to achieve her signature oblique perspective.           There were three suites of collagraph prints on the outside of the Corbett vs. Dempsey booth that were of less interest. One was Laced Armour (front and back) showing strips of paper cross-laced through a larger sheet. Another was Apron Armour II and III, a pair of drawings that showed how a Japanese armour apron form could be manipulated. The third was Green Box Series III and IV. These two drawings were more iterations of possible apron form manipulations. These last two series were redundant and could have been pared down.         This small and intimate exhibition reminded viewers that Diane Simpson is not just a sculptor of large-scale interior pieces. She is also an accomplished draftsperson that has created exquisite 2D pieces. This show gives us a better chance to appreciate the depth of her talent as an artist. It also offers insight on the subtle relationship she had with the Chicago Imagist mainstream and the close ties she maintained with the cooperative gallery scene in the 1970s. Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.