Category: Uncategorized

Boston Public Art Triennial Triennial 2025: The Exchange (May 22 – October 31, 2025) by Emelia Lehmann Boston—a lovely, historic city that I knew best for its collegiate vibes, midnight rides, and notorious tea parties. Quite unexpectedly, I moved to Boston a few months ago for a new job and have been adapting to its laid-back charm. My time in the city has also corresponded with the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, a six-month celebration of the arts through the installation of site-specific public artworks, community programming, and collaborations with local artists, organizations, and neighborhoods. From May to October, the Triennial transforms the city into a living gallery of artistic interventions. As a newcomer, I couldn’t think of a better way to experience my new city than through an art-themed tour.         There are many ways to explore the Triennial. Works are placed throughout the city (identifiable by their vibrant chartreuse signage), and most visitors may stumble across art as they commute to work or stroll through a nearby green space. More ambitious (or foolhardy) explorers like myself might set out with grand plans to see all the public artworks, only to realize that the city is bigger than it appears on a map. Others may prefer to attend some of the many free workshops, artist talks, film screenings, or other interactive activities planned as part of the Triennial. Whatever your path, I hope the journey is entertaining and helps you to experience Boston in a unique and intimate way.         The following is an account of my personal expedition through the Triennial.   Stop 1: Triennial 2025 Hub at Lyrik         To explore the Triennial properly, I decided that I needed a map—a physical one, mind you—and some swag. I stopped by the Triennial headquarters located at the Lyrik, a shopping mall and multi-use space on the edge of the Back Bay and Kenmore neighborhoods. This event space serves as the mustering point for the Triennial, where many of their public programs are held and where interested visitors can get information and merchandise. In addition to my map, I collected some free Triennial stickers (a must!) and saw a work by Berlin-based artist Julian Charrière: an intriguing multimedia work titled Calls for Action (2024-ongoing). Installed in a corner of the Triennial’s headquarters, a dark curtain conceals a theater-like space with a seating area (in the form of bean bag chairs) arranged in front of a large screen playing a 24-hour live-stream video of an old growth Brazilian rainforest. The telephone reference in the title is not merely symbolic—a sign at the entrance of the space instructs the visitors on the interactivity that shapes this piece. “Dial +1 (484) 922-8466 to call into the forest. Your voice travels to a rainforest in Brazil, echoing through a speaker and appearing in real-time on the speaker before you.” Calls for Action embraces technology to transport viewers to a remote and fragile location under threat, and to remind them of the power of even a single voice.   Stop 2: Boston Public Library, Central Library         Leaving the Triennial headquarters, my next stop was just a few blocks away. Located in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, the Central Library of the Boston Public Library is a magnificent mash-up of Gilded Age and modern architecture, housing thousands of books, movies, and CDs, and providing some of the best reading and study spaces in the city. As one of the preeminent public buildings in Boston, it is only fitting that it is hosting a novel (pun intended) literary-themed work in its atrium as part of the Triennial.         Occupying a central place within the library is Sibylant House by artist Caledonia Curry, who also goes by “Swoon.” Based on the artist’s serialized fairytale novella titled Sibylant Sisters, Sibylant House is one element of a multi-part artwork that makes up In the Well: The Stories We Tell About Addiction. Through the archetype of a four-sided structure, the work showcases different characters and narratives as if each wall represents a new chapter. Fenestration and found materials create a lens through which whimsical, expressive figures peer out at the audience. Their identities and stories are left largely up to the viewer to write for themselves using the objects and colors that make up each scene.           For more adventures with the Sibylant Sisters, also explore Gallery J at the Central Library and keep an eye out for Swoon’s divination cards wheatpasted throughout Boston.   Stop 3: Faneuil Hall         To reach my next stop, I navigated through the narrow streets of Boston’s old city center, past ancient burying grounds, the Old State House, through throngs of tourists, and to the old city center. It was a Friday afternoon, and musicians crooned “Maggie, won’t you be mine,” on Franklin Street to enthralled listeners while hot and sweaty families trudged along the Freedom Trail, an urban path that connects sites of American Revolutionary significance. Following my map, I found myself in the center of the chaotic and boisterous scene at Faneuil Hall, Boston’s historic indoor/outdoor shopping mall and food court—very different from the quiet, studious atmosphere of the Boston Public Library.         One of the amusing parts of the Triennial is that, while I knew I was looking for a work of public art, I was never sure what I was looking for. Was it a mural? A sculpture? A video installation or something three-dimensional? As I peered through the crowded streets, I saw a bright chartreuse sign in the distance signaling another Triennial work. This next piece was large, bold, and located within a busy part of the market. I enjoyed watching people walk by and then pause, with looks of confusion, laughter, and awe. Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian) (2025) was created by the artistic group New Red Order, self-described as

“Ghost” Jarvis Art, Sep 4, 2025–Oct 4, 2025 by Paul Moreno A new gallery, Jarvis Art, has opened in Chinatown with an elegant exhibition of paintings connected by the theme of landscape. The show brings together twenty works by seventeen artists whose names, on the gallery’s spare website, are listed alphabetically in understated white type on a black rectangle. In its simple straight forward presentation, this listing format echoes the direct and easy way the paintings are presented. Without much fuss, the show, titled Ghost, teases out a modern idea of landscape painting that relies on expressive gestural mark making to evoke the movement of light through the quakings of nature, or even the stillness of structures. It also evokes a fresh idea that the known landscape is subject to precarity as we continue to lumber deeper into climate crises and slouch deeper into a way of seeing that is reliant on screens—the TV-sized ones that decorate our living rooms with preloaded overhead photos of far-away places, photographed from drones. Or the screens that we carry in our hands, on which we quickly look at paintings with which we will never even share the same room.         The one artist who is represented by more than a single work is John Maclean, a London-based Scottish artist from whom we see four small watercolors. These are the most plainly landscape of all the works in the show. Each is a dreamy little snapshot of clearings and flora, composed of dots and dashes, rich in color and movement. Gold Birch, a depiction of a path through an allée of birches, with its vibrant ochres obscuring an aqua blue sky, feels apropos to the unseasonably cool end of summer in the city. Another untitled one of these is especially notable for its nearly psychedelic use of velvety earth and jewel tones creating a picture where time of day and distinction between near and far are blurred. They can be seen to evoke use of an Instagram filter without abandon, but the artist’s choices are deliberate, specific, and controlled.           A contrast to these, in both size and representation, is one of the largest works in the show, Daniel Licht’s Liar. It is comprised of four adjoined panels, painted with oil and wax, pigmented by the artist with natural minerals. The colors are chalkboard green, rusty browns, and yellowy whites, which feel like they are laid on like frosting, pushed and pulled into areas that became delicate skims or gritty impastos. The artist employs a technique that reminds me of Joan Mitchell—letting the four panels have marks that transgress the edge of one panel and continue onto the next, while also having marks that stop abruptly at a particular panel’s edge. This brings the viewer into the process of art making in an exciting way, letting someone imagine the sequence in which the artist made his movements. It says something about the way we construct a panorama in our mind, seeing a broad landscape broken down into adjoining sections. It also addresses how our memory works—how the way we might remember one moment does not always perfectly align with the way we remember the next.           Max Ruf supplied a particularly engaging and enigmatic oil on canvas. Untitled (phthalo green lines, connected, white over black, red and green) is exactly what the title says it is. I looked and then re-looked at this picture multiple times. I wonder if I did not see it in the context of “‘landscape,” if I would have seen it as an overhead image of a racetrack or a digital-moiré reproduction of a guide one might pick up when visiting a historic home and its surrounding gardens. But if I get my mind to tilt the picture up to vertical, and see it not as a flat representation of something else, if I just let it be on the wall in front of me, the composition becomes stacks, cantilevers, floaters, and a bouncy swirl which all play with gravity in a way that is a bit delightful.           In a somewhat similar way, Variations in Time, a 1964 canvas by Forrest Bess, took a little adjustment of expectation to see as landscape. I think of Bess as a painter of symbols, essentially interested in the flatness of the canvas. Looking at this small painting however, I could recall driving through the barrenness of western Texas, through monochromatic fields of yellow grasses punctuated by the occasional hill on the generally flat horizon. By including this painting in this room of landscapes, the gallery has introduced me to an unexpected way, of looking at Bess’s collection of rhythmic, mostly vertical, marks of deep mustard, seemingly scraped out of the eerie masking tape-yellow field of short brush marks.           One last little gem in this show, Garden Within, is a 2002-09 painting by Joan Snyder. Although her paintings over the decades of her career have varied greatly in style, this work is not like anything I have seen before. It is nearly two paintings in one. There is the 18 x18 inch square panel that is the ground of the painting, and which contains a smaller panel that is centered from left to right, but from top to bottom, is slightly lower than center. The center panel is mostly rich leafy acid greens, flecked with yellow, and occasionally blotched with murky white. The tiny green rectangle is interrupted by bursts of visceral pink, nearly rose-like, clumps. The larger panel is a ground of pale pinks and yellows playing with white, through which swirling ribbons of pink appear to dance. Through these ribbons, scribbles of barely-there green pencil marks snake about. This small painting almost looks ceramic and epitomizes the jolie-laide. It feels intimate and pretty and personal.           In a sense, every landscape is personal. A landscape is

There’s a Darkness at the Edge of Town. “Tom Torluemke, Live on Paper, 1987–2024” Chicago Cultural Center, May 24—August 10, 2025 by Neil Goodman I have known Tom Torluemke for many years and, in some ways, have always considered him a kindred spirit. I grew up in northwest Indiana, also known as “da region,” and taught at Indiana University Northwest in Gary for thirty-eight years. Tom, although born in Chicago, has spent most of his career in northwest Indiana (first Hammond and now Dyer), where he both works and lives. The heyday of NW Indiana coincided with the rise of the steel industry. If we view it now as an outpost of Chicago, it was once a series of smaller cities (Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Highland, and the Harbor) that encompassed the entire region. If someone asks where you are from, you will refer to those smaller locales, as each had a distinct economic and racial profile. These communities with once vibrant downtowns have largely been replaced by shopping malls and box stores. Large segments of the population have moved south to areas like Crown Point, Schererville, St. John, and Valparaiso. This is Tom’s subject—urban meeting suburban—and, like Springsteen’s songs, his paintings and sculptures are often poignant and empathetic portraits of their time and place.         Having been familiar with Tom’s work throughout the years, his exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center was a powerful and diverse exploration of his works on paper. For audiences less familiar with this oeuvre, the exhibition featured large and small-scale works with a variety of subjects and techniques—some works were entirely abstract, while others were representational. Tom seems to have an intuitive and unedited imagination, as hand and thought seem organically linked with limited second-guessing and editing. There is an approachability to his art that speaks to audiences with various levels of artistic experience The wide range of work equally seems to have something for everybody and is engaging both formally and narratively.           Tom’s career spans his work as a painter, muralist, sculptor, and gallery director. From 2002 to 2009, Tom and his wife, Linda Dorman, ran Uncle Freddy’s Gallery in Hammond, then Highland, Indiana. During its tenure, Uncle Freddy’s Gallery was the artistic hub of the northwest Indiana community, hosting exhibitions and forums. Tom was always approachable, eager, warm, and encouraging to the many struggling artists in the region who were trying to find their way and looking for exhibition opportunities or community support. Uncle Freddy’s was the place, and as it no longer exists, for the time, it was an important component of the Northwest Indiana region life.         Below, is an interview I had with Tom about Uncle Freddy’s Gallery and his exhibition at the cultural summer this summer.         Neil: Why did you name the gallery Uncle Freddy’s?         Tom: We named the gallery after my Great Uncle Freddy. I credit my life as an artist to him. He taught me the importance of visual communication. He was deaf and mute and took care of me much of the time when I was young. We communicated by drawing pictures of what we wanted to do each day. As I grew older, the drawings became more complex. He was teaching me to be an artist.         Neil: Why did you open the gallery and why did you close?         Tom: We love art and artists. It’s difficult to be picked up by a gallery. There are so many incredible artists out there, from all walks of life and all ages, who find it daunting to court a gallery for a long time. We wanted to create a more nurturing environment for artists. We simply love strong art and want to help artists.         It’s difficult to do justice to the artists and their work, and we didn’t have a clientele in Indiana to sustain the gallery, even with all the attention we were getting. We used all our resources to keep it going. It was too difficult to sustain, so we closed the gallery to focus on my work.           Neil: Also, do you ever see yourself starting a gallery again?         Tom: Maybe, if everything lines up just right.         Neil: As you mentioned, you had quite a community of artists that frequented Uncle Freddy’s Gallery. Who were some of the artists that exhibited with you, including those who have gone on to more visible careers?         Tom: We surprised ourselves when thinking about the answer to this question. The list is strong and long, although two have since passed away: Adelheid Mers, Patrick McGee, Ish Muhammad Nieves, Jno Cook, Gregg Hertzlieb, Stephen Marc, Gordon Ligocki, Billy Pozzo, Felix Maldonado.         Some were established, some were well on their way, some were emerging, but all made substantial contributions.           Neil: Tell me about your partnership with Linda as you seem to work together as a team.         Tom: When I was priced out of Chicago and moved to Hammond, I began organizing arts activities around northwest Indiana, including exhibits, events, and happenings in Hammond. People involved started to say I should meet with Linda because she was doing similar things for the arts. Unbeknownst to me, these people were telling Linda the same thing. So, we met and had a conversation that never stopped. We worked perfectly together; we each have different strengths, and we got the best out of each other. Our first office was on the curb at Fayette Street and Hohman Avenue in Hammond, where we would meet every morning.         The rest is history, and we have been working together since 2001. We got married in 2020.           Neil:

“Amy Beeler: Domestic Lines, Quiet Rituals” Toledo Museum of Art, July 23 to October 10, 2025 by K.A. Letts Amid the cacophony of current art practice that often privileges visceral sensation and political agitprop over deep thought, fiber artist Amy Beeler’s exhibition “Domestic Lines, Quiet Rituals,” at the Toledo Museum of Art, instead proposes a contemplative island of calm. Relentlessly personal and centered upon the artist’s domestic life and family, the artwork is consistent in media and method but ranges widely in theme—rom nostalgia for changing social and familial customs, to environmental concerns, to the everyday feminism embodied in household routine.         The material that Beeler has chosen for expressive use is the humble clothesline rope. She stitches the soft cord together into freeform sculptures that reference beads, necklaces, agricultural topography, and sometimes, household objects. Additional wooden accents provide structure and visually punctuate formal elements of the artworks.           At the entrance to the exhibition, a basket of laundry sets the terms for the collection of artworks in the show around everyday routines of family life. Beeler valorizes the day-to-day activities of home keeping as central to the family and to broader social cohesion. Ties That Bind (Laundry Wristpins) recognizes the value of domestic labor while also ironically acknowledging its confining nature; elegant wooden hand cuffs physically attach the carrier of the basket to a routine quotidian task.           Beeler’s 20-year professional history as a designer and creator of jewelry is evident in the many artworks, necklaces, collars, bracelets, and capes on display referencing the body. The Games We Played, a large free-form necklace of clothesline and wooden beads, nostalgically recalls Rubatuba, a pastime of the artist’s childhood in the 1980s. The game involved moving a marble by physical contortions through a plastic tube wrapped around the player’s body. She explains, “More than just a memory of a game, this piece honors the broader experience of play—the spontaneous, joyful moments with others that didn’t need boards or rules to feel like a game.”         Beeler’s extraordinary economy of means doesn’t limit the wide variety of subjects addressed in her work. I Live in the Goiter Belt, a bulbous and constricting collar designed to surround the wearer’s neck, addresses the personal anxiety of living with the threat of thyroid cancer, a genetically related illness suffered by Beeler’s mother and sisters and a pervasive environmental risk in the Midwest.           Beeler’s intense concern for the environment extends from her family farm near Toledo into the Lake Erie Basin, a nearby environmentally compromised region, where Ohioans are both affected by and responsible for hazardous pollution. Her environmental advocacy finds form in a wearable replica of Lake Erie, Participant, Lake Erie, a sinuously winding map of the lake that traces the patterns of surface currents down the body. Unique to the artworks of this exhibition, this piece is not white but stained and dyed to illustrate the impact of toxic algal blooms that annually impact the lake and its inhabitants.         Like many of her sculptures, Soft Terrain and Quiet Middle emphasizes the circular nature of domestic activity, of home life built around a recurring set of activities involving a close circle of family members. She makes further pointed references to this relationship with her Gathering Table, inviting gallery visitors to engage physically with the work and encouraging communal meditation on their shared experience.           Spanning one corner of the gallery, 15 panels of Remembrance, Loss and Lasting, memorializes the departed women of Beeler’s family. Each square of the installation is related to the others through interlocking lines of kinship and refers to a particular family member. Beeler says, “The topographical design, created using varying rope sizes, gives the pieces a textured, maze-like feel much like a meditation garden…intended to inspire peace, reflection and mindfulness.”           Historical attitudes that devalued women’s work and associated crafts in relation to fine art have weakened over time but linger, even as quilt-making, fiber work, basketry, ceramics and the like inch ever nearer to the center of the cultural mainstream. Beeler’s insistence on the centrality of family relationships and domesticity to her art practice demonstrates quiet but persistently radical feminism as she explores the overlap between traditional craft ways and craft-adjacent fine art devoted to aesthetics and intellectual content.   K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.

“The Unusual Suspects: Art from Unexpected Materials” Hygienic Art, New London, Connecticut by D. Dominick Lombardi New galleries have a long history of bringing back bygone buildings where rents were once less expensive. SoHo, in lower Manhattan, is the one example spoken of most often that exemplifies the turnaround from scary streets to cutting edge culture. I remember all the loft parties and gallery openings I attended throughout the 1970s, as well as the feeling of being in a place related in part to the Dada movement of the 1910s in Zurich or the 1950s era Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Of course, those earlier examples and locations were markedly different from SoHo of the 1970s, especially due to the impact of two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times, had many commonalities. A spark of that past can be found today at Hygienic Art gallery in New London, Connecticut, albeit on a much smaller scale. Hygienic Art began with the transformation of a well-known but long neglected inner-city diner. It was reborn as a challenging exhibition space where the effect on the local culture ranges well beyond its walls.         The physical renovation at Hygienic Art left quite a bit of the history of the original eatery—the old, tiled flooring; a long, worn Formica counter, complete with swiveling stainless steel stools; and remnants of a working short order kitchen remain intact. There’s no mistaking it; this was once a diner.           Today, it stands as an edgy exhibition space consisting of four rooms. The entrance contains the repurposed kitchen and counter area with portions of an opposing wall available to install art. A larger space around the corner consists of two clearly connected flow-through rooms that offer ample space for wall works and sculptures where there once were tables and booths. A lower level down a flight of stairs has been completely renovated and turned into an open space for installation and wall art.         The nine artists featured in “The Unusual Suspects: Art from Unexpected Materials” are Kamal Ahmad, Howard el-Yasin, Carol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Eric Grau, Deborah Hesse, Alison McNulty, Suzan Shutan and Brian Walters. The exhibition’s theme, which maintains the idea of the found, unconventional, repurposed object as a primary medium is well covered by the curator, and exhibiting artist, Carla Goldberg.           Starting in the entrance room are a number of works by Carol Flaitz. Working primarily with encaustic on charred wood, Flaitz creates reflective earthscapes featuring intensified colors in fluid transitions. The two larger works are more dimensional than the small ones, as the artist is able to set a layer of blackened wood and cosmic color slightly above a dark background textured with crystalline salts and ground glass. This separation of bright color edged in burnt wood above an elaborate blackness suggests the ever-shifting plates of the earth that sometimes cause earthquakes and tsunamis. This darker read makes the colorful upper layer more about chemical spills and ground or water pollution rather than a wondrous and wild world.           In the second room are works by Suzan Shutan and Howard El-Yasin. Shutan utilizes craft store materials such as plastic straws, colorful fuzzy string, and tiny pom poms to bridge the gap between drawing, sculpture, and architecture. Shutan’s most striking work is Detrimental Sips (2000-25), a wall mounted construction in a triangle-based geometric pattern that looks like a “funky town” train trestle crafted with bent plastic straws and a tar-like glue. Judging by the title, Shutan is making a statement about the dangers of plastic straws on marine life, while the structure itself suggests a potential bridge across a worrisome waterway. This combination of references clearly highlights a separation of realities and pinpoints a lack of understanding or responsibility since almost every man-made structure in some or many ways negatively affects the environment.             Furthering the realm of political art are the works by Howard El-Yasin. Using baked banana peels to create Bananas, Bananas, Bananas (2018–19), El-Yasin focuses attention on the hidden atrocities of the burgeoning banana business. During the earliest days of production, the1928 Banana Massacre in Santa Maria, Columbia took place, wiping out as many as 2,000 innocent people. Overworked Brillo, which is a patchwork of squarish steel wool scrubbing pads, indirectly mocks Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes (1964) and puts the emphasis on the drudgery of the woesome kitchen worker. Both works are about power inequities that seems to be getting worse by the hour.           Dominating the third space are the surreal sculptures of Erik Grau. Using concrete and natural and synthetic materials, Grau offers multi-level, fantastical landscapes that feature a fairy tale surface area with caves and transitional spaces below. The pure magic of it all punctuated by the presence of numerous mushrooms prompts visitors to open up, breathe, and wonder.           Sharing the space with Grau are works by three artists: Deborah Hesse, who constructs “spatial wall paintings” that float off the wall suggesting a multiverse of earthly locations; Brian Walters who weaves strips of rusted painted metal to create post-apocalyptic baskets; and last but not least, Carla Goldberg, who offers the eerily epic Eulogies (2022), made from the resurrected materials that once encircled the Jacob Javits Center on New York City’s West Side during the worst days of COVID. Hanging now a few inches from the gallery wall, Eulogies’s reshaped, recovered Plexiglas covered with scratched black pigment suggests the darkest days of the pandemic when New York City was totally unnerved and in full lock-down mode.           In the lower level are the works of two artists, Kamal Ahmad and Alison McNulty. Ahmad clearly reaches his lofty goal of creating an installation that speaks of “loss, survival, and resilience.” Using

“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

Figure of a Gentle Gay Manifesto: “Undercurrents” Nathan Brad Hall, Gallery Victor, June 20–August 30, 2025 by Michel Ségard Throughout history, figuration in art has almost always been the carrier of a message—religious, political, or social—beyond the immediate appreciation of the human form. This dual content is what makes studying the depiction of the human figure so interesting, even in our post-modern era. Gallery Victor is known for showing figurative works that have roots in historical realism yet have a contemporary punch. This exhibition of works by Nathan Brad Hall is a prime example. Hall uses all the techniques of realism developed during and since the Renaissance-particularly chiaroscuro, the careful shading of skin to achieve precise modeling or the meticulous rendering of hair. But he mixes these techniques with subtle areas of impasto—to him, a nod to expressionism—to call attention to certain parts of a painting. The results are a series of large dramatic images of nude male figures that speak to much more than the beauty of the male body.         Meant to be the centerpiece of the show, I Love You the First Time is an oil on linen painting measuring 80 x 120 inches that dominates by its sheer size. Mottled light creates a focus on the face. Two highlights on the forehead are areas with impasto that help call attention to the eyes. Note also the fine detail of the eyebrows and lashes, the reflection of the eyelashes in the whites of the eyes, and the mottling of the skin tones on the nose. Now, to be fair, Hall did not make up these details; he works from multiple photos that he takes of posed models. What is special is that he can painstakingly reproduce those details where necessary. In this painting, the result is an expression that, almost on the verge of being tearful, can be interpreted as conveying deep affection and honesty.           Threshold, another large canvas 60 x 96 inches in size, next caught my attention. This painting stands out as being the only frontal nude. Again, lighting is directed to dramatically emphasize certain parts of the body. We see a severely split face with the left side in bright light and the right in almost total darkness. Resting on a green chaise, the figure’s right hand, is strongly lit, while the left is barely visible. The inner right thigh is highlighted next to genitalia which are almost completely in shadow. The presence of a silhouette of an open mouth on the wall behind the subject draws us away from the figure and to some unknown dream space. This state is reinforced by the looser rendering of the figure than is seen in other paintings. Note that in the face, the beard is not rendered in as fine detail as in I Love You the First Time. In contrast to other paintings, the chest skin is depicted in broader swatches that show the brush strokes. From a purely technical standpoint, the execution of the hand is masterful. All of this reinforces the dreamlike nature of the painting. It also elucidates a hidden meaning in the work: the important aspects of a person are their mind and their skill; their sexuality is nearly irrelevant.           That is not to say that sexuality should be dismissed. Elsewhere is the only painting in the show that is overtly sexual. Yet it is just a provocative image of a face. It demonstrates how compelling youth and beauty can be—especially when there is an undertone of androgyny. Note the exaggerated eyelashes (enhanced by mascara?) and the pouting voluminous lips, along with the flowing, tousled, blond hair. But don’t miss the slightest hint of a mustache above those Nicki Minaj pink lips (almost certainly more makeup). This image is pure sex in its most carnal form. It reminded me of sex workers, drag queens, and Andy Warhol’s movie Flesh. Elsewhere is the conceptual opposite of Threshold, and an acknowledgement of the existence of strong libido in the Gay world. But Elsewhere shows us a camp incarnation often perceived as the gay norm in the straight world.           For me, the most compelling painting was Gossamer. This painting is of a ballet dancer casually seated on a rug, the light focused on his back, buttocks, and feet making a gentle arc. The first thing one notices is how thin he is—his ribs and the vertebrae of his upper spine are visible. The impasto technique is employed on the left buttock, highlighting the most muscular part of the dancer. His feet are meticulously detailed, calling attention to the other main part of a dancer’s physique. But what is unusual is the rendering of his hair. It does not have the fine detail seen in Elsewhere; it is more like the hair seen on Greek statues, thick matts of curls casually sketched in. The model radiates a quiet androgyny with his gentle pose, giving the painting a romantic air. It is the same pose seen in one of the figures in Scott Tuke’s The Bathers from 1890. That painting depicts three naked adolescent youths on a sailboat—the one on the lower left positioned in the same pose. The painting was was in the exhibition “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939” at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago earlier this year. In Gossamer, we see the image of Platonic innocence in the young, relaxed dancer, in contrast to the seductive allure of Elsewhere.   Then there is Day Break, a self-portrait of the artist in a fetal position. Lying on a heavily patterned rug, there are no “separate” highlghts calling attention to particular parts of the body; it is entirely highlighted. What gives this piece its tension is the fact that the subject’s hands are over his head, as if trying to protect itself from something. So, the pose becomes defensive—suggesting the anticipation and fear

Expo Chicago 2025 Navy Pier, Festival Hall, Chicago, April 24–27, 2025 As is our custom, the New Art Examiner sent two reviewers to cover this fair, a staple in the Chicago contemporary art scene for more than 40 years. Below are Evan Carter’s and Michel Ségard’s perceptions of the fair.   Cultural capital is pretty much just capital now by Evan Carter         We report on every iteration of EXPO Chicago. Since little changes year to year, it seems appropriate this time to treat the event as a snapshot of the contemporary art market and the role the Midwest plays in it.         EXPO has gradually shifted from the presentation of a broad scope of materials, methods, and scale to a painting salon with galleries and artists both functioning as the participants.          It is unlikely that we will encounter sights and experiences akin to what was presented in the earliest iterations of EXPO Chicago. Activities like Tarot Card readings by Rhonda Wheatley or a floor-to-ceiling sculpture of colorful laundry baskets by Jessica Stockholder seemed to be a punny critique of the art fair itself. Pieces such as these skewed away from monetary value and toward the value of cultural experience. The shift away from this kind of work is lamented by some and celebrated by others.         I ran into a friend who is an artist and professor and, to my surprise, was glad EXPO was not pretending to be something other than what it is. They were also pleased about what it does for the city in terms of cultural and economic activity. EXPO always has its haters who express disdain for an elite and capital driven art world, but this attitude tends to ignore the fact that artists need funding and support to enable them to produce work and reach an audience. The event also brings commerce to the city and activates other galleries and cultural spaces throughout Chicago.           So, what kind of work did we see? What did galleries from around the world bring to present at this salon-style event? As mentioned earlier, the works presented were almost entirely two-dimensional, consisting mostly of painting. This makes sense given that flat works are easier to transport and sell. Within this consistency of constraint, it is more interesting to consider each gallery’s approach. Chicago’s Secrist | Beach had prime real estate and used it to effectively showcase a roster of artists they represent. Secrist | Beach often presents thoughtful figurative abstraction with lively palettes that are rarely garish. Though the materials and methods differed the overall aesthetic vision of the gallery was clear. The same could not be said of other galleries presenting multiple artists. For example, Ethan Cohen Gallery displayed a hodgepodge of mixed media works that evoke the kind of art experience one might encounter at a mid-tier mall kiosk. These kinds of thrown together displays were rather common and had a diminishing effect on the respective artists’ whose voices felt muted. For a gallery with two locations in New York and a penchant for exhibiting politically charged work, their curatorial voice and vision also seemed lost.           Some works, like Devan Shimoyama’s Le Monde at New York’s De Buck Gallery booth, managed to stand out in these situations. De Buck Gallery also packed many works into a small space. However, it is important to note that galleries have difficult decisions to make in choosing what to ship. Their concern may be making up the cost of participation in an art fair with a high buy in. According to the EXPO website, the smallest booths (400 square feet) start at $26,400 and the largest (1000 square feet) at $66,000.            These price points are nothing for the heavy hitters like Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, who currently dominate the already domineering New York art market. Hauser & Wirth profited handsomely from sales of paintings by Lorna Simpson that sold for close to $300,000 each. With five locations in capital art cities around the globe, Lisson Gallery also pulled in six figure sales from works by Stanley Whitney and Carmen Herrera. Early sales figures by even the most high-profile Chicago galleries were significant but hardly equivalent, according to artsy.net. It begs the question of how well other local and international galleries fared in their endeavors to reach a wider audience. There were a few of those that stood out not just for the quality of work displayed but also because the galleries made the choice to represent single artists at their booths.         Here are just a few: Scott Wolniak—Goldfinch          Goldfinch, one of Chicago’s younger galleries, is adept at striking a balance between traditional media and innovative ideas. In recent years, longtime Chicago painter Scott Wolniak has found a creative rhythm that has yielded what could be his definitive body of work. He does what so few others (if any) do these days–lending modes of abstraction, figuration, pattern, color, and symbolism with a playful kind of effortlessness that produces images that have the capacity to pull the viewer away from the turmoil of the world without being overly escapist. If anything is left to be desired in this work, it is relative to the constraints placed upon the medium of paint. Layers of thin washes are predominant, but interesting things could happen if the material were to be handled with a more expansive range. Perhaps it will be in future work.    Jacob Feige—Pentimenti         Pittsburgh’s Pentimenti Gallery presented a series of works by artist Jacob Feige whose abstract portraits of nameless ambiguous faces have a distinctly iconic quality. Even without discussing them with a gallery representative, these otherworldly iconographic mixed media works are clear byproducts of the digital age. They are almost like cubist self-portraits, made by Artificial Intelligence

“The Gun Violence Memorial Project” Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), May 2–July 10, 2025 by K.A. Letts Gun violence in America is a subject we are sick of yet can’t leave alone. We come back again and again to this wound that never heals with another poignant, yet seemingly futile, lament for the dead. “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” which opened on May 2 and will continue until July 10, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), adds a new and viscerally wrenching entry into the public discourse on the social contagion of gun violence.           Sacred silence surrounds the four room-size white chapels arranged, side by side, in the museum’s Woodward Gallery. Visitors can enter the pristine, stylized structures, which bring to mind columbaria found in cemeteries or church yards. Each house of remembrance contains 700 alcoves, corresponding to the approximate number of gun deaths every week in the United States. Much like the panels of the AIDS Quilt, the glass-enclosed, honey-comb coffers contain the physical traces of individuals whose lives were taken by gun violence—baby shoes, graduation tassels, and photographs offered up by the families of the victims. No distinction is drawn between school shootings, shootings in public places, or church-related violence, though that information, along with the unending variety of the shooters’ deranged motives, is available in awful detail online. All ages, races and religions are represented in a visual litany of endlessly repeated quotidian brutality.           A brief video documentary, filmed in Chicago, Washington D.C., and other U.S. cities, interviews survivors of gun violence and brings their grief into focus. Each story in “Comes the Light,” directed by Haroula Rose, is a simple retelling of events that are all-to-familiar yet earth-shattering for the bereaved.           A research and remembrance library installed in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition provides a site where art can meet advocacy. In addition to literature that directly confronts gun violence in the U.S., visitors can read about the history of protest art and study the philosophy of architecture as a social influence.           First presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project” has traveled to Washington, D.C. and Boston before coming to Detroit, a city with historically high gun violence rates. At each stop in the Project’s travel throughout the country, object collection events have been organized, during which families are invited to contribute artifacts memorializing loved ones lost to gun violence. The artifacts are then added to the memorial houses. There are plenty of open spaces.           “The Gun Violence Memorial Project” is organized by a variety of anti-gun violence organizations, some national and others local. The design and fabrication of the architectural component for the exhibitionis a collaboration between Songha & Company, with artist and creative director Hank Willis Thomas, and the Boston-based social justice/architectural collective MASS Design Group. Purpose Over Pain, a Chicago-based community organization that advocates for safer communities with programs like Safe Saturday Nights, 3 on 3 basketball tournaments, mentoring services, parent support days, and unsolved cases forums, among other programs, is also a facilitating partner in the project. Local Detroit sponsors include University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, Got Grief House, End Gun Violence Michigan.         MOCAD, as a non-collecting institution, is an ideal venue for this project. Unlike traditional museums that prioritize the maintenance of an art collection—and often inadvertently reinforcing established social and artistic norms—MOCAD focuses on embracing urgent social priorities that can inform its mission.         Jova Lynne, MOCAD’s Artistic Director, states, “As a contemporary art institution rooted in Detroit, we are committed to providing space for artists and communities to confront complex realities and envision new futures. “The Gun Violence Project,” with its powerful intersection of personal narrative, public memory, and collective grief, exemplifies how art can serve as both witness and catalyst for understanding.”           But the underlying question for creatives and art institutions at this moment is, how much real effect do projects of this kind have on creating societal change? No matter how well-intentioned, exhibitions that decry social ills without moving toward concrete solutions merely constitute high-minded aesthetic handwringing. To their credit, the organizations collaborating on the project have, through their many supporting events and programs, thought strategically about how to leverage public art to serve concrete political ends. We can hope that their persistent, multi-disciplinary advocacy, sustained over months and years, might—just might—result in meaningful change. K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner,a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries andmuseums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 2–August 2, 2025 By John Thomure As he has proved to be one of the most inventive and unique abstract painters in the United States, a proper retrospective of Jack Whitten’s work has been long overdue. Whitten always embraced and adapted new technologies as materials, tools, and metaphors in his practice. In an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, Whitten explained “My metaphors are found in scientific processes.”1 He believed that we live in a scientific age and that art should reflect the time it was made in. On display throughout the exhibition were the wide array of tools which Whitten built himself in order to achieve the unique surfaces of his paintings. These tools dictated the aesthetics of Whitten’s paintings. He was endlessly creative—from his earliest forays into painting to his later mosaic works. “Jack Whitten: The Messenger”documents the evolution of an artist who reinvented painting again and again from the discovery of his unique style of painting in the 1960s to his innovative smeared acrylic works made between the 1970s and 1980s to his final mosaic inspired body of work which he labored on until his death in 2018.         In his initial paintings, Whitten used all manner of approaches and materials, but with a decidedly political bent. A searing quote included in didactic text sums up Whitten’s intentions as an artist: “My paintings are designed as weapons; their objective is to penetrate and destroy the Western aesthetic. Their final objective is political in nature.” He mixed figuration and abstraction, struggling to find a way of assimilating his political ideas with his technical skill. Born in Bessemer, AL, under what Whitten referred to as the “American apartheid” of segregation, he was politically radicalized at a young age. A meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. compelled Whitten to participate in marches and protests for civil rights.2 These experiences demonstrably shaped his early work.           As Whitten grew into his multifaceted style, his political intentions became less heavy-handed and obvious. He turned to abstraction in an attempt to craft a new culture for Black Americans. He wrote in his journal that Black people in America had been cut off from their culture, and that it was his role as an artist to invent a new cultural paradigm.3 Whitten’s titles referred to prominent Black artists and philosophers. A painting like Sorcerer’s Apprentice alludes to Miles Davis’s album Sorcerer, revealing Whitten’s interest in augmenting his process paintings with chance operations inspired by the musician’s improvisational explorations. “There must be a visual equivalent to jazz… an actual object expressing the same pathos. I want my art to show this.”4 Jazz is a defining part of Black culture in America. Most especially in the 1960s and 1970s, it was opposed to American pop music in that it valued collaboration, history, and community over monetary success and crass individuality. Likewise, Whitten’s work sought to challenge dominant notions of painting brought about by the Western interpretation of art history.         Whitten was an early adopter of acrylic paint, a relatively new medium at the time. It became the foundation of his painting practice. Siberian Salt Grinder exemplifies Whitten’s 1970s style. It was created by pushing acrylic paint across a floor-mounted canvas with a unique invention, The Developer, a large plastic squeegee mounted on a massive wooden t-joint. The large size of The Developer allowed Whitten to smear a swath of paint in a single stroke. He would continue to invent attachments and iterations of The Developer including combs, rakes, and such to provide new textures in his paintings. To complicate the image even further, Whitten would place pieces of wire under the canvas to create impressions of lines and forms like fossils amongst sedimentary layers of paint. Whitten likened this process to photography in that it captured a moment in time instantaneously.5 This technique would evolve as he would take fragments of paint and place them onto still drying layers, allowing him to create more complex and dense compositions. The “painting-as-collage” works compress disparate instances of time—captured with The Developer into a single plane.6 His studio was like a laboratory of innovation, from the materials used to the tools he invented to the ideas he documented across his life in his journals. Breaking new ground is what excited him.           Whitten’s aesthetic experiments extended past just painting to his forays into printing after receiving a grant from Xerox. Liquid Space I was created by soaking the paper in water before applying the Xerox’s toner ink to the surface. The ripples generated by the paper drying created the form of the composition.           Seeing Whitten’s work as an oeuvre, it becomes clear how organic and self-generating his painting practice was. Despite the constant fluctuation of his painting style, Whitten’s work displays a persistent ingenuity. His final mosaic works are the culmination of all of his previous experimentation in unorthodox materials and procedural image making. Each piece of these domineering paintings are small fragments of acrylic paint, cut into blocks and composed into sculptural paintings which suggest cityscapes, nebulas, or circuits. Additionally, Whitten would pour acrylic paint over manhole covers and corrugated steel and pull the dried paint up to create relief molds. These reliefs would be collaged onto the surface of the canvas alongside the small mosaic pieces, embedding his surrounding environment into his works.           This retrospective proves how important Whitten has been to the development of Black art in America. Like other Black abstract painters, such as Sam Gilliam and Norman Lewis, he defied the stereotypes placed on him and believed whole-heartedly that his art could change society by changing the perception of the audience. His work endures because of his innovative methods and the underutilized materials that defined his aesthetic development from the 1960s to his death in 2018. His constant