Chicago Lowdown: Best Exhibitions Over EXPO ART WEEK and Beyond
Katherine Simóne Reynolds, The Scene of the Unseen (2023). Fibre, rag inkjet print. 40.5 x 70cm. Courtesy the artist.
Chicago's art scene was booming in April with a number of exceptional exhibitions opening around the city's flagship art fair, EXPO CHICAGO (13-16 April 2023).
Built on a solid grid system, Chicago's streets shoot straight west from the shores of Lake Michigan and travel true north and south from downtown. Ocula Contributor Casey Carsel shares exhibition highlights from EXPO ART WEEK, having visited shows across all four compass points.
Katherine Simóne Reynolds: A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing
Graham Foundation
25 March–10 June 2023
Katherine Simóne Reynolds' first solo exhibition in Chicago takes two predominantly black/African American towns in Southern Illinois—Cairo and Brooklyn—as case studies for an extended exploration of the Midwestern historical, social, and geographical landscape. The outcomes of these case studies are presented across the Graham Foundation's two floors of exhibition space in sculptures, photographs, acrylic nails, and a two-channel video work.
On the first floor, the artist has tucked dozens of painted clay Cliff Swallow nests around plaster festoons high on the walls. Cairo is on the species' migratory path and the birds are federally protected, meaning their homes cannot be moved; somewhat ironically, the tallest building in Cairo is currently in the process of evicting all its occupants.
The festoons, selected from an ornamentation catalogue that dates back to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, are inspired by a passage from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861), in which the protagonist is unable to see her dying father because the mistress of the house wants her to make to make festoons for a garden celebration.
Using these diverse reference points, in these and other works, the artist asks, who is free and who is protected in this world?
Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
19 November 2022–23 April 2023
There were many highlights in this group exhibition featuring 37 artists who live in the Caribbean, are of Caribbean heritage, or whose work is connected to the region. Curated by Carla Acevedo Yates, the presented works spanned multiple media and scales. One favourite near the beginning of the presentation is In the House of My Father (1996–97) by Donald Rodney.
A large colour photograph taken by Andra Nelki a few months before the artist's death, the image shows Rodney's larger-than-life outstretched hand holding a small sculpture of a house made of skin that was removed during surgery on the artist for sickle-cell anaemia. Joined together with small metal nails, the house and image echoes Rodney's preoccupation with inheritance and identity, in both cases underscored by a deep sense of precarity.
Ebony G. Patterson, who also featured in the 2023 IN/SITU presentation at EXPO CHICAGO, contributed her installation ...the wailing...guides us home...and there is a bellying on the land... (2021). A wall of images and objects in her signature floral, bright, and jewelled style, the installation features bedazzled lizards, beads, and pearls dripping from flowers, as well as a headless figure and paper butterflies.
As is the artist's way, a disquieting sense of threat pervades the surface glitter of the work—arms sticking up from unknown sources, a jewelled snake poised to strike—questioning what is cloaked by beauty, and the violent implications of fetishization.
Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection
Smart Museum of Art
21 March 2023–4 February 2024
The Smart Museum of Art's latest collection exhibition is inspired by the notion that the past is infinitely spiralling through the present and that the core concerns of artistic output are never invented, only revisited. The result of this framework is a series of pairings of work across histories, regions, and genres, in which familiar art is brought to new life through juxtaposition.
Mark Rothko's No. 2 (1962)—a pink and red oil painting on a warm peach canvas—is matched with a Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Benedict (c.1562) by the Italian painter and founder of the Genoese school Luca Cambiaso. Rothko visited Italy in 1950 and was moved by the country's ornately decorated churches; the trip inspired him to strive to evoke the spiritual and emotional experience of religious art such as Cambiaso's.
Both images swirl in soft reds, pinks, and purples. In Cambiaso's painting, Saint Benedict, draped in matte black, stands out from the other figures. In Rothko's image, the figure seems to lurk inside the darker layers underneath the surface colours, and perhaps underneath the surface of the artist himself, who would die by suicide less than a decade after the completion of this work.
Aria Dean: Abattoir, U.S.A.!
Renaissance Society
25 February–16 April 2023
Pushing through meatworks-style aluminium double doors to the Renaissance Society's vaulted one-room exhibition space, the smell hits first: a sanitised rubber that crawls into one's nostrils.
The pungent odour comes from the rubber matting that has been laid across the 85-metre space. Reflecting off this matting is the large screen that plays Dean's ten-minute film, Abattoir, U.S.A.!: a highly realistic rendering of a fictional empty slaughterhouse.
The work is inspired by philosophical writings on the slaughterhouse's role in civil society. Chicago is a fitting venue for this work, given that the city was sustained by its meat-packing industry for more than a century. The industry was so central to Chicago that the city became known as the 'hog butcher for the world' and the stockyards, closed in the 1980s, still reek of blood to this day.
Dean's film takes a short but intense journey through the constructed meatworks. The camera tilts through the cattle's path, with the walls of the meatworks replicated in the gallery space. The 8-channel score vibrates in the viewer's chest. Later, the blood on the floor in the film is thick and pulsating, and the meat hooks swing in upbeat unison. In a week so filled with art, the film manages to hold tight on the power to rattle one's core.
Over at EXPO CHICAGO, the Renaissance Society booth featured three small drawings executed by Dean during the exhibition's run. Each one is a depiction of simple skeletons in somewhat silly situations, and offers an insight into Dean's continued interest in death and absurdity, in a somewhat lighter mode than Abattoir, U.S.A.!.
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Art Institute of Chicago
8 April–3 July 2023
For her first solo museum show, Gio Swaby presents a wide range of recent and new portraits, all executed through machine-stitching and embroidery. The artist describes the exhibition as 'a love letter to the girl that I was ... very well-loved but didn't quite fit in anywhere.'
Swaby's work carries her family history with great love and care, honouring her parents and her home country of the Bahamas. Throughout the gallery space, silhouettes burst with the colour and floral life of the fabrics in which they are executed, while machine-embroidered portraits layer lines of thread to create weight, depth, and detail.
The most beautiful devils are in the details here: a coat made entirely out of embroidered flowers, threads that hang gently down off the canvas, the soft frayed edges of a fur coat replicated in cotton, the warm peach of the raw canvas against an eggshell blue wall, constellations formed across a woman's face by the thread that hangs between stitches, and perfect little imperfections in the knots and gathers of toggled thread tension.
Nelly Agassi: No Limestone, No Marble
Chicago Cultural Center
24 September 2022–14 May 2023
With its world-famous Tiffany dome, jewel-encrusted staircases, and mosaic floors and ceilings, the Chicago Cultural Center is always a beautiful stop for the artistically and architecturally inclined. Curated by Ionit Behar, Nelly Agassi's site-specific installation offers a personal response to these architectural details as well as the history of the building itself.
One enters through a mosaic-patterned carpeted area to a large room that lays bare the internal organs of the building—a series of flexible ducts—for The Quiet Before the Storm (2022). The work's soundtrack amplifies the breath of the space, spreading through the room like the soft hum of singing, exhaling, or electricity.
In the second room, light continues to stream through the large eastern windows, where it is reflected out by large, tinted mirrors—Choreography of the Windows (2022)—that replicate and abstract the shapes of the windows and what lies beyond them.
At most angles the viewer sees their reflected image, along with that of the museum—foreshadowing the collages that follow in later rooms and combine images of architecture and furniture features with portraits of various women—but there is a sweet spot in a couple of the mirrors, where the viewer can slip from the picture and into the joints of the art and perhaps into the building itself.
Esmaa Mohamoud: Let Them Consume Me In The Light
Kavi Gupta
14 April—29 July 2023
Near the reception area of Kavi Gupta's Elizabeth Street space, viewers may notice a few black dandelions on the ground. Entering the space more fully reveals a field of metal renditions of the plant, dusted in places with the yellow and red sunset colours of the lights above them.
The flowers are a part of the artist's installation Darkness Doesn't Rise To The Sun, But We Do (2022), which memorialises victims of police violence. The artist takes the 'weed' status of the dandelion and their hardiness, despite continued attempts at eradication, as a metaphor for the resilience of the black community in the face of oppression. The resultant work is a strong, powerful field of rest and contemplation.
Further into the gallery space are three more works by the artist, including a set of three busts atop Italian marble plinths, collectively titled Gluttony, Gluttony, Gluttony (2023). The busts are carved from shea butter referencing the faces of those who harvest shea-butter nuts in Ghana under exploitative conditions. The three figures face away from the entrance; refusing to easily meet the viewer's gaze.
In the gallery's booth at EXPO CHICAGO, another of these busts faces a wall, her face almost impossible to look upon—a jarring and effective gesture in a space where so much asks for the viewer's gaze.
Allana Clarke: I Feel Everything
Kavi Gupta
14 April—27 May 2023
From a distance, the works of Allana Clarke's latest exhibition at Kavi Gupta look like soft folds of fabric, but as one gets closer, the plastic hardness of these black, organic, large-scale reliefs reveals itself.
Made from hair bond glue, the artist manipulates the material with her hands and feet over the course of weeks, smoothing, roughing, and kneading until she has built worlds, fossils, and tar pits out of the substance.
Subverting the material's role as a product designed to bond extensions to the hair, the work dives into the worlds of meaning contained inside the colour black and meditates on the poetics of black space.
