Art Walk 2017 - Hosted by the Evening Associates

This year's autumn season in Chicago should be renamed #artseason. From September through December 2017, the city will be enamored with arts oriented events across every neighborhood: the Chicago Architecture Biennial, EXPO Chicago, Open House Chicago, and a number of other events will be at the top of the list for every art lover and advocate across the city, not to mention the innovative and interdisciplinary installations popping up all over town in celebration of the city's Year of Public Art. 

But before the insanity endures mid-month, take a moment to consider pre-gaming with us at our very own autumn debut, Art Walk - taking place next Thursday, September 7th in the River North gallery district. Hosted by the Board of Directors of the Evening Associates at the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Walk will take you on a grand exploration of about a dozen galleries and boutiques in River North, open late just for you. You'll have the option of taking one of two routes through the neighborhood, revisiting an array of interdisciplinary practices and works of art by contemporary artists. We'll end our night with cocktails at a new(ish) city escape, Marshall's Landing, and have an opportunity to prepare our eyes and ears (and livers) for the next few months of everything ART & Architecture here in Chicago. 

Info Here: http://www.artic.edu/event/art-walk

Tickets Here: https://sales.artic.edu/Events/Event/14126?date=9/7/2017

#ArtFEED

This past Sunday, Greg and I attended the fourth installment of ArtFeed, an innovative opportunity for museum visitors to gain an in-depth perspective on The New Contemporary collection, currently on view on the second floor of the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC).

ArtFeed is a brunch series, hosted by AIC’s Evening Associates, that fuses an in-depth lecture about a particular current exhibition with a breakfast buffet and a Bloody Mary bar.  Following the conversation, guests are also invited to visit the galleries and have the opportunity to engage with the aforementioned exhibit. 

The must-see collection, without a doubt, gives viewers a taste for contemporary art movements taking place in the United States generally since the 1950’s, with a large number of work emblematic of Pop-Art and Abstract Expressionism. Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly are just two of the artists represented in the collection of 44 paintings, photographs, and sculpture, gifted by Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; one of the largest and most important gifts in the museum’s history.

Overall, I would say the exhibit is vibrant, punchy, and engaging. During brunch, our lecturer cleverly pointed out that there is no distinct start or end to the exhibit, and works of art are not displayed in chronological order - but rather allow for the viewer to choose at which point they enter and exit this particular moment in art history. One of the benefits of this in-depth look is the opportunity to notice certain patterns in the collection as a whole, like for example the recurring theme of the female body, the trope of the gaze, and, of course, the referential nature into popular culture, evident in the work of both Warhol and Lichtenstein.

But for someone like me, who has studied Warhol and the others ad nauseum at school, this collection is particularly exciting to see together, jumbled up without a sense of chronology or hierarchy. I myself am not a fan of pop-art, nor of Warhol. But what I do find both significant and imperative, which I am sure became evident to both Development and Curatorial staff in the first few conversations with the gifting family, is that the collection itself allows one to stand back and view the historic moment in mid-century America more generally: an opportunity to view a moment in time through a variety of perspectives in an effort to understand our own culture more distinctly at a transitional moment in our history.

The New Contemporary is currently on view and more information on upcoming events can be found here: http://www.artic.edu/affiliate-groups/evening-associates

All photos by Greg Birman.

Andy Warhol

Cy Twombly

Why is Art necessary for survival?

Today I attended a Philanthropy Club meeting at LUMA, the Loyola University Museum of Art, on the 3rd floor next to the Martin D'Arcy collection of antiquities. Meaningless as it may be to you, I actually helped write labels for each work of art on display (at the time) for this collection back in 2008 before I graduated college (Loyola) that spring. I have to point this out because, truthfully, I haven't visited the collection since 2008, and in actuality closed the door to Art History since I finished my MA in the subject back in 2010. So, 6 years later, here I am again.

Recently, I find myself quite often repeating this line to people I meet for the first time: I abandoned art history five years ago, but here we are and here I am, and well...it found me again. I actually don't know what that really means other than simply this: I grew very tried of studying the study of art, so I threw myself at something I thought was completely different: civic engagement and social justice. And yet, today, I  advocate for art as, they like to say, a 'catalyst for social impact'. I'm still working out exactly what that means to me personally: I am a trained Art Historian, so my primal nature is to contextualize art objects, explain their significance to the historical trajectory of the practice, and then humanize the value of the object as well as the cult of the object's artist/maker. But in the last two years, I have moved away from THE OBJECT and THE ARTIST, and find myself contextualizing, explaining, and defending THE PRACTICE  - - making, creating, documenting, practicing art. 

At the Philanthropy Club meeting today, where the main topic of conversation was fundraising for the arts in Chicago (i.e examples and best practices), each of the guest panelists + moderator was asked this last question: why is Art necessary to survival?   I'm sure, if I had to re-write my MA Thesis again, 90 pages would only scratch the surface in answering why art is necessary for civilization's humanity and survival, but what I know now is that, very clearly, ART is necessary for mine.