Good news in the art world is — perhaps as always — scarce. Chicago has certainly been feeling the pain of change recently, with the city’s annual art fair, EXPO, shrinking by almost 25% (and excluding a section that featured many local nonprofits), university arts programs facing budget cuts and restructuring, and the DePaul Art Museum closing. However, what could be read as total doom also exposes a condition the city’s creative communities have always known: Artists here make their way, with or without institutional support.
Chicago’s rich cultural history, after all, has as much to owe to its thriving ecosystem of apartment galleries and alternative communities as it does to its big-ticket arts institutions. Given this landscape, it’s no surprise that artistic work here remains strong, even if it often points to existential threats. Many are addressing political and environmental peril, as is evident in shows at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Others are considering infrastructure, seen at LVL3 and Weatherproof. In a moment of institutional failure, it’s a great time to seek art in community and artist-run organizations.
Hunter Foster: Involition
Good Weather, 1524 S. Western Ave, Ste. 119-121, Building A, Chicago
Through April 4
For an exhibition invoking the ever-present threat of natural disasters, Involition is disarmingly slow. The show’s central feature, a rusting Thunderbolt Model 1003 restaged by multimedia artist Hunter Foster, stands quiet and anachronistic, its hulking electromechanical profile a relic of times past. The Thunderbolt, a line of supercharged rotating sirens, is a standardized object of the Midwest, manufactured and installed in the region to warn against Soviet nuclear attacks during the Cold War. The sirens were later adapted to alert for tornadoes in yet another example of the inextricable relationship between war and American infrastructure. At Good Weather gallery, the retired siren rotates a few degrees every four minutes, its piercing wail omitted, leaving only the tired groans of aging metal and the creeping sense of crisis.
Alison Ruttan: The Paradox of Inaction
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave, Chicago
April 4–July 12
Expansive and arresting, Alison Ruttan’s solo show utilizes an overwhelming abundance of ceramic forms resembling rooftops to recreate a scene of submerged suburbia. The installation immediately recalls the apocalyptic imagery of a flooded New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe from which the city has yet to fully recover 20 years later. As global warming increases the probability of extreme weather events, existing structural failures and impending cuts to key environmental and disaster-response agencies likewise increase the likelihood of displacement, destruction, and irreversible harm. By situating viewers in the middle of what is so often a distant encounter of disaster via screens, The Paradox of Inaction forces viewers to confront the urgency of climate change head-on.
It Will Destroy You
Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 West Chicago Ave, Chicago
Through April 19
This exhibition is a real-time reflection of working artists as they process their places in the heart of a collapsing empire. Curated by Chicago local artists and organizers Samiah Fulcher and Isaiah Lee, the group exhibition makes room for works that explore the converging axes of decay and the emerging possibilities for imagining new futures. A frequent theme in the show is the alienating contrast between lived experience and distant awareness in a moment of global uncertainty, embodied in the sickly hyperreal closeups of skin in Chloe Harthan’s paintings, the dejected characters of the Blue Line in Ethan Shay-Cowell’s works, and the prone, dirtied bodies in Michelle Alexander’s floor mats.
Carriage
LVL3, 1542 N. Milwaukee Ave, 3rd Floor, Chicago
Through May 3
In this understated duo exhibition, artists Hyeseul Song and Häsler Gómez turn a keen eye to the unnoticed materials, textures, and spaces of contemporary life. Song’s sculptures reflect a manner of attention that is somehow both obsessive and lighthanded, exemplified in works that replicate and transform a single found doorstop. The original, cut hastily from scrap wood marred by a dead knot, is reiterated countless times through 3D printing in black plastic, abstracting its functional use and enhancing the void that once held a dead branch. Gómez’s work complements Song’s focus on ubiquitous materials through hand-carved cardboard panels that emulate the woodgrain and exact shade of the gallery’s existing gray strip flooring.
Leah Ke Yi Zheng: Change, I Ching (64 Paintings)
The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago
Through April 12
As the title suggests, Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s profoundly meditative show comprises 64 unique paintings, corresponding to the 64 hexagrams contained within the I Ching. According to the ancient Chinese divination text, hexagrams are the graphic representations of the thoughts of Root-Breath, a primal dragon being whose way of thinking mirrored the processes of nature itself. Using canvases of varying sizes and translucencies and a range of muted colors, Zheng creates a body of work that takes on metamorphosis as its medium. As light and air shift through the gallery space, the paintings come alive with change: within themselves, between one another, and in the infinite relationships over time and space that they channel.
Mindy Rose Schwartz: Countersealed
M. LeBlanc, 3514 W. Fullerton Ave, Chicago
April 11–May 23
Utilizing traditional craft mediums like papier-mâché, macramé, and ceramics, Chicago artist Mindy Rose Schwartz creates objects that are equally humorous, emotional, and critical. Her confident works echo the feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, but are also decisively contemporary in their address of ongoing environmental and spiritual crises. “Les danseurs” (2017), a winding sculpture of glimmering white branches and golden thread, holds all the whimsy of a backyard fairy garden. At the same time, its looping expanses cradle something more serious: an intent devotional practice, manifest in its carefully wound cord, and an instinct to preserve, expressed through the jewelry and other precious charms suspended in its delicate web.
Nate Millstein: Duplexes
Weatherproof, 3336 W. Lawrence Ave, Ste. 303, Chicago
Through April 26
Sculptor Nate Millstein explores the tin ceiling, once a means for Americans in the late 1800s to approximate the expensive plasterwork of European homes, as a way to subvert expectations of everyday forms in this solo show. In his wall-spanning installation, Millstein retains much of the language of Victorian pressed tinplate tiles through repetitive geometric and floral ornamentation. Upon close looking, the pattern is interrupted by impressions of quotidian objects, including a button-down shirt and a set of keys on a carabiner. Their ghostly images in the metal are surprisingly comforting, acting as an affirmation that traces of the self can remain in the environments it touched long after the flesh is gone.
Martin Wong: Chinatown USA
Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood Ave, Chicago
April 17–July 18
Chinatowns in the United States exist in dueling realities, simultaneously serving as havens for Asian American communities and constructed exotic experiences for White tourists. These complex enclaves were a point of inspiration for Martin Wong’s practice, as explored in this sweeping exhibition at Wrightwood 659, where over 100 of his works unflinchingly tackle the many folds of Asian American lived experience. “Tai Ping Tien Kuo (Tai Ping Kuo)” (1982), a massive painting that went unseen for almost 40 years, exemplifies Wong’s movement between East and West, blending the artist’s family history with both Western and Chinese art historical, religious, and cultural references.
Ruyell Ho and Li Lin Lee: Language of Abstraction
Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 238 W. 23rd St, Chicago
Through April 26
This exhibition brings much-needed attention to the lives and practices of two Chinese American abstract artists in Chicago. Ruyell Ho, a peer of the Chicago Imagists, shares the group’s interest in bold forms and vibrant color but deviates from their interest in the human body. His mode of abstraction is audacious and maximalist, characterized by an abundance of unnatural colors and lively compound forms. Li Lin Lee, working a couple of decades later, adopts a more systematic approach, with much of his work reading like a series of glyphs reflecting a consistent formal logic across compositions.
Life Imitates Art
Anthony Gallery, 1360 W. Lake St, Chicago, Illinois 60607
Through April 11
Conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, known for his practice examining history, identity, and popular culture, acts as both curator and creator for this show at Anthony Gallery. The group exhibition brings together artists who probe visual culture and its impact on consciousness and lived experience. Take, for example, Pat Phillips’s massive airbrush painting “This is Not a Drill,” featuring easily recognizable products like a folding table, fireworks, and a Bomb Pop — items that could feasibly populate a Fourth of July party, but hold a subtext of violence in their grouping and presentation. Thomas also presents eight of his own retroreflective and lenticular works that assert the fluidity of images by changing as the viewer engages with them.
