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For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art. Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage. Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.
An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.
This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices—members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.
One of the finest and most famous collections of Surrealist art ever assembled now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago is that of Chicago philanthropists Lindy and Edwin A. Bergman. Artists represented include Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, among many others. Noted critic and art historian Dawn Ades has written an absorbing account of the Bergman collection. All the 118 works are reproduced in full color. 180 illus. 120 in color.
An updated selection of key paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring works from around the globe and dating from ancient Egypt to the present day The Art Institute of Chicago, one of the most beloved and important museums in the world, houses an extraordinary collection of objects from diverse places, cultures, and time periods. This beautiful catalogue opens the doors of the museum to readers, presenting an expansive selection of painted works from around the globe, introduced insightfully by James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute. New color photography accompanies entries written by a team of curators, art historians, and educators, which put the works into context. The book showcases a dazzling range of paintings, including an Egyptian funeral portrait, an ancient Mexican wall mural, Chinese scroll paintings, Japanese painted screens, and works by artists such as Caillebotte, Cassatt, El Greco, Gauguin, Homer, Hopper, Johns, Lichtenstein, Matisse, Mitsuoki, Monet, Morisot, Motley, O'Keeffe, Picasso, Pollock, Rembrandt, Richter, Rubens, Sargent, Seurat, Tiepolo, Turner, Van Gogh, Warhol, Whistler, and Wood; contemporary artists featured include Kerry James Marshall, Wanda Pimentel, and Kazuo Shiraga.
In "Chicago Sketches," we visit places as diverse as Maxwell Street, Riverview, Wrigley Field, the old Clark Theater, and the National Bohemian Cemetery. We meet the famous-Nelson Algren and Yevgeny Yevtushenko-and the other people who have touched Reeder's life-Bubbie Gussie, Rabbi Mendel, and the Big Klu. We also witness moments in Reeder's life that echo through history-November 4, 1960 and November 22, 1963. Leonid Osseney's vivid illustrations make all these Chicago sketches come even more alive. "From the Foreword by Charles R. Middleton, President, Roosevelt University, Chicago IL: " Many of us carry vignettes of our lives around in our mind's eye and even occasionally pause to expand upon a moment and craft it into a silently remembered story. But most of us, and I confess to being with you in this, don't really have a startling variety of experiences and memories of people. Richard Reeder, in "Chicago Sketches," thankfully does. A good story may start with the people, as these in "Chicago Sketches" always do, but it's their context that adds flavor to the stew. It's important that someone settled in Tulsa or Old Town. It shaped him in that moment of time when you encountered him, and it says something about you that you found him there and not elsewhere. A good story, much less a collection of them like this one, has as another essential ingredient. While people and places give a story life, that life is brought into motion by the storyteller. Mr. Reeder's sensitivity to humanity touches a chord in us and provides sufficient reason to spend some time, however brief, with these people in these places long ago but not so far away. Finally, I have a confession to make. I begin reading a book today just as I did when I was in first grade. I start by looking at all the pictures (if there are any). Pictures are windows into the written text as well as visions beyond it. Leonid Osseny's illustrations in this book are a wonderful example of this. Once these illustrations have captured you, as they did me, the written words seem to take on additional meanings. Enjoy!
I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.