On view at the Smart Musuem in Chicago is a wonderful show detailing the work of H.C. Westerman.

Your Pal, Cliff presents Westermann with a mix of biography and insight into his craft.  The  show melds together  a mix of art, objects, and archival documents that provide a unique insight into the artists sense of craft, use of materials and decision making process.  The H.C. Westermann Study Collection at the Smart Museum of Art is one of the most significant public collections of artwork and archival material related to Westermann’s life and work.  This is a wonderful view into that collection and is on view now through September 6, 2009. (more…)

The Art Dump is the name tagged to a group of like-minded creative misfits who work under the same flat roof in Torrance, California. They are, essentially, the Girl Skateboard Company full-time art department. The veteran, Andy Jenkins (Bend Press) uses his title as art director loosely. He considers the crew a co-op and lets it operate that way, though each artist does have a brand or specific “chores” they are responsible for. Example? Andy Mueller (The Quiet Life & Ohio Girl) is the creative mind behind Lakai Footwear, and Jordan Mitchell makes sure Royal has an identity. Chicago transplant, Michael Coleman (Foundation Projects) and Desert Twin, Eric Anthony, join forces to take care of all the art duties of the Fourstar line. The Japanese born, Misato Suzuki (A Little Painter), is a very talented painter who takes care of the graphic duties at Ruby Republic with along with Megan Baltimore (Ruby Republic). (more…)

Artist and Chicago art critic Mark Brandl ‘s opening reception for “Out of Sequence,” an exhibition that focuses on consumerism, was apparently so well received, the visitors to that opening couldn’t help but take a piece of the exhibition home with them.

Brandl was at his home in Switzerland when he was notified of the thefts earlier this month in Denver.  Patrons walked out with 26 of the 31 paintings on display.

The missing paintings were part of a display that included three large panel installations and a magazine rack of small paintings made to resemble comic book covers.

“We recognize that this was really inadvertent,” said the museum’s executive director, Adam Lerner. “Some of the most prominent and respected people in Denver inadvertently took them.”

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Hector Duarte has been painting murals in Chicago for the past 24 years.  In that time he has completed some 50 murals through out the Chicago area and is currently working on a mural for the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen.

Hector Duarte was born in 1952 in Caurio, Michoacan, Mexico. He studied mural painting at the workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1977 and has carried his tradition to Chicago and adapted it for brick and mortar buildings.  (more…)

Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective recently opened at MoMA New York and is the first large scale retrospective of Kippenberger’s work in the US since his death in 1997.   The exhibit was originally organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The exhibition is curated by Ann Goldstein, MOCA Senior Curator, and organized at MoMA by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

Kippenberger is most renowned for his seminal role in contemporary “Bad Painting,” as well as for his sprawling sculptural installations, but this exhibit also places due emphasis on Kippenberger’s most mundane area of production — his poster, invitation and book designs. (more…)

Currently on view at the Tate, Defining Constructivism explores work by two of Russia’s most influential avant-garde artists, Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova. Charting their evolution from abstract painting to graphic designs, the show includes cinema and theatre poster designs, books and costumes as well as paintings and sculpture.

This couldn’t be a more timely review of heavy weight constructivists at a time when the term, and meaning of the movement are constantly being thrown around (See Shepard Fairey/ObamArt).  The ideas of constructivism are often not sited directly as the movement itself and ideas behind it are often lost in the coopting of the term for the needed purpose.  That’s precisely what makes the Tate show so special.  You can see first hand, what the movement was about, how it was embodied in these two leading figures and how its spirit was defined by the philosophy that drove this work. (more…)

California based artist, Warrington Colescott, opens tomorrow (03/13/09) at Perimeter Gallery.  Colescott, while not a household name, is by no means a stranger to the art world as you can see from his partial bio below.  Colescott may very well be a name you’ll be more familiar with in time as people begin to reflect upon an amazing body of work.  As an example of this, the Milwaukee Art Museum has the largest collection of work by Warrington Colescott, and they are preparing a major book and exhibition for November 2009. (more…)

From Hitsville

Jim DeRogatis has a post about Chicago rocker and Visa spokesperson Billy Corgan speaking before Congress about the so-called Performance Rights Act, with which the music industry hopes to extract money from radio stations for playing their music.

Radio pays songwriters a “publishing” fee, but there’s no “performance” equivalent. That is, Pepsi spokesperson Bob Dylan gets a few pennies each time Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is played on a terrestrial radio station, but the Hendrix estate gets nothing. (more…)

I love coming across artists like Derek Erdman.  It makes me feel good, makes me still think there are people out there that make art because its a disease they are afflicted with and they can’t stop or they will die.  Derek Erdman has a brand of crazy that is hard to stop looking at.  His work is honest, to the point and defined by a unique point of view.  A point of view that keeps you coming back to look again and again. (more…)

January 30 to April 27, 2009 Eero Saarinen was one of the most prolific, unorthodox, and controversial architects of the twentieth century. By exploring Saarinen’s entire output of more than fifty built and proposed projects–including St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch–Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future will be the first opportunity to understand the architect’s collective work in the larger context of postwar modern architecture through full-scale mock-ups and a selection of drawings, models, photographs, films, and other ephemera. (more…)