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.

Curators: Rachel Furnari and Michael Tymkiw

From Smart Museum:

Horace Clifford (H. C.) Westermann (1922–1981) created a meticulously crafted and highly personal body of work that defies easy categorization. He blended imagery born of profound personal experiences—especially apparent in the Death Ship and other motifs related to his searing experiences in World War II—with bawdy, absurd, or unsettling elements from contemporary American material culture. This comprehensive and revealing new exhibition offers fresh insight into the work and life of this singular American artist.

The Smart Museum

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That is the simplest way you can break down the Art Dump, though it’s not really that simple, for each of these people has a myriad of interests, talents and mediums. As a group, and individually, they work in both commercial and non-commercial worlds. Sometimes these worlds collide and that is where the Art Dump’s collaborative projects exist — amidst the rubble and question marks of a crash site of graphics and fine art.

There are others who flow in and out of the Dump, offering their own abilities from time to time and working in the collaborative environment with the core group. Include the following creatives on that list; Spike Jonze, Evan Hecox, Lori Damiano, Thomas Campbell, Chris Waycott, Jeremy Carnahan, Hershel Baltrosky, Christian Morin, Rick McCrank, Brian Anderson, Marc Johnson, Brad Staba, Andrew Pommier, Edith Abeyta, and Shae Johnson…

Alumnus of the Art Dump include: Tony Larson, Geoff McFettridge, Kevin Lyons, Michael Leon, Rob Abeyta jr., Johannes Gamble, Bucky Fukumoto and Bob Kronbauer.

http://theartdump.com

Lollapalooza
AUG 7 – 9

Among the accidental thieves was a curator from another Denver museum, Brandl said.

Visitors were encouraged to handle the paintings and several photographs of the event feature people with the pieces casually in hand. Once the thefts were discovered, the museum sent out an email calling for the return of the missing art.

So far, 15 pieces have been returned, some with “letters of deep apology,” Lerner said. The museum is working on identifying and contacting the rest of the art snatchers through taped surveillance of the event.

Brandl said the missing paintings are worth between $300 and $500 each and were already promised to a list of collectors and a final show at another museum.

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.  Duarte moved to Chicago in 1985, and has exhibited his paintings and prints in solo and collective shows at such venues as the School of the Art Institute, the State of Illinois Gallery, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, and Casa Estudio Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico.

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“What do people learn when they work on a mural? They learn to work collectively, to consider others’ opinions. They begin to appreciate the walls in their community. When they add color to the wall—a lot of color, on a grand scale—they experience something unique, something emotional, something very personal. Something psychological takes place, and it almost always produces deep introspection.”

“I teach because I want others to have the chance to express themselves.”

—Hector Duarte

Hector Duarte has taught mural painting and printmaking in the Chicago area since 1990. He is a roster artist for the Illinois Arts Council’s Arts-In-Education Residency Program and has worked with Gallery 37, Urban Gateways, the Chicago Public Schools, and others.

There is a great article in the Trib about Hector

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.

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Kippenberger, to me, epitomizes the role of the modern artist. You can quarrel with his methods, personality or persona, but its hard to say that his work didn’t speak to the time in which he lived.  He was very aware of the conversation and history of art as is evidenced in his preoccupation with inside the art world jokes and pokes at fellow artists that require a lot of contextural knowledge to fully appreciate.  He was also an artist that shed the role of ‘painter’ and was able to work across a wide spectrum of media and styles.

Here is a great review of the original show at MoCA in Los Angeles

A great Village Voice article

Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective

March 1, 2009–May 11, 2009

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor

One of the most significant and influential artists of our time, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997) produced a complex and richly varied body of work from the mid-1970s until his untimely death in 1997 at the age of forty-four. This ambitious, large-scale exhibition includes key selections and bodies of work from his entire career: paintings, sculpture, works on paper, installations, multiples, photographs, posters, announcement cards, books, and music. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue—published by MOCA and co-published by the MIT Press—which will constitute a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the artist’s career.

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.

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The Constructivists challenged the idea of the work of art as a unique commodity, explored more collective ways of working, and looked at how they could contribute to everyday life through design, architecture, industrial production, theatre and film.  In addition, constructivists sought to speak directly to the ‘common man’  and give something tangible through art to everyone.

Of course, one might argue that figuration and representation are a more common language than abstraction, but constructivism at its core has a rather Utopian world view.  A new Russian Utopia, rising from the ashes of its past.

For more info on this be sure to check out the Tate exhibit in person or online here.

There are also some good articles on the subject here:

Two Coats of Paint

The Times UK

The Times Waldemar Januszczak

Colescott’s work employs a wonderful sense of perspective and narrative that belies its simple drawing style and overt childlike cartoonish treatment.  His paintings are snapshots of historical events, places, re-creations of famous paintings, or creations based on politics, current events and perhaps mixed with  his own fantasy.  They are incredibly facinating narritives, packed with insight, historical detail that allow you to revist these works over and over and find something new.

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Bio from Annex Galleries

Warrington Colescott was born in Oakland, California in 1921. His parents, Warrington, Sr. and Lydia Colescott moved to Oakland from Louisiana in 1920. Earning his B.A. and M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, he continued with studies at the Grande Chaumiere, Paris, and the Slade School of Art, London. He received prestigious fellowships with a Guggenheim in 1959, followed by a Fulbright in 1966, and National Endowments for the Art Artists Fellowships in 1976, 1979, and 1983.

Colescott was a Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison between 1949 and 1978 and was named Professor Emeritus in 1986. His early graphics were abstractions created in the medium of serigraphy. By the early 1960s he turned his focus on intaglio printmaking and his imagery evolved into social satire and commentary. He has produced a number of narrative satires, including one on the history of printmaking.

Perimiter Gallery
210 W. Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
(312)266-9473   fax: (312)266-7984
Tue-Sat    10:30am-5:30pm

For some insight into the “Not What You Think” campaign, take a look at their flickr page

From the Reader by Alison True

The Bird Machine’s Jay Ryan will be on the panel judging the Chicago Public Library’s design contest. The library’s trolling for a poster to promote its new url, chipublib.org, and its Not What You Think campaign, which the library says “challenges perceptions and highlights the library’s less well-known free services such as music and audiobook downloads, new release DVDs, and free Wi-Fi.”

Entrants need to be “residents of the Chicagoland area eligible for a Chicago Public Library card.” Click here for the rest of the offical rules of entry.

And for profiles of many of the artists who could enter, and samples of their work, here’s a screenprinting scene roundup by Liz Armstrong.

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.

… nor, incidentally, does Warner Brothers, which is really what all this is about. I’m not sure how these payments would break down. I assume it’s a performance fee rather than royalty, meaning the artist might typically get half of the payments rather than a much smaller fraction. Will research and report back.

As DeRo notes, the argument against the bill is that radio sells records with all the free airplay; songwriters get hosed all sorts of ways and so deserve their pittance, but the artist on the label is the one getting all the benefits of being played on the radio.

There’s no better illustration of this than the fact that the music industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on payola to get radio stations to play their artists.

Seems a little churlish for them now to be taking the other tack.

If Congress had vision it would fashion the payments only to the artists themselves, the people who play on the CDs, working around the labels entirely.

The dynamic that seems to be unfolding in the industry is that the RIAA is using its waning days of influence to grandfather in some payments that will artificially keep the labels alive after technological changes have passed them by entirely. Congress should pass on the idea just on that basis alone.