Tonight! The School of the Art Institute of Chicago celebrates a weekend of exhibitions, festivals, symposiums, and creative gathering with graduating students from both the Undergraduate and Masters programs. The weekend will kick off at 7pm this evening, with the opening of the annual Graduate Exhibition located in Sullivan Galleries, showcasing the work of more than 130 grad students completing their degrees in the Master of Fine Arts program. Guest curators include Steven Bridges, grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska), Tumelo Mosaka, and Pablo Helguera. I'll be performing in congruence with MFA in Art and Technology student Dao Nguyen! This event is one you won't want to miss.

Jeffrey Daniels
MFA in Art and Technology

Saturday follows up going just as hard with Impact Performance Festival which presents the work of the second year graduate students who are also finishing up this spring. This work exemplifies examples of theater, movement, and visual arts that merge together and collectively unite to display outstanding and profound visions of performance art. Impact will also take place on Sunday evening for those of you who cannot make it the first night.

Also running the majority of the day from 9am until 4:30pm students in the Bachelor of Arts in Visual Critical Studies and Bachelor of Fine Arts with Liberal Arts Thesis programs, are participating in a symposium where students in their respective departments speak about their thesis work, with the objective of exploring socia land cultural meaning in visual experiences.


MFA Show 
April 27th 7pm
Sullivan Galleries
36 S. Wabash Ave

BAVCS + BFA with Liberal Arts Thesis Symposium
April 28th 9-4pm
Art Institute of Chicago- Nichols Trustees Suite
159 E. Monroe St

Impact Performance Festival
April 28th & 29th 7-8pm
Peformance Space
280 S. Columbus Dr.

http://www.saic.edu/

Back again to be exhibited for the first time in over 30 years, the Art Institute of Chicago presents Harlem, U.S.A., a full collection of 25 photographs captured by African American renowned photographer, Dawoud Bey. Harlem, U.S.A. originally premiered at the Studio Museum in Harlem, marking Bey’s very first solo exhibition in 1979. The images function as documentation of Bey’s experience in Harlem and its surrounding neighborhood during his residency at the museum. Now, decades later these photos reappear, fresh— strikingly different from his much later work. The show opens May 2 and lasts through September 9.

In addition to Harlem, U.S.A., one week later the Renaissance Society will be exhibiting Picturing People, an expansive career survey of Dawoud Bey’s work at the University of Chicago campus, Cobb Hall, in Hyde Park. Expanding from street photography to formal studio portraiture, Bey is recognized for his outstanding commitment to portraiture as a means for investigating community and contemporary society. The show will also include, Strangers/Community, a series which brings together a double portrait people from one community who were previously unknown to each other. He quotes, 

"My work as an artist has been about giving ordinary people an enhanced presence in the world through my photographs. I see my work as a way to bring the human community into a conversation with itself. Hopefully through my photographs viewers come to know not only something about the people that I photograph, but something about themselves as well. My career survey at the Renaissance Society is an opportunity to sum up what I have been doing and thinking about for the past 36 years. It is an opportunity to see all of these photographs and ideas in relation to each other,"

Dawoud Bey born 1953 and raised in Queens, NY is a Distinguished College Artist and professor at Columbia College Chicago since 1998. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum, and Chicago's very own, Art Institute.

Harlem, U.S.A.
The Art Institute of Chicago
May 2 - September 9, 2012
http://www.artic.edu

Picturing People
5811 S. Ellis Ave
May 13 - June 24, 2012
www.renaissancesociety.org

Depth, humor, deception, and a whole lot of color are what you will find at Kipper and the Corpse opening this Friday, April 20th at Robert Bills Contemporary Gallery. These works of art created in a variety of different mediums, including sculpture, photography, drawing, collage, and animation will play tricks on you, abstracting spatial relationships and disguising images and materials as if it were a game. Flipping through the preview images on gallery's website, it's no wonder why this group was put together. Visually you can see parallels between form, texture, color combination, and technique. It's not until you investigate a little bit further into the artists' work where you begin to read into a clear dialogue happening between the themes and context of these crafted works as well.

(Montgomery Perry Smith)

The show features the works of four highly talented conceptual and skilled makers, Lauren Anderson, Mike Andrews, Jessica Labatte, and Montgomery Perry Smith. The three, Anderson, Labatte, and Smith are all former students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), while Mike Andrews, is a current faculty in the Fiber and Material Studies Department, making this a show that I personally am definitely anticipating and looking forward to. The show will be on view from April 20th until June 2nd.

(Mike Andrews)

(Lauren Anderson)

(Jessica Labatte)

Take a look at the full press release at:
http://robertbillscontemporary.com/

This Saturday, April 14th at noon, Zhou B. Art Center invites you to the closing reception of About Face, a solo exhibition of British painter and printmaker, Corinna Button, curated by Sergio Gomez. The remarkable show, illustrates Button’s excavation of beauty and female performance, presenting for the first time ever, separate points of view: masqueraded reality and idol. 

Referencing the work of her predecessors, such as Picasso, Munch, and Nolde, Button calls these painted works, her “giants” as they are literally huge works of art spanning from nearly six feet wide to ten feet tall. These layered figures are not only giant in their size however. They are also colossal in their presence, as every character reveals a different narrative and persona, creating a magnificent allure and aura. Their stories branch from Button’s thesis that “groupings of girls and women in threes provide a window into the intimate thoughts and secrets that shape the narrative of ulterior sentiment.” Each painting provokes you to unveil the several complex layers surrounding the conversation about beauty and examine a deeper dialogue that includes human perception.

The labor that is put into these paintings is also quite remarkable. Much like an archaeologist would, Button identifies her work to be about “digging and excavating” as she continues to build upon material and content, scraping and peeling back surfaces, she moreover reveals bit and pieces on the canvas and through the manifested image as well. 

You can learn more about Corinna's process at: http://www.corinnabutton.com/ She frequently updates her blog with works in progress and upcoming events. 

Zhou B Art Center

1029 West 35th Street, Chicago, IL 60609

(773) 523-0200

http://www.zbcenter.org/

What is Heaven? What is Hell? How do you get there? Do they even exist? These are questions that collectively occupy human consciousness. These themes often appear in self-taught, folk, and outsider art, driving highly stylized and charged work, in various media. Currently on view, HEAVEN + HELL is an exhibition presented by not one, but two organizations: Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the only non-profit organization in the U.S. that is devoted to only displaying the work of self-taught and outsider artists. Co-curated by Molly Tarbell, Exhibition Curator, from LUMA, and Jan Petry, Exhibitions Chair at Intuit the exhibition features 165 works of art by American artists. Franciscan Friar, Catholic Priest, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies, Jerry Bleem also accompanies the bunch with an essay written for the exhibition catalog.

Outsider art, also known as "Naïve art" can be defined as art made by self-taught artists who have never been institutionalized or have little to no contact with the art world. The show itself seeks to explore wide range of expression regarding these concepts, as they’ve been invented, wildly imagined, influenced and inspired by popular media, the Bible or any other religious upbringing.

Personally, I find this show very intriguing. I love the idea of these two organizations collaborating and the parallelism between the way they compliment one another to the way Heaven and Hell also conceptually compliment one another. The physical displacement of the exhibition in two separate locations is a great method for getting Chicago to see more art spaces in the city.

In conjunction to the exhibition, LUMA and Intuit have put together a series of lectures, events, and film screenings that will last through the end of June.
 
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Literal Interpretations of Hell
(from the Heaven + Hell film series)

Thursday, April 12 at 6pm
Location: Intuit, 765 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago
A film featuring, Jigoku (“The Sinners of Hell”) 1960, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa

Commanders of the Cool with Professor Robert Farris Thompson
Saturday, April 21 at 2pm

$10/$5 for Loyola members, students, faculty, and staff
Location: Roosevelt University, Congress Lounge, 430 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago

This lecture will explore a Yoruba image equivalent to heaven— an underwater city, Ode Kobaye, where those who lived correctly and generously on earth are rewarded by being transformed into immortal stones of water.

Cemetery Walk
$50/$45 Loyola members, students, faculty, and staff (includes lunch)
Location: Graceland Cemetery, 4001 N. Clark St, Chicago
A tour at Graceland Cemetery— an ideal location for studying post-life from the aesthetic, historical, religious, and philosophical perspectives. Lunch will immediately follow the tour at Deleece Restaurant (4004 N. Southport)

For additional information on Heaven + Hell visit
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
http://www.art.org/

or Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA)
http://www.luc.edu/luma/