This Saturday is your chance to get more familiar with Fulton Market’s varied businesses, galleries, top notch restaurants and more.  Explore Fulton Market is a free event, open to the public from noon-5pm this Saturday, May 12. 

Meet artists and gallery employees, fashion boutique owners and photographers, interior designers and home furnishings retailers, dance studio instructors and pet day care operators, as well as restaurateurs and food shops in the Fulton Market neighborhood. 

Packer Schopf Gallery; Paul Lamantia's Global Blindness exhibition on view

Tour participating establishments between Halsted and Racine, and Kinzie and Randolph Streets and you could win one of the many graciously donated prizes + giveaways from local businesses including Organic Looms, Private Dental Services, Design Cloud, J.P. Graziano, Takohl Gallery of Jewels, FM Hair Studio, Jeffrey Breslow Sculpture, Packer Schopf Gallery, The Publican, and more. 

Kevin Luthardt, on view at Mars Gallery; Opening reception during event, Saturday, May 12 from 12-5pm

Scroll down to view the 2012 Explore Fulton Market Map and Game Card, or click here to download and print your own.  Maps can also be picked up at all participating businesses. 

Participating businesses include:

*See map below for addresses

·  J.P. Grazlano

·  Peter Miller Gallery

·  Rhona Hoffman Gallery

·  Design Cloud

·  Takohl Gallery of Jewels

·  G R N’Namdi Gallery

·  Western Exhibitions

·  Publican Quality Meats

·  Fulton Market Gallery

·  Packer Schopf Gallery

·  Green Home Chicago

·  Douglas Dawson Gallery

·  Private Dental Services

·  Aesthetic Dermatology

·  Paul Lauren Design

·  Jeffrey Breslow Sculpture

·  Organic Looms

·  FM Hair Studio

·  Morlen Sinoway Atelier

·  Linda Warren Projects

·  Kasia Kay Art Projects

·  FIX Fashions

·  Chicago Party Animals

·  Jupiter Outpost Restaurant

·  Mars Gallery

·  Jan’s Antiques

·  Starbucks

·  La Columbe

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/

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/

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/

Linda Warren Gallery has changed their name from Fine Arts to Gallery and now to Projects, but their mission has remained the same.  The gallery has always been dedicated to carrying out the artistic mission of connecting people through the discussion and discourse of art.  Linda Warren Projects has moved to their new location at 327 N. Aberdeen, just around the corner from their previous West Loop home.

In celebration of their grand re-opening, there will be a reception this Friday December 9 from 6-9 pm, in conjunction with the opening of two long-time gallery artists Emmett Kerrigan and Lora Fosberg. Their new location will have two large gallery spaces, Gallery X and Gallery Y, as well as a new office, Gallery O, that will offer a selection of rotating works chosen from the roster of unique artists and new additions. The new space will act as a platform for LWP to further carry out their notions of finding art that is “engaging, and thought-provoking, challenging but not pretentious, current but not trendy.”

Emmet Kerrigan’s Grand Ave. turns its attention away from his usual industrialscapes and farmscapes and focuses more on neighborhood and houses, creating a feeling of closeness. Kerrigan uses his trademark impasto painting style, while infusing his work with overwhelming colors. He uses repetitiveness as a way to make things unique while depicting facades that still imply human life. Kerrigan also presents works made of salvaged wood from around the city and builds them into neighborhoods, mimicking the idea of children’s blocks. 

Lora Fosberg fuses the opposing forces of city life and environmental awareness into her new exhibition Fallible Memories and Wayward Fictions. She strays away from her usual colorful works and focuses on woodwork and neutral colors, as pieces of mother nature. Fosberg also wrestles with the idea of materialistic “stuff” and the opposition of holding on to and letting go of things. Both shows run through January 28.

Linda Warren Projects is also taking on a new challenge and helping out in the complex needs facing the art community.  Reinforcing the importance of art and creativity in children and adults is an ongoing process, and any programs or opportunities granted are a remarkable help. In 2012 LWP will launch Higher Art- Conscious Corporate Collecting. This non-profit organization will initially work with children from the Chicago and Los Angeles school systems, to create art that will then be bought by businesses and corporations. The school districts will receive the benefits of works sold, and will be apart of a special philanthropic experience. LWP sees the benefits of working with these larger businesses that value art and believe in its power to make a difference.