Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Ellen Philips Katz Director&nbsp;of the Block Museum of Art, Lisa Graziose Corrin.

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Current Position: &nbsp;Ellen Philips Katz Director, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

Hometown: I was born in Queens, New York and raised on Long Island, 52 miles east of Manhattan. My professional career has taken me to Izmir, Turkey, Baltimore, London, Seattle, Williamstown Massachusetts and now Chicagoland.

Previous Occupations:

Director, Williams College Museum of Art 
Deputy Director of Art/Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum 
Chief Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London 
Assistant Director/Curator of The Contemporary, Baltimore

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5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant:&nbsp;Piccolo Sogno, West Loop and North Pond, Lincoln Park

Shop:&nbsp;Turley Road, Andersonville

Book:&nbsp;Outliers and American Vanguard Art, a catalog of a 2018 exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art traveling to LACMA and the High Museum.

Neighborhood:&nbsp;Evanston! My husband and I chose to live in Evanston because we felt it was important to be part of the community that the Block serves. We admire Evanston&rsquo;s activist spirit; the City nurtures and supports its organizations and businesses and residents are unafraid to speak their mind. When we take walks in our neighborhood, the peace poles, signs of solidarity with our immigrant population, and commitment to diversity all remind us that we made the right choice of where to pitch our tent.

Music:&nbsp;Anything at the Lyric (we are season ticket holders) by David Lang, my favorite contemporary composer, or jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

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Tell us a little bit about your background and how your position at the Block Museum of Art came to be?

Northwestern&rsquo;s legacy in the arts is extraordinary and it has been meaningful to me to be one of its champions. In 2012, when I came to the museum, the Block was ready to become an even stronger bridge between the campus and the community. I relished the opportunity to create a new model for an academic art museum within a research university, a model that is focused on collaboration, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, rigorous research, and innovative exhibitions and programs.&nbsp;

Northwestern is on the move! It is an exciting time to be at a future-focused institution that believes the experience of art should be part of the education of every student. It is a privilege too, to be doing this work in the greater context of Chicago, one of our nation&rsquo;s great cultural capitals, along with brilliant colleagues at the helms of so many dynamic institutions throughout the city.

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What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the museum?&nbsp;

As I enter the museum I say hello to Aaron Chapman, our Assistant Manager of Visitor Services and Visitors Services Associate, Rocio Olasimbo and have a chat.&nbsp; Our front-line staff are our greatest ambassadors and the anecdotes they share with me about our visitor&rsquo;s responses ensure I don&rsquo;t forget what we are here to do.

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Do you have a favorite exhibition or collection from the past?

I am a great fan of the Ornithology Galleries at the Field Museum of Natural History, but my favorite collection in Chicago is most likely that of the Chicago Botanic Gardens.&nbsp; People don&rsquo;t think of this extraordinarily diverse collection on 385 acres as a cultural collection but it is.&nbsp; The research and conservation science that is going on in this living museum is world class&hellip;.&nbsp; Not to mention the pure joy of listening to the carillon bells now that the weather is warm.

I grew up inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.&nbsp; To this day when I walk through the front door of that museum I behave as though it is my own home.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s how comfortable I feel there. I am a great believer in getting lost inside museums so that you have unexpected encounters with works of art. I remember going to the Met and seeing a small study of Monet&rsquo;s Women in the Garden, which is now in the Musee d&rsquo;Orsay, and seeing the shadow on the back of a train on a woman&rsquo;s dress and the hundreds of shades of green and grey that composed this picture.&nbsp; I realized Monet was not painting women&rsquo;s dresses at all, he was painting the effects of light. It was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes and everything I looked at around me after that changed. &nbsp;I saw how art could be a window onto other ways of perceiving and understanding the world.&nbsp; At that moment I thought &ldquo;Wow I want to be looking through those windows for the rest of my life.&rdquo;

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Any major successes this year? Any challenges?

2018 has been an extraordinary year for the Block Museum so far with over 20,000 visitors in just three months for the groundbreaking exhibition Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt.&nbsp; The exhibition became a true case study exemplifying our role of as an innovation hub and campus catalyst.&nbsp; In the creation of the exhibition we convened student research and faculty expertise from across the University&mdash;including contributions from classics, art history, sound arts, materials science, computer science, medicine, archaeology, and art history&mdash;all to investigate the mummy of a 5-year old girl buried nearly 2000 years ago.&nbsp; The exhibition included the first museum use of Apple&rsquo;s augmented reality toolkit, an experiment at the Argonne National Laboratory, a student sound design competition, and a class co-taught in Classics and Material Science, to name just a few of the related projects.&nbsp; The fact that our resulting exhibition was covered by Time Magazine, BBC, PBS NewsHour, and made the front page of the Chicago Tribune &ndash; is just icing on the cake, evidence of the power and endless possibilities that can come out of interdisciplinary collaboration.

2018 also saw the release of our new Strategic Plan &ndash; The Block Museum as a Frame of Mind.&nbsp; I see this plan as the Block team&rsquo;s great success, representing almost a year&rsquo;s worth of conversation, planning and stakeholder interviews. The plan lays out ambitious actions for impact over the next five years. I think our greatest challenge is keeping up with the rising tide of participation in the Block&rsquo;s program from faculty, students, and the broader community. We are living in a time when our visitors are seeking a way to understand the complexities of our contemporary world. We have a responsibility to connect to connect art to their lives so that the important contributions of artists across time and cultures resonate and are valued.

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What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

I am a first generation college graduate so a career as a museum director was atypical in my family.&nbsp; Of course being an art history major was great preparation but is not on its own what prepares one for being a museum director.&nbsp; Leadership is a process&mdash;learning from the twists and turns in the road, from my mistakes and, especially from the feedback of those with whom I work, have all been critical.&nbsp;

The museum field needs more diversity at the top.&nbsp; If museums are going to speak to everyone &ndash; then leadership positions need to be held by individuals with a greater range of backgrounds. I talk often to my students about cultivating the belief that change is possible. On my desk is this quote:&hellip;&rdquo;It had long since some to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them, they went out and happened to things.&rdquo; --Leonardo da Vinci

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What are your&nbsp;interests outside of the art world?

I have an unwieldy cookbook collection and am fascinated by global food culture. I am also a voracious reader of history and a compulsive viewer of television political commentary. My husband Peter and I have embraced Chicago&rsquo;s extraordinary cultural offerings. We are season ticket holders for the Lyric, regular theater-goers, support the Chicago Humanities Festival, and are members of The Chicago Botanical Gardens, the Field Museum, the Art Institute and the MCA. Kayaking is also a passion for both of us and we are eagerly anticipating another summer season out on the water.

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What do you look for in an artwork? What speaks to you?

As a curator of contemporary art, I have occasionally had the experience in a studio in which an artist&rsquo;s work struck a chord deep within me. I got disoriented and thrown off balance. &nbsp;The hair on the back of my neck stood up.&nbsp; I knew I was in the presence of something significant.&nbsp; If that experience lingers the second time I see the work, I am likely to want to do an exhibition or to write about it in order to explore that response and to understand what in the work provoked it.

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What&rsquo;s coming up next at the Block Museum of Art?

In Fall of 2018 we are thrilled to be partnering with the Terra Foundation and with institutions around the city on Art Design Chicago, our city-wide celebration of Chicago as America&rsquo;s crossroads of creativity and commerce.&nbsp; Our exhibition Up is Down: Mid-century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl studio is the first to examine the pioneering work of the Morton and Millie Goldsholl and their Chicago advertising firm, Goldsholl Design Associates, which brought &nbsp;Bauhaus design to a broad American audience, and created some of the nation&rsquo;s most iconic brand images including the Motorola logo and the 7Up &ldquo;See the Light&rdquo; campaign. In January 2018 we will present Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, an exhibition about art and cultural exchange along the trans-Saharan trade routes connecting Africa, the Middle East and Europe during the medieval period. Loans are coming from some of the world&rsquo;s greatest museums and the exhibition is traveling to the Smithsonian&rsquo;s National Museum of African Art. This is quite an achievement for the small but mighty Block Museum of Art.

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Lisa Graziose Corrin is the Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Block Museum of Art. For more information about the museum&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/block-museum-of-art">Block Museum of Art</a>.

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Photo Copyright: Joe Mazza,&nbsp;Brave Lux

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An Interview with Lisa Graziose Corrin, Director of the Block Mueseum of Art

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Executive Director and Chief Curator, Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&nbsp;of the Renaissance Society.

&nbsp;

Age: 45&nbsp;

Current Position: Executive Director and Chief Curator, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

Hometown: Bergen, Norway

Previous Occupation: Executive Director, Bergen Kunsthall (2003-2013)

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5 favorites from the past week:

Restaurant: S.K.Y. in Pilsen

Shop: Seminary Co-op Bookstores

Read: Constance De Jong, Modern Love

Neighborhood: Hyde Park, of course!

Music: Sigrid,&nbsp;an up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Norway

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Tell us about your background and the journey that led you to become Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society?

I joined Bergen Kunsthall as curator in my late 20s as I was finishing up my MA, and a few years later I was appointed director. During my time there I made exhibitions with some incredible artists including&nbsp;Rosa Barba, Danh Vo, Christopher Williams, Nairy Baghramian, Runa Islam, and Sergej Jensen. In the summer of&nbsp;2012 I was invited to apply for this job at the Ren, which of course I couldn&#39;t pass up, and the&nbsp;just about a year later my family and I undertook a very&nbsp;big move across the Atlantic!

&nbsp;

Give us a day in the life!

My daughters are 4 and almost 6, so getting us all ready and out of the house in the morning is often a bit of a circus.

At the office, my days usually consist of meetings with staff and other stakeholders, making plans with artists for upcoming exhibitions, fundraising,&nbsp;writing and editing texts, and of course&nbsp;lots and lots of emails! In the evenings I am frequently out at&nbsp;events with our supporters or seeing exhibitions&nbsp;at other institutions, but if it&#39;s a home night I might hang out with the girls at the playground before dinner.

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What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

What has been really exciting in the last year is seeing a number of artworks we have commissioned going&nbsp;out into the world. New projects&nbsp;by Kevin Beasley, Sadie Benning, and Mathias Poledna were acquired by major international museums (Tate Modern, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively), and Jennifer Packer&#39;s beautiful show&nbsp;Tenderheaded&nbsp;is currently on view at the Rose Museum of Art at Brandeis University near Boston. The Ren is a small and nimble institution that does a&nbsp;lot, so one of my biggest challenges is simply&nbsp;managing my time and a very varied workload.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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How would you sum up your experience with the Renaissance Society thus far?

My experience at the Ren so far has been truly amazing. I feel that one of the greatest things about being a curator is just continually learning from artists, being alongside them&nbsp;from initial idea to final presentation. I also learn a ton from my brilliant team of colleagues.&nbsp;I faced a&nbsp;steep learning curve when I arrived in Chicago in terms of negotiating a new and very different cultural and professional field, but I have been humbled by, and am so grateful for, the community of support I have found around the Ren, from the generosity of funders to the enthusiasm of artists to work with us.

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

Look at art, read about art, talk to artists. Stay informed, but avoid chasing trends. And treat people well.

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Favorite&nbsp;pursuit outside of the art world?

I love swimming in Lake Michigan (in the&nbsp;summer) and doing anything outdoors.

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What&rsquo;s coming up next at the Renaissance Society?

Our current exhibition, <a href="http://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/530/richard-rezac-address/">Richard Rezac: Address</a>, runs through&nbsp;June 17 and really shouldn&#39;t be missed! I&#39;m also particularly&nbsp;excited about solo shows next season with Shadi Habib Allah in the fall&nbsp;and Liz Magor in the spring.

&nbsp;

Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; is Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society. For more information about the space please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/the-renaissance-society">The Renaissance Society</a>.

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An Interview with a Curator: Solveig Øvstebø

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418589/fwjxrbr19y5n7d2uoueo.jpg"><figcaption>Brian Westphal and Michael Mcvickar’s open living room is filled with paintings hung salon style, complemented by contemporary furniture and design</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEADuring one of Chicago’s very snowy days this winter, I made my way down a quiet North Side block blanketed in white and pulled up to an industrial looking building that, from the outside, I wasn’t quite sure was the right address. I knew only that I was supposed to visit collectors at their Ravenswood residence. I peeked into a side window and saw someone at a desk jump up to meet me at the door, and a moment later Brian Westphal and Michael McVickar invited me out of the snow and into their art-filled home.&nbsp;After shedding my down-filled layers and meeting the couple’s cats, we first enjoyed some gourmet coffee prepared in a hidden, designer prep space just off of the kitchen. The story of how Brian and Mike’s home came to be was on my mind as soon as I walked in. While the walls are filled with dozens of contemporary paintings and other works of art, the character of the open, ground floor space is also largely defined by its industrial bones, since the building once housed a motor oil company. &nbsp;The couple gutted and rehabbed their previous home, a worker’s cottage in Roscoe Village. According to Mike, “It was a beautiful little house, but it was on a smaller than normal city lot. We basically still had this list of things that would be nice to have.”&nbsp;One day, when Mike was looking through The Chicago Reader real estate section, he noticed an ad for a small factory building for sale in Ravenswood. The listing, he recalls, had bells and whistles that both he and Brian wished their existing house had.“So,” Mike remembers, “I said let’s just go check it out. We called our realtor and came over for a look. Basically it was just a brick box.” The building was two stories, with the first floor totally open and without a kitchen. It had also been neglected. Open windows had let in water, which led to moldy floors. The walls that did exist didn’t go to the ceiling. Because the previous owners had left Chicago and not kept a close eye on things, the space had also been broken into. Graffiti tags were spray painted on the concrete pillars on the first floor.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2752/original/img-6645.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Westphal and mcvickar seated at home in front of Laurie Hogin’s painting, Fabulous Exotics</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Mike adds, “It was kind of a hard living space. We walked out, and I said, ‘No way in hell are we buying this place and leaving our really nice, finished little house.”&nbsp;Brian remembers it differently, “He didn’t say that.”“Yes I did,” counters Mike. “Brian was the one who said it was perfect and that we could do so much with it.”Eventually, of course, they did buy the building. Brian saw promise in the larger lot size and the yard. Even though there was nothing there yet, he says, “It was just grass, but it was clearly a cool space.”&nbsp;Mike admits, “Had we not previously been through a whole house construction project, I would have run out the door. But we did understand that we could probably get it to look like we wanted.”Though the project did seem daunting, a previous owner had originally purchased the property intending to live there. They cleaned up the environmental issues, such as a tow truck in the yard and old storage tanks, which were still present once the factory had closed. By the time Brian and Mike came along, the building had a new roof, as well as a new heating system and windows. They were able to move in and live in the space for a while as they began the work of putting in the first floor kitchen, as well as bathrooms and rooms upstairs. They maintained the original open floor plan and kept concrete ceilings, but they covered up some of the exposed brick in order to hang art and simplify the look of the space.&nbsp;Brian and Mike began buying art together long before embarking on their home renovation. As Mike recalls, “It was a natural evolution. First we had posters, and then Brian started buying some finer framed things.”Brian tells Mike, “You actually said, ‘I don’t want to hang a bunch of posters on the wall.’ And since we had had a good friend of ours stay with us, and he had been collecting art –”&nbsp;“Yes,” finishes Mike, “He was the first person we knew who had art. That opened the door for us to see that real people do actually buy these things.”Those regular encounters through their friend got Mike and Brian to think that they could also learn about and buy art that they loved. For Brian, he admits that they began to understand they valued their friend’s art because it made them ask questions. They were constantly curious about what it was and what made it stand out to them.&nbsp;The next step to discovering art on their own meant visiting galleries. Though they acknowledge that galleries seemed intimidating at first, mostly due to their own inexperience, as well as what they recall as sticker shock, they slowly got to know a few established dealers, such as River North veteran Ann Nathan, and little by little they overcame what Mike considers initial hurdles. Victor Armendariz, who worked with Nathan for many years, told the couple when they were starting to buy that once they got into it, they wouldn’t be able to stop, something that they now know to be absolutely true.&nbsp;“There was a piece by Jeffrey Kamberos,” says Brian, “that we had seen at least a year before we bought it, and it just so happened that it never sold. We kept talking about the piece, and after a year, we thought, ‘We obviously want this painting,’ so we finally bought it and, as Victor warned, it’s been downhill ever since.”Standing in Mike and Brian’s living room, I sensed many pairs of eyes on me. Looking around I noticed many different faces and bodies in the art on view.&nbsp; Much of the work that the couple collects is figurative, which explains their early interactions with dealers like Nathan and Armendariz, as well as William Lieberman, who each represent many figurative artists.As Mike explains, “We were definitely drawn to figurative work.” Brian adds that they didn’t set out with an exclusive collecting focus, but rather it revealed itself as a dominant draw over time. Eventually the pair decided that narrowing their collecting focus would help further develop their taste.&nbsp;Eventually both Brian and Mike had to acknowledge that they had gone beyond casual art buying. “It took me a while to say I am a collector,” admits Brian. For Mike, the label came almost out of a necessity to define their role in the art world, “Well, people will ask, ‘Are you an artist or a collector?’ So, you kind of end up owning the term collector, because we are not artists,” he says.&nbsp;Like other collectors in Chicago I have had the pleasure of interviewing, Brian shares a familiar sentiment about a life with art, “We buy what we love and we love to live with it, so that’s why we do it.” For Mike as well, he says they are not really trying to amass a collection of anything. He emphasizes, “I mean, it really just happens.”Brian and Mike continue to spend plenty of time visiting galleries and art fairs, but they also acknowledge the ease, as well as the pitfalls, of having so much art available online. For Brian, “These days its much easier with everything being online, since you can easily see and find lots of work. On the other hand you don’t have to go out as much. It’s become like anything else – it’s sort of an Amazon.com world.”&nbsp;They do still go to galleries, though they confess not as much as they used to. It’s a little awkward to admit, but Brian says, “We used to go a lot more.”Despite the lure of the comforts of home, the social aspect of the art community cannot be obliterated by the Amazonification of everything. Mike explains, “We like seeing the gallerists and artists, we like running into other collectors. It’s the people who really draw us out.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2753/original/royalty-2c-2008-2c-oil-on-panel-2c-32-x-36-2c-photo-by-tom-van-eynde-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Maria Tomasula, Royalty, 2008, oil on panel, 32” x 36”</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Now the couple says they average at least one purchase a year, their most recent being a porcelain, multimedia piece by Rodrigo Lara Zendejas. Mike interjects, “We had a party here, and we had just gotten this piece that day. William [Lieberman] and Brian [Gillham] from the gallery [Zolla/Lieberman] had told us they were going to come up sometime to help us hang it, but they came to the party and put it up right then. It was a fun example of how so many things come together in the art world.”When explaining what it is about figurative work that appeals to each of them, Mike says, “It comes down to the fact that I just don’t get abstract art. I can understand some of it, but I just find it kind of esoteric that you have to go in and you have to learn. It’s not a bad thing to have to learn the artist’s perspective of course, but I want to look at something and be able to form a narrative on my own.”Brian gets to the point: “We don’t ultimately care whether there is a meaning behind these pieces. People come over and ask me, ‘What’s this about?’ Well, we don’t know. I usually say it’s whatever you want it to be. But for us there’s resonance to seeing people, rather than the abstract.”To Mike, art is primarily visual, and it should be personally appealing, “It can be beautiful to you or not. Maybe sometimes it gets more beautiful the more you look.” He sees the attraction like a relationship, one that in order to last must go deeper than a first impression. For Mike and Brian, art must also defy its surroundings. As Mike puts it, “I just can’t stand hearing people say something like, “Where am I going to put that? Will it fit over the sofa? That’s not why you buy a piece of art.”Talking more about why exactly you do buy a piece of art, Brian and Mike went back and forth about how their own collecting journey might look to a younger generation that has been adamant about seeking experiences over things. Reflects Brian, “To me these paintings are not things, they are not objects you are going to use for a while and either dispose of, or just upgrade, later. These are things you want to live with, so in a way they are experiential because every time you walk into the room you know you are affected by what they do to you in this space.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2755/original/chapin-aleah-laugh-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Aleah Chapin, LAUGH, oil on canvas, 40” x 48”, 2011</figcaption></figure>Mike is enthusiastic about the uniqueness art brings to his day-to-day routine. “I love that I’m the only one in the world that has that painting by that artist,” he says, pointing to a striking scene of a cluster of older, nude women embracing each other and laughing, like they’re sharing secrets while posing for a candid photo in school days. He explains, “That’s an interesting piece – it’s a very inviting and realistic portrayal of these aging women together. One of them is the artist’s mother, and the others are her family friends. It was kind of a woman-power thing, years ago before all the stuff people have been addressing now. The artist, Aleah Chapin, is an amazing person. To me it’s the whole package.”&nbsp;Brian and Mike first saw Chapin’s work at the New York Academy of Arts several years ago. After wandering through the various spaces and seeing work by first and second year students in various stages of progress, they noticed a painting that a young artist who was getting her MFA, Chapin, was working on. Some time later, Brian saw another piece of Chapin’s become available through Flowers Gallery in London. The couple decided to buy it, since it had been on their minds all that time. A few months later she was announced as a finalist for the 2012 BP Portrait Award in London, and eventually she was named the winner for the piece that Brian and Mike had seen back at NYAA. “The prices for her art went through the roof, if you could even get them,” says Brian. “We loved the piece we bought, number one, and we wanted it for that reason, but it’s fun to think we did a good job identifying it early on. I’m delighted that we have this in our house.”&nbsp;For Mike, he says he loves the back-story about the painting’s subjects as well as the tale of how they found it, but ultimately he just likes how it looks. “It’s great to have that history behind the painting, but I don’t need that to appreciate this. That’s what I think I miss in abstract art – I feel like I can’t appreciate it unless I always know everything about the artist and all the elements of the work. For me hopefully any one of these works [at home] stands on their own. You can love or hate it, but you don’t necessarily need to know the details to really appreciate it.”Brian agrees, “There’s enough art out there for everybody. You can pick your own style and decide what you like. For us, this is what we love.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2754/original/img-4491.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>The Happy Garage, by Chris Uphues</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

An interview with Chicago collectors Brian Westphal and Michael McVickar

Building a Home for Art: Reviving an Industrial Space in Ravenswood

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418589/n4ateb2eqndfsiwgc0ho.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAThis past fall a creative synthesis of art and design arrived on the South Side of Chicago when Brooklyn-based artist Fabiola Jean-Louis brought her life-size paper gowns and carefully staged photographs to the DuSable Museum in Hyde Park. I met the artist herself in the spring, and we took a tour of the exhibition with Clinée Hedspeth, Director of Curatorial Services at the museum and the woman who brought Jean-Louis to the DuSable. We talked about how art and beauty can be used as vehicles for contemplating and understanding larger issues. After meeting Jean-Louis I not only looked at paper in a whole new light, but I understood the possibilities of recontextualizing multiple histories.&nbsp;Jean-Louis was born in Haiti, and she says her work is primarily informed by her Afro-Caribbean heritage, black culture and the dialogue of mysticism. By reinterpreting generally recognizable images of European (white) nobility and recreating the traditional trappings using deceptively simple materials such as paper, Jean-Louis sets up immersive scenarios though which viewers can reconnect to a violent and complicated past while reimagining a more beautiful and hopeful history. Viewers who encounter her work first see a stunning, familiar image, and then they detect the questions beneath the surface. This, for Jean-Louis, is how she seeks to rewrite history – not to change the past but to use history to challenge the present and therefore change society in the future.&nbsp;The DuSable is an institution devoted to the historic and artistic examination of the African American experience, an evolving mission that is carried out in endless ways. This latest exhibition represents a new direction for the museum. Following is an edited transcript of my conversation with both Jean-Louis and Hedspeth.&nbsp; –GV&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2745/original/conquistador.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: Clinée, when we first met you told me you discovered Fabiola’s art online at 2 o’clock in the morning. Her work was so personal to you, even through a screen, that you were compelled to contact here. Tell me how you came to collaborate on an exhibition at the DuSable Museum.Clinée Hedspeth: I wasn’t in curatorial here at the time. I was in education, but as a collector I was just in love with her work. So I sent her an email, and she responded. That was before we had a chief curator at the museum, so we kept talking, I looked at more of her work, and then all of the sudden I said, “You need to come here. Let me see what I can do.”&nbsp;Fabiola Jean-Louis: And then we started having conversations with the new curator at first, and then for about a year and a half, about a small group show with two other artists.CH: I had to climb the ladder where I could bring her in. [Laughter]&nbsp;FJL: There were changes happening at the museum and they were looking at the new face of the DuSable and what the new exhibitions would look like, and that took time. When Lee Bey came on board, together with Clinée he said, “We’re gonna make it happen.” And at that point it was like a race to get ready.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2750/original/passing.jpg" alt=""></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2747/original/dsupu7lueaartju.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: Have you had an exhibition on this scale anywhere prior to now? You must have needed a lot of time to get everything ready.&nbsp;FJL: A lot of time. The first ever show that I had with Rewriting History was when it was still very young at the Harlem School of the Arts. That show consisted of two and a half sculptures and maybe four to six prints. By the time Clinée and I started working together I had added more pieces and improved my skill set with how I was making the dresses.&nbsp;So, I got to the point where I needed to remake dresses again. Here is a dress [points] with a totally different type of paper. It’s an archival paper. The original was a newsprint. This paper just had a better flow. Also the cut of the dress is different. I wanted something that is more true to what existed, as far as shape, and the original wasn’t. So for display purposes, I really wanted the actual sculpture to have the right cut and proportion, and it needed to be redone. I also had to spray a dye onto it versus using acrylic paint.The DuSable is my first museum show, and I’m so happy. I’ve always said that it was really important to show my work in a black museum. It also helps that DuSable is a Smithsonian affiliate, since another goal for me has been to get to the Smithsonian. This is a dream come true. This is like the granddaddy of all the granddaddies.CH: Fabiola doesn’t make work catered to the space, and that’s what I loved about her work. At first I didn’t know what was done to make a piece, but once the show was going to happen I had to ask, ‘What’s the checklist?’&nbsp;FJL: It actually takes me four to five months to get one shot, because of conceptualizing, and making the dress. I had to get to a point where I could pump out a dress in a week.&nbsp;CGN: The beauty of each piece is the tip of the iceberg. There’s also the historical context and the story behind it. Are there different stories connected to each piece, or are they each different chapters of a larger story?FJL: Different chapters of a larger story. I do my research and think about history, but I’m not an academic. It’s something that I have to go and find. Also, prior to doing Rewriting History, I was a pre-med student. My career was set to become a doctor, so I’m academic in that sense, but when it comes to the work for Rewriting History it really has to start from this very organic, raw place. Sometimes I don’t even read; it’s about what I know has happened already. I think about the black experience as being non-linear, and I try to tap into as many different aspects of that story as I can. For instance, being a black woman, being Afro-Caribbean – I don’t identify as African American – personally it’s me working from those different places. I also look at the space of the black experience being African American. What does that look like and how does that relate to me? It ends up being part of a larger story, but it’s different chapters. It doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t related in some way. They’re all relative. It’s ultimately about the same thing – injustice, trauma, and violence against black bodies.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2749/original/madame-beauvoirs-painting-flyer-t580.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: When you think about the horrors of so many aspects of history for African Americans, Afro-caribbeans, black people, are you using beauty to get attention or communicate? Is there an element where beauty is a sort of mask? How do you use beauty to connect to something so atrocious?FJL: I like that word, actually. I haven’t used that word mask, and it’s making me think. I think that here beauty can be seen as a mask used to uncover something deeper, for sure.&nbsp;CGN: We do that all the time.&nbsp;FJL: That’s right, because I use beauty as a vehicle to carry my viewers through this journey and take them to a place that’s uncomfortable at some point. But mask, I think, is also very true to that. It’s also being used to uncover something that’s very ugly. It definitely speaks to my response to how I see our society being desensitized to injustice and again, violence against black bodies.&nbsp;Early on in the series when I was creating, I knew for sure that I wasn’t interested in showing the blood and the gore. Us being murdered. Even when I do presentations, I don’t include pictures that are during slavery or even in the ‘50s when black men and women are hanging. It’s so important, to me, to preserve us in some way. And I feel like every time we see us being shot and blood and all that it’s just like there’s no respect.&nbsp;CGN: Well sometimes it ends up being distracting. People just want to look at the blood and gore without thinking about how it got there.FJL: Exactly, without connecting to the actual thing or incident. So I knew early on that I wasn’t going to do that. I took my time to think about how I was going to present it, and beauty became a very clear means, because at the same time I wanted to create work that would be welcoming to different people, and not just the Black Diaspora, but anyone interested in talking about race. I want them to feel welcomed into this space to talk about it. That’s&nbsp;not to say that there’s [something] apologetic in the work at all or that I’m going to hold back from what I feel is important to the story.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2746/original/dntom7au8aettxq.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: When talking about history you said you reference historical situations you know are true, but&nbsp;you’re not relying on academic texts or timelines. The title of the exhibition is Rewriting History.&nbsp;What do you think about being revisionist? It sounds to me like you’re not trying to rewrite the past. You’re actually just trying to understand it from now going forward.&nbsp;FJL: Right. The rewriting part is not literal. It’s not for me to do, because I can’t anyway.&nbsp;CGN: You’re not rewriting it because you’re showing what happened.&nbsp;FJL: It’s more of a What if? What if I could? What if we were always celebrated? The series just shows black female bodies, black women. That’s what I’m most comfortable showing. It’s not that I don’t want to include black men in the work, but as a photographer, as an artist, I’m more comfortable working with the black female body. We’ve been disrespected, so this for me asks a question, while also remembering what actually happened.I’m a firm believer in the saying that in order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been. You have to know where you are. It’s not about forgetting the past. It is about rethinking how we see beauty, how we celebrate the black female body, and rethinking what freedom actually looks like. Is freedom always this big grand thing, or is freedom the simplicity of just sitting for a portrait? The leisure of having the time to be painted or photographed. We take the simplicity of freedom for granted. So the series is about going deeper into what freedom actually looks like, and what freedom is.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2748/original/fabiola-461x600.jpg" alt=""></figure>CGN: There’s another level of just considering a woman’s lifestyle – the trappings of beauty, all of the stuff that has to be out adorning, rather than just within, the body.&nbsp;FJL: We can talk about leisure and the freedom to be painted, but we also acknowledge how even those women were imprisoned, in a way. Fashion was a means to do that. They had to wear these tight corsets.CGN: You mean beauty is pain.&nbsp;FJL: The corset for me takes this on. It’s something really beautiful and aesthetic, but when we think about what it actually stands for, it’s not. It’s confining. It’s choking. The corset represents, for the black women in my works, society, racism and all the limitations that we’ve had. It’s always a dance between how fashion and the celebration of beauty and taking and owning space relates to the things that we take for granted: like fashion, a painting, or who gets to wear what.&nbsp;CGN: Tell me about your artistic process. The sculptures are each related to the photographs, and&nbsp;you said it can take months to set up a single shoot.FJL: I don’t look at other photographers as inspiration for my work. I always look at paintings. My library has just books and museum catalogues that show actual garments, if they have it, and paintings – Boucher, Fragonard, Rembrandt, artists like that. Rewriting History is me showing a contemporary way of what I think a painting looks like. I’m not a painter, even though the pieces in my photographs I’ve painted.&nbsp;I try to get a digital photograph to look like a painting. The first part of the process is looking at those master painters and doing research. Sometimes, the work is a response to what’s happening currently. Other times it’s intuition – a conversation I’m having with my ancestors.Then through that space I think about the concept I want to bring to life. When I figure that out I decide on the style and design. I’m always looking at 16th–19th Century Fashion for reference.CGN: That’s a pretty big time-span.FJL: [Laughter] Well, I think about the style that’s most appealing to me, and sometimes the dresses are going to be replicas of what was in a painting. Early on the dresses were a mixture of different periods. Now, I’m more interested in replicas. I don’t sketch anything. I just can’t operate in that space. It’s too limiting for me.&nbsp;CGN: I would not have guessed that.&nbsp;FJL: I have five notebooks for sketching that I convince myself that I’m going to use, but I just can’t do it.&nbsp;CGN: So, it’s really as you go?FJL: That’s what’s so free about it. I can add on, and it’s all about emotion. At the same time I’m also thinking about the set. I have to think about the design and how I’m going to bring the lighting in and tell the story.&nbsp;CGN: Does every piece end up as part of a photograph?FJL: Usually, yes,but not every single piece. For the DuSable they have two dress that have not been worn yet, and so there are no photographs of these pieces. It doesn’t mean there’s not going to be. I have to work backwards because I had the design and the dress already, but I want to add them into the photographs.&nbsp;CGN: Your photographs have a painterly quality, as you said. Here you photographed your daughter wearing your sculpture and props, and then you&nbsp;digitally apply a veneer that makes it not quite real.FJL: It’s become my style of photography. I just love everything that’s painterly. That in itself takes hours to do. After the photograph is done, it takes me about four days of editing to just paint and Photoshop to get it to look that way. And there’s another reason why it needs to be like a painting – that’s where we are often missing. If I go to a museum, I’m not going to see the black body in a master painting celebrated in that way. If the black body is in that painting, someone is often either enslaved, or they just disappear into the backdrop.&nbsp;CGN: Or they’re in an exotic culture.&nbsp;FJL: And fetishized in some way. So it starts there with a painting; the goal was always to have them in a museum.CGN: You want to put them where they are not.&nbsp;FJL: So I’m not very interested in a photograph really. Even though I use the camera as a tool, like a painter uses a brush, my goal is not to get something that literally looks like a photograph. I’m more interested in something that seems otherworldly.&nbsp;CGN: What materials do you use?&nbsp;FJL: I use acrylic paints. I use dyes, coffee [and] natural stain. I use handmade Japanese paper, or just a simple French craft paper. Sometimes I make my own paper. It depends on what I’m working on and the scale of it. Now my work has progressed to include furniture, jewelry and shoes. So, it’s a madness.&nbsp;CGN: You are at the beginning of your career. Where do you think you will go next?&nbsp;FJL: Rewriting History is inspired by my history and my identity. It’s about analyzing myself and who I am as a black woman, as an artist, as a mother. I’m grateful for the series because it inspired a lot of work that’s going to be an extension of Rewriting History. The work is continuous and still developing. It’s never-ending.&nbsp;&nbsp;Rewriting History is on view through May 23 at the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/dusable-museum">DuSable Museum of African American History</a>.&nbsp;Note: After the interview was conducted Clinée Hedspeth moved on from curatorial work with the DuSable Museum in April 2018 to independent art consulting and appraising. She continues to represent Fabiola Jean-Louis’s projects.</body></html>

Artist Fabiola Jean-Louis at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago

Fabiola Jean-Louis: Rewriting History Through Beauty

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with art dealer Teresa Hofheimer of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/hofheimer-gallery">Hofheimer Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

Age: 64

Current Position: Gallery Owner

Hometown: Anderson, South Carolina

Previous Occupations: Executive Assistant, Figure Drawing/PaintingInstructor, Plein Air Painting Instructor

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant: Herb Restaurant - great Thai food

Shop: Women and Children Book Store in Andersonville

Read: Two books -&nbsp;Paris in the Present Tense&nbsp;by&nbsp;Mark Helprin and The Italian Teacher&nbsp;by&nbsp;Tom Rachman

Neighborhood: Andersonville

Music: John Coltrane

&nbsp;

How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

TH: I had been thinking about opening a fine arts gallery for a long time and when the space I&rsquo;m currently in became available, I took the plunge.&nbsp;I am a painter and I cannot remember a time when I was not making art or in&nbsp;the&nbsp;pursuit of&nbsp;seeing other artists work.&nbsp;I know first-hand how many talented artists there are in Chicago and there are only so many galleries.&nbsp;Art needs to be viewed and experienced in real time.&nbsp;The gallery&rsquo;s&nbsp;focus&nbsp;will be contemporary painting and sculpture, primarily showcasing Chicago artists.&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Give us a day in the life!

TH: I usually arrive around 11 in the morning, make a cup of coffee and start answering emails.&nbsp; I have been spending a great deal of time on the computer and I don&rsquo;t see that letting up anytime soon.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m looking at a lot of work online and I have been trying to schedule one or two studio visits a week.&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Hofheimer Gallery has been in business for almost two months now, but we know it has taken a lot to get things going. How would you sum up your experience setting up shop?&nbsp; 

TH: Most days I feel like I&rsquo;m running around with my hair on fire.&nbsp; In three months I&rsquo;ve had to set up the business end of owning a gallery, contacting and visiting artists studios, scheduling solo and groups shows, curating and hanging the exhibitions, then hold an opening reception with the artists!&nbsp;I have exhibitions scheduled through February 2019.

&nbsp;

Is there a particular favorite memory in the process of opening the gallery?

TH: My favorite was when I hung the gallery&rsquo;s first exhibition, which was a solo show of Chicago artist, Betty Cleeland&rsquo;s&nbsp;paintings.&nbsp;Her work transformed the space and made it very real for me.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

TH: At this point, I don&rsquo;t think I would try to tell them anything.&nbsp;Instead I would&nbsp;ask them, &quot;what are you waiting for?&quot;&nbsp;There is never going to be a perfect time.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Who inspires you?

TH: I have always been inspired by artists who are in it for the long haul.&nbsp; There is something to be said for people who have chosen the arts not only as a profession but as&nbsp;a way of life.&nbsp; To continue decade after decade, to pursue a vision, hone their skills and persist&nbsp;against all odds.&nbsp; That inspires me!

&nbsp;

Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

TH: I am a voracious reader and see every performance of Hubbard Street Dance Company.

&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at Hofheimer Gallery?

TH: This summer will be group shows, in September Judith Roston Freilich will have a solo exhibition, and November will be an outstanding group of Chicago artists working in gouache.

&nbsp;

Teresa Hofheimer&nbsp;is&nbsp;the owner of Hofheimer Gallery. For more information about the gallery please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/hofheimer-gallery">Hofheimer Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

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An Interview with an Art Dealer: Teresa Hofheimer

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with art dealer Aron Packer&nbsp;of Aron Packer Projects.

&nbsp;

Name: Aron Packer

Hometown:&nbsp;Chicago

Previous occupation: Record Store

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant:&nbsp;Bite Cafe 
Shop:&nbsp;Any Dollar Store 
Read:&nbsp;The Hunting Accident by David Carlson and Landis Blair 
Neighborhood:&nbsp;Rogers Park of course 
Music:&nbsp;The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams

&nbsp;

How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

AP: My parents had a big influence on that.&nbsp; My mom, Marilyn Packer, was a printmaker and painter and was pretty aggressive for not having gone to art school.&nbsp; I remember her tying large paintings on the top of our station wagon and driving them down to the Art Sales and Rental Gallery at the Art Institute or a gallery she showed at in Old Town. A little later, my folks were on the Exhibition Committee at the Evanston Art Center where she had studied and modeled for Paul Wieghardt and Nelli Bar.&nbsp;&nbsp;

My father Davey Packer was an industrial designer eventually becoming an exhibition designer, and I would always see him tinkering at his drafting table working on booths for the consumer electronics show and trade shows, things like that.&nbsp; He was very particular in how things looked and were arranged.&nbsp; They both were starting to attend local auctions buying American Folk art and ethnographic art.&nbsp; He was always interested in natural creativity alongside modern design.&nbsp;

My mother bought into an antique quilt shop which eventually was run more like a gallery.&nbsp; American Folk Art quilts have the breadth and graphic quality of contemporary painting.&nbsp; They were visually vibrant and exciting to me.&nbsp; I started to follow my folks to antique shows and flea markets.&nbsp; I bought a few quilts and eventually was comfortable enough to consign some to her.&nbsp; They sold and I was kind of hooked.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s more to it than that, but that is how I got interested in showing and selling art.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Share a typical day in the life!&nbsp;

AP: I am on my computer almost all day&hellip; emailing and trying to make a dent in all my to do lists.&nbsp; Show-hang weeks are the most fun. That is my blank canvas.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Best sale you&#39;ve ever had?

AP: We sold an engraved (scrimshawed) boat by Michael Dinges to Aurora University a few years ago.&nbsp; It hangs from the ceiling and has to do with our sinking ship economy among many other things.&nbsp; It looks like a classic lifeboat and is made of vinyl siding over a constructed frame.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s made with materials one would buy at Home Depot.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Successes you have had this year? What about challenges?

AP: My most recent success was being head of sale for an Outsider and Folk Art auction at Leslie Hindman.&nbsp; It was the first one they have done there&hellip; I am no longer there but that was a great year in my art life. A challenge at the moment is letting people know that since September I have a permanent pop up space they can come and see 5 days a week.&nbsp; Getting a good job I love in the arts would tie with the aforementioned.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

AP: Thumbs up and down on art fairs&hellip;. They are too expensive for a dealer like me, but I actually loved doing them.&nbsp; An empty booth is a challenge.&nbsp; But hard to sell artwork that is made by under the radar artists&hellip; which is mostly what I like to show.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Who inspires you?

AP: I would have to say teachers of all kinds&hellip;&nbsp;grade school, high school, art and music and everything else.&nbsp; We&#39;ve got to support those folks and they don&rsquo;t get paid enough.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?&nbsp;

AP: I am a huge fan of music in general.&nbsp; I play banjo and am in a band called Sinner&rsquo;s Friend.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s comprised of a gallerist, artist, architect and yogi.&nbsp; I played classical guitar and went to college for that&hellip;. worked in a record store after high school which got me into all sorts of music.&nbsp; Over the years I&rsquo;ve gone to hundreds of concerts.

&nbsp;

What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?&nbsp;&nbsp;

AP: I often look for artwork that I wished I could have done myself&hellip;. But I don&rsquo;t have that kind of focus.&nbsp; I also like what I call raw power work, which sometimes can be found in certain Outsider Art.&nbsp; Where someone is so driven to make something they will do whatever it takes to get a piece done with whatever materials are on hand.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s not always pretty per se.&nbsp;

And I do love paintings of many genres and histories.

&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at Aron Packer Projects?

AP: We have a one on one conversation with Maria Tomasula happily grilling Jason Lahr about his current show.&nbsp; On June 9, we start a show with Ben Blount.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a letterpress, print, and book artist.&nbsp; Letterpress is new for me so I&#39;m pretty darn excited about it. &nbsp;With this show we will be part of a print crawl on June 24th generated by Spudnik Press.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Aron Packer is&nbsp;the owner of Aron Packer Projects. For more information about his exhibitions please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/aron-packer-projects">Aron Packer Projects</a>.

Top image credit: Background artwork&nbsp;by artist Bruce Riley

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

An Interview with an Art Dealer: Aron Packer

BY ALISON REILLY

At first glance, Richard Rezac&rsquo;s sculptures might be described as cool, crisp, or sleek. But his careful craftsmanship and delicate choice of color imbue the objects with a warm familiarity, and their contrasting surfaces often activate tactile memories.

Earlier this month&nbsp;Rezac&rsquo;s exhibition, titled Address, opened at the Renaissance Society. Though the work in the show spans the last 20 years, for executive director and chief curator Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;,&nbsp;the exhibition is not a retrospective. &ldquo;We wanted it to be a new commission,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;a comprehensive new installation related specifically to the space of the Renaissance Society.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s colleague, Janine Mileaf, director of the Arts Club of Chicago, had a similar idea. She commissioned Rezac to create a new sculpture for the Arts Club&rsquo;s outdoor space. Inspired by the urban location of the Arts Club, the organization&rsquo;s connection to sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and his own interest in Shaker fence building, Rezac built Glen Elder.&nbsp;

&ldquo;We decided that it would be a nice collaboration to do these exhibitions at the same time,&rdquo; &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; said, &ldquo;to emphasize both institutions&rsquo; respect for his work and his role in the Chicago art landscape.&rdquo; Her deep admiration for Rezac and his rigorous studio practice is evident. &ldquo;He is one of the strongest sculptors working in the U.S. today,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Over the span of 40 years he has been true to his project and worked quietly in his very own vein. There are very few artists who show this kind of uninterrupted concentration.&rdquo;

&Oslash;vsteb&oslash;, like many others, is drawn to Rezac&rsquo;s work not only because of its formal beauty and distinct quality, but also because of the way he builds his sculptures. &ldquo;He makes them all by hand through a very determined process in which meticulous geometry and math are combined with a deep feeling for color and shape,&rdquo; she noted.

Rezac was kind enough to answer a number of questions about his childhood, his education, and his current art practice. Following is an edited transcript of our recent conversation.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="The Arts Club of Chicago hosts Rezac’s site-specific installation Glen Elder this summer. The piece is the most recent work in the Club’s Garden Project series. On View through July 2018" data-rich-file-id="2718" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2718/original/rezac-install-copy.jpg" />

Chicago Gallery News: Where did you grow up?&nbsp;

Richard Rezac: I was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska in a family of six siblings with extended family nearby. My parents enjoyed travel when they had the time and finances, so an outward look around the Midwest was an important aspect of my early years.

CGN: Is there a memory from your childhood that influenced your decision to become an artist?

RR: I had two excellent art teachers in middle school and high school. They were bright, respectful, and encouraging. As examples in their conduct and personal commitment, they were mainly responsible for me, during high school, to decide later to seriously pursue the study of art.

CGN: Why did you decide to become an artist?

RR: Largely due to these teachers, but I have also had a persistent interest in drawing since I was about six years old. That attention and outlook led to an appreciation of what it would mean to go further with other forms of art.

CGN: I grew up in Portland, Oregon and am interested in the time you spent there. What brought you to the city?&nbsp;

RR: I went to Portland to attend the BFA program at the Museum Art School (as it was known then, 1970-74), now the Pacific Northwest College of Art. One of the major benefits was its immediate connection to the Portland Art Museum with its galleries serving as an extension of the studio classrooms. The faculty were accomplished as artists and invested in education, and because the School was small, it was necessarily interdisciplinary, so I took courses in every studio area. I graduated as an artist, not as one specialized in one discipline.

CGN: What was Portland like at the time?

RR: The 1970s in Portland was ideal: open, liberal and responsible, inexpensive.

CGN: From 1980-82, you studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore and received your MFA. How did that time compare to your experience in Portland?

RR: It was also a rewarding education, and a positive time to be in Baltimore, though almost completely different from Portland&mdash;as an older, entrenched, industrial, working-class eastern city. Nature, as I had known it in Oregon and Nebraska, was a long distance from Baltimore. The most rewarding part of that place and time was the ready access to museum collections in Washington D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, which I visited frequently.&nbsp;

CGN: I studied the work of Katarzyna Kobro, a Polish artist associated with Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. I see similarities between your work and hers, because you often work on a human scale, you incorporate materials like wood and metal, and, in addition to freestanding sculpture, you sometimes hang your sculpture on the wall or from the ceiling. How do you see your work relating to early abstract art?&nbsp;

RR: I do admire her work (and saw a survey exhibition in Madrid last summer) and think that it certainly needs to be better known in this country, as it is prescient to some artists working in our time. If early twentieth-century abstraction can be seen today as an examination of some fundamental forms and their realization&mdash;in relationship&mdash;to an appropriate material, resulting in a simple, yet suggestive statement, then I agree that my sculpture, and approach, is indebted to those artists&rsquo; work. Their human-scaled size was inevitable because of the hand-forming construction and the private, rather than public, motivation.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Richard Rezac, Untitled (Ren Screen), 2016-17, painted wood and aluminum, 74 x 120 x 36.5 in. PHOTO: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2716" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2716/original/renscreen.jpg" />

CGN: Can you tell me more about Untitled&nbsp;(Ren Screen)? What inspired this work?

RR: This work is a combination of space divider, but free-floating and rather small; a wall to hang sculpture but with an area only for one. Otherwise, my reason to make it came almost first, two years ago, when invited by Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; for this exhibition. I felt the need to keep the Ren gallery space as open as possible, yet with a need to mark and divide it discreetly. Light from east to west in that space is paramount, so the underside of this screen is transparent and its primary, two-sided plane is on perpendicular axis with the only other built wall in the space. There are some details and surface treatments that match the scale and sensation of my sculpture generally, so it will hopefully be understood as an extension of the sculptures, while also being a slight architectural element, speaking to the gallery structure. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Richard Rezac, Chigi, 2016-17, painted wood and cast hydrocal, 49 x 69 x 43 in. PHOTO: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2717" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2717/original/rezac-chigi-2017.jpg" />

CGN: What is the significance of your sculptures&rsquo; names? I&rsquo;m particularly interested in Chigi and Quimby.

RR: The sculpture titled Chigi references the Italian papal family (originally from Siena). Alexander VII was one of three Popes in the Baroque period that commissioned Francesco Borromini in the architecture he designed for the Vatican. This sculpture incorporates an element that succinctly quotes the family emblem or crest, which is based on a series of overlapping mounds, as in the hillside landscape around Siena. All of Borromini&rsquo;s buildings initiated or completed during his reign contain these emblems, as a mark of sponsorship. My intention for Chigi was to join two seemingly unlike forms: the merged crib-like structure, and the volumetric &ldquo;foot&rdquo; in recognition of Borromini, not so much the Chigi family.&nbsp;

The other sculpture, Quimby, is only the second work that I have made incorporating stained glass. The first house that I lived in with stained glass as a feature was on NW Quimby Street in Portland, and the designs in the several rooms were comprised of a simple grid surround, resembling the fragmented version in this sculpture.

<img alt="" data-caption="From left to right: Richard Rezac, Zeilschip (knot), 2014, nickel-plated cast bronze and cast bronze, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in.; Zeilschip (gauge), 2016, Cast bronze and nickel-plated bronze, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in.; Zeilschip (lunar distAnce), 2015, Cast bronze and painted cherry wood, 7 x 6.5 x 3 in. Photos: TOM VAN EYNDE" data-rich-file-id="2719" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2719/original/zeilschiptrio.jpg" />

CGN: I&rsquo;d also like to know more about the series of sculptures with Zeilschip in the title. Can you tell me more about the material you selected for each one?&nbsp;

RR: Zeilschip is a Dutch word meaning sailing ship or sailor. The four works are based on a ceramic tile, oval in shape, that I saw at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It depicted sailing vessels in port, with the water line level, but the oval set askew. I was intrigued by that subtle disjunction, and so I ultimately made four related works. All are cast bronze volumetric forms, but each has a different surface treatment (one is nickel-plated), and all have a separate &ldquo;instrument&rdquo; or notation on its left side. These small additions complete the sculpture, re-balance it visually, and add a geometric, faceted form. These configurations were all determined by the two sets of axis of the oval: true verticals and horizontals&mdash;one set within the oval, and one set on the wall itself. The coordinates from all points at the periphery of the oval (which resembles an iron cross) in some way converge to spell out the element attached to its left side.

CGN: You have said, &ldquo;Like an architect has a drawing to begin building, I have a drawing to initiate the sculpture with some reliability.&rdquo; Can you talk about your relationship to drawing and sculpting?&nbsp;

RR: For me it makes perfect sense to draw first, to explore possible ideas&mdash;whether that starts with a conscious source or improvisational. I can then adjust the particulars in the drawing over time, and eventually decide if I want to see it as a sculpture. I have never made a sculpture without going through this drawing phase first. For years these drawings have resembled traditional architectural drawings in their showing plan, elevation, and sometimes section in alignment, so it is easy to interpret these images as three-dimensional.

CGN: How involved are you in the installation of your work for exhibitions?&nbsp;

RR: Extensively. Since 1977 I have installed all of the solo exhibitions that I have had, and I have usually been involved in the actual installation of a work in any group show, if it occurred in a city in which I was living.

CGN: How would you describe your studio?

RR: It is on the first floor of the building I live in, a former dairy store, so my studio space is not so large, but the layout is efficient, somewhat compartmentalized, and perfectly suited to my needs. It has good natural light from three directions and is segmented into three areas: for building sculpture, for drawing, and for something in-between, such as painting.

CGN: Does Chicago architecture influence your work?

RR: When I moved here in 1985, the architecture of Chicago came as a revelation the first time that I looked closely at the invention and importance represented by this history. There is an affinity, naturally, to sculpture. Primarily, I gravitate to the street level detail or isolated fragment, but I have not actively used or incorporated, any aspect of local architectural forms or buildings proper. &nbsp;&nbsp;

CGN: If you didn&rsquo;t live in Chicago, where would you be?

RR: Hard to imagine at this time in my life. This is a great city, in my experience, and offers everything I need.

&nbsp;

Richard Rezac&rsquo;s Address is on view at the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/richard-rezac-address">Renaissance Society</a> until June 17, 2018&nbsp; &bull;&nbsp; <a href="http://richardrezac.com">richardrezac.com</a>

 
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Sculptor Richard Rezac at the Renaissance Society in Chicago

An Outward Look: Richard Rezac at the Renaissance Society

<h2>Ai Weiwei&rsquo;s Little Blue Book on the Refugee Crisis</h2>

The prominent Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has long used his fame and social media as a megaphone for his activism. It was because of his blogging and Twitter activity criticizing the government that he was detained by the Chinese police for nearly three months and had his passport taken away in 2011. And his Instagram posts of the last few years have brought increasing international attention to the refugee crisis, as has his documentary&nbsp;&ldquo;Human Flow,&rdquo;&nbsp;released last fall.

By&nbsp;Robin&nbsp;Pogrebin, The NY Times

<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/arts/design/ai-weiwei-humanity-book-refugee-crisis.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=arts&amp;region=rank&amp;module=package&amp;version=highlights&amp;contentPlacement=7&amp;pgtype=sectionfront">Read More</a>

&nbsp;

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<img alt="" data-caption="The new proposal compared to Trump International Hotel &amp; Tower, Chicago’s current second tallest. Golub &amp; Co./CIM Group" data-rich-file-id="2715" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2715/original/screen-20shot-202018-04-23-20at-204-58-47-20pm.png" />

<h2>1,422-foot Tribune Tower addition would be Chicago&rsquo;s second tallest building</h2>

A team of developers looks to shake up Chicago&rsquo;s skyline with a striking 96-story skyscraper slated to rise just east of Tribune Tower. At a public meeting on Monday, Chicago developer Golub &amp; Co. and LA-based partner CIM Group debuted a plan for both the new tower as well as the adaptive reuse of the 1925 neo-Gothic Tribune Tower into luxury condominiums. The venture purchased the landmarked building and adjacent parcels for&nbsp;$240 million&nbsp;in 2016.

By&nbsp;Jay Koziarz, Curbed Chicago&nbsp;

<a href="https://chicago.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17246578/tribune-tower-condos-supertall-skyscraper-hotel">Read More</a>

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<img alt="" data-caption="James Yood. Photo: School of the Art Institute of Chicago." data-rich-file-id="2711" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2711/original/article0-large.jpg" />

<h2>James Yood (1952&ndash;2018)</h2>

Chicago-based arts writer and educator&nbsp;James Yood, who once distilled the role of the critic as one that fulfills a responsibility &ldquo;to look and think as hard as possible,&rdquo; has died. A committed and eloquent assesser of Chicago artists, Yood was a professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also directed its New Arts Journalism program.

Via ArtForum

<a href="https://www.artforum.com/news/james-yood-1952-2018-75105">Read More</a>

&nbsp;

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<img alt="" data-caption="The artist Jeff Koons poses for a photo in front of his sculpture Balloon Venus at the Liebighaus Skulpturen Sammlung in Frankfurt, Germany during the opening of the exhibition Jeff Koons: The Painter &amp; The Sculptor in 2012 DANIEL ROLAND/AFP/Getty Images" data-rich-file-id="2713" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2713/original/gettyimages-146546087-master.jpg" />

<h2>Collector sues Jeff Koons and Gagosian Gallery over years-long delivery delays</h2>

The collector Steven Tananbaum filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court on Thursday (19 April) that charges the artist Jeff Koons and Gagosian Gallery of failing to deliver three sculptures for which he paid over $13m in contractual deposits over a five-year period.

By James H. Miller, The Art Newspaper

<a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/koons-gagosian-balloon-venus-lawsuit">Read More</a>

&nbsp;

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<img alt="" data-caption="Paula Hayes, Teardrop Terrarium T027, 2006. Photo by Sherry Griffin. Courtesy of the artist." data-rich-file-id="2714" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2714/original/d7hftxdivxxvm-cloudfront.jpg" />

<h2>Terrariums Let Anyone Create a &ldquo;Perfect World&rdquo; in Their Own Apartment</h2>

The artist&nbsp;Paula Hayes&nbsp;has always been obsessed with the natural world, so it was never a question of&nbsp;if&nbsp;she would incorporate plants into her work, but&nbsp;how. That answer came in 2004. At a show entitled &ldquo;Forest&rdquo; at&nbsp;Salon 94&nbsp;in New York, she introduced the world to the contemporary terrarium: a delicate blown-glass sphere filled with stones, moss, and a few small plants. The art world&rsquo;s reaction to her work was immediate and enthusiastic. Her terrariums were featured in&nbsp;Wallpaper&nbsp;and&nbsp;T Magazine, and the gallery sold them as fast as she could make them. &ldquo;I had never had that response to my work,&rdquo; Hayes recalled recently. &ldquo;I had never had so many people say, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen anything like that.&rsquo;&rdquo;

By&nbsp;Kate Groetzinger, Artsy Editorial

<a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-terrariums-create-perfect-world-apartment">Read More</a>

&nbsp;

Top Image:&nbsp;Ai Weiwei on the Greek island Lesbos, 2016, where he filmed Turkish refugees coming ashore for &ldquo;Human Flow.&rdquo; &ldquo;Freedom is not an absolute condition, but a result of resistance,&rdquo; he says in his new book, &ldquo;Humanity.&rdquo;&nbsp;CreditAi Weiwei Studio

&nbsp;

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&nbsp;

News from Around the Art World: April 23, 2018

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with art dealer Jean Broday&nbsp;of Jean Albano Gallery.

&nbsp;

Hometown:&nbsp;Born and raised in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Has spent&nbsp;adult life in Chicago and its&nbsp;North Shore Suburbs

&nbsp;

Three from the past week

Place:&nbsp;Los Angeles

Restaurant: I was&nbsp;introduced to a wonderful up-scale Chicago Mexican restaurant - Mezcalina. It&#39;s located in the area north of&nbsp;Millenium Park. It&#39;s an Oasis in the city and is&nbsp;worth a visit.&nbsp;

See:&nbsp;This past week I was in Los Angeles to see a new grandson, Spencer, and visit with my adorable grand daughter Lucy, who is 2 1/2. That&#39;s always special.&nbsp;I did sneak in a quick visit to the Jasper Johns retrospective at The Broad, and I also caught&nbsp;a fabulous Mark Bradford exhibition at Hauser and Wirth.

&nbsp;

How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

JA: I have been interested in art for a long time.&nbsp;I was a Humanities major in college&nbsp;and was introduced to the Chicago Imagists by Linda Kramer when I&nbsp;moved to Chicago a few years out of school. I was excited to be&nbsp;in a position to purchase my own Roger Brown,&nbsp;and a Karl Wirsum as well, 
in the late 1970&#39;s.&nbsp;

Since then it&nbsp;has been my pleasure to work with Imagist work for many years.

I actually started in business in 1986, when the prominent designer Gregory Stratman offered me his walls to showcase artists that I had worked with privately.&nbsp;Many were&nbsp;from California.&nbsp;When Greg unfortunately died in 1989, I moved the gallery into&nbsp;311 West Superior in River North.&nbsp;I came&nbsp;to my present location at 215 West Superior&nbsp;in 1995.&nbsp;

Today we&nbsp;still exhibit some of our original artists, but we have also become involved with Imagist art.&nbsp;This fall the gallery is planning a group&nbsp;exhibit of Imagists,&nbsp;such as Joe Tallarico and&nbsp;John Maloof (a wonderful artist who discovered photographer Vivian Maier), as well as&nbsp;a group show with young artists,&nbsp;curated by Edward Cabral,&nbsp;this fall.

What is the best sale you&#39;ve ever had?

JA: I have been privileged to represent a number of outstanding artists through the years.&nbsp;We represented the Estate of Bill Mauldin and were delighted to sell all of the original Sun-Times editorial cartoons and the remaining&nbsp;Willie and Joe drawings to the Pritzker Military Museum here in Chicago;&nbsp;they are&nbsp;planning a major exhibition in 2019.&nbsp;

Through the years we have worked with Jules Feiffer, Karl Wirsum, Zack Wirsum, Donna Rosenthal,&nbsp;and&nbsp;of course&nbsp;the late Margaret Wharton, whose gorgeous chair and books creations are still amazing.&nbsp; I believe she is one of the most under appreciated and important artists whose work should not be forgotten.

Who inspires you?

JA: I am excited about new and upcoming young artists.&nbsp; I am especially excited about the wonderful artists represented by <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/patron">PATRON Gallery</a> on the West Side. It&#39;s&nbsp;important to me to promote the next generation, including some of their artists such as&nbsp;Samuel Levi Jones, Alex Chitty, and Liat Yossifer.&nbsp;

What&rsquo;s coming up next at the gallery?

JA: We are planning a group show for May,&nbsp;entitled&nbsp;Wild - It&#39;s a Wonderful World.

&nbsp;

Jean Broday is&nbsp;the owner of Jean Albano Gallery. For more information about the gallery please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/jean-albano-gallery">Jean Albano Gallery</a>.

Top Image (left to right): Jean Broday, Jon Bon Jovi, and Bonnie Lautenberg&nbsp;

&nbsp;

An Interview with an Art Dealer: Jean Albano

By GINNY VAN ALYEA

Artist Anna Kunz creates art across a colorful, creative spectrum, seeking to immerse her viewers into her works on a sensory as well as intellectual level.&nbsp;Her art, from works on paper, paintings, sculptures, installations, and other projects, goes beyond&nbsp;physical limits and changes constantly, depending on existing light and other environmental factors. Her work often takes time to see and to experience. Her latest exhibition, Anna Kunz: Color Cast, after three years of experimentation and careful execution, is on view now at the Hyde Park Art Center.&nbsp;

Kunz&rsquo;s work has been included in numerous national and international collections. Anna has had exhibitions in Los Angeles, Houston, Brooklyn, San Antonio and the UK and Poland. Recent exhibitions include at LVL3 in Chicago, TERRAIN the outdoor community exhibition space run by Sabina Ott,&ldquo;Luminae&rdquo; at White Box NYC- also featuring the work of Louise Fishman and Alexandra Phillips, curated by Juan Puentes, &ldquo;Color: Fully Engaged&rdquo;, curated by Jamilee Polson Lacy, &ldquo;Spectral Landscape&rdquo; at Gallery 400 UIC, and &ldquo;The Banner Project&rdquo; at the Smart Museum on the University of Chicago&#39;s campus. (She also once worked at CGN for a time, where she was the most fun co-worker ever.)

Following is a transcript of a recent Q&amp;A about her current exhibition. &ndash; GV

&nbsp;

You&rsquo;ve been an artist and teacher here for most of your career. How did you get started, and what were your early artistic explorations like?

I got started on&nbsp;things pretty early during my time as an&nbsp;undergraduate&nbsp;at SAIC, and I was involved with places like Links Hall, MoMing Theatre, and The Contemporary Art Workshop. At&nbsp;Space Gallery on Division St., which&nbsp;was run by FITZ, an SAIC grad student,&nbsp;I had some shows&nbsp;when I was still in school. One day art dealer Thomas McCormick visited my studio at the generous suggestion of artist Wesley Kimler, who lived in a space below us and who was working with Tom at the time. Tom&nbsp;ended up offering me my first commercial show.

Our studio building on Western and 26th was&nbsp;home to a lot of creative people who were into performance and sculpture, music and collapsing life and art.&nbsp;I was working on performance, painting and printmaking with young ideas about transference, reflection, the haptic and emotive parts of art, poetry, comedy, and using the body as a tool or armature for painting, really. Color was always a key element in my work.

Teaching happened after my Graduate School days at Northwestern. &nbsp;I don&#39;t know how I would ever have met the people I know if it weren&#39;t for teaching. It&#39;s helped me to cast a pretty wide net and it&#39;s kept me up to date. I can&#39;t believe that social media is becoming the new Art History/Visual Culture text book. &nbsp;My early explorations would have been very different if I were making the work now. I&#39;d be much more aware of the camera persona of everything I was making.&nbsp;

What is different about your current work, and this series? &nbsp;

My work has been moving in the direction of this current installation at HPAC for the whole time I&#39;ve been working as an artist. A striking difference here, I guess, is the scale. I wanted to make this work a 360&deg; experience. Embedded in the work, though are the many relationships to painting, performance and printmaking. My more conventional paintings are a distillation of older work. This time it&#39;s coming from more personal places, with a more direct and pure approach, I suppose one that is&nbsp;riskier or a more raw approach,&nbsp;maybe, as well striving for&nbsp;a deeper understanding of color and its associations and relationships.

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="2702" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2702/original/kunz1.jpg" />

Talk about the various materials and experiences that are part of this show that may make people think about&nbsp;&lsquo;painting&rsquo; differently. &nbsp;

This show includes a 30 x 30 foot floor painting that has transducers embedded into it. The painting is made into an instrument, with the sound created by Beth Bradfish, and it is intended to pull sound up through the viewer&#39;s body&nbsp;and doesn&#39;t require the sense of sight to have the experience. Other elements are&nbsp;large, suspended paintings that take their proportions from the space of the gallery and are positioned to be visible through each other so they&nbsp;engage the changing light and shadow in the gallery. I think of the piece as a volumetric painting, but viewers might think about the piece in other ways: low relief sculpture, architectural, set-like, giant monotype-like, etc. &nbsp;

We have created a few tangential experiences during the run of the show. Mwata Bowden and his University&nbsp;of Chicago Jazz X-tet performed a piece inside the installation on April 8. &nbsp;

I want the piece not to serve as a set for performance&nbsp;but an inspirational space for new, improvisational art. I&#39;m very excited to see how that happening turns out. I am also going to be teaching a workshop on color and memory for the 65+ group of artists at HPAC, and I am excited to learn how rich life experiences inform those artists&#39; color choices.&nbsp;

The exhibition description mentions that colors talk to each other &ndash; please elaborate.

I&#39;ve positioned the colors and sight lines to be choreographed, positioned in such a way as to move the viewer through the space. Some of the colors are in harmony with each other, and some of them disagree and are more discordant. The relationships change depending on where you are moving, or what your point of view is; it&#39;s not unlike conversations.

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="2703" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2703/original/kunz3.jpg" />

What is a walk through painting? &nbsp;

Come see it at&nbsp;HPAC.&nbsp;

Would you ever do a series just in black and white and gray? 

The wealthy taste for the demure is alive and well in gray. I think that gray is very decorative and safe. I&nbsp;do think that your question is an interesting idea, but I&#39;m not there at the moment. There is no time for gray or the divisions of black and white in my mind.&nbsp;Perhaps some chromatic gray piece will happen at some point.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="2704" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2704/original/kunz4.jpg" />

You&rsquo;ve been working on this HPAC show for months &ndash; what&rsquo;s coming up next? 

Anyone close to me knows that I have been walking around with an architectural model of HPAC for about three years. The shown view now could have been about 20 other shows that I have ready to go, I just need the space :)

But next I&#39;m going to go and make very small paintings, sculptures and works on paper this summer in Upstate New York during a residency that will undoubtedly be informed by my recent experience with this show.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Anna Kunz: Color Cast is on view at the <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/anna-kunz-color-cast">Hyde Park Art Center</a> through June 24

To view a video walk-through of Kunz&#39;s installation, visit <a href="http://www.annakunz.net">annakunz.net</a>
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A Q&A with artist Anna Kunz on her show Color Cast at Hyde Park Art Center 

The Colorful Perspective of Anna Kunz

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with John McKinnon&nbsp;of Elmhurst Art Museum.

Previous occupation: Program Director at the Society for Contemporary Art

Hometown: I&rsquo;m originally from Trevor, Wisconsin and have lived in Chicago for 16 years.

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant: Marisol at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It&rsquo;s a great place to meet up with colleagues and friends. 
Shop: Brewpoint Coffee in Elmhurst. They have two convenient locations near the museum, so I&rsquo;ve become a regular. 
Read: I came home to find a note written by my daughter that said, &ldquo;Mom is hiding&rdquo;. 
Neighborhood: West Town recently received a huge boost with Rhona Hoffman&rsquo;s new location. 
Music: Freedom, the new album by Amen Dunes is a very enjoyable, solid album.

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and how your position with the Elmhurst Art Museum came to be?

JM: I started undergrad in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UW-Madison. About half way through school, I took a sharp right turn, and was guided by some amazing professors towards a Bachelor of Science in Art. I worked at the Wendy Cooper Gallery in Madison, who started a location in Chicago a few years later where I became the Director. While pursuing dual Masters degrees in Arts Administration and Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I had several internships and did some freelance writing. I then had the pleasure of working as the Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum for a number of years. Next, I spent seven years as the Program Director of the Society for Contemporary Art where I worked with a core group of donors and collectors to support contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was a fantastic opportunity to oversee this nonprofit and work with a lot of very dedicated people.

The position at the Elmhurst Art Museum was enticing because of many opportunities for personal and organizational growth. The museum is at a fascinating point, where it will soon be philosophically and physically transformed as the unique McCormick House, designed by Mies van der Rohe, becomes more visible.

&nbsp;

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the museum?&nbsp;

JM:&nbsp;I usually drink a little coffee, check-in with everyone in the office, organize a few papers, and then head right into a meeting. Lately I&rsquo;ve also peeked into our construction site to see the progress of our building restoration.

&nbsp;

CGN: Do you have a favorite exhibition or collection from the past?

JM:&nbsp;I enjoy all of our shows for very different reasons, but I was personally very proud of our January exhibitions (Gertrude Abercrombie: Portrait of the Artist as a Landscape and IN THIS HOUSE, a site-specific group show in the McCormick House) because I watched the organization come together in my new role. We had a number of fantastic loans, partners, and participating artists; the staff worked very hard; and a lot of my friends and colleagues traveled to see the exhibition.

&nbsp;

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

JM:&nbsp;Before our construction, visitors to the Elmhurst Art Museum would commonly ask &ldquo;Where is the house?&rdquo; The biggest challenge I had was sharing our vision for the construction because most people did not understand where one building started and where the other ended. After giving a number of tours, I had red tape placed on the floor, as well as moved and replaced some interpretive materials. I would say it was successful because we received a lot of generous support to fund the project, and now the tape even seems to be used by our construction company.

On June 10th, we will re-open the McCormick House. Visitors will be able to see its full exterior for the first time in over twenty years and will understand it as a standalone structure again. I am very grateful for the opportunity to guide the organization at this point, and we would not have been able to accomplish it without the leadership and generosity of our donors.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this career path?

JM:&nbsp;I often tell potential arts professionals they should not be afraid to take an unconventional route and take as many internships as possible to try out several different things. It sounds like a clich&eacute; but find what you are passionate about. I did not expect to be in this position, and everyone&rsquo;s path is different.

&nbsp;

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

JM:&nbsp;I listen to a lot of music. For an eight-year period I made a mixed tape every month. The exercise forced me to discover a lot of new music, whether brand new albums or things I missed from the last few decades. Taking a deep dive into another contemporary field gave me a good sense of how you can find things you aren&rsquo;t expecting, an understanding of other artistic approaches, and it led me to appreciate things in a new way.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?

JM:&nbsp;I love to be challenged. I often pause when I find something unexpected that jumps out to me, especially when I return to the same work and reconsider it multiple ways. It is a privilege and a pleasure to talk with artists and hear their thinking process. But truly one of the most enjoyable parts of my job is to share my impressions of an artwork or an entire exhibition with others.

&nbsp;

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at Elmhurst Art Museum?

JM:&nbsp;I&rsquo;ve already hinted at this, but we have big plans for this summer. When the McCormick House is unveiled, we will have a stunning architectural intervention within it by I&ntilde;igo Manglano-Ovalle. Both of these will be accompanied by an exhibition in our main space curated by Barry Bergdoll entitled Mies&rsquo;s McCormick House Revealed: New Views. The show provides an introduction, background, context, and visibility to the McCormick House (1952), one of only three single-family homes built by Mies van der Rohe in the U.S. It is my hope these three concurrent events will give the building an increased visibility as the home is a rare and important example of the architect&#39;s mature style, incorporating elements of his celebrated designs for the Farnsworth House and 860-880 Lake Shore Drive. I hope the exhibition will educate and inspire new generations about the unique and important modern home built in Elmhurst.

&nbsp;

John McKinnon is&nbsp;Executive Director of Elmhurst Art Museum. For more information about the EAM please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/elmhurst-art-museum">Elmhurst Art Museum</a>.

Top Image&nbsp;courtesy of Aidan Fitzpatrick

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

An Interview with John McKinnon, Executive Director of Elmhurst Art Museum

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with&nbsp;Jonathan Kinkley of VGA Gallery.

&nbsp;

Age: 38

Current Positions: Executive Director and Co-Founder, VGA Gallery, and Philanthropic Advisor, Major Gifts, Art Institute of Chicago

Hometown: Wheaton and Chicago, IL

Previous Occupations: Director of Development at Museum of Contemporary Photography; Manager of Foundation and Government Relations, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

5 favorites from the past week: Logan Square has it all -- this past week I played games at Logan Arcade with friends, went jogging with my dog on the boulevard, and had delicious drinks and lunch at Lonesome Rose with my wife and daughter. I&#39;m&nbsp;terrible at reading books in print so I have an audible subscription and am on a 2018 quest to read all of Hemingway (my favorite author). I just finished For Whom The Bell Tolls, can&#39;t get enough. I&#39;m playing Battle Chef Brigade and Tumbleseed made by great local developers for the Nintendo Switch, and listening to Marlon Williams at a trusted friend&#39;s recommendation. Took a few listens but am now super into it.

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us a little bit about your background and your connection with VGA Gallery?

JK: I always had a lifelong passion for both the arts and video games. In recent years games have made leaps and bounds in artistic distinction and maturity as a medium. I also had years of professional experience working for art galleries and museums around the world and thought how great it would be if there were an art organization for games.&nbsp; I called up a like-minded friend from grad school, Chaz Evans, who was into the idea, and we worked together to assemble our first exhibition and Video Game Art (VGA) Gallery was born. After three years, VGA is now a non-profit with a great, energetic staff and board, that serves over 10,000&nbsp;people a year in exhibitions, events and other programming. Crazy growth this year included opening a physical space for VGA&mdash;a storefront gallery space off the blue line Western stop and the 606 with exhibitions, prints of art from video games, education programs, and a scholarly journal about video game art called the VGA Reader.

&nbsp;

CGN: Give us a day in the life!

JK: During the day I have the incredible job of connecting some truly amazing philanthropists in the city with special exhibitions, and projects of significant scale that requires special support at the Art Institute. On nights and weekends I work with a cool group of people who are building Chicago&#39;s first dedicated space for video games and enjoy the city with my family and friends.

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting exhibition you have worked on?

JK: For over a decade, I&#39;ve been thinking about the ideas and work in the current VGA show that I curated, Gun Ballet: the Aestheticization of Violence in Video Games exhibition (through June 3rd, 2018). It&#39;s very satisfying to see it finally realized and sparking interesting and nuanced conversations with viewers of the show.. After Parkland, it has an added relevance with a national debate about gun violence, that includes video games. The show was always intended to be more about &#39;how&#39; game artists represent violence than &#39;why&#39; but some artists in show&#39;s work asks direct questions of violent games and question why we are drawn to them. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes this&nbsp;year.

JK: The biggest deal for VGA this year will be our participation in Terra Foundation&#39;s major initiative, Art Design Chicago. For VGA, SAIC artist and professor Jon Cates is curating an exhibition and catalogue called Chicago New Media 1973-1992 in partnership with UIC&#39;s Gallery 400 and Electronic Visualization Lab. It&#39;s going to be incredible and the first time the full story of Chicago&#39;s history of video games and new media art will be told. I&#39;m super excited.

&nbsp;

CGN: When did you know this industry was a path you wanted to pursue?

JK: Ever since walking through the Art Institute as a kid and seeing the suits of armor from the Harding collection, I was enchanted with museums and galleries as places for beauty, ideas and history. I was hooked. The road was long though, I studied art history in undergrad and interned for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas before getting a masters at UIC in art history in new media and the art and architecture of games and virtual worlds, before getting into the gallery and museum world in Chicago.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

JK: I used to think I was terrible at finance and math and business and was initially interested in art and video games precisely because they seemed far from these fields, but man was I wrong. Now, I live in spreadsheets and budgets and have learned to appreciate the behind-the-scenes strategies for how arts organizations can not just function, but thrive.

&nbsp;

CGN:What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?

JK: For me, art I like in all media has got to have a great aesthetic and captivating ideas. Art that looks amazing but has no depth is not my cup of tea and neither is work that is all concept with no concern for its form or appearance. It&rsquo;s definitely got to be interesting and not boring. I&#39;m also a big civic booster and Chicago homegrown work is always an attractive quality in my book.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see from VGA Gallery in 2018?

JK: In the lead-up to Art Design Chicago we have a full schedule&mdash;next up will be a great summer exhibition of work by Hong Kong-based artists, and we&#39;re also working to kick off a game design educational program for middle and high schoolers.

&nbsp;

Jonathan Kinkley is&nbsp;Executive Director of the VGA Gallery. For more information, please visit <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/vga-gallery">VGA Gallery</a>.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

An Interview with Jonathan Kinkley, Executive Director of VGA Gallery

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417508/zn7jc2572ydrxakhk4mc.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Joel Oppenheimer, owner of Joel Oppenheimer Gallery, The Audubon Gallery, and Oppenheimer Editions.Age: 64Current Position: Owner ofJoel Oppenheimer Gallery, Chicago, The Audubon Gallery, Charleston S.C., Oppenheimer Editions, LLCHometown: Chicago since 18 years old.Previous Occupations?&nbsp;None&nbsp;5 favorites from the past week1. Resaurant: Spiaggio, not trendy, but still exceptional. 2. Shopping: Brooks Brothers, needed a dress shirt. 3. Book: John Gould The Bird Man, Gorden Sauer, researching for a book I am working on. Not recommended for pleasure reading. 4. Neighborhood: Michigan Avenue, River North, I don't go out a lot. 5. Music: Liz Phair&nbsp;CGN: Tell us about your background and how the gallery came to be?JO: I graduated from SAIC with a BFA in 1978. While pursuing my painting I apprenticed to the former conservator of Prints and Drawings from the Art Institute. He was establishing a private conservation practice. Eventually, I took over that business and it has grown into our conservation facility now conserving works on paper, paintings and photographs for private and institutional clients nationwide. Along the way, I acquired an expertise in natural history art and John James Audubon. We now have galleries in Chicago and Charleston, South Carolina. In 1999 I started Oppenheimer Editions, a fine art publishing entity that holds licensing agreements with major natural history museums and libraries in the U.S. and Great Britain.&nbsp;CGN: Share a typical day in the life.JO: Overseeing daily operations of our businesses, although my son David is largely responsible for that. Working on a new book about John Gould's Humminbirds that will be published by Rizzoli this fall. Still painting. In Charleston one week a month for business there and enjoying the relaxed local environment.&nbsp;CGN: Best sale you ever had?JO: That's a difficult question, there have been a few over the last 38 years. About ten years ago I was researching for a book I was writing about a rare 1860 Audubon folio. The book was published by WW Norton in 2013.&nbsp; I thought the folio was undervalued and bought two of them during those years. I held them for quite a while but eventually sold both the same year, one to a museum and the other to a private collector for a pretty good sum.&nbsp;CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.JO: For a brick and mortar art gallery to stay in business at all is a success today. We have a large and unusual inventory of rare antique works. Consequently, our internet presence has allowed us to adapt to the challenges that face all retail today.&nbsp;CGN: What do you want a young person to know who is considering this business?JO: Nothing has changed in that respect. Be knowledgeable, dedicated, reliable and work hard.&nbsp;CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?JO: Whether you are looking at Audubon or Warhol it is the same criteria. Every artist who has created a large body of work has some that stands out above others. Condition and quality are paramount. You have to trust your eye, but your eye has to be an educated one.&nbsp;CGN: What’s coming up next at the gallery?JO: In May we will feature an exhibition of first edition hand-colored engravings by Alexander Wilson published in 1808. He is known as the father of American ornithology.&nbsp;Joel Oppenheimer is owner of Joel Oppenheimer Gallery in the Michigan Avenue / River North area of Chicago. For more information&nbsp;please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/joel-oppenheimer-inc">Oppenheimer Inc</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN Interview Series: Joel Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer Inc

Each week CGN interviews a local art-industry professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a space&nbsp;in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Paula Danoff of Evanston Art Center.

&nbsp;

Age: Guess!

Current Position: President&nbsp; &amp; CEO

Hometown: Evanston, IL

Previous Occupations: Fundraiser and Banker

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week:

Restaurant: Tanoshi 
Shop: Ross Discount 
Read: Who has time to read! 
Neighborhood: River North 
Music: Karen Carpenter

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and how you originally connected with Evanston Art Center?

PD: The Evanston Art Center was founded in 1929.&nbsp; I was not there when it was founded, but I did take classes there when it moved to its location on Lake Michigan in 1966. I had a career in Banking, lived in Japan for 6 years and became an Ikebana Sensei in the Sogetsu school of Japanese Flower arranging. I returned to start a Career in Fundraising for Non-Profits.&nbsp; In 2007, I was offered the opportunity to return to the Art Center in the role of Director in Development and Communications.&nbsp; In 2015, I was offered the position of President &amp; CEO and have been here in this position ever since.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share a typical day in the life.

PD: COFFEE and more COFFEE- and a doughnut from Firecakes Donuts, whenever possible! The Art Center is a constant BUZZ of activity ranging from hanging shows to greeting students, meeting with Board members, artists, event planners and the public.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: How would you sum up your experience during your time with the Evanston Art Center?&nbsp;

PD:&nbsp;My time at the Art Center has given me the opportunity to expand the mission of the Art Center to encompass all arts and fulfill the needs of a larger and more diverse audience.&nbsp; When we moved to the new location in 2015, we gained 5 gallery spaces and greatly expanded opportunities for artists and outreach to the community.&nbsp; I have learned how to appreciate the value in dealing with different points to view to move the mission forward.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

PD: This year we kicked off our second Artwork in Residency program with Shape of Now, a fashion focused one-of-a-kind residency featuring 6 talented designers curated by Katrin Schnabl.&nbsp; We have established two new disciplines this year in our school for Woodworking and a Maker Space.&nbsp; Our outreach to the community continues to grow with programs serving low-income students in Evanston.&nbsp;

The challenge continues to fund all these amazing programs.&nbsp; We continue to reach out to donors, foundations, and business to sponsor and support the Art Center.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: How have you seen technology directly affect/alter the art world?

PD:&nbsp;Yes!&nbsp; In new and exciting ways.&nbsp; Our Maker lab translates 2-D into 3-D with a laser engraving machine and 3-D printing.&nbsp; We have artist interpreting their work in ways not possible a few years ago.&nbsp; This has been a huge growth area for our school.&nbsp; We work with youth in these areas to unleash the creative process into the next generation.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

PD: We have a very robust Internship program for young people ages 15-30.&nbsp; All are looking for a career in the Arts.&nbsp; I advise them to take the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT tests as soon as they graduate, because that is when you are the smartest.&nbsp; This will open any opportunity for your future.&nbsp; I advise all young people to get as much experience with volunteering and internships in the Arts, so that they can make decisions based on experience and not emotion.

&nbsp;

CGN: One piece of advice you would send back to yourself when you started out?

PD: Don&rsquo;t worry, the best is yet to come!

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

PD: My favorite place is the Chicago Botanic Gardens!&nbsp; I find the Japanese Gardens meditative in their simplicity and grandeur.&nbsp;&nbsp;It is a unique place in all of Chicago where you can experience the beauty of nature.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see next from the Evanston Art Center?

PD: Here is a listing of all the exciting exhibitions in the next few weeks!

Current Exhibitions:

Nelli Bar and Paul Wieghardt Gallery, The Fair brings together independent fashion designers artisans and collectives to present their current spring/summer collections in a unique sales event.&nbsp; As a part of the ongoing&nbsp;SHAPE OF NOW&nbsp;fashion&nbsp;residency&nbsp;series&nbsp;curated by Katrin Schnabl, the public will have the opportunity to shop a curated selection of fashion, accessories and objects created by the participating designers and guest artists at&nbsp;THE FAIR, a unique art-meets-fashion pop-up showroom.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Second Floor Gallery Space. Lindsay Olson, an artist with a science-based practice, is known for her unusual art projects. As Fermi National Accelerator&rsquo;s first artist in residence, Olson&rsquo;s work sheds light on the fascinating world of subatomic particles. Her love of science and technology grew out of her work with Chicago&rsquo;s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the world&rsquo;s largest wastewater treatment facility. She uses her training to create art about the hidden realities of our world, shedding light on both the smallest frontiers and the structure of the universe: the subatomic realm of neutrinos, quarks and leptons. As a part of this exhibition, Fermilab docent Anne Mary Teichert will give a talk on Sunday, March 18 from 2 - 3pm.

&nbsp;

Studio Exhibition: Students of Duffy O&rsquo;Connor.&nbsp;This multi-level course, Intaglio, taught by Duffy O&rsquo;Connor, invites beginners to work alongside experienced printmaking students as they explore the tradition of Intaglio printmaking.&nbsp; The basic processes of intaglio printmaking of etching (line, aquatint and softground) and drypoint are taught with primarily black and white imagery; color printing is also explored by students beyond the beginner level.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

The Radical Visibility Collective creates performance that awakens queer crip futurism. The collective will showcase their work in an ongoing installation at the Evanston Art Center throughout March as part of their Shape of Now residency. They will also create a music video that encapsulates the space and performance so that people can continue to experience their vision for radical visibility.

&nbsp;

Paula Danoff is&nbsp;the Executive Director of the Evanston Art Center. For more information about the EAC&nbsp;please visit:<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/evanston-art-center--3">&nbsp;Evanston Art Center</a>.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

An Interview with Paula Danoff, Executive Director of Evanston Art Center

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417509/yiqiuvqwdcrg0kiktayj.jpg"></figure>Each week CGN interviews a local art-world professional to discuss&nbsp;the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Jennifer Muray, Executive Director of Filter Photo.&nbsp;Age: 45Current Position: Executive Director, Filter PhotoHometown: ChicagoPrevious Occupation: Director, A+D Gallery, Columbia College Chicago&nbsp;5 favorites from the past weekRestaurant: Charlie was a Sinner, cute little bar with lovely cocktails, Philadelphia (I was traveling for the Society for Photographic Education’s Annual Conference) Shop:&nbsp;Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia, all you ever need and more. Read: The New York Times daily briefing is about all I’ve had time for lately. Neighborhood:&nbsp;Lincoln Square, close to home, easy to walk, good coffee Music: Black Panther!&nbsp;&nbsp;CGN: Tell us about your background and how your position with Filter Photo came to be?JM: I was director of A+D Gallery, at Columbia College Chicago for over ten years.&nbsp; The gallery closed a few years ago to make way for the expansion of Shop Columbia but it was a dedicated non-profit space exhibiting a broad roster of art and design based exhibitions.&nbsp; Additionally, I’m trained in photography and primarily work in photography as a visual artist and curator.&nbsp; I’ve taught photography for over 15 years, first at Columbia and now at Loyola University Chicago.&nbsp; The combination of my engagement in the photography community and my non-profit gallery experience was a natural fit for the Executive Director position at Filter Photo.&nbsp; I took over for Sarah Hadley and James Pepper Kelly in 2016.&nbsp;CGN: Give us a day in the life!JM: Varied!&nbsp; As an arts administrator and educator who is also trying to plug away at a personal practice each day is a bit of everything.&nbsp; Like so many people in the arts I wear many hats and have several email accounts to stay on top of. But, I do like a routine, so I’m good at compartmentalizing my time.&nbsp; In addition to the non-stop email catch up, I also meet with artists, staff, and board members regularly and do a lot of writing and proof reading for Filter communications and grants.&nbsp; I’m currently sending out invitations to professionals to join us at the 2018 Filter Photo Festival in September, brainstorming for our workshops and artist talks for the Festival and working with the Filter board of directors on updating our 5-year plan.&nbsp; I teach a few days a week and look forward to critiques with my students.&nbsp; Every few weeks you’ll find me at Filter Space installing artwork and tweaking the lights.&nbsp;CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.JM: We are very excited about the success of our newly launched Photography Book Club; it’s an open access group that meets once a month to discuss photography books, historical through contemporary.&nbsp; 3-5 books are featured every month.&nbsp; The first meeting in February was a great success.&nbsp; I think people are hungry for opportunities to engage with one another around like-minded topics, looking to build community, and share their passions.&nbsp; We’re happy that Filter Photo can provide a space for that kind of engagement and connect people.Challenges…hmm.&nbsp; Running a non-profit organization dedicated to photography is definitely challenging.&nbsp; Photography is this weird word that can mean so many different things.&nbsp; We spend a lot of time explaining what we mean by photography by defining the term contemporary photography through the examples found in our exhibition program and other community-based programs like the book club and professional development workshops.&nbsp; Our hope is that more and more photographers working in a purely aesthetic and formal way will push their practice into a more content-driven and conceptual arena.&nbsp; We want to provide opportunities for them to make that transition and support that process for anyone working in photography.&nbsp;CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?JM: The connections you make and maintain with people are the most important.&nbsp; The obvious things like a good work ethic are also important – respond to email, be on time, carry your weight, and contribute to the conversation are always key.&nbsp; But it’s the relationships that you build with people that will move you forward, whether you are the artist, director, curator, or administrator.&nbsp; Showing up really is half the battle - not just to promote yourself but supporting your colleagues and peers as well.&nbsp;CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for yourself, what speaks to you?JM: I need to be able to live with the work; it needs to enhance my daily life as I move through my home.&nbsp; I don’t mean in a purely decorative way, but in a way that makes me think and connect with my other interests.&nbsp;CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?JM: I have a morbid sense of curiosity.&nbsp; My graduate thesis work was on cabinets of curiosity so anything collection, taxonomy, and natural history based will interest me.&nbsp; I was just at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia for the first time; it’s this amazing medical museum with anatomical anomalies, specimens, surgical implements, and the like on display.&nbsp; The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is perhaps my favorite museum in the world and the plants and flora exhibit, which is tucked away on the second floor of The Field Museum in the old 19th century display cases, is always on my list of things to see.&nbsp;CGN: What should we expect to see from Filter Photo in 2018?JM: Filter Photo has an exciting year planned.&nbsp; This spring we are hosting two professional development workshops – The Evolving Landscape of Photography Publishing with Michael Itkoff of Daylight Books in March; and Getting Seen, Getting Shown: Professional Practices for Photographers with Sasha Wolf and Jess T. Dugan in April.&nbsp; Spots still available in both workshops!&nbsp;We just launched our annual call for exhibition proposals for the 2019-2020 exhibition season at Filter Space.&nbsp; This is such a great opportunity to get your work seen by our panel of reviewers.&nbsp; Unlike a strict voting process, the review panel really discusses the proposals and makes decisions about the next year of exhibitions.September 27 - 30 we are celebrating the 10th Annual Filter Photo Festival with 4 days of artist talks, portfolio reviews, workshops, and exhibition openings.&nbsp; We are slowly rolling out the programming and just announced Mona Kuhn as the keynote speaker on September 27th.&nbsp; All artist talks, exhibitions, and evening events are free and open to the public – we hope to see you there!&nbsp;Jennifer Murray is&nbsp;the Executive Director of Filter Photo in Chicago. For more information about the space&nbsp;please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/filter-photo">Filter Photo</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN Interview Series: Jennifer Murray, Filter Photo

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Dan Addington, owner of Addington Gallery.

&nbsp;

Age: 53 
Current Position:&nbsp;Gallery Owner 
Hometown:&nbsp;Denver, Colorado 
Previous&nbsp;Occupation:&nbsp;Graphic Designer and Illustrator

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week: 
Restaurant: Lady Gregory&#39;s 
Shop: Martha Mae: Art Supplies &amp; Beautiful Things, Andersonville 
Book: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson 
Neighborhood: Andersonville 
Music: As a guitar player, Lindsay Buckingham is an artist I revere. Same with Richard Thompson. Aimee Mann&#39;s latest is currently on heavy rotation at the gallery.

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and how Addington Gallery came to be?

DA: The story of Addington Gallery&nbsp;probably goes back to grad school, where the truth about my identity as an artist took shape, and where I also discovered the joy of going to art galleries. I largely learned the latter from Barry Blinderman, director of Illinois State University. I worked for him,&nbsp;and he would frequently bring his staff and students to Chicago to introduce us to the gallery world. Barry was bold and enthusiastic and always on the lookout for an experience.&nbsp;We were ushered into back rooms and heard professional stories that we would not otherwise have had access to.

Once I moved to Chicago, I found some of the galleries to be quite generous, giving their&nbsp;advice, offering me jobs&nbsp;and looking at slides of my paintings. The curator at Betsy Rosenfield Gallery recommended I show Gwenda Jay my work, and she gave me my first gallery show in Chicago. I met more gallery owners, and soon Eva Cohen offered me a job as director of her River North space. When she retired, I became the director at Gwenda Jay and later a partner at Gwenda Jay / Addington.

During this time I was fortunate&nbsp;to recieve&nbsp;support and advice from gallerists like Roy and Ann Boyd, Ann Nathan, Ken Saunders,&nbsp;Byron Roche, and&nbsp;many other gallery owners who have been very supportive since. I know that this&nbsp;encouragement helped give&nbsp;me the confidence to open Addington Gallery in 2007.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share a typical day in the life of the gallery.

DA: One thing I love about working in the gallery and also about being an artist is that no day is really typical. Yes, there is a lot of administrative work to do, but each artist&nbsp;and&nbsp;client I work with is unique. I&#39;m meeting new people all the time, and they each require sensitivity to their own&nbsp;situation. When I&#39;m in the studio, each painting can take me on a different journey, and the potential is there to learn something new each time. There&#39;s a lot of crossover between these two pursuits.

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting sale you ever had?

DA: That&#39;s a tough&nbsp;question, for many of the reasons I mentioned - each sale has its own story&nbsp;and unexpected things happen all the time. The best part of each sale is meeting the client, and teaming up with them. Some enter into the process as problem solvers, some enter into the process as explorers. In all those cases, I&#39;m a partner with them through that process. I watch some collectors fall in love with an artwork right before my eyes. It&#39;s a process most artists don&#39;t always get to see. It really does bring me joy!

Conversely, it&nbsp;almost breaks my heart when I see people fall in love with a piece, profess that love out loud, and then&nbsp;for whatever reason, walk away from it. Many of my clients recount stories to me about artwork they regret not getting. So, I&#39;m always&nbsp;happy when people follow their instincts. I haven&#39;t really answered your question though, have I? Well, I want to say that the last sale is always my favorite!&nbsp;I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it&#39;s totally true!

I loved placing a sculpture in the beautiful high rise apartment owned by the mother of a very well known Chicago filmmaker. Her stories were fantastic! I&#39;ve enjoyed selling work to professional athletes, newscasters, and politicians. All good experiences. OK, I know a story where the client confirmed that it was ok to talk about the sale publicly. It was a real treat to meet&nbsp;Juanita Jordan, Michael&nbsp;Jordan&#39;s mother,&nbsp;and help&nbsp;her pick out work and install it in her and Michael Jordan&#39;s Highland Park home &ndash; that was a championship experience.

So, huge, one-time sales are great, but I find the most important deals have been those that have lead to friendships as well as&nbsp;a real appreciation for, and even dedication to, the gallery, our vision, and the artists we represent. The collectors who stick with us&nbsp;and discover new artists with us &ndash; they aren&#39;t just buying art, they are letting us walk with them on a real journey. It&#39;s really about art over the long term, and that&#39;s the most gratifying part of this process.

&nbsp;

CGN: What are some successes as well as challenges you have faced this year?

DA: I&#39;ve noticed an interesting and increasing trend in the last year, maybe a little longer. Many people who&nbsp;bought artwork from the gallery years ago, whom I had not seen for awhile, or who just weren&#39;t steadily collecting, have returned to purchase new artwork.&nbsp;It&#39;s been great to see how some of the goodwill from those early encounters has brought people back in their own time.

This is true of artists too. In addition to clients, the real success of this gallery for me has been the artists I&#39;ve been able to meet and work with. I love talking about art - all aspects of it. It&#39;s one of my favorite things, and I get to do it with a great range of artists who are each dedicated to this pursuit, and who express that dedication in very individual ways. It has changed me and made my tastes much broader.

This year I had a number of opportunities to curate exhibitions outside of the gallery, and to participate with other institutions jurying shows and presenting new artists. I also spent time at a number of colleges, speaking both as a curator and as an artist, teaching workshops and participating in critiques. These &quot;extra curricular&quot; activities have become a very important aspect of my vocation for me.&nbsp;I love getting to contribute to these students&#39; experiences in the same way that visiting artists and&nbsp;curators did for me when I was in school.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

DA: Find good mentors. Learn as much as you can from them. Know art history! Especially post-war to the present. Yes, being successful in this business requires you to be a businessperson, but it really means you should have a curatorial vision. This is the difference between selling art like a commodity on-line, and curating a space that offers the viewer a unique and knowledgeable experience with the artwork. Of course, the challenge is to make those things work in tandem. You have to wear a lot of hats. There are a lot of good artists but not a lot of accessible galleries. If you have a vision, pursue it! You are needed in this culture.

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

DA: Of course, my favorite thing to do is spend time with my family. I love to travel, and I have a wife who is a great artist and teacher who also loves to travel and see new things. I love spending time and going places with my 10 year old boy. I love to play guitar. I have been&nbsp;in bands since I was a kid, and I play whenever I can with other musicians who challenge me, so I am always learning.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see from Addington Gallery in 2018?

DA: I&#39;m thrilled about this year&#39;s schedule of exhibitions! We are going to see&nbsp;powerful new work from established artists, as well as&nbsp;exciting work from artists who are new to the gallery. I want this gallery to always be a place of welcome and renewal - new work, new ideas, and new visitors as we continue to advocate for our artists and present their ideas and vision to the community.

&nbsp;

Dan Addington&nbsp;is the owner&nbsp;of Addington Gallery&nbsp;in River North, Chicago. For more information about the gallery&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/addington-gallery">Addington Gallery</a>

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CGN Interview Series: Dan Addington of Addington Gallery

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Thomas Masters, owner of Thomas Masters Gallery.

&nbsp;

Age: 63

Current Position: Artist/Owner of Thomas Masters Gallery

Hometown: Chicago

Previous Occupations: Musician &amp; Vocalist

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week

Restaurant:&nbsp;Alinea

Shop:&nbsp;Eataly

Read:&nbsp;Fire and Fury

Neighborhood:&nbsp;Uptown, West Loop and Fort Greene

Music:&nbsp;Soundtrack from the Series &quot;Sense8&quot;

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and how Thomas Masters Gallery came to be?&nbsp; 

I was living in New York and, like so many Artists, struggling to make things work. I read an interview with David Byrne in Rolling Stone Magazine where Byrne was asked about the Taking Heads central message; &quot;take control of your life, your art&hellip;.&quot;&nbsp;&nbsp; It really struck me that I needed to do exactly that.&nbsp; So, after moving back to Chicago, I began to organize my life as an Artist and began the first steps towards opening TMG.&nbsp; It was 1993 when I opened.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Give us a day in the life! 

I usually wake at six&nbsp;and read in Italian for an hour. At 9:00 AM,&nbsp;it&#39;s a 40 minute walk to the gallery and my studio.&nbsp; I usually paint and/or make music for about two hours and then open the gallery. Clients, collectors, designers and artists fill the rest of my day.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Most exciting sale you ever had?&nbsp;&nbsp; 

Well, there have been quite a few great ones over the years. Most recently&nbsp;I was able sell, with the help of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/zolla-lieberman-gallery">William Lieberman</a>, a Deborah Butterfield horse.

The whole process was really exciting; going to her studio and ranch in Montana, meeting a wonderful, world class Artist and a woman of amazing talent.&nbsp; Before that it was selling the sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Once again, world class artist and an amazing woman.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Share some successes as well as challenges this year.&nbsp; 

Each year is different.&nbsp; Last year we were challenged by a major re-construction of our building and the two buildings on either side of us.&nbsp; When the year ended, I realized we had one of our best years ever.&nbsp; Somehow the madness of it all focused us.&nbsp; Lemons and lemonade.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;What do you want to tell a young person considering this business? 

Go for it.&nbsp; Be smart.&nbsp; Follow your instinct. Listen to others in the business, but not too much.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;What do you look for in an artwork? What speaks to you? 

Something that moves me and at the same time I&nbsp;can imagine our collectors being moved too.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?&nbsp; 

I will answer this&nbsp;with the words of Ai Wei Wei;&nbsp; &quot;Everything is Art, everything is political.&quot;

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;What should we expect to see from Thomas Masters Gallery in 2018?&nbsp; 

We have some great shows and some really fantastic mixed-media performances coming to the gallery.&nbsp; For the past few years we have expanded our gallery to include international consulting.&nbsp; This year we will be building relationships in Italy, France, Poland, Great Britan, Brazil, and Portugal.

&nbsp;

Thomas Masters is the owner&nbsp;of Thomas Masters Gallery in the Near North Side of&nbsp;Chicago. For more information about the gallery&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/thomas-masters-gallery">Thomas Masters&nbsp;Gallery</a>

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN Interview Series: Thomas Masters, Thomas Masters Gallery

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Aron Gent, owner of DOCUMENT.

&nbsp;

Age:&nbsp;33

Current Position: Gallerist, Printmaker, Artist

Hometown: Wales, Wisconsin

Previous Occupations: Sandwich Maker, Paperboy, Tennis Racquet Stringer, Golf Cart Attendant

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week: 
Restaurant:&nbsp;Shiki (Japanese restaurant) 
Shop:&nbsp;Art Los Angeles Contemporary 
Read:&nbsp;People&#39;s&nbsp;mannerisms while standing in my booth at an art fair 
Neighborhood:&nbsp;Brentwood, Los Angeles, CA 
Music:&nbsp;The Sirius XM Classical channel in my rental car

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and the process of opening DOCUMENT?

AG: My father is a commercial photographer in Milwaukee, and he was a big influence for me&nbsp;growing up. I ended up going&nbsp;to Columbia College&nbsp;and fell in love with the art side of photography. After graduating in 2007 I started printmaking at a digital inkjet studio. At the time I was working, curating shows at my friend Edmar&rsquo;s space (Co-Prosperity Sphere) and going to my studio at night to make my own work. I realized I was spending a lot of time traveling between those 3 things, so in 2011 I decided to merge them all together to create&nbsp;DOCUMENT.

&nbsp;

CGN: Give us a day in the life!

AG: I start my day walking to the gallery.&nbsp;I always start with a pot of coffee and a smoothie and then dive into work (open the gallery,&nbsp;answer&nbsp;emails, make&nbsp;prints, edit&nbsp;images, photograph&nbsp;things,&nbsp;do&nbsp;invoices, and&nbsp;resist the control freak in me and try not to micromanage my employees and interns.) Usually&nbsp;I wrap up around 6 or 7 at night&nbsp;and either go to the gym, or have a drink with friends. I also travel quite a bit. Last week I was in Los Angeles for one art fair. In two&nbsp;weeks we will be in Mexico City for another fair.

&nbsp;

CGN: How would you sum up your experience running DOCUMENT?&nbsp;&nbsp;

AG:&nbsp;All I really am is a problem solver. People come to me with their art related problems, and I solve them. I&rsquo;m grateful to have my own business, and I&rsquo;ve learned that a lot of patience, flexibility, and always making sure your client is happy and satisfied at the end of the day is key. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting sale you ever had?

AG: We sold out an entire show for the first-time last year. It took a few months, and a lot of hard work, but&nbsp;it felt so satisfying. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

AG: Last year we moved the gallery and studio from the West Loop to West Town. My girlfriend Betsy and I also moved into a new apartment at the same time, so that was an adjustment. The hardest part of running the gallery is keeping the exhibition program tight, focused and well curated. Juggling fairs, printing, photographing, out of town travel, studio visits and telling artists &quot;no&quot; on&nbsp;certain things can be&nbsp;difficult.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

AG: If you want to start a commercial gallery it will take 5 years to break even, and then 5 more years to make a living. You will always have to readjust&nbsp;yearly to stay relevant. You need to commit and really focus on the long game;&nbsp;patience is key,&nbsp;and you will be rewarded if you put in the time and do the work.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for work yourself, what speaks to you personally?

AG: I specialize in photography, video and sculpture. I&rsquo;m drawn towards work that has a strong conceptual backing that is equally strong in its execution.

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

AG: I eat, sleep and breathe art. Outside of that I enjoy how great television is these days, and I just took up tennis again.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see next from DOCUMENT?

AG: Now we have up a great 4-channel video and sound installation by Mary Helena Clark, who was in the last Whitney Biennial.

Next is a show of&nbsp;Howardena Pindell video drawings,&nbsp;which&nbsp;will open the same weekend as her MCA solo exhibition mid-February.

Then Paul Mpagi Sepuya will have an exhibition of new photos that will overlap with his inclusion in MoMA&rsquo;s Being: New Photography 2018&nbsp;show that opens in New York&nbsp;mid-March.

In June&nbsp;we will open a Sterling Lawrence show &ndash; we just exhibited his&nbsp;work in our booth&nbsp;at Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair and people freaked out over what we showed.

In July&nbsp;Sibylle Friche, our gallery director, is curating a summer group show.

We will kick off the fall 2018&nbsp;season with a Stan VanDerBeek show in September during EXPO CHICAGO.

&nbsp;

Aron Gent is the owner&nbsp;of DOCUMENT in West Town, Chicago. For more information about the gallery&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/document">DOCUMENT</a>

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CGN interview with dealer Aron Gent of DOCUMENT

CGN Interview Series: Aron Gent, DOCUMENT

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Dan Tamarkin, owner of The Rangefinder Gallery at Tamarkin Camera.

&nbsp;

Age: 48

Current Position:&nbsp;Owner and Lead Curator, The Rangefinder Gallery at Tamarkin Camera

Hometown:&nbsp; New Haven, Connecticut

Previous&nbsp;Occupations:&nbsp;Writer, Teacher, Theatrical Lighting Designer &amp; Fabricator, Raconteur

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week:

Restaurant: Club Lago! 
Shop: Dovetail on Chicago Avenue &ndash; I love midcentury Modern and Deco, and owner Julie Ghatan curates a fabulous offering. 
Read: &ldquo;Slightly Out of Focus&rdquo; by Robert Capa, the renown war photographer and photojournalist 
Neighborhood: Avondale &ndash; I&rsquo;m just starting to explore my new neighborhood. 
Music: I&rsquo;ve been listening to a lot of Leon Russell lately, Lowell George, and Bonnie Raitt. One co-worker calls these &ldquo;The Grandpa Sessions&rdquo; whenever I&rsquo;m DJ du Jour, which I find hilarious.

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and the beginning of Tamarkin Camera and Rangefinder Gallery?

DT: My father founded Tamarkin Camera in 1971 in the house I grew up in, and when he retired in 2010 I took over the family business and brought it here to Chicago is 2012. That same year we opened the Rangefinder Gallery, as a showcase for images from the iconic Leica camera. In the 1980s, Tamarkin Camera created the trend of the &ldquo;Leica Gallery,&rdquo; which is emulated by Leica Stores around the world today, so it seemed only natural that our new Chicago home would be here in River North.

I was trained as a theatrical lighting designer and writer (the latter here in Chicago at UIC &ldquo;Circle&rdquo; Campus). I tended bar, waited tables, built theater sets and designed lighting in&nbsp;Chicago theater for years, and eventually worked as a teaching artist and a technical writer before taking over the family business in 2010. A photographer since 1981, I have been interested in light and shadow my whole life, and theater and photography fit perfectly. I&rsquo;m a very fortunate person to be doing what I love and to love what I do &ndash; the convergence of my love of the historic Leica brand, of photography and the arts in general, of Chicago architecture, and of collecting things&nbsp;can all be experienced in our little showroom and gallery.

&nbsp;

CGN: Give us a day in the life!

DT:&nbsp;A day in the life of Danny T is not all that fun or exciting! Like many of us, it&rsquo;s a lot of time spent emailing, phone calls with clients and steering the ship. The fun and interesting part is meeting and talking to the people who visit the gallery and showroom, and sharing my knowledge of Leica and photography with collectors, shooters, and anyone else who wanders in. And, of course, the cameras! I spend a lot of time looking at images for the gallery, appraising cameras, and trying to find the collectibles squirreled away in closets and old camera bags. And if the day is a First Friday when we have our monthly reception in the gallery, I can show off these things we love &ndash; the images and the cameras that make them. That&rsquo;s one of my favorite parts of what I do.

&nbsp;

CGN: How do you sum up the gallery&#39;s program in one sentence?&nbsp;

DT:&nbsp;The Rangefinder Gallery is Chicago&rsquo;s gallery and hub for both emerging and established photographers to discover new work, display and share their own work, and to spark conversations and connections around photography and the arts.

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting sale you ever had?

DT:&nbsp;The most exciting sale I ever made was actually not a sale itself, but acquiring a group of images from pre- and post-Revolution Cuba made by Roberto Salas, a friend and fellow Leica photographer as well as&nbsp;a marvelous storyteller. Hearing his stories was a real thrill for me, and for gallery goers at the opening and the Artist Talk. Bringing an artist &ndash; and his work &ndash; from Cuba is no easy task in this political climate, but the outcome was both exciting and full of hope. Roberto&rsquo;s memories of adventures with Fidel Castro and &ldquo;Che&rdquo; Guevara are enlightening, dramatically poignant and also at times funny and deeply moving, and are rarely heard here in the Unites States. Showcasing and offering images &ndash; both the stories and the storytellers &ndash; that have both historic and artistic importance is a thrill beyond the ordinary for us.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

DT:&nbsp;In the past year, we&rsquo;ve seen an increase in visitors to the showroom and gallery, which is a huge success regardless of any sales. We&rsquo;ve also seen increasingly exciting photography, very high-caliber work. Another success is in connections within the community &ndash; we&rsquo;re finding there&rsquo;s a genuine, strong and growing interest in photography within our community. More connections are being made more often here in the gallery and at our events. It feels really good to watch this happen.

One challenge I think all galleries share is bringing visitors in the door, whether or not they are actually shopping. We have galleries and encyclopedias in our pockets now and we are constantly plugged in, which for many people becomes a substitute for the experience of physically visiting a gallery or a library. Another challenge is like many other small business owners face: how to reach interested and potential customers, and how to retain them.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

DT:&nbsp;What I&rsquo;d tell anyone who is trying to do anything: in the words of Lenny Bruce, &ldquo;Remember: anybody who ever did it, never did it before.&rdquo; You just gotta jump. That and carpe diem, I suppose.

&nbsp;

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

DT:&nbsp;Tough question. Thumbs Up for anything that gives&nbsp;exposure to more artists, and that gives more consumers&nbsp;access to&nbsp;art. It&rsquo;s kind of hard to find fault with the idea. However, as a gallery owner, it is likewise difficult for me to relish the idea of an art fair; I believe that in practice, art fairs mean that fewer of the artists and their consumers come to value the gallery and its experience. However, like in any field, we must at least acknowledge the trends and desires in our marketplace and we exclude them at our peril; like technology, it is not intrinsically good or bad &ndash; it is how we use it that matters.

&nbsp;

Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?&nbsp;

DT:&nbsp;People and travel. I really enjoy meeting and talking to people wherever I go. These have been some of my most rewarding and interesting experiences, and mesh quite well to photography, which is my main artistic outlet.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see from Rangefinder Gallery at Tamarkin Camera in 2018?

DT:&nbsp;More great images and First Friday receptions! We&rsquo;re excited to have more color photographs this year than we usually exhibit, from artists both local and international. We are also excited about all of our events this spring and summer; we&rsquo;re engaging in a wider variety of speakers and photographers for our free Artist Talks and for&nbsp;Spring and Summer Photo Walks, which have become increasingly popular. We want to bring more people out of hibernation, and to get together to experience photography from all points of view along the artistic process.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Dan Tamarkin is the owner&nbsp;of Rangefinder Gallery and Tamarkin Camera&nbsp;in River North, Chicago. For more information about the gallery&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/the-rangefinder-gallery-at-tamarkin-camera">Rangefinder Gallery</a>

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN Interview Series: Dan Tamarkin, The Rangefinder Gallery at Tamarkin Camera

The Evolving Zen of Artist Adam Siegel

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Deborah Maris Lader, owner and director of Chicago Printmakers Collaborative.

Age: 56

Current Position:&nbsp;Director of Chicago Printmakers Collaborative

Hometown:&nbsp;Cleveland, Ohio

Previous&nbsp;Occupations:&nbsp;Professor of Printmaking at Indiana University/Fort Wayne, Printmaking teacher&nbsp;at Cornell University, High School Art Teacher, plus lots of the usual waitress gigs before that.

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week

Restaurant: Kitsune - Iliana Regan is a culinary genius.

Shop: I regularly spend time at Costco buying ginormous mountains of paper towels and nitrile gloves for the printshop. Not my favorite place but a necessary evil.

Read: Just finished &ldquo;Paris in the Present Tense&rdquo; by Mark Helprin &ndash; very good.

Neighborhood: Lincoln Square! I just love this neighborhood. My print workshop and home are here, plus it&rsquo;s where I raised my kids, where I shop, go to movies, work out, and everything else.

Music: I&rsquo;m in a folk band called Sons of the Never Wrong. Despite the genre that defines my own music, I love all kinds of stuff &ndash; classical, rock, alternative, gospel, blues, jazz, Americana and world. If I put my music on shuffle, I&rsquo;ll hear Andrew Bird, Talking Heads, Erwin Helfer, Beyonce, Anais Mitchell, the B-52&rsquo;s, The Decemberists, Luis Fonsi, and Ella Fitzgerald all within the hour.

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and the process of starting Chicago Printmakers Collaborative?

DL: Making stuff has been my passion since&nbsp;day one. As an undergraduate sculpture major, welding giant pieces of metal, carving wood and grinding stone, I loved the materials but missed the act of drawing. I took a class in printmaking, which involves incising imagery onto etched metal plates, drawing onto lithography stones and carving wood relief blocks, I&nbsp;was immediately hooked. Printmakers tend to be socially comfortable creatures because of the need to share equipment and resources, and they tend to cluster around whoever has a press. Because teaching has also always been an important part of my career, nurturing others to pursue their artistic goals, it was only a matter of time before I opened my own print shop. Creating community around the medium of fine, handmade printmaking has been my focus for over 28 years.

I was a professor of printmaking at Indiana University/Fort Wayne before moving to Chicago in 1989 and initially sought a teaching position. At that same moment in time, the stars aligned and an old defunct print shop became available for sale. I jumped on it and sunk all my cash into birthing the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. I didn&rsquo;t know anyone in Chicago besides my architect husband (a good sport if ever there was one)&nbsp;and wondered if this crazy thing I was pouring my heart and sweat into would actually happen and if anyone would ever walk through the door of a 2nd story walkup warehouse in Ukrainian Village where the only retail in the neighborhood was a Cut-Rate Liquor and a Wendy&rsquo;s (along with the occasional late afternoon chorus of gunshots).

It was my version of &ldquo;build it and they will come&rdquo;&hellip; and in fact they did. The printmakers who first walked through the CPC&rsquo;s doors have been the lifeblood of the studio ever since.

In the spring of 1999, the CPC moved from its original location to an expansive, rented studio space in Chicago&rsquo;s Lincoln Square neighborhood. In 2015, I bought a decrepit old building where the roof was caving in and the pipes had all burst and I renovated it to comply with my fantasy printshop dreams. And so it was that the shop moved to its new, custom built, permanent location just 4 blocks north of the old. If I ever leave here it&rsquo;ll be feet first.

CPC&rsquo;s member artists hail from all over the world, but most live in the Chicago area. The workshop is home to 7 Resident Artists, hundreds of students, and scores of professional printmakers who work on the presses 24/7 with keyed access. The CPC gallery features works on paper by over 60 international artists.

My role as a curator and dealer has expanded in the past 5 years, especially as our new bright storefront and gallery walls have attracted buyers who are more and more interested in our international reach and are thrilled with the general affordability of prints, many of which can be produced as limited-edition multiples. When folks happen in during our open hours, they may catch an artist pulling an etched image off the press or drawing on a stone, as the gallery shares space with the active workshop. Sometimes visitors actually applaud when an artist &ldquo;reveals&rdquo; a finished print before their very eyes &ndash; it&rsquo;s an education and performance all in one, and it demystifies the print medium in the best way (they also see how much hard work is involved).

&nbsp;

CGN: Give us a day in the life!

DL: Every day is so different! Some days I may be picking up supplies, reclaiming silk screens, fixing a broken glass litho slab and doing PR via social media. The next day I may be drawing on an etching plate, printing, hanging a gallery show, making labels and creating Instagram videos (we have 26.6K followers as of this week, plus I have 3 Instagram and FB accounts &ndash; one for my art, one for CPC, and one for my band). The day after that I may have a band rehearsal, a demo for a tour group at CPC, and an evening gig.

There are some days where we have community events and I delegate tasks for our 5 CPC interns while working alongside them to maintain the studio, answer emails, organize classes, and clean. All while greeting visitors and selling prints. Most every day I try to work out in the morning, then hit the studio or streets for the types of things mentioned above, and then I go home to assure my husband that I still exist. I sometimes like to cook, and&nbsp;always make time early in the day for a matcha green tea latte with almond milk. I&rsquo;m usually up until around 1:30 AM&nbsp;doing administrative, social media, email and other work from my home computer. Then I read a little before I collapse. It&rsquo;s important (to me) to be creative in some way everyday, whether it means drawing on a plate or sketchbook, curating an installation, or simply composing what I&rsquo;m going to wear.

&nbsp;

CGN: How would you sum up your experience running CPC?&nbsp;

DL: I&rsquo;ve learned that being creative comes in many forms, and that artistic output doesn&rsquo;t always hang nicely on a wall or sit on a pedestal. Creating community, or building a printmaking workshop, taxes similar artistic muscles and can satisfy the itch to make something from nothing. I used to beat myself up if my artistic output suffered while performing CPC administrative tasks, but now I just see it all as the same thing, and it has oddly resulted in my being more productive with the stuff that hangs on walls! Go figure.

I love printmaking and its array of stones and plates and tools and presses, but what makes the CPC special are all of the printmakers and interns and&nbsp;students and art collectors and visitors who walk through the CPC door every day. The artists draw,&nbsp;etch,&nbsp;carve,&nbsp;print and haul enormously heavy objects around the studio. The work is physically demanding and exacting, and requires a great amount of technical skill. The work that has come out of the CPC print shop during the past 28 years is astonishing. It&rsquo;s hugely satisfying to see these artists make their marks in printmaking studios, University print shops and in exhibitions all over the world. It&rsquo;s also rewarding to sell their work, which supports them financially. The CPC was set up to foster dialogue, collaboration and community among Chicago&rsquo;s printmakers, as well as to educate and share the beauty of the medium with the broader public. Working alongside these artists has been an honor and an inspiration. The city and community has been tremendously supportive, gallery visitors can see us at work, as the printed image comes off the press.

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting sale you ever had?

DL: Every sale is exciting. I love these artists and their work and it&rsquo;s important to me to have a variety of price points and imagery so that there is something in the gallery that ANY person can afford. A first-time buyer&rsquo;s thrill is as exciting as a seasoned collector&rsquo;s purchase. I do have this regular collector from Baltimore who comes once a year to snap up a nice haul of gorgeous things, so of course that&rsquo;s always big fun, especially since he has such exquisite taste!

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

DL: After last year brought us the new-guy-in-chief, I made a conscious effort to make 2017 the year of furthering the CPC&rsquo;s global reach, while championing the role of the arts in transcending the muck of divisive politics. CPC held a series of free, drop-in POP (Print Organize Protest) events where folks could screen print posters and tees, and write letters to our elected officials. In the gallery, CPC showed a gorgeous exhibition of Iranian Printmakers while simultaneously touring a collaborative exhibit of CPC and Iranian printmakers throughout Iran, Italy and Norway. We followed that with the summer ON PAPER International Printmaking Competition.

We then exhibited the gorgeous work of young Thai artists from Chiang Mai, followed by our current International Small Print Show. So &ndash; lots of work but some wonderful collaborations amongst artists from all over the globe. The work from Iran had to basically be &ldquo;smuggled&rdquo; into this country. It was both scary and thrilling to make all that happen, and when Chicago&rsquo;s Iranian community came to the CPC to celebrate Nowruz (Persian New Year) with us, it was fantastic, and we met so many cool new people!&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: One piece of advice you would send back to your 20-year-old self?

DL: As an artist/musician: Trust that your work will tell you where it wants to go. The process is&nbsp;most important, not the end result.

As a mom: &ldquo;No&quot; is a love word.

As a community print shop owner: Start small and don&rsquo;t get too far ahead of yourself. Roll with the setbacks, because they will always be part of it. No sense in stressing too much about the inevitable pitfalls. Reassess and move forward.

As a person: When people look at your 20-yr-old self and think your plan to open a print workshop is batshit crazy, just imagine that in 28 years they&rsquo;ll be asking you for advice.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you look for in an artwork? When searching for a piece for yourself, what speaks to you?

DL: I want it to be both beautifully crafted and moving in some deep way. Obviously, I love the way prints look, so I gravitate towards the intimacy of an etching or wood engraving or lithograph or drawing, but I can just as easily be moved by the texture and layers of an encaustic painting or sculptural object.

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?&nbsp;

DL: Music&nbsp;of course! Writing, singing, playing and arranging songs with Sons of the Never Wrong is pretty darned cool. I very much also enjoy dance, theatre, and film.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see next from Chicago Printmakers Collaborative?

DL: We are in the early planning stages for our 2nd Steamroller event, which will take place sometime in mid-July. It&rsquo;s a basically a community-wide printmaking festival in which the feature attraction is a large 12-ton paving truck in our back driveway that rolls over and prints massive 8-foot artist-carved woodcuts onto fabric while amazed bystanders snap loads of photos with their smartphones. We usually have food trucks, relief printing demos and live music throughout the day, so it&rsquo;s quite the happening!

Other than that, CPC will offer its usual schedule of Printmaking classes, open houses, exhibitions, and membership activities, which can all be found on our website. CPC is also publishing a series of 4 and 5-color Tony Fitzpatrick etchings, printed by our master printer Catherine Winings.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Deborah Maris Lader is owner and director&nbsp;of Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. For more information&nbsp;please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/chicago-printmakers-collaborative--3">Chicago Printmakers Collaborative</a>

&nbsp;

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CGN Interview Series: Deborah Maris Lader, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Doug VanTress, co-owner of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/the-golden-triangle">The Golden Triangle</a>

Age: 55

Current Position:&nbsp;Co-Owner

Hometown:&nbsp;Flint, Michigan

Previous Occupation:&nbsp;Management Consultant (2 years at Arthur Andersen)

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week

Restaurant:&nbsp;Hai Yen on Argyle

Shop:&nbsp;Golden Triangle&rsquo;s new pop-up on State St.

Read:&nbsp;Joseph Roth&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Emperor&rsquo;s Tomb&rdquo;

Neighborhood:&nbsp;Ukrainian Village (where I used to make pizza)

Music:&nbsp;new Bob Sinclar (very upbeat)

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us about your background and how you started the Golden Triangle?&nbsp;

DVT: I didn&rsquo;t like my job as a consultant and was unusually receptive to finding something else.&nbsp; My partner, Chauwarin felt the same way and we decided to go into business together.&nbsp; Our first venture was a bust but it led to opening a small shop selling gift items and later that shop morphed into an Asian antique store. Though we didn&rsquo;t know it at the time, that small shop was an incubator that produced many practical ideas (and cash flow).

&nbsp;

CGN: How do you sum up your experience running an antiques business?

DVT: It&rsquo;s an extremely satisfying line of work because we are surrounded by the best of the past and the people who are attracted to that are incredible.&nbsp; It matters very much who you interact with in your work.&nbsp; My customers are intelligent, creative and open-minded.&nbsp; I learn so much from them.&nbsp; I also learn from the objects and furnishings I sell &ndash;they were made lovingly and slowly, mostly by one person for another person.&nbsp; That matters.&nbsp; So I can enjoy the people side of my business for a few hours and then do a material deep-dive, restoring something, studying, tinkering.&nbsp; Or I can do research online.&nbsp; This&nbsp;job is perfect for me.

&nbsp;

CGN: Share a typical day in the life.

DVT: Get up at 7:30.&nbsp; Go to work, caiffenate.&nbsp; Check my art-world emails, map out how to deal with a crisis.&nbsp; Every day has one, at least a small one.&nbsp; Then a customer walks in and whatever my plan was, it is upended. We chat about everything. &nbsp;Eventually, I get back to the workshop to observe my team.&nbsp; Actually, I escape there sometimes.&nbsp; My job is to supply judgement &ndash;how to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible.&nbsp; Sometimes the problem is one of physics &ndash;how to bend a piece of wood, for example.&nbsp; Sometimes it involves aesthetics &ndash;how to improve the finish on a piece or bring out its best characteristics.&nbsp; I love this part.&nbsp; Then a lunch at my desk, checking my political news sites (I am interested in the world beyond furnishings!)&nbsp; Afternoons are busiest for customers, both for designers and retail.&nbsp; At some point, I do some paperwork.&nbsp;&nbsp; Maybe make an Instagram post. Then something interrupts&hellip;&nbsp;&nbsp; Home by 7, sometimes dinner out. Perhaps a movie or grazing the cable selections with phone in hand.&nbsp; Every night finishes with reading &ndash;and not on the phone.&nbsp; Liking the old stuff these days &ndash;Balzac, Tolstoy and all that.&nbsp; Fascinated by the French Revolution right now as we drift into our own&hellip;

&nbsp;

CGN: Most exciting sale you ever had?

DVT: Probably our restaurant construction work in China.&nbsp; Not one sale but a project for over a year.&nbsp; Many cities, wonderfully fast &amp; and a little bit crazy.&nbsp; Business, personal, wining and dining, designing on the fly with a team of eager assistants of every type.&nbsp; Working with a Chinese customer is a whirlwind of activity and forward motion.&nbsp; Things that take a year here, take two months there.&nbsp; And everything comes out just as good or better.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

DVT: We are opening a new gallery complex in Chiang Mai, Thailand.&nbsp; That is my chief challenge.&nbsp; That and figuring out how to sell antiques to the millennials!

&nbsp;

CGN: You are a frequent traveler, any recent adventures you care to share?&nbsp;&nbsp;

DVT: Every trip includes some &ldquo;adventures&rdquo; or experiences that are unforgettable.&nbsp; I tend to be a visual person and I am fascinated by the effects of the light on old buildings and monuments.&nbsp; I like to ponder the past and bathe in melancholy.&nbsp; And then have a great dinner.

&nbsp;

CGN: One piece of advice you would tell your younger self when starting out?

DVT: Don&rsquo;t over-think, pick the right partner, jump in and do it.&nbsp; Live below your means for a long time.&nbsp; You will miss out on nothing.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you look for in a piece? When shopping for an antique item yourself, what speaks to you?

DVT: I like to see age registered on the piece &ndash;plausible evidence of age.&nbsp; Not a complete ruin but old-looking.

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?&nbsp;

DVT: Probably good movies or reading old novels.

&nbsp;

CGN: What should we expect to see next from the Golden Triangle?

DVT: More contrast &ndash;ancient &amp; modern mixed.&nbsp; This is our moment; having access to everything and trying to sort out how it all goes together into a coherent whole.&nbsp; Is coherence even possible now? Let&rsquo;s find out.

&nbsp;

Doug VanTress is co-owner of the&nbsp;The Golden Triangle&nbsp;in Chicago. For more information about the shop&nbsp;please visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/the-golden-triangle">The Golden Triangle</a>

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An interview with Golden Triangle owner Doug VanTress

An Interview with a Dealer: Doug VanTress

Each week CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Hannah Litvan,&nbsp; director of Ice House Gallery.

&nbsp;

Name: Hannah Litvan

Age: 24

Current Position:&nbsp;Gallery Owner and&nbsp;Director

Hometown: I grew up in Wilmette, but my home is Evanston!

Previous Occupation(s): My first job was at a Lou Malnati&rsquo;s Pizzeria all through high school. I was a Writer and Features Editor for my college paper the Albion Pleiad. While living in Jackson Michigan&nbsp;I was a historic guide and gallery attendant for the Ella Sharp Museum. I also helped with the start up for their Prison Museum Cell Block 7.

After graduation I took a job as&nbsp;a historic tour guide for the Richard H. Driehaus Museum&nbsp;and did some volunteering for the Field Museum as a bone picker for their Ornithology department. I briefly worked last holiday season at an Evanston chocolate shop, Belgian Chocolatier Piron, which was fun. Starting in high school, I&nbsp;would clean&nbsp;houses for extra cash. Once I decided to embark on opening the gallery, I quit the museums and went to cleaning as my main job as the scheduling was&nbsp;easy so I could work on the gallery and didn&rsquo;t have a daily job taking up my time.

&nbsp;

5 favorites from the past week&nbsp;

Restaurant: Kuni&rsquo;s, a great&nbsp;family-owned Japanese place in Evanston

Shop: This week my sister and I went to Not Just Thee Fish Bowl, which is a pet shop, they have the most wonderful little ferrets, bunnies and guniea pigs you can play with. It&rsquo;s always fun.

Read: I just started &ldquo;The Name of the Wind&rdquo; by Patrick Rothfuss and I dig it so far. I&rsquo;m a big fan of&nbsp;manga so this is the first all-words book I&rsquo;ve read in a while!

Neighborhood: Evanston always! Beautiful houses and an awesome coastline, with a cool view of the big city. My fianc&eacute;, Chris, and I go on walks all the time just to look around.

Music: Music is a tough one.&nbsp;I&rsquo;m really into RADWIMPS and Superfly right now, but Blink-182 and Breaking Benjamin are always favorites.

&nbsp;

Tell us about your background and how your work with Ice House Gallery came to be?

I&#39;ve had&nbsp;interest&nbsp;in making and appreciating art my whole life, but became&nbsp;serious about becoming&nbsp;an artist when I was around&nbsp;12 years old. My biggest inspiration&nbsp;definitely&nbsp;came from cartoons and anime&nbsp;I watched, and still watch, constantly. I attended Albion College where I had a double major in English Creative Writing and Art with a Sculpture focus. Growing up and even in early adulthood, I never quite&nbsp;knew what job I wanted.&nbsp;After graduation&nbsp;I cast a huge net over any loosely artistic job I was qualified for. Hundreds of applications and tediously-written cover letters were sent into the digital abyss to never return. I managed to get a part-timer to support my independence, but it was not fulfilling.

The decision&nbsp;to quit and pursue opening a gallery was difficult. Who was I to do something like that? No one will take me seriously right? Thoughts of &quot;it&rsquo;s too big a change&quot; and&nbsp;&quot;it won&rsquo;t come to fruition&quot; were frequent.&nbsp;So many excuses floated in my head. Ultimately my mom and I found a building that would be perfect, and signing onto the lease&nbsp;solidified moving forward. I held pitch meetings at Evanston Public Library to find local artists and hear their thoughts on my idea. I searched the Evanston art community with&nbsp;the opportunity to meet&nbsp;many strong artists, business owners and art supporters to pick their brains and build&nbsp;connections.

The build-out for the space was a retrospectively enjoyable nightmare. What was projected to be a three month build-out turned into 13 months! Old warehouses seem to have their way and not want to be changed. My building manager and I wanted to highlight the integrity of the building while bringing it up to code. I found&nbsp;the build-out itself was simple, but city codes are another animal. Ice House was supposed to open in March 2017, but it did not&nbsp;happen. It was then supposed to open in June 2017, but again,&nbsp;could not&nbsp;happen. We took part in Evanston Made in June, a city-wide event&nbsp;to promote locally made art and products. We put on a sidewalk sale because we thought we were going to be open, and didn&#39;t want all our ads and excitement to go to waste! It was a good day for us!

My friends and family helped tremendously when we eventually got to move into the space with setting up the studios, painting and hanging everything. We finally opened in October 2017, and it was a blast! Looking back, all the extra time&nbsp;caused by delays ended up allowing us to grow public&nbsp;interest in Ice House and learn more about who we were and who we want&nbsp;to be when it it was time to&nbsp;finally&nbsp;open our doors.

&nbsp;

Share a typical day in the life.

Just now I&#39;m settling into a routine as we&rsquo;ve&nbsp;been open for about a month. I work at the gallery most days, going through emails and posting on our social media. Often artists come in to chat and show me their work. I am always thinking of the next show, feature and performances so I look up and save local artists I think may be a good fit with Ice House. It&rsquo;s fun to get into a planning groove. We try to focus on marketing plans to get our&nbsp;new name out there as well. When everything is good-to-go, I will read or draw at the desk waiting for potential art buyers to make their way in. Basic business stuff I suppose, but it being&nbsp;my business makes&nbsp;it&nbsp;fun! A couple nights a week I still go clean an office building in Evanston, but I always come home to my fianc&eacute;, cat and friends for wine and videogames.

&nbsp;

Is there a particularly favorite memory in the process of opening the space?

While&nbsp;in the build-out process I was also still deciding on my public image for the gallery. I found art people in Evanston to talk to and they were amazing. They listened to me, supported my idea and told me about their ideas and experiences. Most of these strong, caring people were women so that was very inspiring to me. It was so cool to ask a stranger for input and advice, and have them open up to me. The Evanston art community is very uplifting for&nbsp;those wishing to join and expand it.

&nbsp;

Share some successes as well as challenges this year.

Opening was definitely our biggest success, not only because we actually opened, but because of the support from our&nbsp;community. So many people came through all day and asked about us and our vision. It was amazing to speak with&nbsp;everyone and see all&nbsp;our hard work pay off.

A challenge we faced was more&nbsp;a series of small hills. Yes construction was arduous, but envisioning a business is a lot more complicated than one may realize. There were things I knew I wanted and didn&rsquo;t want, but there were so many aspects&nbsp;I never even considered and making certain decisions was tough. I wrote a mission for us and made sure we stuck to it with every decision&nbsp;made.

&nbsp;

How do you see Chicago&rsquo;s art scene in comparison to other cities? What do you think makes it particularly unique?

The Chicago and outreaching art scene is unique because it has such a huge variety. You have local artists from all different backgrounds and walks of life producing and showing in many different forms&nbsp;like street art, formal galleries, fairs, and performances. Traditional as well as modern art thrive simultaneously here, creating a diverse art scene anyone can appreciate. I think art in its many forms (not just what you can hang on a wall) is important to the mood of the city and neighborhoods. We also have an international art influence mixing with the local which even further diversifies the artistic community in the Chicagoland area.

&nbsp;

How have you seen technology directly affect/alter the art world?

You can be the most traditional artist ever, but in this modern world your art almost always has to have an online presence.&nbsp;Therefore you have to be tech savvy when&nbsp;showing your work to galleries or submit a portfolio. Most galleries or shows I&rsquo;ve submitted to require a digital portfolio and when I meet with other artists we usually ask for a (well-designed) card with our artist&nbsp;website on it. So even artists who do not use digital mediums must have a digital profile.&nbsp;And typically more than just one to get your name out there.

&nbsp;

What do you want to tell a young person considering this business?

Speaking as a young person, I say.. do it now! Dreaming of that &ldquo;one day I will&hellip;&rdquo; is time wasted.&nbsp;Opening a business of any kind is not a quick nor&nbsp;easy process, so why waste time&nbsp;at a job you&nbsp;don&rsquo;t like&nbsp;wanting something more? Take action and never be apprehensive to ask your community for ideas, advice and help. It&rsquo;s surprising who will invite you to their home, make you coffee, and talk dreams for hours! Ultimately,&nbsp;plans and timelines will mostly fly out the window,&nbsp;you&rsquo;ll&nbsp;plan out way more than you initially realize, and you will have stumbles and hiccups. However&nbsp;it&rsquo;s all part of the process. There&nbsp;will be&nbsp;days where you are not&nbsp;open yet, and it all seems a mess,&nbsp;you will want to quit.&nbsp;But birthing your brain-baby is so worth it. So stick to it!

&nbsp;

One piece of advice you would send back to yourself when you started out?

Oh there is so much I would tell my year-ago-self. Patience and flexibility are&nbsp;the biggest lessons I have learned. I would tell myself to just breathe through the bad and&nbsp;the good is on its&nbsp;way.

&nbsp;

Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

I&rsquo;m a mega-lover of Japanese culture, modern and historical. I&rsquo;ve been learning Japanese for about seven years, have studied in Kyoto, and&nbsp;am an avid reader on history and current culture. I enjoy many sides of Japanese culture relating to art and history (and have for quite a long time). Chris and I are honeymooning there and I plan to be in&nbsp;and out of Japan throughout my life.

&nbsp;

Favorite work of public art in Chicago?

As a child I liked the Picasso because it&rsquo;s a huge, mysterious beast. I would imagine it walking around the city at night. Now I&rsquo;m not sure if I have a favorite lone-standing piece. I&rsquo;m a big fan of Chicago&rsquo;s architecture and history. I love stained glass and sculpted masonry, so I enjoy Chicago&rsquo;s Architecture Tour.

&nbsp;

Artists you admire most.

Hayao Miyazaki&rsquo;s work touches my heart and shaped my artist-self growing up. Many manga writers have inspired&nbsp;and influenced my style such as Akira Toriyama, Hiromu Arakawa, Misashi Kishimoto and Satoshi Kon to name a few. Recently I traveled to Prague and had&nbsp;the opportunity to see a ton of Alphonse Mucha&rsquo;s work and visit his grave. His work has also inspired&nbsp;and shaped my style for a long time.

&nbsp;

What&#39;s coming up next at the gallery?

So much! We are new, and&nbsp;are currently trying to develop a strong program for shows as well as performances. We post on our website and social media all the details.

Our first performance which was a music and art collaboration show Friday November 17th, which was so fun and unique. Our turn-out was better than I thought it would be, and the music sounded amazing in our space.

Each month, on the first Saturday of that month, we have an opening reception for our monthly featured artist (always a local of course!) December 2nd was Evanston artist Jim Park&rsquo;s &ldquo;Bloomz&rdquo; series opener and he will show through the end of the month.

Our December performance is a stage reading written and performed by two Evanston actors: Max Lusk and Meghan Bortle. Friday December 15th, at 7pm and Saturday December 16th at 2pm and 7pm

We try to be a part of Evanston&rsquo;s involved sense of community so we are a part of &ldquo;Small Business Saturday&rdquo; 11/25 from 10am to 6pm and the &ldquo;Warm Bevvy Walk&rdquo; 12/7 from 5pm to 8pm

Our second floor is a bit of a different entity with Private Studios as well as a Cooperative artist workspace. These can be rented monthly or longer as a space for artists to create. We are building out a photo room too so artists can take photos of their work, models, headshots or whatever they need to take photos of. It&rsquo;s such a neat space which has been popular so far. I hope it becomes a thriving little community, and I would love to have a studio show next year.

&nbsp;

Hannah Litvan is the owner and director&nbsp;of Ice House Gallery&nbsp;in Evanston. For more information about the&nbsp;gallery please visit:<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/ice-house-gallery">&nbsp;Ice House Gallery</a>

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An Interview with a Dealer: Hannah Litvan

&shy;&shy;Each week CGN interviews a local art world professional to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Lelde Kalmite of Bridgeport Art Center.

&nbsp;

Age: Don&rsquo;t ask, don&rsquo;t tell

Current Position: Curator

Hometown: Wurzach, Germany

Previous Occupation: Non-profit arts administrator &amp; University instructor of, art history, studio art, and humanities.

&nbsp;

Favorites from this week:

Restaurant: Antique Taco on 35th street

Shop: National Museum of Mexican Art gift shop

Read: I read The New Yorker every week

Neighborhood: Still learning about Bridgeport, which has a fascinating history

Music: I love classical music (especially chamber music)

&nbsp;

Chicago Gallery News: Tell us about your background and how you came to connect with the Bridgeport Art Center?

Lelde Kalmite:&nbsp;After about a dozen years working as a non-profit arts administrator, in 2009 I took an early retirement and rented a studio at Bridgeport Art Center in order to get back to making art full time. I soon came to realize that BAC had the potential to become an important art venue on the South Side. I was given the opportunity to further develop the 4th floor gallery and begin a program of curated art exhibits. Since then, I have designed and installed over 50 exhibitions in three galleries at the BAC. This is the most dynamic and exciting place I have ever worked.&nbsp; I have a lovely studio and regular interaction with so many Chicago-area artists, curators, collectors and art lovers.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Share a typical day in the life.

LK: I start early and work on my own art for several hours each morning (4-5 hours per day).&nbsp;Afternoons are usually dedicated to curatorial work. This includes visiting the artist studios, preparing PR materials, communicating with each artist selected for a given show and helping them prepare for the exhibit.

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Which part of bringing together an exhibition proves most challenging?

LK:&nbsp; Creating an exhibit from a diverse collection of artworks is, as most curators know, akin to creating a new work of art.&nbsp; It is a pleasurable challenge, because it allows me to share my love of art.&nbsp; My educational background and work in non-profit administration have strongly influenced my work as a curator.&nbsp;

The exhibits do not necessarily reflect personal preferences but represent themes that can teach people about some important aspect of contemporary art or group of artists (geometric abstraction, the art of encaustic, male artists of color reflecting on social issues, paper arts, and so on). Many mundane administrative details (consignment agreements, announcement cards, receipt of artworks, etc.) go into preparing each show. However the actual installation of an exhibit is very satisfying and often exhilarating.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: How do you see Chicago&rsquo;s art scene in comparison to other cities? What do you think makes it particularly unique?

LK:&nbsp;Every major city has its own history and traditions in art.&nbsp; In Chicago, there has historically been a contrast between a tradition related to European modernism/abstraction, versus one that grows out of Midwestern Regionalism, na&iuml;ve art and popular culture. Today there seems to be no dominant tradition in which artists can situate themselves (either for or against).

In addition, there has been a steady reduction or even elimination of art in the school curriculum, so younger visitors who come to view art exhibits are often not very familiar with the long history of art &ndash; neither Western art, nor the art of other cultures.&nbsp; I believe that is what makes a place like BAC so important in the art community of Chicago.&nbsp; It educates visitors while engaging them with a very entertaining experience in a building full of art and artists.

&nbsp;

CGN: How have you seen technology directly affect/alter the way Bridgeport Art Center views it programs or connects with the surrounding community?

LK: The internet and social media have grown the audience for art exhibits at Bridgeport Art Center. Information about the programs is readily available on the website and disseminated to a growing e-mail list of visitors. There is a vital interaction among visitors interested in the different programs &ndash; dance studio, ceramic center (with its own beautiful gallery curated by Jay Strommen), fitness center, fashion shows, Maritime Museum, and more.&nbsp; People can come for a terrific evening of immersion in culture, free of charge for both entry and parking.&nbsp; The Internet has spread the word about Bridgeport Art Center throughout the world. Recently one night, at a River North gallery opening, a&nbsp;group of European visitors walked into the gallery and asked, &quot;How do we get to the Bridgeport Art Center?&quot;

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;One piece of advice you would send back to yourself when you started out?

LK: I would advise myself to rent a studio at a place like Bridgeport Art Center directly after graduating from the University so that I could be part of a larger artistic community and start to live the life of commitment and hard work that is required to excel in the field of art.

&nbsp;

CGN: Favorite cultural pursuit outside of the art world?

LK:&nbsp;I enjoy playing the piano, especially with other instrumentalists, and am looking for some other competent amateurs who might like to form a chamber group (just for fun).

&nbsp;

CGN:&nbsp;Favorite work of public art in Chicago?

LK:&nbsp;Virginio Ferrari&rsquo;s Super Strength at the University of Illinois Chicago Engineering Research Facility.

&nbsp;

CGN: What&#39;s coming up next at Bridgeport Art Center?&nbsp;

LK:&nbsp;A full schedule of exhibitions for 2018 is in place for the 4th floor gallery.&nbsp; This&nbsp;includes art by architects and designers. The&nbsp;6th annual art competition and&nbsp;a show called Loved Ones will explore depictions of people with whom artists have meaningful relationships, to name a few. There will be a show about patterns found in nature as well as several others.&nbsp;The 3rd floor rental gallery is also completely booked for the coming year, with shows by the Colored Pencil Society of America, student and art teacher shows organized by the Illinois Art Education Association, the non-profit group CAVA, among others.&nbsp; It is a tribute to the hard work of the staff at Bridgeport that we now have so many exhibits and other events to offer not only residents of the South Side, but visitors from the entire city and beyond.

&nbsp;

Lelde Kalmite is a Curator at Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago. For more information about the organization please visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/bridgeport-art-center">Bridgeport Art Center</a>.
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