<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418546/bntuzrijyowqsswgxr4p.gif"></figure>By KEVIN NANCESince the mid-1970s, Rhona Hoffman has been a force in the Chicago art world and beyond—a fact enshrined last December by Vanity Fair magazine, which named her one of America’s 14 most important female art dealers.&nbsp;Known for showing a mix of formal and/or politically engaged work by artists at various points in their careers, Hoffman’s eponymous gallery has established a track record and reputation far larger than its relatively modest digs in the West Loop. If you’re an artist in Chicago, or one from elsewhere looking for a prime showcase in the Midwest, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery is high on your list. And if you’re a collector with an eye for the latest and greatest in contemporary art, you head to 118 N. Peoria Street.&nbsp;Chicago Gallery News recently caught up with Hoffman—who was working with her staff to prepare the gallery’s booth design for this fall’s EXPO CHICAGO—for an interview in her light-and-art-filled office. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.&nbsp;CGN: Has your work as an art dealer been affected at all by you being a woman?RH: No, although with the exception perhaps of a Marian Goodman or a Barbara Gladstone or maybe a few others, generally the superpowers in the art world are men, both in America and Europe.&nbsp;&nbsp;You’re talking about people like Larry Gagosian?Gagosian, yes. But Hauser &amp; Wirth are even bigger. David Zwirner. They are eclipsing a number of bigger, male-owned galleries. The men tend to go for the big paintings, the big prices. But there are still very powerful women dealers all over the world. Paula Cooper is still there. Marianne Boesky’s becoming a big deal. In Europe, there’s Monika Sprüth. In São Paulo, there’s Luisa Strina. In fact, there are more women who are dealers than there are men who are dealers. But the price points are generally lower. I hate broad generalizations, but in great measure, women dealers tend to show art that sells for considerably less than the men. And what’s happening now—which is really horrifying—is that certain big galleries are waiting for the depth of the artist to be developed. As a less-monied gallery develops the artist—has shows, takes them to art fairs, takes care of them, brings them to the world, makes them popular—along comes Mr. Big Fish and says, “Come with me, little girl or little boy. I can make you even more popular.” It’s always been the case, but it’s happening more now.&nbsp;Have you been on the receiving end of that?Not yet. (Thinks about it.) Yes, I have, actually.&nbsp;&nbsp;You had an artist who was poached?I wouldn’t say poached. The Pace Gallery took on Robert Ryman, and I never really had another show since then. They seemed to be able to control that. And David Zwirner now represents Fred Sandback. I have an excellent relationship with the estate, so they’re not going to completely take it away from me. But I have less control over it than Zwirner does.&nbsp;&nbsp;In the case of Ryman, that was someone you had invested in, so to speak.Yes, yes. We’d been showing him since the late ’70s.&nbsp;This did not make you happy?Well, why would I like being run over? (Laughs.) I’m not a masochist.&nbsp;Getting back to the topic of women in your history as a gallerist: The Young Hoffman Gallery, which you started with Donald Young in the mid-’70s, was one of the first to show a lot of women artists, including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, etc. Was there, and is there now, a preference on your part to show women artists?&nbsp;If so, it’s not conscious. We always picked work that we thought was challenging and interesting. I have to amuse myself, you know. I’m not here just to make other people happy. I have to take care of my ego as well. I have to come to work and feel good, and I like to back a good horse. You know, back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the people doing the most exciting things were women. I’m a very political, socio-political animal, and I care about the world. The gallery is still split between artists who do formal work and people who are actively engaged in societal concerns. And the women were political. Barbara Kruger was political, for sure. Cindy Sherman, not so much. But they were doing interesting things. And then in the early ’90s, along came the African-American artists, who were doing work that intrigued me. I think it’s like no one having heard of [Jorge Luis] Borges or [Gabriel Garcia] Márquez. They just seemed to break upon the scene here, but they’d already had huge careers in South America. The same thing happens in the visual arts. You start seeing work that’s interesting to you, for a variety of reasons—including, always, the formal aspects. And that’s where you want the dialogue to be.&nbsp;&nbsp;But it wasn’t that you were making a special point of recruiting women artists, or African-American artists, for the sake of addressing some imbalance.Not at all.&nbsp;&nbsp;And that’s still true?Absolutely. In terms of African-American artists, we started Mickalene Thomas’s career. Now we have Deana Lawson, who has a show opening at the Art Institute on Sept. 5. We have Derrick Adams. Of the new artists we have taken on in the last couple of years, one is an African-American artist, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, who actually was raised in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. You never heard of him. But you will.&nbsp;He sounds like a good story.Yes. He grew up poor. When he was 14 or 15, his mom died. Her name was Mary Quinn, so he took her first name as his middle name. He was very fortunate in that he had two teachers who took him under their wing and pushed him along at school, got him scholarships, things like that. He made it. Very smart, very verbal.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/744/original/junebug.jpg" alt=""></figure>To what extent would you say your choices as a gallerist reflect your personal taste in art?One hundred percent.&nbsp;You wouldn’t take on an artist whose work you personally didn’t care for but thought might sell?Never.&nbsp;How would you describe the niche you’ve carved out as a dealer?Well, we’re a Midwest gallery. We largely sell in the greater Midwest, except for art fairs, where the world comes and you sell to anybody from anyplace. I don’t have a show of a New York artist and immediately sell it back to New York art collectors. Nathaniel’s show, for example, comes fresh from the studio, we open it without anything sold—although there are people in New York dying to buy some of the pieces—and Chicago goes first, and the Midwest. Then the rest of the world can go. That gives me an edge. I give the artist a bigger exposure than if he or she had shows only in New York.&nbsp;&nbsp;It seems like you used to do a lot of art fairs; now, not so much.I’ve cut back, yes. Now I’m just doing three, the Art Dealers Association show in New York, Art Basel Miami and EXPO CHICAGO. We went to Hong Kong for three years, we’ve done other fairs. But they’re very costly. And a lot of the work I sell at an art fair, I could sell anyplace. And you know, I don’t have a Picasso to pull out of the back room to cover the cost of a fair.&nbsp;&nbsp;How have the fairs changed the way you do business?What the fairs did was change the composition of your clientele. Now the collectors go to all the fairs and they know all the dealers. So they’re not going to come to you as a dealer and say, “Oh, I want to buy a this or a that, could you get me one?” They’re just going to go to a fair and buy one from whoever’s selling it. So everyone has the same clients now, mostly. Everyone can buy from everybody now.&nbsp;And that’s less satisfactory to you than the old way?Yeah, because there’s less conversation. [Chicago collectors] Jack and Sandy Guthman and I were together a while back, and we were reminiscing about what Saturdays used to be like in the good old days, the ’80s and ’90s. On Saturdays, collectors would come and sit around my office and we’d talk about art. Now everyone’s too busy. And the other thing that really is the bane of my existence is that everybody—well, not everybody, but so many people have art advisors. Of course, there are some really good ones. But you don’t have to go to school to hang out your shingle as an art advisor. Your information, your history, your ability to discern art is unknown. And they take people around and say, “Look at this, this is interesting.” I understand it to some degree, because people are busy, they’re working too hard. So you have someone now who makes money from you when you buy something through them, plus sometimes they get a stipend from the gallery. It’s interesting.&nbsp;People say the art world runs on reputation, and that goes for both artists and dealers.&nbsp;That’s a stupid generalization. The art world runs on a lot of stuff.&nbsp;But you do have a reputation.I know, I’m reading about it now. (Laughs.) I’m well-known for doing just what I said. And I’m known for doing it as long as I’ve done it. Starting in ’76, that’s a long way from there to here.&nbsp;I wonder where that places you on the list of longest-serving gallerists in Chicago? Near the top, I’m thinking.Well, there’s the Richard Gray Gallery. They were there since before me. Stanley Johnson. (Thinks.) Hmm. Wow. That makes me maybe the oldest living dealer really active in Chicago.&nbsp;&nbsp;There’s Ann Nathan—Oh, Ann, of course. She’s been around longer than I have. Maybe Carl Hammer?&nbsp;Well, what I’m getting around to, a little fearfully, is the fact that you’re at a point in your career when many people are considering retirement. Do you have thoughts along those lines?I don’t know. I just signed a new lease, but only for three years. I’ll think about it then. (Smiles.) The thing is, my job comes along with a really nice life. Not necessarily a lot of money, but a really nice life. I do for a living what I would do in my spare time. I have interesting conversations in this job. I don’t have to be the best friend of every collector who buys things from me, but I’m connected to a world that I’m really interested in, which is theoretical and intellectual. And we drink a lot and have a lot of fun. (Laughs.) So what am I going to do, stay home?&nbsp;Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer&nbsp; Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinnance1">@KevinNance1</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN interviews Rhona Hoffman on 40 years in business 

Rhona Hoffman: 40 Years of Having Fun

By KEVIN NANCE

Art collector Helen Zell is one of those people who thinks best on her feet. Given the option of a sit-down chat or being interviewed while touring the modernist Streeterville condo she shares with her husband, businessman Sam Zell, she immediately chooses the latter. It&rsquo;s quite a trek, encompassing 18,000 square feet of space that contains some 800 objects, including major works by Ren&eacute; Magritte, Joan Mir&oacute;, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dal&iacute;, Remedios Varo, Giorgio de Chirico, Louise Bourgeois and a host of younger and emerging artists, along with ethnographic material and the occasional foray into Pop art.

Associated for two decades with the Museum of Contemporary Art, where she has held several positions including board chair, Zell is sleek and chic&mdash;her draping silver hair set off against an elegant all-black outfit&mdash;but entirely down-to-earth, her husky alto regularly erupting into laughter. Here&rsquo;s an edited transcript of our visit. &nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Zell in the company of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois" data-rich-file-id="739" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/739/original/helen-zell-second-shoot-6.jpg" />

CGN: How did you get started with collecting?

HZ: The collection was originally conceived as a Surrealist collection. It was 18 years ago&mdash;Sam and I weren&rsquo;t even married yet&mdash;and we talked about collecting art. Over dinner one night, he looked at me and said, &ldquo;Do you like art?&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;Yeah, I like art. Like it a lot.&rdquo; Then, &ldquo;Well, what do you like?&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;Well, I like a lot of things. I&rsquo;ve been a museum-goer my whole life.&rdquo; He said, &ldquo;Well, I like Surrealism!&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;You do?&rdquo;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

You didn&rsquo;t know that at the time?

I didn&rsquo;t have a clue. I didn&rsquo;t know he was interested in art, let alone Surrealism.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Am I correct in thinking that you, rather than your husband, take the lead in the collecting process?

That&rsquo;s right. When we first decided to do this, Sam looked at me and said, &ldquo;OK. You do all the work and I&rsquo;ll write the checks. It&rsquo;s really going to be fun.&rdquo; And that was it.

&nbsp;

So, you&rsquo;ve always been in the driver&rsquo;s seat.

Yeah. But he loves it. And takes great pride in walking around and learning about the collection. It&rsquo;s a really big part of what he likes to show people.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

And did you have a background in art when you started the collection?

Not really. I was always a museum-goer, but I never took an art history course. I was always a literature person, and I played the piano.&nbsp;

I was afraid to go to galleries. Terrified! Because they were so snooty. I lived in New York when I was young, and was horrified by walking into these places that were so quiet. Nobody talked to you - kind of looked down their noses at you. I was really uncomfortable and didn&rsquo;t feel like I belonged there.

&nbsp;

So the two Magrittes on the wall there are foundations of the collection?

Right. Also Dal&iacute;, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy. Our criteria generally was the quality of the work&mdash;how it affected us. Did it intrigue us? Did it make our hearts beat a little faster?

&nbsp;

That&rsquo;s a good yardstick.

And pretty consistently, that&rsquo;s been true, whether it&rsquo;s Surrealism or work that has nothing to do with Surrealism. You have Magritte and you have these Mayan ceramic figures that are 2,000 years old, and you think, &ldquo;What do they have to do with one another?&rdquo; Well, maybe nothing.

&nbsp;

Maybe the connection is those African masks that inspired Picasso.

To me, it&rsquo;s about the way the artists express themselves. (Pointing to a piece.) That&rsquo;s by Gertrude Abercrombie, an American Surrealist from Chicago whom I had never heard of until Julie Rodrigues Widholm at the MCA did a collection show and revealed to me for the first time that there were a couple of Abercrombies in our permanent collection. She juxtaposed some of those pieces against more contemporary work and showed how they influenced one another. I loved the work and found out that we had a dealer in Chicago with access to it, so I went to Corbett vs. Dempsey and they found me an Abercrombie! That&rsquo;s the part I really love&mdash;the story, the hunt. Making connections, finding out I really love something that fits in with the other work that we already have, then going to find it. That&rsquo;s always fun.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Well, &ldquo;eclectic&rdquo; is the word of the day.

It&rsquo;s actually not. If you look at a lot of collections today that are put together for hedge-fund guys and people who are into buying for the sake of having trophies on their wall, buying and selling. . . that&rsquo;s very different from what we&rsquo;ve done. We&rsquo;ve done what the collectors did once upon a time. They collected what they loved, and they took little side trips, had little adventures. I like to think I&rsquo;m an old-fashioned collector.

&nbsp;

It&rsquo;s not about buying and selling.&nbsp;

We never sell. We buy it and expect to eventually give it away.

&nbsp;

*

<img alt="" data-caption="A collection of objects in a sandbox—including maquettes, driftwood, seashells and other objects—from the studio of Lee Bontecou, recently acquired by Helen Zell in a special purchase via New York dealer Ann Freedman." data-rich-file-id="738" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/738/original/helen-zell-4.jpg" />

Next, we encounter a group of neo-primitive sculptures by Louise Bourgeois.

One of my favorite artists is Louise Bourgeois, who died a few years ago. There were originally about 50 of these sculptures, called &ldquo;Les Personnages,&rdquo; first exhibited together at MOMA in the &rsquo;50s. The group has been reassembled a few times, including once at the Guggenheim in New York. When you think of her work juxtaposed with Tanguy&rsquo;s, I think she has a Surrealist DNA. I just find them very compatible.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

They seem to have a relation to your ethnographic art.

Yes. Absolutely. They&rsquo;re like totems. That&rsquo;s the kind of thing that makes it all make sense for me.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

One of the sculptures has a mirror for a face.

My grandkids love that. It&rsquo;s like you become part of the piece.

&nbsp;

There might also be a reference to women carrying baskets on their heads.

Or it might be some strange figure with a whirlibird on his head. (Laughs.) Later in her life, she did some incredibly huge monumental spiders. One of them was in the Turbine Room at the Tate. Then she did some that were much smaller, like this one (points to a spider sculpture on a table). There are about five of these, and in this case she combined it with one of the little cloth figures she was making at the end of her life. I love this piece. You can say it&rsquo;s strange or tortured, but I like to think of it as a more powerful version of her&mdash;sort of stalking her prey.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

In the hallway, Zell pauses in front of two paintings hung side by side, both featuring couples&mdash;the first very happy together, the second not so much.

These are two of the pictures that started the collection. We&rsquo;re at an art fair early on, and Sam zeroes in on this piece (of the happy couple). He says, &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s this artist?&rdquo; It was Dubuffet&mdash;early Dubuffet, from the &rsquo;40s, didn&rsquo;t look like his later work at all. And Sam said, &ldquo;I really like that piece.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&nbsp;

One of the faces looks like an Ed Paschke face.

Definitely, although Paschke wasn&rsquo;t working yet. Anyway, the couple looks very happy together. I think it&rsquo;s a classic example of, you know, you see something that resonates, because it means something for you.

&nbsp;

You were newlyweds.

We weren&rsquo;t even married yet. We were very happy and very romantic. It&rsquo;s also very colorful, and we both love color.

&nbsp;

(Pointing to the other painting): This is later in the relationship&mdash;darker, more serious

(Laughs): We still weren&rsquo;t married yet. Although I have to say, we&rsquo;re not dark, not very serious. Sam&rsquo;s one of the most upbeat people you&rsquo;ll ever meet. I&rsquo;ve learned a lot about optimism from him. Anyhow, the next year, there was another painting with another couple. This is Heinrich Campendonk, a German Expressionist.

&nbsp;

The piece has a Rousseau-like feel.

I see that. I think it also has some interesting references to sex.&nbsp;

As Sam will tell you, that&rsquo;s a big thing for him. Lots of naked ladies. Tits and ass! (Laughs.)

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

We turn the corner, where there&rsquo;s a large Roy Lichtenstein painting.

That was in the Lichtenstein retrospect at the Art Institute a few years ago, wasn&rsquo;t it? &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;

That&rsquo;s right. It was one of the few pieces in the show that wasn&rsquo;t owned by someone who wouldn&rsquo;t sell it.&nbsp; It was offered for sale by [New York art dealer] Larry Gagosian. (Cont. on next page...)

So when Sam and I fell in love with it, we were keenly aware that we could probably buy it.

&nbsp;

You bought it after having seen it at the Art Institute?

Right. I immediately contacted Larry&mdash;I knew him very slightly&mdash;and we started the dance, the negotiation, which lasted about three months.

&nbsp;

That&rsquo;s a long dance.

He&rsquo;s tough, but so am I. (Laughs.)

&nbsp;

I&rsquo;m sure you drive a very hard bargain.

It&rsquo;s just that I&rsquo;m tenacious. Sam would never&mdash;he would say, &ldquo;How much does the painting cost?&rdquo; The guy would tell him, and he&rsquo;d say OK and write a check. I cannot do that, because I&rsquo;m too familiar with the way the art world works.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

There&rsquo;s big markup.

They mark up their paintings with the idea that they&rsquo;re going to deal with you, negotiate. That&rsquo;s all part of the process.

&nbsp;

And you did get Gagosian to come down on the price?

Yeah. He finally broke down and sold it to me two days&mdash;or maybe a day and a half&mdash;before a big auction where the values of Lichtenstein went up 40 to 50 percent.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

So it wasn&rsquo;t a good move to sell when he did.

No. He should have waited. And I would have had to be satisfied with a worse price for me because of what happened at that auction. That&rsquo;s where the art market really influences what you&rsquo;re doing as a collector. I hate that part of it, but you must be aware of it.

&nbsp;

*

&nbsp;

We move to another large space down the hall, formerly a separate apartment which now houses the Zells&rsquo; photography collection and works by younger and emerging artists, many with a Surrealist bent.

A lot of the work in here is collected in tandem with institutions, especially the MCA and the Art Institute. If they&rsquo;re doing a show and want to collect the work&mdash;like this piece by Marlo Pascual&mdash;and I like the work, I buy it and promise it to the institution. It&rsquo;s a way of supporting the local museums and keeping work moving in and out of the space. It gives me the opportunity to be flexible without having to store things. I like to keep moving on.

&nbsp;

Do you think of this as a separate collection, or as part of a single collection?

It&rsquo;s one collection with two pretty clearly defined parts, but a lot of the young artists in here are influenced by Surrealism, so it&rsquo;s the perfect time to start mixing them together.

&nbsp;

This is an interesting piece (referring to a large panel covered with peacock feathers).

That&rsquo;s a Carol Bove, another artist I discovered through my association with the MCA. They did a show called The Language of Less, and she was one of the artists included. So I bought this from the show, and it will eventually go back to the MCA.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

We come to a collection of small pieces, including maquettes, driftwood, seashells and other objects, in what appears to be a sandbox.

This looks like Lee Bontecou.

It is! And it&rsquo;s actually one of my favorite stories. She did a show four or five years ago for Ann Freedman in New York, and I loved it, and was very interested in these three things called &ldquo;Sandpits,&rdquo; which were included in the exhibition to show how Lee works in her studio. They were not really considered works of art; they were just to show how she puts things together, experiments with shapes and forms. Well, I fell in love with this. I didn&rsquo;t want to buy one of the pieces of art&mdash;I have a lot of her art&mdash;but I really wanted to have this. I&rsquo;ve always been fascinated with her, I&rsquo;ve met her, spent some time with her. So I asked if I could buy this, and Ann said, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think she wants to sell this.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

It&rsquo;s work product, essentially.

Exactly. It&rsquo;s a sandbox you play in to decide what you&rsquo;re going to make next. I said, &ldquo;Oh, Ann, just tell her I&rsquo;ll give it to the MCA! Beg her!&rdquo; (Laughs.) Months went by, and then Ann called me one day and said, &ldquo;She finally agreed to do it.&rdquo; So finally it arrives in a box&mdash;all the sand, in bags, and all the little objects, beautifully wrapped in tissue paper. I had Ann photograph the whole assemblage when it was in New York, so I made a grid and proceeded to put it all together. And it worked. Then Ann called me again and said that Lee had said, &ldquo;You know, she doesn&rsquo;t have to do it like I did it. She can do it the way she wants to do it.&rdquo; And I said, &ldquo;I thought I&rsquo;d start off the way Lee did it.&rdquo; (Laughs uproariously.)

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer&nbsp; Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/kevinnance1">@KevinNance1</a>

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Art collector Helen Zell is interviewed in CGN

Helen Zell’s Old Fashioned Approach to Collecting Contemporary Art

Zo&euml; Ryan is the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2014 she curated the second Istanbul Design Biennial. She also teaches art history at SAIC and University of Illinois Chicago. She has written several books, including Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention, published in 2011.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Zoë Ryan at the Art Institute of Chicago" data-rich-file-id="752" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/752/original/zoe-cc-88-ryan-photo-by-kyle-lamere-march2014.jpg" />

CGN: You came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and regularly travel extensively for your job. Please decribe your fall schedule.

&nbsp;

ZR: What I love most about my job is that no two months are the same. The fall is always particularly busy, with new exhibition openings, and this fall is exciting as we open our major mid-career survey of work by architect David Adjaye. We installed the exhibition here at the museum for most of August, and then I was off to Istanbul for a quick trip, since I am on the advisory board of the Istanbul Design Biennial, which I curated in 2014; I try to attend board meetings, as the biennial is an institution that I am particularly fond of. I have also been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw in September, which I am looking forward to, as I have never been. Travel is always a pleasure, but I like to keep a balance between my time in Chicago and my time away.

&nbsp;

What are highlights of the Adjaye exhibition opening in September, for design&nbsp;aficionados as well as the layperson?

&nbsp;

This is a really important moment in David&rsquo;s career. He now has more than 50 built projects and many more in development or under construction all over the world. Next year, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Washington Mall, designed by David opens to the public. This is a project of immense national and international significance and has become the lynchpin of our exhibition at the Art Institute. The exhibition provides a moment to reflect on David&rsquo;s career and understand the past 15-years worth of work within the context of his projects in development, such as larger scale public buildings and urban master plans across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.&nbsp;

In addition to models, drawings, sketches, and photographs, the exhibition includes a specially commissioned series of short films featuring David&rsquo;s buildings and commentary from an international coterie of art world luminaries such as Thelma Golden, Lorna Simpson, Chris Ofili, and Taiye Selasi. These help bring David&rsquo;s projects alive. In addition, visitors will be able to experience many of his projects at a one-to-one scale through full-scale mock-ups of fa&ccedil;ades of his buildings, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC and Sugar Hill in Harlem. We are also installing a wooden pavilion in the galleries that visitors can walk through, giving them a first-hand experience of one of David&rsquo;s projects and enabling them to experience for themselves David&rsquo;s interest in material, spatial and compositional explorations.

<img alt="" data-caption="Francis A. Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington DC, 2012. ©Jeff Sauers, courtesy of Adjaye Associates." data-rich-file-id="753" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/753/original/adjaye.jpg" />

Adjaye is known for designing architectural projects that in part address social issues.&nbsp; This is also a theme of the upcoming inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennial.&nbsp; What do you think design can offer society?&nbsp;

&nbsp;

The fields of architecture and design are inextricably linked to every aspect of our daily lives. From our buildings, streets, education, food, and health care to our communications, political, and economic systems, the types of work that architects and designers are tackling has grown exponentially. Architects and designers play an important role in identifying points of urgency and posing questions, as well as formulating and materializing solutions. They have an incredible capacity to take urgent challenges and create outcomes that raise the quality of life and help make the world a more sustainable place, all while delighting and amazing us.

&nbsp;

How do you see Chicago as a base for all that you do?&nbsp; What does Chicago have to offer the rest of the design world?&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Wandering the streets of Chicago is a lesson in modern and contemporary architecture. This is an inspiring city to live and work in, and the city is a frame for my work. Chicagoans are very proud of the rich cultural and artistic traditions that have been born and cultivated here and the many talented individuals who have made their mark here, from architects such as Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, to contemporary practitioners such as Jeanne Gang and John Ronan. It&rsquo;s incredible to live in a city where everyone has a point of view about the built environment.

&nbsp;

In design, there continues to be a rich tradition of graphic, furniture, and product designers based here following in the footsteps of modern designers, such as Charles Harrison and John Massey, Marcia Lausen at SudioLab, James Goggin, Helen Maria Nugent and Ronald Kirkpatrick of Haelo Design, Scott Wilson of MNML, and emerging practitioners such as Parsons &amp; Charlesworth and Plural. It&rsquo;s a rich, creative environment in which to live and work.

&nbsp;

Many people think of design, and objects first come to mind. How can we see design as conceptual rather than physical?

&nbsp;

The wonderful thing about working in the fields of architecture and design is that we all can have an opinion about these fields of practice, based on our own experiences of living and working in buildings and cities and using design daily, whether it is our smart phones, tea kettles, or the street signs that help us get to where we are going.&nbsp;

Designers are master communicators - able to frame and explore intellectual, cultural, and social questions through their work. A burgeoning area of study is speculative design, in which the processes of design ask questions about everyday life as a means to find solutions to challenges as varied as the impact of new technologies on our health and wellbeing or our increasingly aging populations.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

You&rsquo;ve been building AIC&rsquo;s first contemporary design collection - what are one or two of your favorite acquisitions to date?&nbsp;

&nbsp;

We are currently preparing for a new installation of work from our 20th and 21st century architecture and design collections. This will be the first time that the museum has dedicated galleries for these periods, and in preparation, we have been acquiring new work. Recently we acquired a pre-fabricated kitchen and bathroom unit by French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand. They are fantastic, 1970s units, inspired by Pop Art in their vibrant colors and shapes. They help us expand on the history of pre-fabrication that has played such an important role in the history of America and elsewhere in the 20th century. Visitors to our new galleries will get to experience a design element meant for architectural interiors at a one-to-one scale and fully appreciate what they might have been like when they were originally installed in the ski chalet for which they were designed in France.

Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2014 she curated the second Istanbul Design Biennial. She also teaches art history at SAIC and University of Illinois Chicago.

Q&A with Design Curator Zoë Ryan

BY LAURA M. METTAMI met Cheryl years ago when I volunteered to assist in The School of the Art Institute’s (SAIC) Continuing Studies program and was placed in a fashion class she was teaching. Since then, I’ve kept up with Cheryl’s ambitious projects and exhibitions. Her energy is contagious, her passion is palpable, and she has a unique way of connecting to youth and the community. The artist’s recent work has questioned issues of power, inequality, race, gender, and segregation. Cheryl Pope has been busy. And she likes it that way.&nbsp;Pope lives and works in Chicago, and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago), and Galleria Bianconi (Milan, Italy). She earned her Masters from SAIC in Design: Fashion, Body, and Garment in 2010 and currently teaches in SAIC’s Fashion and Contemporary Practice Departments.Top image: Cheryl Pope, Strength to Love (for Chicago), 2013, rhinestones and adhesive on glass in velvet, wood and glass case. Photo credit: James Prinz Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cherylpope.net">www.cherylpope.net</a><figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/757/original/c-pope-2.jpg" alt=""></figure>LM: When did you become interested in&nbsp;art?&nbsp;CP: I lived across the street from a forest preserve and was always finding and making things, but it wasn’t until my senior year in high school, in my first art class with Mr. Englehart, that art became my path. He was the first to respect my intention to make.&nbsp;He believed in me and respected me, and this was transforming when I needed it most. I will always be grateful to him.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/769/original/cheryl-pope-one-of-many-one-2-lr.jpg" alt=""></figure>You’ve had quite a busy year, with multiple exhibitions in Chicago (Just Yell: From Within at The Poetry Foundation; Just Yell: Leveling the Playing Field - DCASE Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center), as well as several others in Miami, Boulder, Germany, Italy, and Dubai.&nbsp;Any highlights from your spring and summer shows that stood out to you?In each exhibition and event, I have been repeatedly reminded of the value of quality over quantity. I think so often we evaluate based on numbers or scale. For me I can put all my time and all my heart into a project and reach only one person, but I can really impact them - and this is all that&nbsp;matters to me. This gives me all the courage, energy and purpose to continue.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/770/original/cheryl-pope-poetry-foundation2.jpg" alt=""></figure>Do you enjoy having a full plate?&nbsp;Yes! Life only happens once. I live each day with this attitude. I have so much respect for my dreams and I want to do all I can to make both mine and others’ come true.&nbsp;What’s next this fall and into 2016?I’m curating a one-night fashion event on September 18, 5-10pm, for the Art Loop Alliance (closing Wabash between Monroe and Madison); exhibiting in ARTBO in Bogota, Colombia; performing and installing a public work in Osnabrück, Germany; and participating in the Elmhurst Art Museum’s Biennial in December.&nbsp;Your recent Just Yell exhibitions have shined a light on the issue of gun violence and its impact on society - city youth in particular. Under the guise of cheerleading, you’ve made discussions about this urban issue accessible while humanizing those involved. I applaud your continued involvement with this topic. Can you&nbsp;elaborate on your connection with the subject and what led you to pursue this series?Engaging with youth in communities throughout Chicago, it became more and more evident to me the many ways in which youth are affected by gun violence and I felt called to respond to it. I decided to use Cheerleading, formerly called Yelling, as a framework to contain their voices and reactions to these issues.&nbsp;Cheerleading suggests sides, it suggests winners and&nbsp;losers, but more importantly it suggests a team, a community and a shared goal and belief.&nbsp;The idea of yelling is complicated: you can yell for help, for fear, for hope, but you are yelling to be heard. And these voices need to be&nbsp;seen and heard.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/767/original/cheryl-pope-23-yell-yell.jpg" alt=""></figure>How has your perception of gun violence, and perhaps physical violence, changed from when you first started working in this series?I have become more aware and educated on the many systems, layers, and politics involved that complicate, enable, and resist positive change. I think it’s easy to point a finger, or to say, “get rid of guns” to try to solve a problem, but these issues are deeply rooted in systems of power and privilege.&nbsp;Instead we need to accept and confront the fact that segregation, unequal education and racism are the most harmful acts of violence, and it is here that the change needs to happen. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/768/original/cheryl-pope-too-young-to-die-2-lr.jpg" alt=""></figure>You have worked with youth and young artists and poets on a number of different projects over the years. What do you consider a highlight of working with younger collaborators?This spring I was invited to be on a panel at Young Chicago Authors. After the discussion a young woman came up to ask me a question. We looked at each other and both got wide eyed the same moment. It was Del Marie Nelson, my mentee from 10 years ago at the James Jordan Boys &amp; Girls Club. We lost track of one another and have once again connected. Since that moment she has been at the Cultural Center every day and involved in all the summer Just Yell / Poetry as Self Defense projects.This was such a significant moment, as it revealed the true sense of community, of time passing and being there for different phases of a life in the community. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child,” and we are all responsible for our part. It is a blessing to have the opportunity to spend time with so many young, extremely talented artists.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/771/original/cheryl-pope-remember-to-remember.jpg" alt=""></figure>You studied fashion at SAIC, among many other pursuits, and worked as a studio manager for Nick Cave. Are you in the midst of any fashion projects?&nbsp;I’m currently working on a collection of kimonos as well as a fragrance line; both relate conceptually to my studio practice. I am also designing and constructing the garments I wear in my performances, which are largely in conversation with fashion as a language and the history of fashion.&nbsp;What do you enjoy doing in your down time, outside of art-related activities?&nbsp;I spend my time in the gym training in boxing and Muay Thai. I love to be physical, sparring, learning new drills, and improving form. There's always more to learn;&nbsp;always new challenges.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/772/original/cheryl-pope-this-or-that.jpg" alt=""></figure>&nbsp;Forgetting time and budget limitations, what is a dream project of yours?My dream is to have an art school. It will have a foundation that starts with a focus on the physical body in terms of health and self-care, and will include holistic spiritual therapy while maintaining a rigorous academic and studio practice that generates top contemporary work. We will have a team that travels to scout and recruit youth so that its accessibility is not dependent on privilege, but rather, on heart, intention, and talent.&nbsp;One-liner Chicago favorites…Art space: Promontory Point Park, Monique Meloche Gallery, The Poetry Foundation, Intuit, Randolph Street Flea MarketRestaurant/bar: Avec, Chicken Shop at Soho House, Owen + Alchemy, Grace (which I haven’t been to yet but one day will)Recommendations for tourists: Architecture Foundation River Tour, University of Chicago Campus, Open Mic at Young Chicago Authors on Tuesday nights.&nbsp;Can you&nbsp;name a few artists who have inspired you?Nick Cave (visual art); Andrei Tarkovsky (film); Steve Reich (music); Pina Bausch (dance); Jack Kerouac (poet).&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cherylpope.net">www.cherylpope.net</a>

Cheryl Pope's artwork has questioned issues of power, inequality, race, gender, and segregation. She lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago), and Galleria Bianconi (Milan, Italy). She earned her Masters from SAIC in Design: Fashion, Body, and Garment in 2010 and currently teaches in SAIC’s Fashion and Contemporary Practice Departments.

Cheryl Pope is Making Change Happen

BY KEVIN NANCE

As young collectors, Ellen and Richard Sandor started out slowly. &ldquo;We were kids, and we both have a collector gene in us,&rdquo; Richard recalls in a recent interview at their Gold Coast apartment. &ldquo;We bought lithographs for $10 or $15.&rdquo; His wife shrugs. &ldquo;To be honest, it wasn&rsquo;t anything more than a young couple who wanted something on the wall,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;The obsession did not occur until 1978, when we bought this apartment.&rdquo;

Obsession? A strong word, that.

&ldquo;Just look around,&rdquo; Ellen Sandor says. And you see what she means.

<img alt="" data-caption="Art seems to continue infinitely on up the winding staircase. Photo by Kevin Nance. " data-rich-file-id="556" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/556/original/sandor-staircase-copy.jpg" />

The Sandors&rsquo; Astor Street home&mdash;a 6,700-square-foot gallery-like space that features marble pillars from the old Palmer Potter mansion&mdash;is bulging with art, including about 1,600 works in photography, sculpture and new media. Photographs take pride of place, hung closely together, salon-style, in vertical arrays that almost reach the first floor&rsquo;s 18-foot-high ceiling.&nbsp;

There are images that represent the different eras of photography, from its beginnings in the mid-19th century to the golden age of photojournalism (including classic prints by Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and others) to 1970s celebrity portraiture (much of it by Richard Avedon) to postmodernism (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman) to contemporary work by international artists such as Ai Weiwei.

At first glance, the display can feel dizzyingly chaotic, with sculpture and new-media work juxtaposed with the photographs. But there&rsquo;s method&mdash;and, yes, a certain obsessiveness&mdash;to the seeming madness. The photographs are grouped by subject: French; American history (including a print of the flag being put into place on Iwo Jima, signed by the survivors); Czech modern; African-American; fashion; science; architecture; and on and on.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Richard and Ellen Sandor standing among their Potter Palmer columns" data-rich-file-id="555" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/555/original/sandorcolumns.jpg" />

And the juxtapositions, which initially may have seemed arbitrary, begin to make sense. A photograph of Picasso by his lover, Dora Maar, is accompanied by another image in which subject and photographer switch roles; you can see Picasso&rsquo;s shadow creeping in from the side. There&rsquo;s not one but two prints of Rodin with his famous sculpture &ldquo;The Thinker&rdquo;&mdash;a silver print and a gravure, the latter more valuable&mdash;plus, of course, a Rodin sculpture. There are multiple images of the Italian sculptor Giacometti, including one by Cartier-Bresson in which the artist looks much like one of his famously elongated artworks. There are works by Toulouse-Lautrec as well as a rare photograph of the artist himself, diminutive and droll.&nbsp;

&ldquo;It all matches,&rdquo; Richard Sandor says with satisfaction. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all related.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&ldquo;The beautiful thing is that the photography is displayed with paintings and sculpture and new media,&rdquo; his wife adds. &ldquo;It took a while for Richard to get comfortable with it, but by the &rsquo;90s, we were juxtaposing everything. He loved clustering various things.&rdquo;

In the early years and even much later, the Sandors&rsquo; unusual way of displaying their collection struck some visitors as, well, odd. &ldquo;People looked at it and said, &lsquo;Jesus, you shouldn&rsquo;t be presenting it like this,&rsquo;&rdquo; Richard Sandor says. &ldquo;No one is going to do what we do,&rdquo; his wife adds with a shrug. &ldquo;Very few people, anyway. But the pairing of different media is what&rsquo;s happening now. Even the museums are starting to catch on.&rdquo;&nbsp;

*

This magnificent obsession, one of the most impressive and eclectic private collections in the world, is the result of the artistic passions of Ellen Sandor, an accomplished new-media artist in her own right, and the curatorial rigor of Richard Sandor, a leading economist at the University of Chicago.&nbsp;

&ldquo;When we started, I wanted Richard to share my passion for art,&rdquo; says Ellen Sandor, who received her degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has long been a pioneer in virtual photography and virtual-reality art. &ldquo;I knew that he had the historical research impulse inside him. I wanted him to be obsessed, and sure enough, it worked.&rdquo;&nbsp;

It worked in part because her husband, who knew a thing or two about undervalued investments, saw that photography was in the early stages of an upswing. It had struggled for years to gain acceptance in the art world&mdash;only a handfull of museums around the globe devoted space to the medium&mdash;but was beginning to appear in small auctions at Sotheby&rsquo;s and elsewhere.

&ldquo;Photography was not really considered fine art, and to us that seemed absurd,&rdquo; Richard Sandor says. &ldquo;But it was great value, so in 1980, I went to Sotheby&rsquo;s and publicly bought a bunch of things and paid top prices, like $2,000 to $5,000. I stood up and kept on paying, because I wanted to be a marked man. From that day on, every dealer said, &lsquo;There&rsquo;s a new collector, he&rsquo;s crazy, he&rsquo;s paying thousands for pieces as opposed to hundreds.&rsquo; So when every dealer would hit Chicago, I got first dibs. And during the 80s, we were probably the principal buyers of photographs at Sotheby&rsquo;s and Christie&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp;

In the end, his economist&rsquo;s insight served the Sandors well. &ldquo;Photography has grown about as fast as computers: 18 percent, compounded for 40 years,&rdquo; he says with a smile. &ldquo;We were fortunate.&rdquo;

It wasn&rsquo;t just the chance to invest in photography, or even his wife&rsquo;s urging him on, that appealed to Richard Sandor. It was the chance to amass a collection that, if not exactly encyclopedic, could encompass the entire history of the art form.

&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t see the span of art, but you can clearly see the span of photography, which began in the 1830s,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;You get a grip on it. We didn&rsquo;t set out to do it this way, but the collection defined itself. There&rsquo;s a timeline to follow that leads you from one thing to the next. And if you&rsquo;re obsessive-compulsive, as we are, that&rsquo;s what you do.&rdquo;

Catherine Edelman, owner of her eponymous photography gallery in River North, calls the Sandor collection one of the most historically complete, and most uniquely displayed, that she knows of.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen another collector install in that fashion, but the Sandors have come to understand that when placed appropriately, the images start to tell a story about the history of photography,&rdquo; Edelman says. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll buy the same image in many different incarnations, including a vintage and then a modern print, because they like to see how the photographer sees that image over time. Or they&rsquo;ll have a famous image and then a print of the next frame on the photographer&rsquo;s roll of film&mdash;something that informs the well-known image. It&rsquo;s very informative and interesting, and they&rsquo;re very invested in doing this extra level of research. As a result, their collection is like no other I&rsquo;ve ever seen.&rdquo;&nbsp;

Over time, as the Sandors themselves realized just how unique their collection is, they&rsquo;ve begun to allow it to be seen by others. For years, Richard Sandor resisted, preferring to share the collection only with friends and small groups associated with the Art Institute. But as always, his wife wore him down. &ldquo;She said, &lsquo;We&rsquo;ve got stuff from 1840 to new media. We can&rsquo;t keep it all to ourselves. We have to open it up.&rsquo; And she was right. It&rsquo;s been a satisfying experience for us to share.&rdquo; Now the collection is frequently on display to groups organized by major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as during EXPO Chicago, the city&rsquo;s annual international contemporary art fair.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a world-renowned collection with several very expensive pieces, so it shows the maturity of the Sandors when they open up their home,&rdquo; Edelman says. &ldquo;When you&rsquo;re doing something at the level they&rsquo;re doing it, you realize you&rsquo;re the temporary owners of something much larger than yourselves and that you&rsquo;re obligated to share it. They&rsquo;re great citizens in that sense.&rdquo;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve met dozens of serious photo collectors, and Ellen and Richard are the most knowledgeable members of the species,&rdquo; says the Chicago photographer Art Shay, who has several images&mdash;including a print of his famous picture of Simone de Beauvoir standing nude in Nelson Algren&rsquo;s bathroom&mdash;in the Sandor collection. &ldquo;The walls of their vast Chicago apartment could serve as a history of the growth and burgeoning of the photographic art. The eye is caught by two historic Diane Arbuses, Cartier-Bressons galore, the most famous Dorothea Lange, etc. They are absolutely world class.&rdquo;

The Sandors, by the way, are not done collecting. Although nearly every inch of space in their apartment appears to be accounted for, &ldquo;They just keep adding,&rdquo; Edelman says. &ldquo;Which is just phenomenal.&rdquo;

And just a wee bit obsessive? Absolutely. The Sandors wouldn&rsquo;t have it any other way.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Follow Kevin Nance on Twitter @KevinNance1

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ellen and Richard Sandor’s Art Obsession

BY GINNY VAN ALYEAThe heart of Michigan Avenue can be a chaotic, visually draining place, but nine floors up from the corner of Michigan and East Erie is an elegant space filled with hundreds of art history’s most important and valuable works. Testaments to human artistic achievement line the walls. In a coat and tie seated at a partner’s desk along the windows overlooking the Magnificent Mile is Stanley Johnson, the gentleman who has researched, collected and shared these works with the world, a vibrant intellectual who has led a life filled with language, learning, and art. From Northwestern University to travels throughout Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, followed by nearly a decade and a half in Europe, Mr. Johnson earned a reputation as a Renaissance Man. Mr. Johnson was formally recognized for his artistic contributions by France’s Minister of Culture as an Officer of Arts and Letters. He is the only United States art dealer who has been so decorated, and in the Midwest there’s only one other person who’s received the same honor, and that’s Douglas Druick, the current President of the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson has placed art in more than 60 museums around the world, and he has published and mounted over 100 fine art exhibitions. In 2015 Mr. Johnson, with his wife Ursula, marks the 60th anniversary of the gallery his father started in 1955.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/561/original/mr-26-mrs-johnson-4-copy.jpg" alt=""></figure>Stanley Johnson always loved being a student, but his journey to becoming a renowned art dealer was a circuitous one. From a young age he loved to travel – in some cases by bus, truck or traded horse, encountering friends, mentors, foreign ministers and even lethal anaconda snakes and earthquakes.&nbsp;After a year studying art and architecture in Mexico City and a degree from Northwestern, Johnson ultimately arrived in Geneva, Switzerland in the mid-1950s to continue his study of art history. Following two semesters of art and philosophy in Geneva, Johnson went to France where he volunteered for the US Army; after basic training stateside, he was recruited to be a spy for the CIA in Vienna at the end of the occupation (his official title was Assistant Liaison Officer in Vienna), largely because of his extensive travels and language aptitude, something the army valued when they requested he attend cocktail parties to eavesdrop on foreign generals. Johnson says he was a total failure as a spy, but he was a very capable interpreter for the U.S. Commanding General in Vienna at the time. It was a wild time in his life and in the world.&nbsp;Not content to be fluent in just French and Spanish, Johnson wished to improve his German, as well as his archeology and history studies, citing the language as a big block in his learning to date. He even promised a Northwestern German professor that in exchange for accepting a passing grade, he would never take another German course, as the professor said he was not capable of learning it.&nbsp;His decision then to move to the University of Innsbruck in Austria would lead him to his future wife, Ursula, a beautiful young German girl who was doing post-graduate work in art history. Johnson’s German improved considerably – he says he spoke with his mother-in-law only in German, though he and Ursula communicated in French, which he still considers their best means of expression.&nbsp;Together, Johnson and Ursula returned to the University of Vienna, where Johnson moved on to study ancient Greek. From Vienna, they went to Perugia, Italy to study Dante for nine months. And From Perugia Johnson went to Florence while Ursula spent time at home in Düsseldorf.&nbsp;It was in Florence that art history truly began to permeate Johnson’s existence. Every morning he went to the Uffizi Museum and spent the next six hours, every day for 3-4 months, looking at each painting.&nbsp; He recalls, “I looked at each stroke. I became extremely familiar with the paintings there, and I always listened to what people had to say when they looked at those paintings.”&nbsp;&nbsp;Eavesdropping in this case offered insights into global perspectives floating through the museum. Johnson observed some key lessons in looking at art: “The French had important things to say, but they all had the same things to say. The Germans had interesting and profound ideas, but they were all the same ideas. The Americans, on the other hand, could stand in front of the same paintings, and though they might not have intelligent or sophisticated ideas, they were often ridiculously silly, it was people from the new world who from time to time would offer a discovery about why something was truly beautiful. They looked at the art with an open mind.”&nbsp;Johnson cites a Texas man’s blunt observation that a Michelangelo resembled a poster as an ‘ah-ha’ moment. Johnson had been trying to determine why he never really liked the work, and in fact it was as the man said – it lacked a third dimension. Today, Johnson says, “I’m still fighting for a freshness of vision. One of the reasons [the gallery has] one of the greatest art collections in the world, you see, is because I’ve been able to see things in advance.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/559/original/rembrandt-self-portrait-at-a-window-2014-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Rembrandt's Self Portrait at a Window</figcaption></figure>Johnson’s father, S.E. Johnson, started the gallery in 1955, at 224 South Michigan Ave. when he bought a gallery that was for sale in the Roosevelt University building. In 1963 when the 645 N. Michigan Ave. building was built, the gallery moved north and took over half of the second floor. (Note: About a year ago the gallery moved to the ninth floor to a more intimate space largely due to the proportion of internet business the gallery now does.) Ursula recalls that the fall evening on which the gallery was first opening at the new address was on a Friday in November 1963; it was the night JFK was assassinated. “We were actually in Paris, and even from there we were shivering. It was a very bad November, and it was all quite memorable.”In the gallery’s early days, the elder Mr. Johnson came to visit his son in Paris. Stanley and Ursula were living in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the sixth floor of a 17th century walk-up, then the Hôtel de Verneuil,&nbsp;and as Johnson notes, there was cold, running water only down on&nbsp;the second floor. He says, “It was total misery, except we could look down towards the Louvre. When my father asked what would happen if there were a fire, I said I’d never thought about that. He said, ‘Well I have. Let’s go downstairs and have a cup of coffee.’&nbsp;He didn’t want to be there one more minute.”&nbsp;In the building’s defense, Ursula points out that it had been standing since the time of Louis XIV, most likely because the cement over old wood didn’t burn more than anything else would have. She says the building is still there today, though not the hotel.&nbsp;Despite their transatlantic separation, Johnson began to work for the gallery from Paris, taking advantage of his proximity to some of the great minds and talents of the 20th century. When Johnson’s father said that he would love to show Jean Cocteau’s art in Chicago, he recalls, “I went downstairs to the corner café to use the phone, and I looked up in the telephone book: ‘Cocteau, Jean.’ When he answered, I told him my father had a gallery in Chicago and he wanted to do a show of his ceramics and drawings. He said, ‘I’d love to do it. But unfortunately today, morning, noon and night, I’m busy. Come to my house for tea tomorrow.’” The Chicago exhibition was quite successful, and it was just the first of several significant art dealings started from his neighborhood café.&nbsp;Johnson traveled next to Rome with his parents. The trio arranged to meet Giorgio de Chirico while there and spent an afternoon speaking to him in French and Italian along with his wife.&nbsp;Johnson says, “They just loved the three of us; we got along tremendously. My father bought 24 de Chirico paintings for $12,000. At the end of that whole thing,&nbsp;de Chirico said, ‘We love the three of you and would like to have you to dinner at our country house tomorrow. You must promise not one word about business – strictly friendship, friendship, friendship.’” It would be an important lesson for the younger Johnson on how to do business.&nbsp;Following the successful visit, the 24 purchased paintings were sent back to Chicago for the gallery exhibition. Not one was sold.&nbsp;Johnson admits, “That was a disaster. $12,000 at that time was a lot of money. My father wrote a letter to de Chirico, which I have, that said the reason nothing sold was because all the paintings had bad subject matter, so he wanted to exchange all 24 for new ones. de Chirico responded that it was not because of bad subject matter, it was because he was a bad art dealer. He did exchange six paintings, and one by one they sold for $950-$1,150 until finally all 24 were sold. Today the same ones at auction go for $300,000-$400,000. &nbsp;From Paris Johnson, selling art was not yet Johnson's primary pursuit; the majority of the time he&nbsp;continued&nbsp;studying art history and philosophy alongside Ursula, learning from academic stars like André Chastel, one of the greatest art history professors of 20th century, at the Institute of Art and Archeology at the Sorbonne, and under Jean Wahl, also at the Sorbonne.&nbsp;Mr. and Mrs. Johnson returned from Paris for good after Stanley’s father died suddenly in 1967. When I ask him if he had a different vision for the gallery than his father, he says, “It was a commercial gallery. [My father] did some terrible things and sold some junky stuff, but gradually we got some better things. Bad things could pay the rent for awhile.”&nbsp;Johnson reflects that his opportunity to be a student was very different from his father’s. “When I was in Florence, he wrote me a letter saying, 'We are your parents and we are paying for you. What are you doing? What’s keeping you there?'&nbsp;I wrote back that I’m doing absolutely nothing and I intend to stay for two more months doing absolutely nothing (I was also there because of the GI Bill.) When I came back to Chicago, I told him I’d been at the Uffizi from 10am-4pm each day; his reaction was, ‘That’s wonderful. I’d love to be able to do that but I can’t get away from my business.’ Ultimately he appreciated what I was doing.”&nbsp;Johnson’s language, travel and art knowledge were building blocks for the time when he would run the gallery.When he and Ursula took the helm following the senior Mr. Johnson’s death, they brought their scholarly, worldly perspective to art research, collecting and selling. Notably, in 1991 the gallery mounted a Cubist exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1992 Johnson’s companion book, Cubism &amp; La Section d’Or: Reflections on the Development of the Cubist Epoch 1907-1922 was one of ten books nominated for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship. Since 1991. He is currently close to submitting a revised version to publishers in London.Mr. Johnson’s gallery specializes in a range of art, but the focus has long been on Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism (though an exhibition of contemporary paintings by Milwaukee artist Bruce Dorow opens May 1.) Johnson says they are always acquiring works, “We have to take time to decide what we will acquire. We don’t acquire works because they’re saleable - we have no interest in that. We determine if they’re in an interesting category of works and if we would like to own those works. If so we can go to our best friends and say we bought this and think this is a wonderful thing. We think we’re pretty exceptional that way. That’s the way we’ve been running the gallery.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/560/original/picasso-head-of-a-faun-copy.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Pablo Picasso, Head of a Faun, 1962</figcaption></figure>He continues explaining why the gallery deals in say, Old Master prints vs. paintings, “Old Master paintings is a bad category for us because there aren’t any more great ones left. Our collection of drawings out of France, of Picassos, may be the greatest private collection of its sort in the United States. We reject the category of Old Master drawings when they go back to say, the 16th century or before, but when you get up to the end of the 17th century or into the 18th we still buy things in which we’re interested. Old Master prints are still fantastic and there’s still a possibility to buy things for relatively accessible amounts of money. We’re dealing more with European art than American art, and our competition is essentially European. As a result we have to outfox, out maneuver and out connoisseur European competitors, which is a fun challenge easily met, for the very reason I explained when I visited the Uffizi – the Europeans tend to have preconceived notions of what’s this and what’s that. They can’t conceive of some American knowing more about what they live with.”What else makes this market so appealing to Johnson? Camaraderie, knowledge and competition. Johnson excitedly explains, “The Old Master Print market consists of auctions in London - where it all started. You’ve got the round table with the green velvet top and the work is being offered - there are ten dealers seated and they are all European, except me. The winner is the one who got the best deals in buying those things, not he one who has the most money. It doesn’t have much to do with who has the most money but the one who has the best eye. The other thing is that for an individual to be brought into that world is a difficult thing. You also can’t just have anyone show up since it’s a rare thing. Much of it is about friendship, friendship, friendship.”Johnson attests that each work in his private collection has a story. He lists artists most of us encounter only in world famous museums: Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Jacques Villon and Matisse. So, where did they come from? Johnson is eager to tell the story of another friendship he forged in Paris, one with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s art dealer. As a result of his place within an intellectual group in Paris, which included Kahnweiler and others, Johnson eventually became one of the direct dealers of Picasso. In 1970 Kahnweiler, in his 90s at the time, had 120 drawings, watercolors and pastels of Picasso’s to unload, and there were nine dealers from around the world, including Johnson, who had first choice. Johnson clearly recalls, “I arrived at Kahnweiler’s Paris studio about an hour before this sale. I said to him, ‘It’s wonderful to be one of these nine, but I’m the ninth one as well as the youngest. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to take any drawing I want?’ He responded, ‘Monsieur Johnson, if it’s that important to you, go in there and take any drawing you want, but don’t tell the other dealers, and don’t leave it in the room – put it in my office so they don’t see it. You must promise me two things: the drawing you pick today, you will never sell. And every time you look at that drawing you tell yourself what a great guy Kahnweiler was.’”Towards the end of our conversation, Mr. Johnson stops to ask me if I’m having fun. He continues, “I’m always having fun, and I enjoy the competition.”&nbsp;Johnson’s career as a world traveler, a student of art history and an art dealer has been filled with stories and great relationships. His greatest partner of all has undoubtedly been his wife, his intellectual as well as business companion and the reason he finally mastered German. About Ursula he shares, “She is quiet, but she is very, very knowledgeable. We have formed the collection. It’s been a whole life together.”&nbsp;&nbsp;

An interview with Ursula and Stanley Johnson on the gallery's 60th anniversary 

R.S. Johnson: 60 Years of Art and Learning

BY LAURA M. METTAMJudy Ledgerwood’s bold use of color and pattern transforms the spaces in which her art exists. She establishes a dichotomy between precision and abstraction, order and chaos, the vividly decorative and the subtly conceptual. Ledgerwood has received numerous awards from prestigious arts organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts and Artadia. Her work is held in international private collections as well as in many of the nation’s top art museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Currently a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Ledgerwood lives and works in Chicago. She is represented by Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery, as well as by several other international galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Houston, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.Top image: Judy Ledgerwood, Chromatic Patterns for the Graham Foundation, 2014, Graham Foundation, Chicago, IL<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/613/original/judy-ledgerwood-sun-tide.jpg" alt=""></figure>LM: Do you remember when your interest in art first began?JL: My mother was in graduate school for education at Indiana State University. In her early childhood education class, she learned that kids would be more creative if they weren’t given coloring books but instead, made their own pictures. This early encouragement reached a crisis when I was seven and lost a coloring contest to a girl named Lori. I was disappointed that her Cinderella picture, neatly colored within the lines, was selected over mine, which I clearly thought was more artistic. I’ve been seeking attention for my art-making ever since.&nbsp;• You earned your BFA from The Art Academy of Cincinnati and your MFA from SAIC. Can you provide a brief background about where you grew up and then elaborate on your decision to study art through the graduate level? Any comments on your experience as an art student?I grew up in a tiny farming community in Indiana. I identified as an artist at an early age, so I understood that artists need to be a part of a larger community. I chose what I thought was the surest path to my success through education. I had studied the biographies of other artists whom I admired, and this was the path that they followed so I emulated them.I met my husband, Tony Tasset, in undergraduate school. He shared my ambition of becoming an artist and together we still make a strong team. We grew up together sharing successes and failures in a very difficult field. I’m his biggest fan and vice versa. It’s invaluable to have a person who believes in you and understands what you do.At SAIC, for the first time I met artists who were better than me.&nbsp;That’s the thing about moving from a small town to a larger one. The challenge to keep up was just the kick in the pants that I needed. That and a fear of truly becoming a starving artist pushed me to focus on what I needed to do to become a professional artist.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/614/original/judy-ledgerwood-crossing-over.jpg" alt=""></figure>• Were you always interested in teaching? What path led you to your current role as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University?I didn’t teach until I was out of grad school for almost a decade. I got lonely working in my studio and I found that socially, artists wanted to network more than discuss art. I wanted to discuss the big questions; I missed that about school. I started teaching one class at SAIC, then soon after I began full time at Northwestern. Our students rarely self-identify as artists, but most go on to contribute to society. I am in the perfect position to proselytize for art. Many high schools no longer offer courses in art, but I think it’s the best way to learn critical thinking. There are no right choices when making art, only ones that work. Learning how to determine a working method and the criteria for judgment is something that I’ve only recently gotten good at. The icing on the cake of my job is working with graduate students. Northwestern fully supports the MFA candidates, so we get the cream of the crop in our graduate program since it is so competitive for top candidates.&nbsp;• How do you think today’s art students and art schools differ from when you were in school? What has changed? Where are things headed?The big change has been in the softening of disciplinary boundaries. Young people no longer say, “I’m a painter.” They say, “I’m an artist,” or maybe even something like, “I make things.” Art school in the 21st century focuses to a lesser degree on the artist as an individual author, and more on community solutions to aesthetic, political or even practical problems - a reflection of how the art world really is now. Of course some fields like painting will not change much pedagogically. And hopefully education can do more than train worker bees for artists like Jeff Koons.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/615/original/judy-ledgerwood-smart-museum-2.jpg" alt=""></figure>• Your work is vivid and energizing. Repetitive patterns are controlled but not exact. They are precise yet loose. When viewing the larger installations of repeat patterns, I think about the performative aspect of creating the work and how the physical act of painting is also repetitive and controlled. I find the thought of creating these wall paintings - such a time consuming, perhaps meditative process - as an almost comforting, contemplative change of pace from our culture’s digital age need for instant results. Can you comment on your work process for both large installations and smaller works on canvas?I think about creating experiences that must be seen first person - whether work on canvas or large-scale installations painted on the wall. Patterns suggest regular continuity, but life is not like that, even with many repetitive gestures that make up a day, like morning coffee or showering. Each moment is unique if you’re aware.I try to make paintings that not only breathe in the after-image created by visual color interactions that flicker visualy, but allow the performative act of painting to create a sense of time, especially through repetitive patterns. The drips suggest real time. I experience time as elastic. Moments spent on hold with the utility company are endless; moments spent with your young child pass in a heartbeat. I think my work functions well if the viewer’s experience brings about a greater self-awareness. This is not so different from the aims of all abstract painting.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/616/original/judy-ledgerwood-smart-detail.jpg" alt=""></figure>• I love the transformative environments that your installations and immense wall paintings create. The installations have the power to alter familiar spaces as seen in your recent&nbsp;Chromatic Patterns for the Graham Foundation, and Chromatic Patterns for the Smart Museum, among many other pieces you’ve done in the past. Can you talk about your use of such vivid colors and repeat patterns, and how the scale and content of your work has evolved over the years? Are you experimenting with any new methods or materials?I have shifted from a palette based on a response to decorative color in architecture that commented on Modernisms’ failures, to work that creates cast color or uses color interaction to leak out from the surface of the painting into the space in front of the canvas, the space where the viewer is. Each era develops a new model for describing space, and space reflects the age that produces those responses. Think of the Cartesian model of space developed during the Renaissance as a model of rationalism as just one example. When I started my career in the artworld of the late 80s at the moment of the first art boom, the thing that seemed most urgent to address was the increasing power of images circulating as reproductions. There are paintings that look good reproduced that are generally not very satisfying to look at in person. For me, an art experience is between a viewer and a work of art, not between a viewer and an electronic device. It’s even more of an issue now, so I still stand by my desires to make painting a first person experience.I started using enormous scale early in my career. Then, as now, I want to create immersive environments - to make paintings that act like architecture. Once I felt that the scale was becoming habitual, I had to learn to make smaller paintings that were effective. I discovered that making smaller paintings scaled to the human body and installed to emphasize that relationship helped to make a direct connection to the viewer. I still make a lot of 15 x 15" paintings to try out a new idea on a manageable scale.I tried encaustic painting recently. I wanted to see what happened when color was not contained within the edges of a shape and edges between figure and ground were more erratic. I like the object quality of these kinds of paintings, but the encaustic is limited because it has to be done on panels, which get too heavy at large scale. So now I’m trying to achieve a similar goal with more familiar painting materials and techniques.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/617/original/judy-ledgerwood-graham-detail.jpg" alt=""></figure>• Is there a way in which your work is displayed that you feel it has the potential to have the most impact on the viewer? For example, how might a smaller painting on canvas compare to a wall installation compared to something even larger like your 2014 collaboration with EXPO Chicago and The Beaches of Fort Myers &amp; Sanibel that resulted in a very public display of your artwork around Chicago during EXPO. Any comments on your experience with this particular public art project or others you may have been involved with in the past?For me the reason to make paintings is to address a viewer. I am always aware of the viewer when I make installation choices. Small paintings are hung to correspond to the viewers’ head, and the size of the shapes is at human scale, often in response to architecture, which is also built for bodies. The EXPO Chicago and The Beaches of Fort Myers &amp; Sanibel project was an opportunity to make a work outside a gallery or institution, which was new for me. Although one response to spending time at Rauschenberg’s studio in Captiva Island might have resulted in a typical Ledgerwood painting in a palette inspired by the light of Florida, I instead made work inspired by the light and space. For me the most profound experience of the place was the vast expanse of sand, sea and sky, and just as important this was conceived of as a project for everyone, not just your typical art going public.I wanted to work in a genre that most people understand, and landscape seemed appropriate to the site of presentation. I also liked the contrast between horizontal landscape in the billboards and their placement in an urban environment. These landscapes harkened back to the kind of paintings that I made twenty years ago at the start of my career. I know that I was very privileged to have the Florida experience to respond to. I wanted to create an image in the city for those that didn’t have that experience, to share a little of what that experience was like for me with everyone who encountered the billboards.&nbsp;• Do you have a favorite public art piece here in Chicago or elsewhere?I love the Picasso in Daley Square and the Dubuffet on the corner of the State of Illinois building.&nbsp;• Who are some of your favorite artists – older influences, or currently working artists?I grew up visiting the impressionist collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. I think that I learned color theory in those galleries. So I am indebted to Monet as much as I hate to admit it. Matisse, Blinky Palermo, Mary Heilmann, Harriet Korman, Pamela Fraser &amp; André Butzer are just a few favorite artists that come to mind.&nbsp;• Between your practice, your husband also being a prominent artist, and your teaching, do you ever reach a saturation point when it comes to art consumption? When you need to tune out, so to speak, what’s a favorite non-art interest of yours?We are busy just trying to keep up, so there is not enough down time, which I hope to address - as soon as I have time! Tony is very good at cooking, and I wish I could spend more time gardening. My garden it pretty Darwinian, but I grow mostly perennials, a few vegetables, and I have a tiny cutting garden every summer.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/618/original/judy-ledgerwood-installation.jpg" alt=""></figure>• You mentioned that you’d be traveling to Lustenau soon for an exhibition. Can you describe this exhibition or project? Do you have any other plans coming up this summer or fall?&nbsp;My show in Lustenau is with the same gallerist I have worked with in Europe since 2005, Wolfgang and Christa Hausler (<a href="http://haeusler-contemporary.com/">Häusler Contemporary</a>). They have galleries in Munich, Zurich and this newer one in Lustenau, Austria. My upcoming project for Lustenau is called Lose Loos in response to the influence of Adolf Loos on contemporary taste even though his seminal contribution, Ornament and Crime was written in 1908. Loos counseled against excessive pattern and advocated the use of only specific colors. His attitude was heavily influential for Le Corbusier, who of course is much admired. Chromophobia is shared by many people who think that colors limited to a few basics; black, white, ultramarine blue, grey, yellow ochre reflect a higher level of sophistication, with brighter colors relegated for children and people from ‘other’ cultures. Of course my work goes against all of this. Since the show is in Austria, it seems likely that many viewers will be aware of Loos position and see my work in opposition to his ideas.Over the summer I plan to devote concentrated time to finishing a body of new work that I’ll show in Houston at <a href="http://www.barbaradavisgallery.com/">Barbara Davis Gallery</a>. I am also working toward a show in New York at <a href="http://www.tracywilliamsltd.com/">Tracy Williams Ltd</a>. for her new space on the lower East Side, and in January 2016 I have a sort of retrospective opening at the Kennedy Museum where I’ll make a wall painting installation, and show a selection of paintings and drawings. Also in September I was offered a five-day lectureship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolbermoor near Munich. I am interested in the global exchange of ideas.&nbsp;• Would you share your thoughts on Chicago’s art community?Chicago has more great artists than a city this size has any right to. Many do not get the recognition they deserve because it’s Chicago I suppose. The audience is not as large as one would think for a city of more than two and a half million. I’m lucky to have access to world-class museums here. Galleries are good - I wish more people supported them so that young artists didn’t feel so pressured to move to New York or Los Angeles to find the support they need.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/619/original/judy-ledgerwood-sun-on-waves.jpg" alt=""></figure>

CGN interview with artist Judy Ledgerwood

Artist Insights: Judy Ledgerwood

BY LAURA MILLERAlibi Fine Art is a young gallery dedicated to photography - one of the few in Chicago that focuses exclusively on the medium. Located in Ravenswood on the city’s north side, Alibi is owned and operated by Lisa Janes. New to gallery ownership as of spring 2014, Janes continues to push the photo-centric mission of the gallery forward while aiming to highlight the work of often overlooked artists. Janes shared some insight with Chicago Gallery News about her new role at the gallery as well as her own interest in photography. - LM<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/510/original/installation-1.jpg" alt=""></figure>Q: Tell me about your background and your interest in art.&nbsp;A: I am originally from Alaska, but I have lived all over the country since I left for college. I studied art at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. After receiving my BA, I completed the professional photography program at the New England School of Photography in Boston. I arrived in Chicago to take over the gallery last spring.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Are you an artist?A: I am an artist myself, though I rarely exhibit my own work. &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Alibi Fine Art was established in July 2010 by Adam Holtzman (now one of Alibi’s represented artists), and you took ownership in the spring of 2014. How did this transition come about?&nbsp;A: Before I took ownership of Alibi last spring I was curating at a small gallery in Urbana, IL. Adam and I are old friends from school, and I had asked him to consign some of Joseph Sterling’s work to the gallery for an exhibit. During our collaboration he came up with the idea to turn Alibi over to me before he moved his family back to the east coast. It was something I had always wanted to do, and it was an opportunity I could not pass up.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: The gallery has focused on photography. Will you continue to feature photography exclusively moving forward?&nbsp;A: I intend to continue to exclusively concentrate on photography. It is the medium I know and love best, and currently there are very few galleries in Chicago dedicated solely to it. I took Alibi on because I liked Adam’s selection of artists and the direction he had taken the gallery in up to that point. Deviations are inevitable, especially as I add new artists to the Alibi roster and explore potential collaborations with other organizations, but I aim to maintain the core characteristics established early on. &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/509/original/other-pictures-installation-8.jpg" alt=""></figure>Q: The CGN office regularly receives questions from artists about how they can get dealers to look at their work. Do you also get this question often, and are you open to reviewing new submissions even if you’re not seeking additional artists?A: I do get this question frequently, and I am sympathetic to it. Unfortunately I do not have time to respond to the numerous inquiries I receive, so I am not open to looking at unsolicited art, especially not in person. I jury and review portfolios through events such as Filter Photo Festival, and I encourage artists to take advantage of similar opportunities if they want their work to be seen by gallerists and curators. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: You recently moved the gallery from Montrose to your current Ravenswood address. How is your new space?&nbsp;A: The new location is working out well. Most of Alibi’s regulars have found me by now, and I have gotten a lot of new foot traffic from events such as the Ravenswood Art Walk. Sharing space with Manifold Chicago provides good cross-disciplinary traffic and the closer proximity to Lillstreet Art Center has benefited us as well. &nbsp;&nbsp;Q: How important is foot traffic to you and the gallery?A: I place slightly more importance on those who seek the gallery out because they tend to be the most loyal enthusiasts for the medium, however, I have had a lot of luck with repeat visitors who began as walk-ins.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: What new shows do you have scheduled this spring?A: Coming up is David Akiba’s homage to Harry Callahan in the spring, followed by Dan Farnum’s color photographs of urban youth in Michigan. Plans are in the works to participate in more art fairs in 2015. Farther down the road I would like to work with artists from disadvantaged backgrounds to provide a way for them to show work that would otherwise go unseen.&nbsp;&nbsp;Q: Do you have any big plans for the year ahead?A: A current professional goal is to find interesting ways to spotlight my artists through social media, events, and collaborations.&nbsp;&nbsp;Alibi Fine Art 4426 N. Ravenswood (60640) Tel 773-454-1512 F-Sa 12-6; and by appt. <a href="http://www.alibifineart.com">www.alibifineart.com</a>

CGN interview with dealer Lisa Janes of Alibi Fine Art

Dealer Profile: Lisa Janes, Alibi Fine Art

By KEVIN NANCE

The artistic sensibility of Chicago architect Carlos Martinez&rsquo;s collection is best described as &ldquo;eclectic.&rdquo; Within the 3,000-square-foot Gold Coast condo he shares with his partner, Michael Tirrell, Martinez has amassed a significant modern and contemporary art collection that juxtaposes abstract and figurative work, often hung in pairings that emphasize the contrast. The art, in turn, exists in a kind of creative tension with the highly traditional interior architecture of the building, an upscale 1897 Holabird and Roche apartment complex that was one of the first of its kind in Chicago&rsquo;s Gilded Age. &nbsp;

A native of Cuba and a resident of Chicago since 1982, Martinez is now a principal at Gensler, a leading architecture firm, specializing in interior design. His taste for mixing periods and styles is evident at the couple&rsquo;s Astor Street condo (which, they were happy to discover, was once occupied by L&aacute;szl&oacute; Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian painter and photographer who founded the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology). Rich wood paneling, molding and floors, a massive mantelpiece and bookshelves form a striking old-world backdrop for the art, much of it by Chicago Imagists Ed Paschke and Roger Brown. &nbsp; &nbsp;

Chicago Gallery News recently sat down for an interview with Martinez, his dog Blue snuggling beneath a blanket at our feet. Here&rsquo;s an edited transcript of our chat.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: How did you get started as a collector?

A: It all started 28 years ago, which is when I made my first &ldquo;serious&rdquo; purchase&mdash;the first time I went into a gallery and bought something. It was a drawing by David Kotker, a young, up-and-coming sculptor here in Chicago who was doing some really big pieces. Zolla/Lieberman had a show of his studies for the sculpture, which were really wonderful, almost de Chirico-ish. A lot of David&rsquo;s pieces were sort of perverted&mdash;the line drawing I bought has a kind of S&amp;M quality. It&rsquo;s really beautiful.

&nbsp;

Q: You still have it?

A: Yes. I&rsquo;ve never decommissioned a single piece. And then one day, David decided to get married, have a kid, and stop doing art. He was very well-known at the time&mdash;he was a darling of the art community here&mdash;but he&rsquo;s not so well known now because he quit. I think I paid $600 for the drawing.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: Which was a lot of money then.

A: Oh yes. But it was a birthday present to my partner, Michael. So from that point, for every Christmas and every birthday, I would buy a new piece, occasionally more than one. We&rsquo;ve been together for 28 years, so that&rsquo;s how the collection happened.

&nbsp;

Q: Had you been single, would you still have been collecting art?

A: Yes, for sure. I would have bought it for myself. (Laughs.) I&rsquo;ve always loved art. My mother used to say when I was a kid, &ldquo;When you grow up, I think your house is going to be like a museum.&rdquo; (Laughs.)&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: And so it is.

A: Yes, although I don&rsquo;t think of it as a museum. (Laughs.) The other thing that happened was that around the time I bought that first piece, I did a project here in Chicago with a wonderful curator and art consultant, Emily Nixon. She&rsquo;s extremely knowledgeable and has her own company, Nixon Art Associates. I told Emily, &ldquo;Christmas is coming up and I want to buy a present for Michael. He has heard of this guy here in Chicago, Ed Paschke. Can you help me get a Paschke?&rdquo; She said yes, she knew of a great piece by Paschke at a gallery in Michigan. I went to see it and loved it, but then she said, &ldquo;Let me show you these other pieces also.&rdquo; They were these two black-and-white drawings, &ldquo;Hubert&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tudor&rdquo; [1976]. And there they are [points to the drawings over the mantelpiece]. And then she said, there&rsquo;s another piece, which I also loved. And I told her, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to buy them all.&rdquo; So that was the beginning of the whole Paschke thing. Michael and I really love his work, and over the years, when something comes up at auction, I often bid on it. Roger Brown was the other artist who Michael liked in particular.

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="496" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/496/original/martinez-copy.jpg" />

Q: You have several pieces by both artists, I see.

A: I think there are about a dozen Paschkes and nine Roger Browns. We also have several other classics&mdash;a Motherwell, a Nevelson, a couple Picassos. There&rsquo;s an Ellsworth Kelly, which is one of my favorites. It&rsquo;s funny, because everything is either highly abstract or completely figurative. Michael says, &ldquo;If we go into another room with faces looking at you&hellip;&rdquo; Paschke is always a face, you know.

&nbsp;

Q: What was it about Paschke&rsquo;s work that appealed to you?

A: Michael had met Paschke, and one of the things he really liked was how down-to-earth Ed was. I started reading about him, and I liked the story behind the art. When Ed did one of his early pieces of a female entertainer, he got some criticism for &ldquo;exploiting&rdquo; women. The story I was told was that the next year, he came out with this series of &ldquo;Hubert&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tudor&rdquo;&mdash;there was a third piece, which I&rsquo;m tracking&mdash;about male entertainers, some of whom were transgendered. Ed was having a dialogue with the art community and its narrative around his work. I thought that was wonderful. I was on a panel recently and somebody asked me, &ldquo;What inspires your work?&rdquo; As an architect I look to the social construct of the time&mdash;what&rsquo;s happening in the world, in popular culture. That was also the lens Paschke used in his art. The fact that he was a Chicagoan was also important, and that he was part of this school, the Imagists, with Roger Brown.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Q: What was the connection with Brown? Did you meet him?

A: I never met Ed Paschke, and Michael never met Roger Brown. Part of what we like about Brown is that many of his paintings are about buildings and the people in them. Everybody thinks, &ldquo;Oh, you&rsquo;re an architect, so of course you like Roger Brown.&rdquo; It was Michael who was mesmerized by his depictions of glowing windows in the black-box buildings. He really connected with that, and I loved it too, because I love Mies van der Rohe, and we lived in a Mies building on Lake Shore Drive at the time. I also like how Brown depicts the sky.

&nbsp;

Q: Those pillowy skies&mdash;

A: Pillowy, yes. Or they look like drapery. He was even more outrageous than Paschke with his critical commentaries. We went to a Brown show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery and saw the piece &ldquo;The Jim and Tammy Show.&rdquo; I loved it, in part because here again we are dealing with popular culture in the context of fine art. I can&rsquo;t say I understood it; in fact I wondered, &ldquo;What the hell does it mean?&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Q: You knew who Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were?

A: Yes, although politically, I had absolutely no affiliation with their mission. I showed it to Michael and said, &ldquo;We should get this, it&rsquo;s so cool.&rdquo; He said, &ldquo;That is the most horrible thing I&rsquo;ve ever seen in my life.&rdquo; (Laughs.)

&nbsp;

Q: It has a camp sensibility.

A: Super-camp. It&rsquo;s about religious fanaticism, of course, but also the scandal they had. So about three years ago, that piece came up at auction, I think at Leslie Hindman, and I said, &ldquo;I have to get it. I was destined to have that piece.&rdquo; I gave it to Michael as a Christmas present. He got a big laugh out of it.

&nbsp;

Q: I see you also have a print by Le Corbusier, which makes sense given the architecture connection.

A: Yes, I bought a book about his lithographs in 1979 when I was an architecture student. I bought it at the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, and probably paid $20. The book now is worth $800, which is what a copy sold for recently at auction. I loved the lithographs.

&nbsp;

Q: He&rsquo;s not so well-known for those, is he?

A: No, but they&rsquo;ve become very collectible. The Peninsula Hotel has six of them. When one of the lithographs came up for auction at Leslie Hindman, I said, &ldquo;I need to have this piece.&rdquo; I had a business trip and had to be out of town, so I told Michael, &ldquo;Could you please go to the auction and bid on this piece?&rdquo; The day of the auction, I called home and Michael said, &ldquo;I feel terrible. I got to the auction a couple minutes late and didn&rsquo;t get to bid on the piece. I&rsquo;m really sorry.&rdquo; I was so disappointed. A few months later, Christmas Eve comes, and we were going to have dinner with Emily Nixon. We got in the car to go to dinner, and Michael said, &ldquo;I forgot something,&rdquo; and went back inside. He took a long time and I was getting upset. Finally we went to dinner and came home and were having tea. I said, &ldquo;Wait a minute, there&rsquo;s something different.&rdquo; There was the Le Corbusier piece, framed and hanging on the wall. That was really nice of Michael.

&nbsp;

Q: And kind of wicked, also.

A: Absolutely.

&nbsp;

Q: Your architecturally traditional apartment sets up an interesting dynamic with contemporary art hanging on the walls.

A: I always loved the idea of the contrast between classical architecture and modern furniture and art. In Spanish, the word for furniture is mueble, and the word for real estate is inmueble. Literally, what&rsquo;s movable is mueble and what&rsquo;s fixed is inmueble. The terminology clarifies the fact that some things you take with you, and other things stay behind. To me, architecture is designed for the ages, but furniture and art reflect where you are in time. So coming to this classical apartment was about creating a tension between the two things.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer.&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/kevinnance1">Twitter @KevinNance1</a>

&nbsp;

Image picture at top: Martinez shows off works by Paschke and Roger Brown alongside various artifacts.

&nbsp;

A collector interview with Carlos Martinez

A Classic Setting for Eclectic Art

By KEVIN NANCEArt collectors often claim that they buy art solely because they love it, not because they consider it an investment. But for Paul and Linda Gotskind, a Chicago couple who’ve spent the past quarter-century thoughtfully amassing an impressive collection of contemporary art, they see a work’s monetary value, now and (potentially) in the future, as a necessary part of the decision-making process.“Most people would probably say that they don’t have the money thing in the back of their minds, but they do,” Paul Gotskind says in an interview at their River North home. “We buy art mostly because we like it, but when you’re buying something that costs a lot of money, you’ve got to think about the investment part of it. I’m not saying we buy things because they might go up in value, but at the same time, I don’t want to lose every cent we’re putting into it, either.”Linda is even more definite on the subject. “For me, it’s part of my portfolio,” she says. “I’m not in a position to spend several million dollars on something and ignore the possibility that it could be worthless at some point.”The Gotskinds’ unapologetic practicality with regard to art and money stems in part from the fact that they both spent most of their professional careers as stock and commodities traders, he at the Chicago Board of Trade and she at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. &nbsp;(Paul remains an active stock trader, working from home; Linda, a teacher before entering the financial industry, is retired.)&nbsp;Their understanding of the fiscal realities of art collecting also affects the art they buy and how they buy it. They deal primarily with established galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago (including the Richard Gray, Alan Koppel, Kavi Gupta and Rhona Hoffman galleries). “We’ve occasionally bought pieces from galleries whose reputations we weren’t sure of,” admits Linda Gotskind, “which might not have been the best decision.” And rather than take risks on emerging artists, the couple prefers to collect work by mid-career artists “who’ve made a move for themselves,” as Paul puts it. “They’re associated with good galleries, they’ve sold at auction, they’re in museum collections.”Also hovering in the background of their art-buying choices is the fact that with his first wife, Paul Gotskind built a significant collection of work by blue-chip artists such as Picasso, Dubuffet, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly.&nbsp;At the time of their divorce, Gotskind and his ex-wife chose to sell the entire collection rather than make the difficult decisions that would have been necessary to divide it. “If we hadn’t sold it, that collection would have been worth a small fortune today,” he says wistfully. “Now I’m paying the same amount for younger artists that I was paying for blue-chip artists back then.”*<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/430/original/gotskinds-2-copy.jpg" alt=""></figure>The Gotskinds’ collecting is also largely about their own emotional investment. Showing a visitor around their 2,800-square-foot condo recently (they also have a home in Laguna Beach, Calif., where they keep the other half of their collection of about 100 pieces), they take obvious pleasure in the work. They are unusually knowledgeable about each piece, having developed relationships with many of the artists and learned more than many collectors do about the art-making processes involved. Their collection is consciously integrated with family heirlooms and photographs. “That’s my best art,” Linda says proudly of a framed portrait, “My grandkids.”Both Paul and Linda know what they like (primarily painting and sculpture, the latter often with a textured, tactile quality) and what they don’t. “Conceptual art is something we’re still working on,” Linda says. “Something that needs an explanation, that you have to study up on, is not what I’m normally drawn to—although when you walk around with a curator, that’s all they’re drawn to.” Most of all, they’re drawn to quality. “We’re big fans of buying one of the better pieces by an artist,” Paul says. “I’d rather buy a lesser artist’s better work than Andy Warhol’s worst piece.”Along the way, the Gotskinds have developed fairly specific affinities: for African-American artists, including Rashid Johnson, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Jack Whitten and Theaster Gates (“Black artists are having their time right now,” Linda says); women artists (including Rosson Crow, Wangechi Mutu and Elizabeth Neel); and Chicago artists (including Gates, Angel Otero, Dzine and William J. O’Brien).“Paul and Linda have an extraordinary eye,” says Tony Karman, who enlisted the Gotskinds as investors in Expo Chicago, the annual art fair at Navy Pier. “They are very active on the contemporary art scene, not only with leading galleries but as people who collect artists who have gone on to great careers. One of the best parts of their collecting ethos is that they don’t use an art adviser; they share the experience of finding artists they want to collect, and they stay true to their curatorial vision.”Perhaps the Gotskinds’ biggest problem now as art collectors is that they’re essentially out of display space, though they continue to actively collect. Virtually every possible place to show art in their two homes is filled.&nbsp; Lending pieces to museums (which they do frequently, including recent loans to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and other institutions) only solves the problem temporarily.“It’s a question we don’t have an answer to yet,” Paul says a smile. “We’re working on it.”One possibility is to sell some work at auction, which, so far, they’ve done only sparingly. Another option is to donate some artworks to museums, but that still leaves something to be desired. “The pieces the museums are the most interested in are the pieces we’re most interested in,” Linda says, “and I’m not ready to give them up just yet.”Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1

Collector Profile: Linda and Paul Gotskind

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417943/nzmy38pedy2ltbzyotye.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;By KEVIN NANCEIn the community of art dealers in Chicago, Kavi Gupta stands out as one of the busiest and most ambitious. From his base in his eponymous gallery at 835 W. Washington, Gupta surveys an expanding mini-empire of exhibition spaces that now includes a branch in Berlin as well as two satellite spaces in Chicago (219 N. Elizabeth in the West Loop and 2108 S. California in Pilsen); in September, he plans to open a fourth Chicago space, a store specializing in art books and small editions, next door to the main gallery.Over the years, Gupta has represented a core group of midcareer artists from Chicago—including Theaster Gates, Curtis Mann, Angel Otero, Melanie Schiff and Tony Tasset—but casts a wide net in terms of marketing them around the globe. More recently, his stable of artists has diversified in terms of geography, but Gupta’s approach to selling their work has remained consistently international.&nbsp;Chicago Gallery News recently visited Gupta, 45, at the Washington Boulevard gallery, where he also lives in a rooftop apartment with his wife, Jessica Moss, associate curator of contemporary art at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Following is an edited transcript of our chat.&nbsp;What drew you to become an art dealer, and what was your preparation for it?I started out collecting art. My family in India are some of the biggest collectors of contemporary Indian art. My father, Raj Gupta, was an architect and an engineer, who moved here in 1964 and worked with Bertrand Goldberg on Marina City. I was born in 1969, and our life was about architecture and design. I was an art history minor at Northern Illinois University; I was an investment banker after college but was spending all of my money on art. I went to get a master’s at the business school at the University of Chicago, and they allowed us to work with other departments. I chose the art history department, and that really propelled me into thinking I wanted to do something with art. I wanted to be around art, I wanted to be around artists, and I wanted to show what I was collecting. In the late ’90s, I found a building in the West Loop, a boarded-up crack house on Peoria, for a dollar a square foot. I called right there and said, “I’ll take it.” I built that space over two years, and I later bought the building across the street. As the West Loop developed, the value of those spaces went up, and we were able to leverage that into buying this building.&nbsp;Fifteen years later, you’ve got a ton going on.Yes, although the busyness, for us, isn’t really defined by how many people are walking through the door. We’ve positioned ourselves as a gallery that’s based in Chicago, but we don’t quantify our success based on things happening here. I just had a meeting with the staff, and they’re so busy that they can’t fathom how they’re going to get everything done. But it’s to do with all the things we’re doing around the world—collectors from everywhere, artists from everywhere. We’re a global gallery that just happens to be located here.&nbsp;The majority of our artists are Chicago artists, but we’re promoting them around the world.It’s not about foot traffic.Right. In New York, it’s about dealing with who walks into the gallery; that’s their day. Our day is meetings and conference calls and research for artists and flying everywhere. Somebody from the gallery’s on the road all the time. We’re very proactive on behalf of artists, and that means not sitting here waiting for that client to come into our door. So our guys are out there talking to collectors, talking to curators, talking to art writers, pitching ideas and getting in front of them. If you look out my office door, you’d see two people packaging catalogs and other people writing proposals for museum shows. We have one person doing nothing but PR for specific artists. We have two people, who are artist liaisons, going to artists’ studios, talking about their practice, and talking about what’s coming next. It’s a constant back-office function and a high level of activity with a global focus.What was the thought process behind opening the Berlin gallery?It was part of this same thing we’ve been talking about. Berlin is a cultural capital, a place where curators and artists live and spend time. It’s about thinking; it’s about looking. And it’s a place where new art always comes from. For me Berlin has always been that place in Europe. It’s also very affordable, so it was a great place to make a European foothold. We wanted to reach out beyond Chicago and establish a beachhead for our Chicago artists, to have a different audience come and see the work, increase its recognition. It’s been very successful. We also use Berlin as a way to find new artists from Germany and elsewhere. Because it’s so affordable, artists come from all over the world and have studios there. There are artists from every city in Europe, as well as from Japan, China, and India. So it’s important for us to be there and see what’s really happening in contemporary art today.You also have multiple spaces in Chicago. You just opened a new one on Elizabeth Street, for example.That’s right, and we have a third space as well, an 11,000-square-foot building in Pilsen. The idea, basically, is to build opportunities for our artists. A lot of them work in large scale, and I wanted to give them the impetus to do that if they wanted to. We did a large show of Roxy Paine pieces, Apparatus, in the Elizabeth Street space that won the AICA [International Association of Art Critics-USA] Award as the best gallery show in the country; it took up two rooms and 5,000 square feet. It was a museum-caliber show, one of the bigger productions a gallery has ever done in Chicago. We also produced a Tony Tasset piece for the Whitney Biennial that was 80 feet long.&nbsp;So you have three spaces in Chicago - you’re opening a fourth - and you have one in Berlin. That’s a lot.It happened by need; it wasn’t really a conscious decision. Our gallery here isn’t that big, and we don’t have storage. At one point I was renting a storage building for $8,000 a month, and one of our collectors, a banker, said, “That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you go buy a warehouse, and your mortgage will be half of that for a bigger space.” So we bought the Elizabeth Street building, an 8,000-square-foot cold-storage facility that we renovated, and yes, the mortgage is less than half. And the space turned out so beautifully that we decided to start doing exhibitions there. And then the Pilsen space, a former auto garage, turned into the storage building.So it’s not about establishing an empire.Oh my gosh, no. We’re way too exhausted for that. We’re just working very hard for our artists, and we have to do what they need. We’ve only grown to fill that need.&nbsp;Will you keep expanding in the near future, or stay the same size?We don’t plan things that much; we’re just going with the flow. We do plan to open a kind of small bookstore and editions gallery, which has been a dream project for a while. It’s going to open next to us in this building in September. A lot of our artists are producing small editions, along with monographs or art books, so the new space will be a place to show those. We also want to be able to do lectures and artist talks there, to bring a criticality to the shows we’re doing. &nbsp;&nbsp;Is there some through-line, some shared quality in the artists you choose to represent?Well, there’s a regional focus to some extent. We like to find and promote artists from Chicago; it’s a big thing for us. We’re really proud of having found a program here and taking it global. Another area of common ground is that we’re interested in artists who develop a narrative through process. They’re very interested in the process of making things, and they make a hint of a narrative. Or there’s some personal statement that’s being made.&nbsp;As opposed to something that’s purely abstract.Right. Another area we’re interested in is artists with a little bit of a social practice, a social narrative—who are making, not so much a political commentary, but are looking at the world and responding to it. This September, for example, we have shows by Mickalene Thomas and Glenn Kaino. Both of them deal with issues they’ve been grappling with, including race, gender, political structures. Mickalene’s show is mostly done in cast bronze and has to do with her history with her mother, who was a flamboyant African-American socialite in the ’60s. Mickalene also produced a film about this, “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman,” that was broadcast this year on HBO; the film will be shown here in the gallery. Also this fall we’ll be doing Glenn’s Leviathan, his first major show in many years, in the Elizabeth Street space.Which artists have you had the longest professional relationships with?Angel Otero, for one; we started working with him before he had finished grad school. Tony Tasset, who had a show here this summer, we’ve been working with for many, many years. We’ve added four or five new ones—including Mickalene, Glenn, Roxy, Jessica Stockholder and McArthur Binion—but most of our artists, we’ve been working with for close to 10 years.Back in the days of the Hairy Who and the Imagists, Chicago artists had a kind of group identity, a set of shared aesthetic concerns, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.&nbsp;The good thing about being removed from New York or L.A. is that there, artists do tend to become slightly homogeneous; they develop schools that emerge pretty regularly, and the schools themselves push an aesthetic. Here, I think the artists don’t tend to group in those ways. Everyone has a unique practice, and we look at each artist as an individual here. I can’t think of anything that really ties them together, but I think that’s a good thing.&nbsp;&nbsp;Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer + photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1</body></html>

Kavi Gupta: Taking Chicago Artists Global

BY LAURA MILLER

I first met James Mespl&eacute; one day several years ago, when he stopped into the Chicago Gallery News office after visiting Printworks Gallery. He dropped off a catalogue from his upcoming show and shared a first hand explanation of his conceptually loaded work. Since that visit, and on many others, I&rsquo;ve been pleased to gain knowledge and history from the congenial, insightful Chicago artist.&nbsp;

Mespl&eacute;&rsquo;s intricate paintings link the past to the present through portrayals of historical imagery, mythical figures, and surrealist landscapes; fine details and vibrant, saturated colors fill his canvases. References to pop culture and modern themes dot his work along with the occasional glimpse of the artist himself.&nbsp;

Mespl&eacute; studied painting at the University of Missouri in his home state, and following his move to Chicago in 1968, graduated with honors from Northeastern Illinois University in 1970. He has taught art at various Chicago institutions over the years, including Francis W. Parker School, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mespl&eacute; lives and works in Chicago where he is represented by Printworks Gallery, and his work is included in numerous public and private collections. - LM

Image shown at top of page:&nbsp;James Mespl&eacute;, Calliop&eacute;, Muse of Epic Song and Poetry, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 7 &frac12;&rdquo; x 9 &frac12;&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Clio&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of History, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 7 ½” x 9 ½”" data-rich-file-id="444" height="546" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/444/original/clio-web.jpg" width="682" />

<h4>LM: How long have you lived in Chicago?&nbsp;</h4>

JM: I&rsquo;ve lived in Chicago since 1968. I was 19 when I moved here, and I&rsquo;m from a small town in the Ozarks called Nevada, Missouri. I had visited my brother in New York and my sister in Chicago in previous summers, so when I decided to leave the University of Missouri to finish my education, I chose Chicago.&nbsp;

<h4>Tell me about your recent summer exhibition, Mythic Faces &amp; Figures, at the Chicago Cultural Center and your upcoming fall show, Muse, at Printworks Gallery.&nbsp;</h4>

Mythic Faces and Figures at the Cultural Center included my larger canvases in egg tempera and oil, a mixed technique of painting that I originally learned from Thomas Hart Benton, whom I met through my teacher Fred Shane.&nbsp; This process gives luminous, brilliant color, which I very much like. &nbsp;

Muse, my Printworks exhibition, is a series of 33 new collages, made with a variety of water-soluble media, including ink, watercolor, gouache, casein, and acrylic painted over paper collages. Most of the works are small and intimate. The Muses inspire us in the diverse arts. Many people know about the nine Muses but few know their names or attributes. I hope everyone will stop by the gallery, see the exhibition, and pick up the free catalogue, which is really a small guide to the Muses. Once you know their names, you will see them pop up in works by writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce. The Muses can take you on a journey to both the past and the future.

<h4>I always enjoy hearing your stories. Can you share a noteworthy memory about a triumph you&rsquo;ve encountered throughout your years as an artist?</h4>

In 1987, I was commissioned by Chicago City Ballet to create sets for Chicago!, a new ballet to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the city of Chicago. The premier was at the Chicago Theater on State Street. I couldn&rsquo;t miss the chance to put a monumental image of a golden Venus on the top of the Sears Tower (now Willis). It did not go unnoticed by the critics. This led me to produce a painting with similar images, which was included in my first international invitational exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York in 1988. The title of that exhibition was Classical Myth and Imagery in Contemporary Art. In the art world it is certainly true that &ldquo;one thing leads to another.&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Terpsichoré&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Dance, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="445" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/445/original/terpsichore-web.jpg" />

<h4>Your work is loaded with vivid representations of classical figures, and nods to historic symbolism.&nbsp;Can you elaborate on your interest in mythology and historical subject matter?</h4>

I have always been interested in the narrative in my painting, and in my music as well. My preference is classical music. I like a beginning, a middle, and an ending. For me, it is rather like sex&mdash;the foreplay, the act of pleasure, and the climax. Remove any one of these three parts and something is definitely missing. Sometimes, in narrative painting, the story is only suggested and the viewers complete the action in their minds. These stories have as many different endings as there are viewers. We get out of a painting what we personally bring to it.&nbsp;

I love mythology because the narratives are always open to various interpretations. Often multiple meanings exist simultaneously, both mundane and profound; exoteric and esoteric. My interest in mythology began at an early age, encouraged by my grandfather, who shared with me the stories he learned from his father and grandmother. I find many similarities between his Osage (Native American) stories and the Greek Myths, since both deal with the forces of nature, the sky, the earth, and the creatures that live upon it. Carl Jung, of course, would claim archetypes exist in all cultures.

<h4>What do you find unique about Chicago&rsquo;s art community?&nbsp;</h4>

I find it a nurturing place to work because it is not market-driven. Art, whether a novel, a painting, or a symphony requires time, energy, and isolation in order to bring an artistic creation to completion.&nbsp;

Chicago provides a wonderful cocoon in which art can develop and mature before it emerges and takes its flight from the artist&rsquo;s studio. Other cities around the world have provided the same conditions for the development of art at different times, but the muse is fickle; she never stays in any one city forever. Chicago&rsquo;s location in the middle of the country was in the past a detriment, but it is now looking more like an asset, as people move away from the edges of the continent. For many Americans, the Great Lakes, the Prairie, and the Mississippi are still terra incognita, but in the new century, this is going to change. What will the art of the new century look like? Only one thing is certain. It won&rsquo;t look anything like work from the 20th century, which looked nothing like work from the 19th century, which looked nothing like work from the 18th century, etc., etc.

<h4>Are you in the middle of any big projects?&nbsp;</h4>

I am starting a new series of egg tempera and oil paintings on panels, which incorporate gesso relief in both the picture plane and the frames. The nature of the subjects and narratives are top secret at this time.&nbsp;

The twelve paintings will take me two years to complete. They should be ready for exhibition in the fall of 2016.

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Melpomené&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Tragedy, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="446" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/446/original/melpomene-web.jpg" />

<h4>Do you have a favorite place in Chicago?</h4>

I love the conservatories at Garfield Park and Lincoln Park, and the Chicago Botanic Garden in Highland Park. I have been sketching plants in all these places since the early 1970s. At that time, when I was still teaching, I used to take my Francis Parker art students to the Lincoln Park conservatory to sketch.

<h4>What books /authors /poetry do you find yourself re-reading every so often? Any classics or old favorites that have really influenced you or your work?</h4>

Shakespeare, Edith Hamilton on Mythology, and Harry Thurston Peck&rsquo;s Classical Literature and Antiquities. Elise Paschen commissioned me to create a painting for the cover of a book of poems entitled Bestiary (Red Hen Press). Her poems, which draw upon her Osage heritage, I found both provocative and powerful. I reread Bestiary recently and found that her poems release a torrent of emotions and images, which any artist could draw upon for ideas.

<h4>Tell me about your studio practice. What is the typical evolution of one of your paintings, for example? How long will you work on a piece, and do you have a set plan when you begin or do elements develop as you work?</h4>

My normal practice is to get up, have breakfast, go out for a good coffee, and get back to start work by 9:30am or so and I work until 6pm, with a 30 minute lunch break. Often I return to the studio after dinner and work until about 10pm. My works begin with small thumbnail sketches that get transposed into small drawings, which are then gridded up to canvas size. The large paintings usually take about two months from beginning to completion. As I work on the pieces, often my plans change and I add or take away elements in the composition. Sometimes, I move on to a new work, only to return to an older work.

<h4>Describe your studio. Is it Organized and tidy, or more of a hodgepodge?&nbsp;</h4>

My studio fluctuates from being organized and neat to a hodgepodge, as I move to the completion of a project.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="James Mesplé, &lt;i&gt;Erato&lt;/i&gt;, Muse of Erotic Poetry, multi-media collage on paper, 2013-14, 9 ½&quot; x 7 ½”" data-rich-file-id="447" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/447/original/erato-web.jpg" />

<h4>What inspires you to produce work? Do you have a long list of ideas ready to go, or do you wait for a spark of some kind?</h4>

I have dozens, probably a hundred, sketch books full of ideas, quick sketches done on my travels to museums and intriguing places here and abroad. I refer to these constantly, and one sketch may inspire several works. However, I have come to the conclusion that I would need several lifetimes to make use of all of my sketches. Sometimes, ideas happen in dreams, and I get up and sketch them down before I lose them. Daydreams are easier.&nbsp;

<h4>Are there artists, past or present, whose work you really admire?</h4>

An early influence was Ivan Albright, whose paintings I first encountered in the Art Institute when I visited as a grade school student. In Missouri, I gained much from two of my earliest teachers, Fred Shane and Thomas Hart Benton. In Chicago, I was inspired by the Imagists, especially the paintings of Ed Paschke, who later hired me to give egg tempera workshops to his students at Northwestern. And I studied under Karl Wirsum, at the SAIC. And, of course, I am influenced by numerous Old Masters, especially Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Martin Schoengauer.

<h4>You have a history of teaching at various educational institutions. How was your experience with teaching? Any comments on how the landscape has changed in art education, or on the current state of art education?</h4>

I taught full time for ten years at the Francis Parker School, and part time at the studios in the School of the Art Institute.&nbsp; I enjoyed both, but teaching never left me with enough time for my work.&nbsp; I have been away from teaching for years, so I cannot speak authoritatively on the current situation.

CGN interviews artist James McNeil Mesple

Artist Insights: James McNeill Mesplé

By KEVIN NANCE

In 1986, two young brothers, ShanZuo and DaHuang Zhou, visited Chicago to attend an exhibition of paintings they had created together in their home country of China. The brothers&rsquo; unique partnership&mdash;they collaborated on large canvases on which their sensibilities melded into a cohesive, though not always seamless, whole&mdash;had already made them rising art stars in Beijing. In Chicago, it was an even greater curiosity, in part because Americans think of visual artists as the ultimate individualists working in isolation, chasing intensely personal visions that no one else, not even a sibling, could possibly share.&nbsp;

Two painters, one painting: How could that work?

Twenty-eight years later, the Zhou Brothers are still in Chicago, still raising eyebrows with their seemingly counterintuitive process of making art as a team. The difference now is that piece after piece, exhibit after exhibit, they&rsquo;ve proved the wisdom and fertility of their collaboration. They are fixtures of the international contemporary art scene, their paintings fetching prices starting in the six figures in the United States and Asia. (They also create sculpture, the largest examples of which currently sell for up to $8 million.)&nbsp;

The brothers also loom large in realms beyond the art world, making paintings as a form of performance art in front of business and political leaders at gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in 2000. In 2011, President Obama commissioned the Zhou Brothers to create a painting that he presented to China&rsquo;s president, Hu Jintao, in a private ceremony attended by the brothers at the White House.

But even as the Zhou Brothers&rsquo; career has expanded into most corners of the globe, they have anchored themselves in Chicago, specifically in the South Side&rsquo;s Bridgeport neighborhood. They live and work in a former Polish social club, which now contains a vast, airy, light-filled studio where they create their paintings, often working on up to 15 large pieces at once. (Sometimes the brothers paint with the stretched canvases lying flat on the floor, sometimes standing up, sometimes both at different stages.) And two blocks away, the Zhou B Art Center, a sprawling complex of galleries, artist studios and event spaces established by the brothers at 1029 W. 35th Street, is preparing to celebrate its tenth anniversary this fall.

&ldquo;Chicago feels like home,&rdquo; ShanZuo says in a recent interview in the garden of their Bridgeport complex. (DaHuang is the younger of the pair, although both brothers, who keep themselves fit and favor stylish, form-fitting outfits and hipster hats, appear significantly younger than their actual ages, which they declined to reveal.) &ldquo;At first we didn&rsquo;t intend to remain in Chicago, but once we got here, we felt like we need to stay,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;Chinese artists are a little shy, a little humble, singing very deep. In America, it&rsquo;s more powerful, more direct.&rdquo; He smiles. &ldquo;Here you show your muscle.&rdquo;

*

In their earliest artistic efforts in China, the Zhou brothers trained and painted separately, but they came together as a team in 1973. &ldquo;At first it was just for fun,&rdquo; ShanZuo says. &ldquo;Collaboration among scholars and calligraphers is a tradition in China, so we thought we would try.&rdquo;

But the brothers quickly realized two things. One was that their collaboration wasn&rsquo;t always fun. As part of the process, each brother has the freedom to cancel out&mdash;to &ldquo;destroy,&rdquo; in their blunt terminology&mdash;what the other has done by altering, augmenting or erasing it entirely. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s totally free to do anything,&rdquo; ShanZuo says, &ldquo;I am free to do anything, including to cover over what he&nbsp;did.&rdquo;

From the start, then, their collaboration was rooted at least as much in conflict as in harmony. When they paint, the brothers&rsquo; separate identities neither merge nor disappear; rather, they engage in a dialogue, one responding to the other, and sometimes the conversation can become a bit heated.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Sometimes he gives you a surprise,&rdquo; DaHuang says of his brother. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re working very smoothly, developing something, feeling very comfortable with it, and then he comes in and goes&nbsp;pah-pah-pah-pah-pah! And everything is destroyed. It&rsquo;s hard to take sometimes. You respect his talent, but it doesn&rsquo;t mean you don&rsquo;t get angry.&rdquo;

But out of that destruction and those sometimes raw emotions also came something unexpected: a new form of art-making that produced results that neither brother could have accomplished on his own.&nbsp; &ldquo;At the beginning, we knew it was interesting, but we didn&rsquo;t know how&nbsp;special it was, how important it was,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;But more and more as we worked together, we realized the value&nbsp;of the collaboration. People think we have&nbsp;the same idea and bring harmony to it before coming to the canvas. That&rsquo;s wrong. The value of&nbsp;the collaboration is that it opens up things that couldn&rsquo;t happen any&nbsp;other way. When you paint by yourself, no matter how great a painter you are&mdash;Picasso, whatever&mdash;you won&rsquo;t have the courage to destroy your own painting. You&nbsp;think you are always right. But two people together, they don&rsquo;t care. You paint something amazing, but he destroys it, because he sees it differently. And with this kind of fighting, something comes out in the painting&nbsp;that&rsquo;s never happened before. It&rsquo;s a mystery, and it creates a new magic.&rdquo;

The greatest mystery, perhaps, is that for all the struggle implicit in their creation, the paintings often arrive at a place of harmony, or at least a balance of elements, however precarious. Sometimes the balance has the feeling of competitors battling each other to a draw; other times, a natural order is achieved, like planets threatening to collide but slipping, at the last moment, into alignment.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s quite unique, what they do,&rdquo; says Kuiyi Shen, Director of the Chinese Studies Program and Professor of Asian Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Shen is also author of the introductory essay in Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration, published in 2004 in connection with an exhibition mounted by the Chicago Cultural Center and the Elmhurst Art Museum. &ldquo;They start from differences, from their own places, and then there&rsquo;s a competition&mdash;a confrontation, actually. But gradually, the two sides get together, and that results eventually in harmony.&rdquo;

Sergio Gomez, curator and director of exhibitions at the Zhou B Art Center, often finds himself awed by how the brothers repeatedly manage to find equilibrium. &ldquo;What makes it work for them is their culture of trust,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Sometimes when you see them together, you have a sense that they&rsquo;re connecting in a language besides the verbal. Many times they fight, but at the end, the whole comes together and it turns out to be incredibly beautiful.&rdquo;

As ShanZuo puts it, &ldquo;Sometimes after a while, you both see something, and it&rsquo;s good. You stop right there. The painting is done.&rdquo;

*

The Zhou Brothers&rsquo; work has evolved considerably over the decades. &ldquo;As artists, when you start to feel like you satisfy yourself, you always pursue a different thing,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;You always look for the best way to make your art go further, go beyond.&rdquo;

&ldquo;When you&rsquo;re young, you think you can do everything,&rdquo; his brother adds. &ldquo;But it takes a long time to find your own style.&rdquo; DaHuang nods. &ldquo;The most important thing is what kind of artistic language you create for yourself.&rdquo;

Their first collaborations in the 1970s were often representational and narrative-based, inspired by Chinese folklore&mdash;one early painting, currently on display in their dining room, shows a mythical beast being slain&mdash;and primitive cave drawings. In the &rsquo;80s, the brothers pushed their engagement with 5,000 years of Chinese art history into the realms of modern art, producing work that, while grounded in tradition, increasingly responded to the international art world in a way that combined the ancient and the cutting-edge.

After settling in Chicago, the brothers spent the &rsquo;90s soaking up influences from their new environment, producing a body of work that was both heavier in texture and more abstract. In those paintings&mdash;several of which remain on view through Oct. 4 at the Zhou B Art Center as part of an exhibit called Zhou Brothers: American Period&mdash;minimalist figures (often secret self-portraits) are prominent, strolling through somber color fields illuminated by lightning flashes of vibrant red.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Zhou Brothers&rsquo; paintings have become almost entirely abstract, decorative and free-flowing, most traces of narrative and the figure having been eliminated. Texture is more important than ever, the canvases rougher, the paint thicker and more three-dimensional. The paintings are more gestural, more intuitive and more concerned with a fluid kind of movement, than before&mdash;a fluidity not of things but of emotions, reflecting their philosophy that &ldquo;feeling is liberty.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Our work is not about thinking, it&rsquo;s about feeling,&rdquo; ShanZuo says. &ldquo;When we paint, something is flowing there, you just have to feel it. It&rsquo;s like tai chi [a Chinese self-defense discipline now used primarily as exercise and stress reduction]. It doesn&rsquo;t look powerful, but the power is there.&rdquo;

Accordingly, the brothers engage in a minimum of chatter when they paint. &ldquo;Originally we talked and planned,&rdquo; DaHuang says. &ldquo;Later we realized we don&rsquo;t have to talk too much.&rdquo;

ShanZuo nods. &ldquo;The painting itself,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is the conversation.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

Image shown at top of page:&nbsp;The Zhou Brothers, DaHuang Zhou and ShanZuo Zhou, in their Bridgeport studio. Photo: Kevin Nance, 2014

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter @KevinNance1

&nbsp;

The Zhou Brothers: Four Decades of Collaboration

Realizing Realism: Gwendolyn Zabicki

Artist Insights: Vera Klement

By KEVIN NANCE

*This profile was published in the May-August 2014 issue of Chicago Gallery News

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="Tom McCormick and Janis Kanter at home in Hyde Park. Painting: Mary Abbott, &quot;Imrie,&quot; 1953 o.c., 71 x 74&quot;" data-rich-file-id="213" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/213/original/tomjanisvert.jpg" />If the secret of a happy marriage is compromise, Thomas McCormick and Janis Kanter are one of the happiest couples on Chicago&rsquo;s art-collecting scene. Despite their significantly differing tastes&mdash;he leans toward mid-20th-century abstract painting, mostly by deceased artists; she favors contemporary work by living artists in various media, photography in particular&mdash;McCormick and Kanter have blended their interests and, along the way, created one of the city&rsquo;s most eclectic yet surprisingly harmonious private collections.

Over their 22-year marriage, this Chicago art-world power couple&mdash;he owns the Thomas McCormick Gallery in the West Loop, while she chairs the board of directors at the Hyde Park Art Center&mdash;have learned how to negotiate with each other on their joint acquisitions. Sometimes it&rsquo;s a matter of one bending a bit in the other&rsquo;s direction. Other times it&rsquo;s a matter of one spouse recognizing that the other&rsquo;s enthusiasm for a particular work of art is so primal, so unshakable that resistance is futile.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I would say the decision-making is heavily weighted to one side of the couple,&rdquo; McCormick says with a smile, pointing his chin in Kanter&rsquo;s direction during an interview at their sprawling historic home, a 1904 Holabird and Roche mansion in Hyde Park that they bought and refurbished five years ago. &ldquo;One of the first expensive pieces we bought together was at the Chicago art fair at Navy Pier a while back,&rdquo; McCormick recalls. &ldquo;I step out into the corridor and here comes Janis walking towards me. She&rsquo;s got that look, and I know I&rsquo;m in trouble.&rdquo;&nbsp;

His wife doesn&rsquo;t deny it. &ldquo;If I don&rsquo;t like it,&rdquo; she says with a twinkle in her eye, &ldquo;it doesn&rsquo;t get very far.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Or it goes in my man-cave upstairs,&rdquo; he offers. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all me, straight down the line. She walks by there on tiptoe.&rdquo;

&ldquo;On occasion I walk in and go, &lsquo;I could really do something in here,&rsquo;&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;And then I think, &lsquo;I need to be out of here.&rsquo;&rdquo;

In all seriousness, McCormick&rsquo;s willingness to accede to his wife&rsquo;s judgment has grown over the years, in part because his experience has taught him that her more experimental tastes and instincts (&ldquo;I definitely like things that are weirder,&rdquo; she says) are more on target than might be initially apparent. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a little bull-headed,&rdquo; he admits. &ldquo;But Janis helps me see things that I would turn a blind eye to otherwise. I would be much more inward-looking, much more of an old fart about all this stuff if I weren&rsquo;t married to her. More often than not, what happens is that we&rsquo;ll get something that I&rsquo;m not crazy about, and then six months or a year later, I really love it. It grows on me.&rdquo;

One of the earliest examples of this was the piece Kanter fell in love with at Navy Pier all those years ago: a photo-collage by the Scottish artist David Mach of a Chicago River scene, which now hangs in their entrance hall with a small collection of Asian ceramics beneath a chandelier of Murano glass. McCormick&rsquo;s initial hesitation about the Mach piece was that it was so large, and as his wife says, &ldquo;Wall space is at a premium in this house.&rdquo;&nbsp;

That&rsquo;s true despite the fact that the house is a rangy 8,000 square feet. &ldquo;Some people with eclectic collections display them salon-style, but Tom and Janis don&rsquo;t do that,&rdquo; says Kate Lorenz, executive director at the Hyde Park Art Center and a longtime friend of the couple. &ldquo;They hang things with space around them, so everything kind of breathes.&rdquo;

___

Husband and wife came by their respective collecting knowledge and practices via distinctly different routes. McCormick, who studied printmaking at the University of Kansas, is a largely self-taught collector who began acquiring (and sometimes reselling) antiques, especially furniture, oriental rugs, paintings, prints, textiles and ceramics, as an undergraduate. &ldquo;If it&rsquo;s not nailed down, I&rsquo;ve probably bought and sold it,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I never did cars, but you never know.&rdquo; By 1992, when McCormick moved from Kansas City to Chicago and married Kanter, he had narrowed his business model to dealing in paintings, but continued to collect most of the other genres he had loved as a teenager.&nbsp;

She, on the other hand, had grown up surrounded by art as one of three children in a collecting family. Her parents, Chicago tax attorney Burton Kanter and his wife Naomi, began with little money (&ldquo;They used to frame pieces of wallpaper,&rdquo; their daughter recalls fondly) but, as their fortunes improved, collected work by local artists and, eventually, blue-chip pieces by some of the biggest names in the international art world. Eventually the senior Kanters amassed a collection of about 1,200 artworks.

But Burton Kanter in particular never lost interest in contemporary and local artists, often developing relationships with them that proved mutually beneficial. &ldquo;He was a patron,&rdquo; his daughter says. &ldquo;Artists would come to my dad and say, &lsquo;Hey, Burt, I really want to do this body of work for the next year. Is there a chance that you could support me for this amount of money, and you&rsquo;ll get the first six pieces of your choice?&rdquo; &nbsp;

After their father&rsquo;s death in 2001 at the age of 71, Kanter and her two brothers inherited the family collection, which they have since culled down to about 500 pieces. About a third of the McCormick-Kanter collection, displayed in their homes in Hyde Park and Sawyer, Mich.,&nbsp;

is from the Kanter family legacy, and includes pieces by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann and Andy Warhol, including ten works from Warhol&rsquo;s &ldquo;Myths&rdquo; series.&nbsp;

Another third features works by artists represented by the McCormick Gallery, including mid-century abstract expressionists such as the 92-year-old New York painter Mary Abbott, as well as Chicago artists such as Dawoud Bey, Roger Brown, Tony Fitzpatrick, Richard Hunt, Judy Ledgerwood, Laura Letinsky, Wesley Kimler and others.

The final third includes works jointly acquired by McCormick and Kanter, with the latter&rsquo;s taste&mdash;her special emphasis on large-scale photography, including a series of commissioned portraits of their daughters, Tatum and Reese&mdash;a bit more apparent. Several of these works were acquired at art fairs or through the Hyde Park Art Center, often as a result of Kanter&rsquo;s passionate and sometimes rather sudden attachments to them. &ldquo;She tends to be pretty sure about things very quickly,&rdquo; Lorenz says. &ldquo;Just the other day, a show was going up in one of our galleries and she was breezing through. By the time she got to the end of the hall, she had essentially bought something. We hadn&rsquo;t even put the price list down, but something shook her, and she was ready to add it to her collection.&rdquo;

McCormick is a more deliberative buyer and more attentive to the price of an artwork than his wife. But he is not without his own all but uncontrollable enthusiasms, including a passion for elegant Mexican serapes (McCormick has 40 of them in his man-cave, displayed on a rack system with hand-cranked dowels that he designed himself) and various artworks featuring dragons.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a dragon guy,&rdquo; he says helplessly, then recounts what happened one year at the Armory Show in New York, when he spotted a ceramic sculpture featuring the mythical creatures by the mid-career Chinese artist Li Lihong. McCormick had lusted after the piece since seeing it on the cover of Art + Auction magazine two weeks earlier; now, beholding it in the gleaming porcelain flesh, he could barely contain himself.&nbsp;

Within minutes he was on the phone to his wife, who calmly told him: &ldquo;Tom, just get it.&rdquo;

___

It&rsquo;s difficult to quantify the McCormick-Kanter collection, which consists of a core group of about 150 paintings, prints and photographs divided between their two homes, plus hundreds of other objects, including collections of textiles, antique oriental rugs, Italian art glass, Asian (especially Japanese and Chinese) ceramics, salt-and-pepper shakers, Mexican and Arts &amp; Crafts pottery, art furniture and a wide variety of sculpture. The remarkable thing about the works on display in Hyde Park is that despite the fact that they are arrayed in fairly close proximity and often grouped together in juxtaposed fashion, they cohere far more than they clash.

&ldquo;Janis has an eye for design, and the house itself is such a platform,&rdquo; Lorenz says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an amazing house that they&rsquo;ve refreshed and put a new palette on, and it holds art wonderfully. When you walk in and see an Andy Warhol next to a young photographer next to a ceramic pot, it all makes sense, because it&rsquo;s all held together by the house.&rdquo;

It&rsquo;s held together, too, by a couple who have assembled their collection the way they&rsquo;ve nurtured their marriage: by knowing when to bend and blend, when to stand firm, and when to tell each other to just get it.

*Publisher&#39;s update to the print edition:&nbsp;Artworks from the Kanter family collection are owned by Art Enterprises, Ltd.

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. <a href="https://twitter.com/KevinNance1">Twitter @KevinNance1</a>

Collector Profile: Janis Kanter and Tom McCormick

BY FRANCK MERCURIO

William J. O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s first big solo museum exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 2011 helped cement his reputation as a skilled ceramicist. Standing out from the 100 ceramic works were O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s &ldquo;busts&rdquo;&mdash;highly expressive, human-like heads that carry a wide range of cultural references from 19th century face jugs to rubber Halloween masks. These pieces read as engaging psychological portraits, but they also showcase O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s accomplishments in the medium of clay.

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &lt;i&gt;Untitled&lt;/i&gt;, 2007. Collection of Dana Hirt. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Tom Van Eynde, courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York." data-rich-file-id="77" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/77/original/90e1cwob284.jpg" />So, it may be surprising to learn that the 38-year-old, Chicago-based artist is well versed in a variety of media&mdash;besides ceramics&mdash;including assemblage, painting, drawing, and metal sculpture. Examples of each genre are presented in O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s first comprehensive museum exhibition, William J. O&rsquo;Brien, opening January 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

&ldquo;The work in the studio was nothing like the stuff I saw in the [Renaissance Society] show. He had all these other incredible bodies of work,&rdquo; says MCA curator Naomi Beckwith who organized the O&rsquo;Brien exhibition. &ldquo;What I wanted to do was to bring the breadth of his works out to the public.&rdquo;&nbsp;

O&rsquo;Brien first exhibited at the MCA in 2005 as part of the museum&rsquo;s 12 x 12 series (now called BMO Harris Chicago Works). He was also included in the MCA&rsquo;s group exhibition Phantom Limb: Approaches to Painting Today in 2012.&nbsp;&ldquo;Bill is clearly someone, institutionally, who we&rsquo;ve been watching for some time,&rdquo; says Beckwith.

O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s current exhibition is the latest installment in the MCA&rsquo;s &ldquo;ascendant artist&rdquo; series&mdash;which has featured such notables as Rashid Johnson, Amalia Pica, and Paul Sietsema. As the word &ldquo;ascendant&rdquo; implies, these exhibitions present artists who are not quite at mid-career, but are on the brink of fame. Says Beckwith, &ldquo;We&rsquo;re catching people on their way up.&rdquo;

O&rsquo;Brien is the first Chicago-based artist to be showcased in the MCA&rsquo;s ascendant artist series. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s really great to feature someone located here [in Chicago], someone who&rsquo;s already showing in New York,&rdquo; says Beckwith. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s nice to come home and look at the talent that&rsquo;s right under our noses.

In addition to being represented by the Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, O&rsquo;Brien is also represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Almine Rech&nbsp;Gallery in Paris.

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &quot;Untitled&quot;, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman" data-rich-file-id="78" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/78/original/ec339002.jpg" />The physicality O&rsquo;Brien brings to his art is a constant that runs through each genre he tackles.&nbsp;&ldquo;He has such a bodily investment in the work that he produces,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;You can see him really working across the page in the drawings. You can see him wrapping, molding, reshaping, breaking and sticking things together in the assemblage work.&rdquo;

Representative of the physicality of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s process is the layering of textures in his work. His ceramic busts are heavily textured, often featuring knobs of clay protruding from glazed surfaces, giving a kind of bumpy, nubby appearance. Some of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s &ldquo;paintings&rdquo; are assemblages constructed of layers of detritus&mdash;packing materials, old clothes, sticks&mdash;all covered in a unifying pigment. His metal sculptures are created by welding a series of planar elements together, giving the impression of texture through layering. Even O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s drawings are multilayered.&nbsp;A counter-balance to the &ldquo;masculine physicality&rdquo; of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s pieces is his interest in color, pattern, and na&iuml;ve forms&mdash;qualities that are often associated with feminist artists, outsider artists, and/or artists of color.

<img alt="" class="right" data-caption="William J. O’Brien, &quot;Untitled&quot;, 2008. Collection of Larry and Marilyn Fields. © William J. O’Brien. Photo: Tom Van Eynde, courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. " data-rich-file-id="80" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/80/original/3de77wob380.jpg" />&ldquo;There is almost a kind of feminist gesture there,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;where you see his work moving from the decorative, associated with women&rsquo;s work, to something that feels like abstraction. You see his work veering from quilting and textile to assemblage.&rdquo;&nbsp;

This push-and-pull between masculine and feminine, art and craft, high and low is evident throughout all of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s works. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s thinking about those things that have been dropped out of art history,&rdquo; says Beckwith, &ldquo;while using those things that have been valued by art history.&rdquo;

In September 2011 a fire almost completely destroyed O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s studio and the studios of three other artists in an Avondale warehouse. Many of his works were lost. Luckily, enough works survived in the galleries and in the hands of collectors that the current MCA show could still be mounted. New pieces have filled the gaps, including a large-scale, site specific installation that Beckwith describes as &ldquo;totemic objects&rdquo; exploring the idea of &ldquo;monuments to feelings.&rdquo;

When speaking of O&rsquo;Brien&rsquo;s likely reception at the MCA, Beckwith stated, &ldquo;He&rsquo;s been teaching at the School of the Art Institute for a while. It&rsquo;s going to be amazing to have his students here [at the MCA] alongside his colleagues. Clearly, he has a collection base and group of supporters here in the city. It&rsquo;s nice to have what feels like a big family hug around William at this time.&rdquo;

Accompanying the MCA&nbsp;exhibition will be a monograph, William J. O&rsquo;Brien, co-written by Beckwith and Trevor Smith of the Peabody Essex Museum, which will include a creative writing piece by local critic Jason Foumberg. The monograph will include a checklist of the 140 objects to be displayed in the MCA exhibition.

For more information about William J. O&rsquo;Brien (both the exhibition and the monograph), visit <a href="http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/">www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/</a>

William J. O’Brien at the MCA

BY LAURA MILLER

Juan Angel Ch&aacute;vez is a passionate and active member of Chicago&rsquo;s art community.&nbsp; The artist was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and currently lives and works in Chicago where he teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has exhibited his work internationally and has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards from notable organizations including the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and 3Arts, just to name a few. &nbsp;&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, &quot;NEPTUNO&quot;, 2011, interactive sculpture. Top image: LA ESPERANZA, street installation, 2005" data-rich-file-id="82" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/82/original/7juan.jpg" />

Tell me about where you&rsquo;re from and your transition to Chicago.

I&rsquo;m originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, and I moved to Chicago when I was 13 years old. At first I suffered from severe culture shock. I was in 7th grade, and I didn&rsquo;t speak English.&nbsp; I came from a place where the emphasis was on farming and ranching, and my school&rsquo;s agricultural curriculum focused on breeding cattle and growing apples. At first, Chicago was suffocating, and I wanted to run back to splicing fruit trees and vaccinating cattle.

After a year of living in Uptown/Andersonville, I adapted and gained confidence as I explored the city. When some of my neighbors started to get involved with the Latin Kings, at my mom&rsquo;s first opportunity she enrolled me in art classes. She encouraged me to apply my talents through a constructive form, and I owe a lot to her and the teachers she roped into her art class conspiracy.

The real assimilation into Chicago culture happened when I discovered skateboarding, because it gave me space and freedom. It made me think of the urban space as a landscape and not confinement. I&rsquo;ve grown with the city and now feel like I&rsquo;m a part of Chicago. I go back to Chihuahua quite often, and I love going there, but after a few months, I&rsquo;m ready to feel the energy of the city again.

Please discuss your visual arts studies and how you&rsquo;ve honed your practice and technique over the years.

My art studies are a bit complex. I think my mother had a lot to do with that because, aside from enrolling me in art classes, she had my high school teachers register me for SAIC&rsquo;s early college programs as well. I attended SAIC for my undergrad on a scholarship, but my career was short lived when I was asked to leave the school. I had an issue with writing in English, and my scholarship was revoked.

I decided to get involved in as many positive and creative endeavors as possible. I started working with the National Museum of Mexican Art, and I got involved with community public art. I took skateboarding more seriously and began to hang out with DJs, graphic designers, graffiti writers, and rave promoters. I&rsquo;m partly SAIC schooled and partly street schooled.&nbsp;

How and when did you first start exhibiting?

In 2001 I was very involved in public art. I was painting murals and mosaics in schools, and I didn&rsquo;t really see the value of exhibiting my work. I started putting up relief sculptures on boarded up buildings all over the city to try and change the idea of advertising space with something more whimsical. I didn&rsquo;t have a goal with that series - it was just fun! Shortly after, I was nominated for the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation&rsquo;s Individual Artist Award, and I won it. That really changed my perspective and marked the direction of my work.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, SPEAKER PROJECT, Interactive sculpture, 2007" data-rich-file-id="160" height="454" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/160/original/juan3.jpg" width="670" />

Your mixed media art has many components. I particularly enjoy the carpentry elements in your large wooden pieces. Talk about the significance of the materials you use &ndash; what are you drawn to working with, and why?

I view the use of materials and objects as contemporary artifacts ingrained in the quest for survival, exploration and establishment. Carpentry to me is not just construction; it represents components of methods or processes that signify shelter and navigation in the establishment for survival. It is really interesting for me to see materials that reveal an essence of history in their texture and shape.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, SPEAKER PROJECT, Interactive sculpture, 2007" data-rich-file-id="159" height="444" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/159/original/juan4.jpg" width="666" />

Tell me about your studio practice.

My two kids take a lot of my time, so I work out of my home studio at night. At first it was hard to adapt to working at home, but I&rsquo;ve made some interesting changes and this new process has made me think in more detail about my projects. I make everything small scale now and that helps with materials, budget, labor, space &ndash; plus I don&rsquo;t get stuck with storage issues. &nbsp;

Chicago&rsquo;s public art is one of my favorite things about this city. You have work on view at various CTA stations as a part of the city&rsquo;s public art initiative. How do you feel about having work displayed at these locations?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;m a big fan of the public art in Chicago as well, and I&rsquo;m honored to be a part of the city&rsquo;s collection. The work I&rsquo;ve done for the CTA has immortalized my art in the city - I love that!&nbsp; I would love the opportunity to make another public art piece, and I still think about making more public art, but I don&rsquo;t know how my new ideas would apply. New work would be very different than VIDA SIMPLE at the pink line, for example.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, ﻿GIANT, street installation, 1999" data-rich-file-id="161" height="605" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/161/original/juan1.jpg" width="426" />

You are one of many commissioned artists involved in the Hyde Park Art Center&rsquo;s&nbsp;Not Just Another Pretty Face program.&nbsp;(This year&rsquo;s show runs thru March 30, 2014.) Would you share comments on the program?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;ve done NJAPF three times; it&rsquo;s been lots of fun and great works have come out of it. Cultivating relationships between artists and patrons is an excellent idea. HPAC is not afraid to try new things and neither are their NJAPF patrons. It&rsquo;s very liberating to try and reinvent the wheel when considering portraits.

Are you in the middle of any big projects?&nbsp;

I&rsquo;m gearing up for larger projects this spring and summer, but this winter I&rsquo;m trying to focus on the creation of smaller works with a new direction. I&rsquo;ve always done very large projects that have an immediate result, but I want to try and focus on pieces that take longer to make.&nbsp;

How do you see Chicago&rsquo;s art community?

Chicago is a very vibrant city, and I love being a part of its art community. Emerging artists are making really inspiring and amazing work, and the creative energy in this city is more intense because of that; it keeps me on my toes.

<img alt="" data-caption="Juan Angel Chávez, NO SHOES NO SHIRT NO SERVICE, Found materials installation, 2013" data-rich-file-id="162" height="454" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/162/original/juan11.jpg" width="680" />

<a class="btn" href="http://www.juanangelchavez.com/">www.juanangelchavez.com</a>

Artist Insights: Juan Angel Chávez

<img alt="" data-rich-file-id="87" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/87/original/img-2560.jpg" />

BY MARY DEYOE

When you walk into Ann Nathan&rsquo;s gallery you feel like you&rsquo;re floating. The gallery sits about a half story above street level, and when you stand at one of the enormous picture windows looking out at those passing by, you are in another world. I imagine that is just as Nathan intended it.&nbsp;

For more than 30 years in Chicago, Ann Nathan has run a gallery. She began in 1980 in a 200-square foot space she rented from the ceramicist Ruth Duckworth. &ldquo;The space was tiny. We showed jewelry and ceramics, and we used every inch of space. The pedestals opened up and doubled as storage space,&rdquo; Nathan recalls. For several years the gallery existed there before a couple of moves, then survived a fire and relocated and rebuilt in her current space on Superior Street. &ldquo;Although many galleries have since opened further south and west, I think this area will always survive because of its location.&rdquo; The galleries are close to the L and blocks from Michigan Avenue.&rdquo;

When talking about how she has thrived for so many years, Nathan admits she has always had a simple approach. &ldquo;I am open to showing what works.&rdquo; This is, though, limited to figurative art and realism. &ldquo;When we started everyone was showing abstract work, but I was never interested in doing what everyone was doing.&rdquo; This perspective has freed Nathan to show a diverse range of artists and styles. The work, by artists from around the world, ranges from the dreamy paintings by Christina Haglid to the bold and dynamic sculptures by the long-time Chicago artist Michael Gross. &ldquo;Michael&rsquo;s work is unique and strange,&rdquo; Nathan said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s sculptural, functional furniture.&rdquo; This is another trend you&rsquo;ll find at Nathan&rsquo;s gallery. The furniture pieces are always functional. In fact, when we met, Nathan and I sat and talked on two beautifully carved wooden stools.

In regards to how the gallery and art landscape has changed in Chicago, Nathan seems unfazed. &ldquo;Chicago is a welcoming place, but every space is different.&rdquo; Nathan believes you have to pick work you like and show what you like to show.&nbsp;

Nathan and her gallery staff are certainly welcoming to visitors, a trait that has undoubtedly helped in the gallery&rsquo;s success throughout the decades. While you explore the work in the gallery and move from a gigantic charcoal portrait by Mary Borgman to playful, smiling nude sculptures by Esther Shimazu, you feel transported, at least for a little while, to a place far away from Superior Street.

An Interview with Art Dealer Ann Nathan

BY KEVIN NANCE

<img alt="" data-caption="Øvstebø is right at home in her new role as executive director of The Renaissance Society. Photo by Kevin Nance" data-rich-file-id="73" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/73/original/solveig.jpg" />

When Solveig &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; first received a phone call from The Renaissance Society in Chicago about the possibility of her becoming the institution&rsquo;s new executive director&mdash;replacing Susanne Ghez, who was retiring after 40 years in the position&mdash;the timing could hardly have been worse.&nbsp;

For one thing, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; had recently accepted a new term as director of Norway&rsquo;s Bergen Kunsthall, which she had led for nearly a decade and which was expanding with additional gallery space and a new office for her. For another, she was three days away from giving birth to her daughter, Ella. As she recalls now with comic understatement, &ldquo;It was not a time when I was looking for a new job.&rdquo;&nbsp;

But the Ren, as the renowned art space on the University of Chicago campus is known, was persistent. Six weeks after the first call, a second one came. &ldquo;We had a very short list of people we wanted for the job, and Solveig was on the top of that list,&rdquo; says Canice Prendergast, the member of the Ren&rsquo;s search committee who took the lead in communicating with &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very difficult job to fill, because we need to have one of the best curators of avant-garde art in the world who also happens to be very good at running an institution like ours. It&rsquo;s rare to find someone with both qualities; the group of people who do is very, very small. The new director also has very big shoes to fill, since Susanne essentially created the Renaissance Society and turned it into a world-class institution. But given Solveig&rsquo;s track record, we thought she was the ideal person to fill those shoes.&rdquo;

This time around, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; found herself intrigued. She knew of the Renaissance Society&rsquo;s high regard on the international art scene, having hosted some of the same artists whose work had been shown at the Ren. The two organizations&rsquo; structure and practice were similar; they were both non-collecting institutions focused on temporary exhibitions of cutting-edge art. Most important, the Ren&rsquo;s search committee emphasized that she could concentrate on presenting art exhibitions largely free from the complicating factors&mdash;audience and sponsor expectations, commercial and market forces, political considerations&mdash;that plague her peers around the world.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Sometimes those factors can become so important for an institution that there&rsquo;s not enough space left for what&rsquo;s really interesting to me, which is the art production and the communication with the artists,&rdquo; she says in an interview at her office, where she took over from Ghez last fall. &ldquo;They convinced me that this is a place where art comes first.&rdquo;

In her new job, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; says she plans to increase the Ren&rsquo;s profile locally by expanding its outreach efforts, which could include a satellite gallery to supplement the institution&rsquo;s smallish 3,200-square-foot exhibition space in Hyde Park. (She has no plans, however, to support a move away from the University of Chicago campus in search of larger permanent quarters. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s not on my to-do list,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;and I have a big to-do list.&rdquo;) She also wants to publish exhibition catalogs and other publications on a larger scale and within the timeframe of the exhibition in question (as opposed to the current practice of publishing some catalogs after-the-fact).&nbsp;

In addition to her duties overseeing the Ren&rsquo;s administrative operations and strategy, &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; is also its chief curator. Her first outings in Chicago begin this month with a show of new work by the German artist Nora Schultz (January 12-February 23), followed by an exhibition by the Canadian artist Christina Mackie (April 27-June 29). These will be the earliest demonstrations of &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s vision of the curatorial role as closely tied to artistic production in the early stages of the creative process. Last year, for example, she spent four days in Schultz&rsquo;s empty studio in Berlin in conversation with the artist, acting as a sounding board and filter for her ideas. &nbsp;

&ldquo;This institution is not just a passive space where we show artworks that have been seen elsewhere,&rdquo; &Oslash;vsteb&oslash; explains. &ldquo;Instead of picking artworks that have been shown in museums or biennials or galleries, I am asking the artists to present works that they are producing with us, that are completely new, that maybe are based on ideas that the artist hasn&rsquo;t been able to try out yet. This is a place where they can experiment with new ideas, and so in dialogue with us, new works can come about.&rdquo;

Although it was not a factor in her decision to accept the new job, there was an additional circumstance that made &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;&rsquo;s move to Chicago seem, in hindsight, somehow inevitable: She was born here. In 1972, her parents moved to the Windy City, where her father, a professor of theology, served a two-year stint as pastor of the Norwegian Memorial Church, also known as the Minnekirken, a Norwegian-speaking Lutheran congregation in Logan Square. The family went back to Norway when their new daughter was 18 months old, never to return.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a strange thing,&rdquo; muses &Oslash;vsteb&oslash;, 40. &ldquo;My daughter is now the same age I was when we lived in Chicago the first time, and I am now the age my mother was when we were here. And because I was born here, I am a U.S. citizen, but never had an American passport. I thought it would be hard to get one, but I went to the embassy and brought my birth certificate, and they gave me my passport, just like that.&rdquo; She smiles. &ldquo;And here I am.&rdquo;

Solveig Øvstebø at the Renaissance Society

By KEVIN NANCE

When Peter and Eileen Broido moved from the west suburbs to a highrise condo overlooking downtown Chicago in 2004, it wasn&rsquo;t the spectacular view of the Chicago River and the Loop that was the primary selling point.&nbsp;

&ldquo;It was the wall space,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;That and the size of the freight elevator.&rdquo;

<img alt="" class="left" data-caption="Peter and Eileen Broido: “The fun for us is finding art, putting our money where our mouth is.” Artwork pictured: Lari Pittman, &lt;i&gt;Ephemeral and Needy,&lt;/i&gt; 1990, 82 x 66&quot;. Photo: Kevin Nance " data-rich-file-id="81" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/81/original/peter-and-eileen-broido.jpg" />He smiles when he says it, but he isn&rsquo;t kidding. The Broidos needed plenty of room to display their impressive collection of contemporary art, which currently consists of nearly 180 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces on view. (An additional 50 artworks reside at their adult children&rsquo;s homes on the East Coast, with about 30 more pieces in storage.) And the freight elevator was of real concern. Early on, a recently acquired 10-foot-wide panoramic photograph by Gerard Maynard missed fitting into the elevator by a couple of inches. The building management suggested that the piece could be hoisted by crane to the Broidos&rsquo; balcony more than 30 floors above the riverbank, but in the Windy City this seemed like too much of a risk; in the end, they donated the photograph to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Another acquisition, a large painting by Chicago artist Judy Ledgerwood, made it into the elevator but couldn&rsquo;t be brought through the apartment door because the corridor outside was too narrow; the painting&rsquo;s frame had to be broken down and reassembled inside the apartment.

Such are the adventures of one of the city&rsquo;s most prolific art-collecting couples, who have spent the past 40 years in daily dialogue with art. They&rsquo;ve feathered their 2,600-square-foot nest with works by Chicago artists (Ledgerwood, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Curtis Mann, Tom Friedman, John Pittman and Stephanie Brooks, among others) and others from elsewhere in the United States (John Baldessari, Jane Hammond, Jenny Holzer, Byron Kim, Chris Martin, Bruce Nauman,&nbsp;Jon Pestoni, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Zak Prekop, Richard Tuttle, Kehinde Wiley, etc.). Most recently they&rsquo;ve begun branching out to Europe, with emphasis on works by German artists such as Frank Nietzsche.&nbsp;

Abstract painting dominates the collection, which also includes a smattering of mixed-media work, notably a large painted collage on a sculpted metal and canvas substructure by the Argentine-American artist Fabian Marcaccio. A group of works on paper&mdash;including works by Nutt and Tuttle&mdash;take refuge in a bathroom, where they&rsquo;re shielded from the natural light that otherwise suffuses the apartment.

Most of the pieces were acquired soon after their creation and early in the artists&rsquo; careers; the Broidos collect only what they like, not what they think might appreciate in monetary value. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t do it as an investment,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;The fun for us is finding art, putting our money where our mouth is, and seeing what happens. And it&rsquo;s been OK.&rdquo;&nbsp;

The Broidos rarely sell their holdings (though they do sometimes trade one piece for another), instead choosing to donate to museums. Beneficiaries of their largesse include the Museum of Contemporary Art (where the Broidos are longtime supporters and members of MCA&rsquo;s Merge, a collecting group), the Akron Art Museum and the Elmhurst Art Museum, which displayed several Broido-donated works this fall as part of Inventory, an exhibition of EAM&rsquo;s collection.&nbsp;

&ldquo;What strikes me about Peter and Eileen&rsquo;s collecting is that they&rsquo;re focused on emerging artists,&rdquo; says Staci Boris, EAM&rsquo;s chief curator. &ldquo;They like to seek out new artists, not people who have a track record or are well known. They enjoy the discovery aspect of it, the process of figuring out who is interesting and who has a future. They&rsquo;re unique in their vision, and they don&rsquo;t follow trends.&rdquo;

Along the way, the Broidos have become fixtures on the Chicago art scene, mixing with artists, curators, gallerists and other collectors with an ease born of an engagement sustained over four decades. As Eileen Broido puts it with a smile, &ldquo;We&rsquo;re kind of part of the woodwork in Chicago.&rdquo;

The Broidos&rsquo; collecting journey began soon after they moved to the Chicago area in 1969. (Originally from Manhattan&mdash;where he spent much of his undergraduate years at Columbia University visiting art galleries at a time when you could pick up a Jasper Johns painting for $500&mdash;Peter Broido was a surgeon at Central DuPage Hospital for many years; his wife was a nurse.) Although they lived 30 miles west of the Loop, the young couple came into the city most weekends. &ldquo;We spent a lot of time on the Eisenhower Expressway,&rdquo; he recalls with a smile. One day they were walking down Michigan Avenue and turned east on Ontario, where they were met with a scene that reminded them of Disney&rsquo;s Fantasia: a row of people coming out of an art gallery carrying small paintings.

&ldquo;It was like those walking buckets from&nbsp;The Sorcerer&rsquo;s Apprentice,&rdquo; Peter Broido recalls. &ldquo;The Phyllis Kind Gallery had had a show of Roger Brown paintings, and people were taking their pieces home with them.&rdquo;&nbsp;

The Broidos were enchanted. They didn&rsquo;t buy a Brown then&mdash;though they would do so a half-dozen times in the years to come&mdash;but they met Kind, who introduced them to the Hairy Who painters, including Wirsum, Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, along with other Imagists including Brown and Ed Paschke. &ldquo;That was fun,&rdquo; recalls Eileen Broido, who was so enthused that she went back to college, studying art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and, later, the University of Chicago.&nbsp;

In the next two decades, the Broidos amassed one of the city&rsquo;s largest and most significant collections of Imagist painting, focusing on works that combined figurative and abstract elements. Over the years, however, they began to feel that the Imagists were stuck in a bit of a rut. The turning point came with a Paschke retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989-90. &ldquo;We looked at it and said, &lsquo;Ed Paschke is repainting Ed Paschke,&rsquo;&rdquo; Peter Broido recalls. &ldquo;We started looking critically at what we were buying, and basically all of those artists were painting the same things. They hadn&rsquo;t really moved on. And we decided it was time for us to move on, too.&rdquo;

Although the Broidos continued to buy some work by Chicago-based artists, often from Chicago galleries (they maintain relationships with the Rhona Hoffman, Kavi Gupta and Shane Campbell galleries to this day), they began to make an increasing percentage of their acquisitions in New York, forging relationships with dealers in Chelsea and, in later years, on the Lower East Side. And while their earlier purchases had featured the figure, more and more the Broidos concentrated on purely abstract works.

&ldquo;Abstraction just seemed to wear better,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;If you go back and look at abstract art from the &rsquo;40s, the &rsquo;50s, it still looks pretty fresh. Hans Hofmann, my God! Those are just fabulous paintings. They still sing.&rdquo; On the other hand, his wife says, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just hard to find anything incredibly new with the figure.&rdquo;

In the 1990s, photography and conceptual art came to the forefront of the art world, but the Broidos largely stuck with painting. Conceptual art they found &ldquo;a little boring,&rdquo; Eileen Broido says. And photography? &ldquo;The problem with photography is in some ways the same thing that&rsquo;s true with figurative art,&rdquo; her husband says. &ldquo;What are you going to do with it that&rsquo;s different today? You need to make your mark in some way, and another sunset isn&rsquo;t going to do it.&rdquo;

As the Broidos developed their taste in art&mdash;they rarely disagree; &ldquo;After 45 years of marriage, we&rsquo;re pretty much the same person,&rdquo; Peter Broido says&mdash;they also established patterns in the manner of their collecting. They often visit art fairs&mdash;they&rsquo;re regulars at Art Basel Miami and NADA, and say they have enjoyed the first two years of Expo Chicago at Navy Pier&mdash;but almost never buy at the fairs. &ldquo;What I find art fairs most useful for is making connections with dealers I&rsquo;ve never met before and seeing work that we haven&rsquo;t seen,&rdquo; Peter Broido says. &ldquo;I probably will never buy anything out of a fair, because we don&rsquo;t like making snap decisions.&rdquo;&nbsp;

For similar reasons, the Broidos tend to avoid making studio visits with artists with whom they have no prior relationship, because of what they experience as an implicit pressure to buy. &ldquo;I like talking to artists, because I think they&rsquo;re terrific people,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But I really don&rsquo;t want to go to their studios, because you feel pressured. It isn&rsquo;t even overt. It&rsquo;s subtle, but I just don&rsquo;t want to be in that position. If we went out on a tour with 100 people, I&rsquo;d be thrilled to go to artists&rsquo; studios, but I don&rsquo;t want to be there one-on-one.&rdquo;

&ldquo;We do sometimes go after we&rsquo;ve purchased a piece,&rdquo; his wife adds. &ldquo;We were just in Berlin and went to Frank Nietzsche&rsquo;s studio. His dealer said, &lsquo;You&rsquo;re here, Frank&rsquo;s here, why don&rsquo;t you stop by and say hi?&rsquo; We did, and it was interesting to meet him. But there was no pressure, because we had already bought a piece from him.&rdquo;

The gregarious Broidos especially enjoy discovering new artists by talking with gallerists&mdash;which explains their increasing preference for smaller and emerging galleries on New York&rsquo;s Lower East Side. &ldquo;Nowadays if you go into the galleries in Chelsea, and if the dealers are there, they&rsquo;re certainly not out where you can see them,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;On the Lower East Side, the owners are there. They&rsquo;re young and energetic and enthusiastic and intelligent, and they really enjoy telling you about their art, which is the way it used to be when I was younger. It&rsquo;s fun to see that.&rdquo;

And so for the Broidos, the fun continues. The day after their interview with Chicago Gallery News, they were off to Miami for another round of art-fair visits, combing the aisles in search of new artists to collect. Fortunately for them, they still have a few square feet of open wall space.

Collector profile: Eileen and Peter Broido

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418167/itdrdtvw7b68klneai3i.jpg"></figure>By KEVIN NANCEThere will be no special exhibit, no monograph, no hoopla whatsoever commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Richard Gray Gallery this fall. “We spent a lot of time thinking about that, but didn’t come up with anything that needed to be done,” gallery director Paul Gray says one recent morning in his office at the John Hancock Center. “Fifty years is a substantial achievement, I recognize that, but we looked at things others have done on major anniversaries, and none of them inspired me to devote time to that. We started work on a publication, but it seemed self-indulgent and not very meaningful, so we canceled it.”So, this fall it will be business as usual: two major openings (new paintings by Alex Katz September 20–November 2, 2013,&nbsp;followed by a show of older works by David Hockney at Frieze Masters in London and later in Chicago), participation in large international art fairs (including EXPO CHICAGO at Navy Pier) and the usual whirl of buying, selling and brokering transactions of mostly blue-chip work by famous artists to deep-pocketed clients in the Windy City and around the world. The gallery’s clients now include more than 10 percent of the Forbes 400 list, including nine members from the Chicago area, as well as similarly high-rolling collectors and museum curators from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. In 2012, sales were just under $100 million.The decision to avoid anniversary-related festivities is both typical of Paul Gray (who took over management of the city’s most successful gallery from his father, Richard Gray, nearly two decades ago) and telling. The younger Gray, now 58, is known for his preference for a tightly focused business strategy, concentrating on a single niche of the art market—the high end—rather than the more eclectic approach once favored by his father, who dealt in antiquities, tribal art and works on paper in addition to the early and mid-20th-century paintings and sculpture that have always been the gallery’s primary stock-in-trade.“My father always wanted to be sure that there were many opportunities for success in the course of the year, but I felt that that was making us more mediocre on all levels, that we were spreading ourselves a little thin,” says Gray, whose hair, elegantly tailored suit and even his argyle socks are visual reminders of his family name.&nbsp; “I wanted to be more of an expert in something, so I decided to specialize in more expensive art, regardless of medium, and I wanted to relate to collectors who were a little further along on thedevelopment timeline—collectors who were really knowledgeable and demanding, and who would be appreciative of whatever we could bring to them.” If it can’t be done well, in short, Paul Gray doesn’t want to do it, including anniversary celebrations.The Richard Gray Gallery opened on November 4, 1963, at 155 E. Ontario. The elder Gray—his son was 9 years old at the time—had worked for his own father for several years and had been casting about for a new direction.&nbsp; Trained as an architect, he’d long been interested in the visual arts, particularly painting and sculpture, and he’d married into a family of art collectors.&nbsp; When a friend suggested that he open an art gallery, it struck him as an opportunity to combine business with pleasure.“Maybe because of my architecture background, I had a particular interest in draftsmanship, prints and drawings,” says Richard Gray, 84. “When I opened the gallery, I had the idea that I’d be handling that kind of thing, and that’s what happened. I started out by representing established and emerging artists primarily working on paper.” Quickly, however, Gray sold works by a number of painters and sculptors, including Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Louise Nevelson, Hans Hofmann, Fernand Léger and Jim Dine, an impressive list that would eventually grow to include Hockney, Josef Albers, Joseph Cornell, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, among many others. Gray also made significant forays into aboriginal and African art.“My standards were about trusting my own eye, my own sense of aesthetics,” Gray recalls. “It wasn’t the particular style or period that interested me; it was the individual work of art.”&nbsp;Demonstrating a talent for networking with artists and clients, Gray quickly established a reputation as the Chicago gallery with the deepest bench, the longest reach and the highest ambition. “They were the best gallery in Chicago, as far as I was concerned,” says Dine, still one of the Grays’ most-shown artists. “Richard has a tremendous eye and a great world view, and he was really the only truly international gallery in Chicago for a long time. I was very pleased to be there.”&nbsp;For most of his youth and early adulthood, Paul Gray gave little thought to the prospect of joining the family business. He was mildly interested in visual art—like his father, he had dabbled in painting and drawing in high school—but lacked a deep or abiding passion for it. As his father went about the business of making the gallery into a success, the younger Gray was no more absorbed by the process than most young people are in the careers of their parents. “I was raised around the art world and didn’t totally take it for granted, but I didn’t idolize it in any way, either,” he recalls. “It certainly wasn’t preordained that I would go into this field. I didn’t even think about it until I was nearly 30.”After five years as a theater producer on the East Coast, Gray returned to Chicago to attend graduate school at Columbia College and began working at his father’s gallery one day a week, hanging art, making follow-up calls to artists and clients, and generally learning the business. It was a ground-up apprenticeship that eventually led to his succeeding his father as managing partner in 1994. (Richard Gray maintains a presence at the gallery, where he keeps an office from which he manages his personal affairs, but he no longer plays an active role in its management.) Paul Gray opened a New York branch of the gallery in 1996. In years since then, he gradually phased out many of his father’s initiatives, including separate departments for tribal art and prints and drawings, as part of his overall strategy to pursue a narrower and potentially more lucrative focus on the market’s highest strata.As part of that process, the younger Gray also represents fewer emerging or even mid-career artists than his father did. There are exceptions, such as Jan Tichy, a Czech-born new-media and video artist who moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. “Jan is very busy, but he doesn’t have a large commercial market at this point, and he doesn’t have any commercial impact on our business,” Gray says. “But I took him on because I find his work compelling.” Still, Tichy is the exception that proves the rule.“Of course Paul had his own notions, his own particular tastes, some of which were different from mine,” Richard Gray says now. “But he’s done extremely well, building a first-rate reputation, not just in Chicago but internationally. I was absolutely happy for him to do his own thing.”In at least one respect, Paul Gray is a chip off the old block. Just like his dad, he quickly showed a flair for cultivating professional and sometimes deeply personal relationships with clients and artists, despite—or perhaps because of—the latter group’s reputation for eccentricity and prickliness. “Artists play a special role in culture, because they’re the bravest, most adventurous, the most willing to bare their souls in public,” he says. “They have a lot to teach us, and that’s why people are drawn to their work. On the other hand, I think most artists would acknowledge that they’re not the easiest people to be close to, because they’re pretty uncompromising and pretty self-involved; they’re focused on making that next discovery in their work. They can be social, but they can be highly antisocial also, and that’s one of the things I respect about them.”Gray has formed a particularly close relationship with the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, best known in Chicago for his Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, and to whose portfolio Gray now assigns two full-time staff members. About the same age, Gray and Plensa initially met at the artist’s first show in Chicago in 1996. “We hit it off in two seconds,” Plensa recalls. “Since that day Paul and I have grown together, developing a beautiful friendly relationship. Richard and his wife, Mary, really embraced me as one more member of their family, and I consider Paul a brother, even though he insists on teaching me to swim in any ocean despite knowing that I can only swim in the Dead Sea.”Paul Gray has also proved adept at the delicate art of connecting some of the world’s richest art collectors with each other, acting as a go-between in private transactions involving large egos and even larger sums. In his biggest such coup several years ago, Gray brokered a deal between Los Angeles mogul David Geffen and Chicago hedge-fund billionaires Anne and Kenneth Griffin. The Griffins, regular clients of Gray’s, were interested in acquiring a Jackson Pollock; Geffen, also a client, was interested in selling one—for which purpose Gray introduced the two sides. “Over lunch at Geffen’s home, Ken Griffin’s eyes kept drifting toward a very, very important Jasper Johns painting on the wall nearby,” Gray recalls. “When we left the house, he said to me, ‘I think that painting is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.’”The Griffins didn’t buy Geffen’s Pollock, but after a week of intense negotiations overseen by Gray, the Griffins purchased Johns’s False Start (1959) for $80 million, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist at the time. (The Griffins have since loaned the work for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.) In the process, Gray’s reputation as an experienced liaison between collectors buying and selling art to each other was cemented.“It used to be that any serious art collector in Chicago would come by the gallery at least once a month, but that rarely happens now,” says Gray, who recently moved the gallery to a larger space with higher ceilings on the Hancock Center’s 38th floor. “Now we largely go to the collectors as advisors and curators. It’s part of the evolution of the business.” <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/organizations/richard-gray-gallery--2">The Richard Gray Gallery</a> keeps evolving right along with it.&nbsp;Image: Paul Gray, photo by Kevin Nance</body></html>

CGN interviews Paul Gray of Richard Gray Gallery on the occasion of the gallery's 50th anniversary in 2013

50 Years: A Milestone Arrives Quietly at Richard Gray Gallery

A young doctor quietly living on Chicago’s North Side fell into collecting art 20 years ago. Like many devoted collectors, he says at first he didn’t know what he was doing, but it’s been a passion ever since. Within his Modern-looking condo, surrounded by faces of all colors and shapes and contortions, one is struck by the number of works by Outsiders - those curious and inspiring artists who are compelled to create art using any means and materials necessary in an effort to express the thoughts within them. Through learning about his own tastes and interests, this collector has discovered the pleasures of meeting artists in unexpected places and the fun in sharing the unconventional with friends at home. -GVCGN: Tell me how you got started collecting works of art? Is your focus different today? DR: The first work I bought was at auction, at Kass/Meridian, probably 20 or so years ago.&nbsp; Unfortunately I was caught in a bidding war - with my roommate at the time! I ‘won’ that battle, only to find I owned a work I knew nothing about, by an artist I had never heard of, but for which I had fought feverishly. That lesson in impulse buying taught me to research, take my time, enjoy the process of discovering what type of art I liked and how to go about finding and collecting it. Much of the art I acquired in the beginning of my collecting days was during travel - I’d pick something up when I was in Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, or London. Eventually, as I formed stronger opinions and learned a bit, I gravitated to Outsider/self-taught artists. I also like to support local artists, and in particular the younger artists who have come from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.You have focused on figurative work as well as Outsider art. What is it about these genres or view points that attracts you? I’ve tried and failed to come up with a unifying theme for the art in my collection, and in the end I’ve realized it’s not important to have one. You hear so often (because it’s true!) that you should collect what you like and what you want to live with, and that is always what I’ve sought to find, whether it is work by self-taught artists, contemporary trained painters or photographers, or furniture designers. I have collected paintings, drawings, some sculpture, furniture and woodwork from various eras - really a hodge-podge, but ultimately from this chaos comes a space in which I love to live. I am constantly changing it to accommodate new additions. The Outsiders appeal to me because they were not beholden to the market or to a perceived audience of collectors, gallery agents, professors, and so on. I think in many ways you are able to see their pure creativity. I have collected works by Lee Godie, Charles Steffen, Jim Work, Henry Darger, Paul Estrada, and Anna Zemankova - some of these artists participated in the established art world and some did not, but all of them have communicated absolutely unique visions.Please highlight any favorite pieces or collecting experiences. Are there lessons you’ve learned through observing and buying art? I found an artist in Hanoi whose work I loved several years ago. She was represented at a gallery there but lived outside Ho Chi Minh City, so I spent a day trekking miles past the finished roads on the outskirts of the city to find the compound where she and her husband, a sculptor, lived. With blond hair, blue eyes, and the biggest nose in Vietnam, apparently, I certainly stood out wading through those fields, so I trailed about ten kids with me by the time I reached the artist. She and her husband hosted me for hours, showing me how and where they worked and looking through all their art - it was really a great day, and I think that was one of the experiences that really hooked me. Part of the joy of collecting is the process, of course, and learning about the lives and influences of the people you meet along the way. Many of the works that mean the most to me I acquired in artists’ studios, or on the streets in destinations like Lima, Peru and Mexico City - places outside the complex that has grown around the art business, such as the mega-fairs and galleries.Are there any reactions to the works in your collection that have surprised you, such as&nbsp; candid responses from friends or family? My friends think I am nuts, particularly when they are evaluating the latest Outsider&nbsp;acquisition: ‘So, he was schizophenic, or&nbsp;bipolar?’ and ‘You paid for that, or you found it on the street?’ or, ‘Can I sell you what my kid did in school last week?’ I think to most people there is more respect for art that comes from traditionally trained artists, or from recognized galleries, or for more figurative work. In my house there is no relationship between a work’s monetary value and how it is received by a casual observer who is over for dinner. In fact Henry Darger’s work inspires the least positive reviews, though when a guest learns the back story it intrigues them enormously and changes many opinions. Along those same lines, not everything in my home is really family-friendly, and Darger is a good example of that; his reverse image with hermaphrodite Vivian Girls only comes out at more festive dinner parties!

Collector Profile: An Eye for the Outsider

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418168/kxmplluyyata1q2gabbc.jpg"></figure>By Laura MillerLaura Letinsky’s subtly haunting photographs stick with you. The scenes in her work convey ease and elegance, yet they are conceptually loaded with references to art history, literature, music, and writing. The viewer is asked in changing ways to consider what her images signify to them. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Letinsky attended the University of Manitoba and Yale’s School of Art before migrating to Chicago, where she is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Chicago. She is represented locally by Valerie Carberry Gallery, in addition to other galleries in the U.S., Canada, and Germany.LM: How does Chicago compare to other cities where you’ve exhibited or where you’re represented?Laura Letinsky: Chicago is a great community. There’s a bit of self-consciousness about being smaller than New York or L.A., with all the negative associations of provincialism and its insecurities, but Chicago is fantastic in that its scale is big enough to be stimulating, challenging, and diverse while still being manageable on many levels. I can live here and manage to make art, teach, have kids, space, a garden, friends - that is, a life that is full and rich. Every place has benefits and challenges but I find Chicago a really productive and fabulous balance.LM: As a University of Chicago professor is there any sound advice that you adhere to personally that you’ve shared with a student?LL: I recently had a critique with a student who was setting up a stranglehold on the possibility for experimentation and learning and seemed at odds with her larger interests. I encouraged her to toss out the division between her art and the rest of her life and to instead revel in the places where she drew fun and enthusiasm, skepticism and challenge; to venture to places she didn’t necessarily know vs. well-trod ground. Art that is about art exclusively is to me relatively narrow. There are artists for whom this makes sense, but I’m most thrilled when art makes me see differently - seeing understood here as knowledge.LM: In your Ill Form and Void Full series the incorporated collage elements add layers of complexity to the work and blur the lines of space and perception: What is real? What is a photo of a photo, or a copy of a copy? What is missing? What might the viewer add? How did this series came about?LL: In 2010 I began work after a year’ hiatus. A number of events had conspired such that I stopped making pictures, uncertain of whether I would be able to continue; knowing I couldn’t continue as I had. A crisis of belief? For years the question, what is a photograph had driven my practice; if anything and everything is ripe as photography’s subject, and given the unrelenting volume of images, why make pictures? What do they do? I now understand the answer has to do with what they are - that is, pictures are how they exist in our world, how we produce and consume them.For the series I decided that to use images, mine and others, indiscriminately with objects, digital downloads, and scans permitted a kind of promiscuity that felt right. It’s a way of negotiating my ambivalence for this medium, a deep and abiding love and irrevocable loathing. To focus this inquiry around home and food portends a potent array of issues including consumption, sexuality, need, want, labor, gender, etc.LM: What are you trying to set the stage for when you’re assembling scenes for your photographs? A specific mood or memory?LL: There’s not really a mood or memory as there was with the earlier manifestations of my still-life work. In this series I am feeling my way around, trying to find a way to set up ideas, ambivalences, conflicts, resolutions, relationships, that bespeak of “home”.LM: Still lifes have such a loaded history. Are there any specific artists you see your work referencing/ influenced by/ commenting on?LL: When I first began my references were the Northern European still life masters, particularly Pieter Claesz, in front of whose work I still get weak-kneed. Later I turned to others in this era, as well as Chardin’s scenes of food, in the Renaissance’s religious and allegorical paintings, Modernists who used the still life precisely because of their disregard for its domesticity, i.e. its familiarity. Stronger for me now are a range of artists whose work explores the tensions between the personal and public sphere: Jessica Stockholder, Richard Tuttle, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mickalene Thomas...For the last two years, writing and music have had more impact for my practice than visual references.LM: How do you feel about including your work in magazines that usually celebrate the perfectly polished? Are you breaking any rules, or maybe starting a new trend—&nbsp;celebrating the imperfect?LL: My pictures are never going to be widely accepted; they are not the new paradigm. I’m grateful for those who appreciate my sensibility, but the aspiration of perfection along with its inevitable failure and dissatisfaction is perhaps too deeply ingrained.Commercial work is really interesting and hearkens back to pre-modernist artistic practice in which we were hired guns, producing work for clients, the church or other patrons. The notion that art if informed by commerce is somehow impure is a modernist invention which, while it served some purpose, is a pretty impossible conceit. &nbsp;LM: Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?LL: Just the usual aspirations for deep and abiding fulfillment of all my wishes and desires, some altruistic, other pretty petty...Family and friends, first and foremost.LM: Any big plans coming up for 2013?LL: I’m really excited about my shows at the Denver Art Museum and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. I’ve also got some travel planned to Istanbul, Guadalajara and Mexico City, maybe Oaxaca, and Beijing. I really want to go to India and feel that I’m taking a circuitous route. I’m looking forward to delving back into the studio so as to continue in the direction I’ve begun.</body></html>

A 2013 Chicago Gallery News interview with local photographer Laura Letinsky. 