News from Around the Art World: March 5, 2018
ELLEN ROTHENBERG // SPERTUS INSTITUTE
If you had to leave your home for good, what would you take with you? Would you take your favorite books? The scarf that your grandmother knit for you, your favorite necklace that your best friend gave you, your red shoes, most comfortable pillow, love letters, spices that you cannot find anywhere else, or more practical things like passports, identity cards, and money? Is it possible to carry your whole being if you leave a part of your life behind? Stepping in Ellen Rothenberg’s installation, ISO 6346: ineluctable immigrant, at the Spertus Institute, such questions flock together in one’s mind and do not let go of your soul for a long time.
By Pınar Üner Yılmaz, THE SEEN
Chicago's unique — and complicated — intersections inspire artist's work
If Rascal Flatts is correct and life is truly a highway, artist Peter Gorman wants to ride it all night long.
The Seattle-based creator of digital art biked through Chicago during the summer of 2015 and discovered the unique looks of some of the city’s interesting intersections. He has since created artwork featuring those streets that are a bit off of the traditional grid. He sells it on his Etsy store, BarelyMaps.
By Darcel Rockett, Chicago Tribune
Chicago’s Particular Cultural Scene and the Radical Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks
In an interview with the rapper Kanye West from 2003, shortly before he released “The College Dropout,” West recounted the time he met the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, at a dinner held for students in Beverly Hills, Chicago, when he was in “fourth grade or sixth grade.” Brooks asked him if he had a poem to read, West recalled. “I said”—here, the interviewer writes, he put on a high-pitched boy’s voice—“ ‘No, but I can write one real quick.’ I went in the back, wrote a poem, and then read it for her and the 40 staff members.”
By Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker
In Marrakech, New Art Fair and Museum Make Case for an Intriguing Future
It may well be that settings for people-watching can get no better than an art fair in a grand Moroccan hotel. The milling in and out of La Mamounia Palace in Marrakech was a sight to see last weekend in the midst of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair: locals and travelers alike taking up their stations amid bountiful orange trees and swaying palms, with a lot of dashing fashion on display. Sounds and scents stirred the senses more, from clacking traffic noise drifting over top the hotel’s gated walls to a dizzying mix of floral aromas whirled together with notes of citrus and gasoline.
By Andy Battaglia, ARTNEWS
Picasso painting offered in money-laundering scheme, US feds say
On Friday (2 March), the US Department of Justice (DOJ) unveiled a multi-count indictment in a federal court in Brooklyn against four corporate and six individual defendants who prosecutors say were part of a $50m international securities fraud and money laundering scheme that involved the attempted sale of a Picasso painting to an undercover agent.
By Victoria Stapley-Brown and Anna Brady, The Art Newspaper