MoCP Newsletter

June 6, 2006

News In Brief

MUSEUM COUNCIL’S ANNUAL AUCTION RAISES OVER $80,000 FOR MoCP

The exclusive reception for MoCP’s exhibition Anticipation featured a silent and live auction of work by leading international artists, and was a smashing success! View snapshots from the benefit event here.

MP3 EXHIBITION HERALDS FIRST PUBLICATIONS FOR MIDWEST PHOTOGRAPHERS PROJECT

In August of 2006 MoCP will release a trio of books by artists from the Midwest Photographers Project (MPP), a rotating archive established in 1982. MPP is a collection of photographs by both prominent and emerging artists from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Museum utilizes the images in print viewings, exhibitions, and now publications. MP3 will include the work of three rising stars, Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich, and will be published by the Aperture Foundation.

Kelli Connell uses elements of private relationships she has experienced herself or witnessed in others to inspire intimate, two-person scenes, played by a single model. She uses Photoshop to stitch multiple medium-format negatives together to create the juxtapositions in the final photographs. Justin Newhall’s photographs explore the energy we put into keeping myths alive—the stories of undaunted courage, brave explorers, cowboys and Indians— by capturing the landscape, historical sites, discarded memorabilia, and makeshift roadside museums littering the modern West. When, in the wake of September 11th, Americans were encouraged to respond by shopping (so as to maintain the nation’s economic stability), Brian Ulrich began documenting consumerism. Shot in malls, grocery stores, and commercial warehouses, Ulrich’s pictures document the bounty of commercial goods available to consumers and the peculiarities of the places that offer them for sale.

MoCP WELCOMES NEW CORPORATE PARTNER AND ANNOUNCES FACILITY RENTAL

Seize the opportunity to hold your next private or corporate event at one of Chicago’s premier cultural institutions! We now offer options that include use of the entire museum or our elegant print study room, providing the perfect backdrop to a memorable occasion.

We are pleased to welcome our newest corporate partner and exclusive caterer, J&L Catering, which has been one of Chicago’s most celebrated catering services for more than a decade. J&L can provide a full range of services for your event, including event management, tabletop design, a professionally trained staff, a complete bar package, entertainment, decor and floral arrangements (see our special event contract on our website for restrictions). For more information or to learn about corporate sponsorship levels that allow complimentary use of our facilities, contact us at 312.344.7779.

Talkin' Back 3: Chicago Youth Respond

LOCAL KIDS AND TEENS PICTURE THEMSELVES ON OUR WALLS

Now in its third year, Talkin’ Back was once again a success, generating an inspiring collection of artwork by youth from Chicago Public Schools. The product of a partnership between the Center for Arts Partnership’s Project AIM (Arts Integration Mentoring) program and MoCP’s “Picture Me,” Talkin’ Back is the culminating exhibition for students in these programs. While “Picture Me” and Project AIM allow underserved youth to develop skills in photography, writing and understanding of the arts, Talkin’ Back provides the opportunity for to exhibit their work in a professional setting.

Among the projects on display at Talkin’ Back 3 were a collection of striking photographs of plant life were accompanied by scientific research and evocative poetry by elementary school students who studied the plants on a field trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory. There was an installation of surgical masks customized by hospitalized children in a program by the Snow City Arts Foundation, an organization that provides educational, creative opportunities to kids who miss school due to illness. Another project, in which teenagers posed for photographs as their “alter egos” such as famous athletes, singers, and movie stars) with accompanying text, dared them to give voice to their dreams.

The most visually striking piece was an assortment of snapshots and text titled Holding on/Letting Go. Students were first asked to take 1,000 snapshots of “the things we carry” and “the things that we cannot bear to lose,” inspired by stories of survival in the wake of hurricane Katrina and by issues presented in the exhibition Stages of Memory: The War in Vietnam displayed at the MoCP in the fall of 2005. The students’ bright, poppy images of beloved pets, toys, books and, mostly, people –- were displayed with a text panel of 1,000 descriptive words they wrote in response to the photograph, Jimmie’s Apartment, Memphis Tennessee, 2002, by Alec Soth, a celebrated artist in the MoCP permanent collection.

The exhibition included artwork by students from the Academy of Communications and Technology (A.C.T.) Charter School, Curie Metropolitan High School, Theodore Herzl Elementary School, the Jane Addams Hull House Center for the Arts and Culture, Juarez Community Academy, Northside College Prep High School, Albert R. Sabin Magnet School, and Snow City Arts Foundation.

MIXING IT UP

MoCP’s KAREN IRVINE JOINS FELLOW CURATORS FOR EXTRAORDINARY ART EVENT

In conjunction with the opening of their newest luxury boutique hotel, the James Chicago, the James Hotel group asked an elite group of local curators and gallerists to collaborate on an art exhibition that would highlight Chicago’s art scene while appealing to the hotel’s culturally astute demographic. The result was MIXART, a unique multimedia showcase of contemporary art by local artists.

MOCP curator Karen Irvine, along with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Lisa Dorin, Dominic Molon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Stephanie Smith of the Smart Museum of Art, and Lorelei Stewart of UIC’s Gallery 400, handpicked nineteen artists to show work at the hotel. The exhibition was presented in conjunction with a silent auction, in which artists chosen by Monique Meloche of Monique Meloche Gallery and Andrew Rafacz of Bucket Rider Gallery, used disposable cameras to shoot work on the theme of “travel and leisure.” The auction proceeds benefited the Chicago-based charity After School Matters.

The collaborative project was “focused on a balance between media, gender, and age,” Irvine says. “It was mostly work by emerging artists, with a few mid-career and quite established artists mixed in.” The show included the work of Catherine Sullivan, Anne Wilson, and Judy Ledgerwood, among other local luminaries. Irvine herself worked with four artists – photographers Matt Nighswander and Greg Stimac (both artists are Columbia alumni), as well as the performance duo Industry of the Ordinary (Columbia faculty Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson).

Matt Nighswander exhibited pieces from his Chicagoland series, an enigmatic body of work that captures mundane, peculiar moments that could exist anywhere, but seem to oddly epitomize Chicago, while Greg Stimac exhibited five large photographs from his Recoil series, a collection of portraits that explore America’s fascination with guns. His portraits focus on the recreational use of guns, especially by young people, and often capture the moment the gun is discharged. Stimac is a 2005 graduate of Columbia College with BFA in Photography, and his work is included in MoCP’s permanent collection.

Industry of the Ordinary, whose recent work includes cooking and “branding” pancakes in a sort of performance/breakfast experience for visitors to the Hyde Park Art Center, defines their mission as “exploring and celebrating the customary, the everyday, and the usual.” For their MIXART performance Brooks and Wilson asked an opera singer to join them in a refined rendition of a taunting British football cheer set to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West.” They also exhibited several photographs documenting other performance feats – such as bundling their entire wardrobes and carrying them around for a day.

With so much cutting-edge talent in one place, did the MIXART exhibition shed light on any trends in Chicago art? Irvine said it did not, but that it did highlight the tremendous diversity of the local scene. “It was fresh and original, edgy and alive,” she says. “It had good energy.”

Ones to Watch

WITH ADAM BROOKS

Artist, curator and Art and Design faculty Adam Brooks has a front-row seat for the abundance of fresh new work being produced at Columbia College — and an eye for undiscovered artists elsewhere too. He sat down for a chat over coffee with MoCP’s web administrator, Audrey Michelle Mast, and revealed a few artists to check out and keep up with…

Howard Henry Chen
Chen, a Columbia MFA grad, makes “visually arresting, compositionally interesting images…[his] subject matter is also engaging and charged, with an edge of the exotic but also an edge of the familiar,” Brooks says. Chen’s large-format, multiple-panel images are products of periodic trips to Vietnam to visit his family. Brooks appreciates “his approach to the overlap between a traditional culture, the rapid encroachment of western culture, and the way they intersect in this very strange hybridization.” Last year, Chen’s work was included in MoCP’s exhibition Stages of Memory: The War in Vietnam. His work is currently on view at the Master of Fine Arts in Photography Thesis Exhibition at Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery.

Joachim Koester
“I saw his piece at Documenta years ago called Pit Music,” Brooks says of Koester, a Danish artist living and working in New York. “It was an installation which used video and sculpture an endless loop of a string quartet playing a Shostakovich work, but from multiple angles…you were actually placed physically above it…it was in this pit he built… He also photographed a Utopian community in Copenhagen, documented it using a day-for-night technique. I’ve been watching his career since. ” Koester’s new project, Morning of the Magicians and other works, documents his visit to Cefalù, Sicily, in search of an infamous villa that was once a communal home to the occultist Aleister Crowley and his devotees.

Cecil McDonald, Jr.
McDonald’s photographs are large in scale, but intimate in scope. The subjects are often his daughters – washing their hair or dancing around the house to records. “Cecil has been focusing primarily on his family and family life, and the notion of what it means to be a middle-class black family in Chicago at this point in time,” Brooks says. “He’s adept at making images that stake out some interesting not particularly well-examined territory.” He recently worked with spoken word poet avery r. young on a project for MoCP’s Talkin’ Back 3 that used photography, poetry and marketing to help African-American students overcome stereotypes and disempowering media messages. McDonald’s work is currently on view at the Glass Curtain Gallery as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Photography Thesis Exhibition.

Melissa Scherrer
“I included [Scherrer] in a talk I gave at Sotheby’s on current trends in photography,” says Brooks. “Her work also has this kind of narrative quality. She sets up these scenarios in domestic, or suburban, settings, but there’s always something kind of odd about them. In one piece, called Satellite, [the artist] is sitting on a back porch of a house with a satellite dish in front of her, and a polo-neck shirt pulled up over her face so she looks like she’s hooded or masked in some way…it’s a really arresting image.” A graduate of UIC, Scherrer now lives and works in New York City.

Margaret Wright
Wright makes “narrative photographs,” says Brooks. “She’s using technology to create these panoramic and time-based elapsements of social interaction. There are other precedents for this kind of work. One might associate it with Sam Taylor-Wood and her Six Revolutionary Seconds pieces, but Peggy’s work is different because it’s a series of images that are stitched back together digitally. She’s someone that definitely bears watching because I like the ordinariness of the subject matter that becomes somewhat transformed by the formal procedure she puts it through.” Images from Wright’s series Almost Out the Door: Stories of Adolescence are currently on view at the Evanston Art Center as part of the Annual Evanston + Vicinity Biennial, as well as the Master of Fine Arts in Photography Thesis Exhibition at the Glass Curtain Gallery.

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