Contemporary Chicago Art

Yogyakarta, December 22, 1998
by Claire Wolf Krantz

I’m going to talk about Chicago art because I thought that it would be interesting for you to see what is happening there, and because it would provide a context for what I’m doing. I believwe that while we’re all individuals as artists, we are also products of our time and our place.
Chicago is one of the three major art centers in the United States. Smaller than both New York and Los Angeles, and situated between them, it has its own flavor and vibrancy which affects its art. Along the eastern edge of the city is a large lake and to the west a flat prairie; both form a counterpoint to the tall buildings that soar above. The city's geography and its status as a major center for architecture and city planning is one of several important influences on the art made here. Moreover, the variety, complexity, elements of violence and danger, and the sheer energy of its urban environment continue to provide images and subjects for ongoing generations of its artists.

Chicago's strongest tradition has been a figurative one, beginning with the 1950s as a response to Surrealism. The figurative style that developed in Chicago during the 1 960s and 70s became known as Imagism, a style that has now become mainstream. Narratives were portrayed using stylized, faux naive or cartoon like figures in a flattened and simplified space, sometimes accompanied by texts. These works expressed personal, psycho-sexual subject matter and/or fantasy, or theydepicted the seamier side of street life of the working class neighborhoods in which artists could afford to live and maintain studios.

At the same time, other artists were influenced by the abstraction initiated in New York and Europe. However, Chicago artists seldom considered abstraction as limited to the purely formal manipulation of appropriate mediums. Moreover, although these differences are now less distinct than, say, 20 years ago, New York tends to concentrate primarily on expanding the boundaries of art.In contrast, Chicago artists generally are more interested in shaping their work, no matter what the style, to some connection with real life issues - the personal life of the artist and the urban environment of the city.

The following three artists are of the generation after the original Imagists. They have developed some of the elements of Imagism, such as faux naive drawing, altered space, and narrative scenes, into feminist and gender-based subject matter.

Hollis Sigler (showing slides)
Hoping to Beat the Odds, oil pastel on paper w/painted frame, 1995, 30x35"
Feeling Robbed of my Future, oil pastel on paper w/painted frame, 1995, 30x35"

I believe that Sigler is one of the most significant artists working here. Her faux-naive style, developed in the early 1970s, was the keystone for many Chicago artists who followed her. In order to command the viewer's attention in a new way, she gave up the facility of her earlier beautiful, realistic drawing in favor of what you see today. She created new formal devices such as stage­like settings for her narratives, indicating that her pictures are both theater and drama. She also painted her picture frames, adding the idea of the theater's proscenium, and included phrases and stories that explain the action in the scene. Her stories are about intimate relationships and situations set in environments such as her home or her back-yard, but they never include the people, who seem to have suddenly departed the scene. Her newest works are paintings and drawings about ,her illness with breast cancer. She depicts her feelings symbolically as well as bringing facts about her disease out into the open so that she can help other women with cancer.

Phyllis Bramson (showing slides)

Little Goody Two Shoes, 1996, mixed media on canvas, 49x-69" An Unreliable narrative,1994,oil on canvas, 7'x71"
Bramson has often been compared to Sigler, but the two are quite different. While Sigler's scenes recall events and personal issues that actually happen, Bramson's work is more focused on fantasy and play. Her concerns lie in the blurred distinction between the invented and the real, and how cultures determine not only what is considered good and bad, but also shape our fantasies. Using lush surfaces and fabulous narratives, she paints scenes combining images of modern Western life with segments from exotic places or the imagined past with its fiction of comfort, suppressed eroticism, and luxury. For her, "painting is the place where the real meets the imagined. 

Claire Prussian (showing slides)

Red Yarn, 1996, digital print, 10x13"
Fairy Tale -Jack and the Beanstalk,1998,digital print, 30x40"
Prussian investigates the relationship between the psychic and the social. Issues of safety and danger, separation and loss, and youth and aging consistently appear in her paintings and digital prints. The digital works use photographs scanned into the computer and combined with painting and drawing that is done directly using the computer. Prussian's work is autobiographical, expressing her thoughts and feelings about particular events and environments in her life. Recently she began to re-imagine her early childhood and the fairy tales her mother read to her, now picturing them in an adult context. In Red Yarn, a ball of yarn is a symbol of domesticity, as well as a reference to an unfolding story, or an unraveling life. Into her scenes of comfort and luxury, Prussian generally incorporates disturbing elements, such as these lizards, to indicate that a comfortable home is no guarantee of security. The second print comments on another well-known fairy tale, Jack in the Beanstalk. Here, the little boy is Jack, who climbs a beanstalk to explore the world and is chased back down by an ogre, here represented by a giant hand. Other artists, including Richard Loving, refer to the body, body parts, or clothing to comment on the body in contemporary society.

Richard Loving (showing slides)
Emerge, 1997, mixed. media on paper, 22x30"
Sublimate, 1997, mixed media on paper, 19x24"

These pieces represent Loving's early interest in anatomy, now coupled with issues concerning the" body" and Western culture's threat towards it. Many elements in his works are derived from the art of other eras or traditions, such as the dots that refer to Aboriginal dreaming paintings. In these mixed media collages on paper, Loving includes copies of wood engravings by early Renaissance masters.

Vera Klement (showing slides)
New HiII,1995, 6x7'
Pieta, 1997, oil on canvas, 87x78"
Portrait of Celan, oil on canvas, 38x42"

Klement paints objects or figures that at removed from their settings and arranged on a white, unpainted ound which represents silence. The objects are recognizable, yet they are ambiguous enough to yield many meanings. I think that her works, although they are figurative, actually operate as abstractions. Some of her works are in response to poetry, as in the portrait of the poet Celan. Klement says that her "images are a way of leaving a trace of her experience of her times and reflect the ecstasy and at the same time the hopelessness of that task."

Susan Sensemann (showing slides)
Mask, 1997, IIfochrome Print,40x26"
Frill II, 1997, IIfochrome Print, 24x17"

Susan Sensemann is also what I would consider an abstract artist, although she sometimes uses the figure to express abstract ideas. Her paintings, prints and photographs, which are about the female body and its relationship to both the physical and the social environment that defines it. These photographs deal with the theme of the aging woman's body, which continues to be beautiful and erotic in new, almost frightening ways as it slowly reverts to the earth from which it came. Claire Prussian has explored similar themes since the 1970’s.

Sungmi Naylor (showing slides)
My Back V, 1998, C Print of a computer manipulated image, 28x23"

Naylor's photographs are of the body transformed, written about, and violated. She wrote that, as the mother of a daughter, she negotiates the dilemma between her own mother's idea of a "good girl," what it means to be a proper woman, and the way she wants her daughter to grow up. She is interested in the evolution of the traditions, customs and beliefs of her Korean heritage as they are filtered through each generation of women and reinterpreted for contemporary use.
Other artists refer to objects that have personal or symbolic meanings. These works can be either figurative or abstract. Some artists, such as Ann Wiens, use traditional painting techniques, while others explore new materials for their works.

Ann Wiens (showing slides)
Red Salamander in Leaves, 1997, oil & acrylic on mylar, 1 2x 11 "
Spotted salamander on Rock, 1997,oil & acrylic on mylar, 12xll"

Wiens is interested in how animals and their environments are used as projective devices for describing or picturing human behavior. These painted salamanders, for instance, change their appearances to match their environments. Wiens is also interested in freshly exploring how beauty functions as an element of art and in reestablishing respect for aesthetics in art.

Diane Simpson (showing slides)
Kerchief, 1996, acrylic on wood, vinyl mesh, rayon/silk cord, 27x14x11"
Bowler, 1994-95, oil stain on wood, bronze mesh, rayon silk cord, 27x44"

Sources for Simpson's sculptures are the formal qualities of materials and the structural qualities of architecture. Her choice of materials and techniques for assembling elements (steel mesh/silk cord, stitching/weaving), reflects the coexistence of the industrial and domestic worlds.

Barbara Cooper (showing slides)
Cyclus, 1994, wood, 44x46x26"
Ova, 1994, wood, 74x34x40"

Barbara Cooper is inspired by the patterns in nature which integrate function and beauty. Her pieces are made by weaving and/or wrapping thin strands of wood over an armature to create a shaped "skin". She developed her methods of construction by observing the building processes in the natural world. She says that our bodies are built cell by cell, fibers are bundled into muscle, and birds build resilient nests, accumulated twig by twig.

Anne Wilson (showing slides)
A Chronicle of Days, 1997-98, Linen, hair, stitching, 6x20' overall, 100 parts.

Anne Wilson generally uses hair and cloth as her materials and the types of labor (hand-stitching) that are associated with the domestic work place. For this installation, Wilson stitched single marks, or spots, each day for a month, onto a patterned, damask tablecloth used for formal occasions. The colored spot stands in opposition to the refined cloth and disrupts the woven image. Wilson's objects and installations explore themes about history and time, labor and daily rituals, and issues of presentation and display.

I will now show a few abstract works in which the formal qualities of the works, such as line, form, composition, and texture, are primary. However, even these works have additional references to the real, which may not be obvious.

Marlena Novak (showing slides)
Tankas 19 & 20,1998, encoustic, oil on wood, 25x3x2"

Novak's work refers to early 20th century Russian constructivism and its strong relationship to architecture. She wishes to illuminate the difference between what we believe is true and what is really there, and how what we beHeve shapes what we see and understand. Her ideas are very cJose to mine, although our works are totally different from each other.

Frank Piatek (showing slides)
Double Reversed Odalisque, 1998, acrylic over charcoal on canvas, 58x72"
Double Reversed Odalisque ,1998, acrylic over charcoal on canvas, 58x72"

I see a strong connection between Piatek's interests and point ,of view and my own, although, as with Novak's work, they are not visually similar. They refer to history and to a variety of cultures and languages, implying that meaning is unstable and connected to history, time, and culture. Piatek's paintings and collages combine images and words which both disrupt and create new connections visually and in language. Although the elements of his work come from realistic sources, such as knotted rope or words and phrases, they are combined as abstract entities to produce new meanings or understandings. His collages, in particular, refer to books as well pictures _
Photography has a very strong tradition in Chicago art because of the establishment here of the New Bauhaus art school by refugees of Nazi Germany during World War II. Its emphasis on experimentation and innovation in photography influenced contemporary photography the world over, but remains particularly alive in Chicago. Recently, a lot of artists have begun to make use of the computer to enhance or alter their photographs, thus replacing or extending some of the standard darkroom techniques.

Joyce Niemanas (showing slides)
Fragile, 1996, Computer generated Inkjet print, series: Sample, 13x10"
Building, 1996, Inkjet print, series: Sample, 12x17"

Niemanas' digital images are made on the computer from her photographs, found images, and her own paintings and drawings. They refer, in a humorous way, to some of the darker sides of our psyche as well as our society. Fragile pictures a young girl taken from a children's picture book. Layered over it is Niemanas' drawn image of "Humpty Dumpty", the egg in a well-known nursery rhyme which reads: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the King's horses and all the King's men, Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. The hands at the bottom of the print recall Medieval Christian iconography that shows hands reaching up to pull innocents down to sin and Hell. Building intentionally looks like the work of the 16th century Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel. Niemanas refigures Breugel's tiny figures, scenes, and compositional devices into a contemporary story in which a house is being built that will actually be a domestic prison for a young woman.

Patty Carroll  (showing slides)
Comfort
Octopussy
Ooh!

Patty Carrol is another prominent photographer who uses computers to replace darkroom manipulations for her photographic intensions. She plays with different interpretations that can be made from words and images. These pieces deal with some people's belief that comfort and security can be derived from ignoring the evils around us. They refer to the saying, "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." She wrote: "As women of a certain time, place and generation, we have been brought up to be polite, ... cook lovely meals, and send thank you notes. Sometimes our real, inner identity becomes modified or hidden behind these behavioral necessities. Sometimes we are even lost. Sometimes domestic ritual becomes our total identity, especially to those around us. Often we are seen through the filter of our domestic roles."

Jane Calvin (showing slides)
Girls, 1996, C-Print, 24x20"
Shadows, 1994, C-Print, 20x24"
The Kiss, 1998, C-Print, 20x24"

Calvin arranges and then photographs these enigmatic tableaus to look as though they were real. They explore mystery, menace, love, desire, and gender issues, inviting the viewer to attach his or her own meanings and stories to the images. The work refers to the disjunction between the real and the imaginary, reflecting the unstable mood of the late twentieth century. Manipulation of lighting, spacial depth and flatness, camera angles and combinations of real objects, photographs, and texts all contribute to the complexity of her work.
Chicago is also an important center for artists' made books. Attention is paid to pushing the boundaries of the idea of a book and what it is used for. I have been active in making artists' books since 1979 and have been influenced by artists such as Buzz Spector, whose work I am showing you now.

Buzz Spector (showing slides)
Kafka, 1988, Ink on altered book, 8xSx2"
History of Europe, 1983, Plaster poured over found book, 10.5x12x15"

Spector regards his books as objects containing meanings beyond the boundaries of the obvious. For these pieces, he tears pages out of books, to create new shapes and new combinations of words, lines, and sections of texts. Other books are altered in many imaginative ways, to change their structures, their appearances, and their connotations.
Other recent trends include Installation, Neo-conceptual, and Political art, including Community Based Murals. While installations and neo-conceptual work was stimulated by international trends, political art is tied more to Chicago's tradition in narrative and figuration, and to the Mural movement. These genres are often mixed.

Edith Altman  (showing slides)
Test Flight #1
Test Flight #2
Test Flight #3

Altman began in the late 1960s as an abstract sculptor. She moved into installations and performances which include sculptural objects, texts, and sometimes sound, light, and video. Her subject matter includes spiritual realms of existence, Cabalistic rituals, questions of evil relating to the Holocaust, and the subjects of women and aging in Western culture. These recent pieces are being made for an installation and performance which deals with the human being's desire to fly, and its ultimate failure. She had the outfit you see her wearing constructed to suggest the desire to fly, but the clothing really binds her hands and feet, muffles her, and prevents her from walking, let alone flying. In this work she expresses rage at our society and an artworld which discards mature women, banishing their work and their ability to soar. The sense of being muffled is also related to America's current hostility to culture and to supporting the arts, a situation which is suppressing innovation and hampering artists' ability to work creatively and to exhibit their work.

Dennis Kowalski (showing slides)
Native American Housing - Southwest, 1997, patio blocks & floor tile,. 16x36x~3" (variable) .
Native American Housing - Northwoods 1997, rocks & floor tile, ~14x42x60" (variable)

Kowalski's installations are commentaries on art and politics.  These installations of little clusters of houses are ironic references to the pueblos, or villages, in which some groups of American Indian people live. Americans have often romanticized these places as emblems of the spirituality, authentic living and ties to the land ascribed to Indians, but lost in many of our lives. By relegating authenticity and spirituality to the domain of the “other”, in this case the Indian, we exoticize and dehumanize them, relegating them to marginal roles in our society.In a sense, we then relieve ourselves of the responsibility to develop our own inner lives as we substitute the token for the real. Kowalski's heaped up shapes also mockingly refer to the work of the artist Charles Simmons, whose tiny ceramic models of Native American pueblos tucked into cliffs, actually perpetuates these stereotypes.

Kay Rosen (showing slides)
Nancy Drew,1998, pencil on paper, 15x22"

Helen, 1998, sign paint on canvas, 1 5x11 "
Regarded as a conceptual artist, Rosen is a linguist who departed from her scholarly study of the structure of language to explore how what the written language looks like affects its meaning. The type face in Nancy Drew looks like how the phrase sounds, while the meaning refers to a popular series of mystery books that 10 year old girls of Rosen's generation (and mine) loved and would read voraciously.

Robert Peters (showing slides)
Invisible Islands: The Rise and FalJ of Local Color, 1997, Installation in Night Bazaar, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Peters is an installation artist whose conceptual works are collaborative and address current ideas and events in his life or the world.This 1997 installation was made for an international art festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was a site-specific work done in the Night Bazaar, a place where foreign tourists and urban Thais from Bangkok meet with the local people to either enjoy a bit of the exotic or to reconnect with their rural roots. Peters wrote a series of phrases that reflected what he had learned about the social and political events that were happening while he was living there. A second series talked about the interactions among the different types of people who mingled in the spaces. The work was printed in Thai and English and put on the risers of several sets of stairs in the market.

John Rozelle (showing slides)
Mancblld Fetish, 1993, mixed media on canvas, 36x2400"
Du Unto Junior, 1993, mixed media on canvas, 44x30"

John Rozelle is an African American painter who connected to the practices of traditional African societies in which objects are used in the demonstration of social, spiritual, and political concerns. However, the subject matter of his works concerns the contemporary experience of African American men in America.

Olivia Gude (showing slides)
Where We Come From .. Where We're Going, 1992, mural, acrylic and spray paint, 600 sq. feet

Gude is one of the younger leaders in the community based mural movement, active in furthering the theoretical basis of what murals should be as art and in relationship to the community. She has made many of Chicago murals, usually working with a team of artists from the community. This mural, which is actually one of my favorites in the city, is unusual in that she painted it herself. The mural is in a neighborhood that includes very poor people, very rich business people, and the intellectuals from one of the most important universities in the country. Gude stood on the street near the train station and stopped people on their way to work to ask them questions about their lives and relationships in the neighborhood, took photographs of them, and painted their portraits along with their stories on the walls next to the station.

Claire Wolf Krantz (showing slides)

Mountains Carved by Roads, 1998, acrylic, 63x34"
The Burning, 1998, digital iris print, 10.5x9"
Death of My Studio, 1992, oil, 36x65"
Sea Life, 1997,acrylic, 76x44"
Scenic View, 1998,acrylic, 44x26"

I will now speak briefly about my own work. I have a few slides of some earlier pieces to provide a context for the new work in my show . My first influences in art school were that of the Imagists who were my teachers. Their innovations in incorporating text, unusual compositions and conventions for delineating space into personal narrative and sense of place can be seen in much of the work I've shown, and has influenced my own work as well. However, my work differs from the figurative works of many of their descendants --my way of thinking has always been more abstract and cognitive. The range of media that I've explored includes painting, printmaking (mostly monoprints and etchings), artists' books, photographs, mixed media works and digital prints. The narrative content of my pieces has changed over time, corresponding to the changes in the events in my life. But the major underlying theme is my interest in how we develop our understanding and meaning through our experiences with people and places.

My works are complex. I take photos of places in which I have personally spent time and have thought about and juxtapose them with drawings and paintings on canvas, paper, or on the computer to make new combinations. In doing so, I incorporate many art historical associations with style, media (such as painting or photography), or composition, which then produce new, sometimes unexpected, ambivalent, or mysterious messages. Some of the resulting mixed media works are about home and my urban environment. Other works use photos from far away, places that I visit in order to feel connected with the forces of nature, or to be stimulated into fresh ways of thinking by new sights and ideas. I generally use several media in one piece to dispute the split between nature and culture, the body and the mind that is a traditional part of Western thought. I work with the idea that what we come to know happens from many sources: through language, through moving our bodies in space, and through what we see. The process of understanding artworks is even more complicated than 6r. encountering ordinary images because art-related styles and  mediums have histories attached to them which change in time and according to the cultures that create or use them. Also, our understanding of the works depend upon where the viewer is standing in relation to the picture and upon the cultural background, life experiences and information which the viewer brings to the picture. These interpretations actually shift as we move and think about the different ways that the picture and its different elements could be understood.
My career in art also includes working as a critic and guest curator of shows. These activities have given me the opportunity to explore ideas in many different ways and from several points of view. Writing about other peoples' art forces me to think about their ideas, and their ways of thinking. It enables me to learn by closely observing what other artists do and how they do it. My artwork is enriched by these other art-related activities. I also bring to my work as a critic or curator a different kind of understanding that is lacking in non-artists -- that of the actual creator of things.
The work that I'm showing you spans about 6 years. I always consider the structure, the shape or objecthood of my paintings as contributing to its meaning, and I have experimented with many different structures and materials. One important form for me is the book as painting, the teller of visual tales.

My current works, fashioned as Chinese scrolls, incorporate certain Chinese compositional devices which refer to their tradition of combining landscape painting with reading and with ideas about the individual's perceived relationship with nature that are philosophically different from Western attitudes. On the other hand, my digital images function as painted pages in a Western book. I am presently collaborating with a poet to produce my newest images which contain fragments and phrases from her poems. These pieces are meant, like the Chinese scrolls, to be read visually and linguistically.

Park Place 1 detail, installation, (or "Mom, lying in bed, reading a book 1993, oil, 93x67:
One part of an installation exploring how different artists think about places. This exhibit was about a specific place in Chicago, and how 10 artists made artworks in response to it. My work consisted of 2 parts: a wall piece and a sculptural book lying on the floor.

The Book of. Life, installation, 1994, oil, 6.5x6x4" including wall, 9' ht
An installation made for an exhibit about relationships between Black and Whites in America. It talks about the consequences of different communities not cooperating with each other. The fire and water stand for both life and death; the constructive and destructive forces, which exist in relationships between groups of people. I am suggesting that we can choose between the two possibilities and act on them.

Quebec, 1988,1994, oil,14x34
The shape for this piece is part of a series in which I used the shapes of books to make object-like paintings on the wall. The other installation pieces are large, and stand on the floor. This painting is in the shape of accordion folded books, inspired by traditional Japanese and Mexican formats for books.

Studio Site, 1996, acrylic, 24x41 "
The shape for this group of paintings was inspired by the shadows created by my wall-hung relief book/paintings.

Home Site,1996, acrylic, 19x14"
This is a part of a body of work dealing with my home, a subject I've explored off and on for years. In these works I used different materials, such as strips of wood or glass, to allude to both architectural elements in the home, such as windows, (framed by wood and containing glass) and to the presentation of framed paintings.

In conclusion, I've shown you a lot of different kinds of art made by men and women from a wide range of backgrounds, ages, and concerns. But a number of themes have surfaced repeatedly. The works are related more by these recurring themes rather than any similarities of styles or techniques. Although I have wandered far away from home, and borrowed ideas and ways of working from other places, I continue to maintain intellectual and visual ties to my home and consider myself a Chicago artist. I hope that, in the short time I have been speaking today, I have been able to communicate some of the issues that concern me and my peers to you, who inhabit an art world that is so far away and different, but maybe not so very different, from my own.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.