Major Art Institute Exhibition Showcases Revolutionary Moment in 20th Century Graphic and Industrial Design

Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life Features Artists and Designers Heartfield, Klutsis, Lissitzky, Sutnar, Teige, and Zwart Bringing “Art into Life”

Exhibition on View June 11-October 9, 2011

Beginning around 1910, a group of vanguard artists working in Europe advanced the radical idea that art had a mandate to transform daily life, from silverware to postage stamps to buildings.

This theory would eventually take hold in the wider world, where it merged enthusiastically with the demands of the industrial marketplace, the nascent mass media, and urban popular culture.

This vibrant and critically important moment in east-central European modernism is comprehensively explored in Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life–a major exhibition on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 11 through October 9, 2011, in the Modern Wing’s Abbott Galleries (G 182-184).

Focusing on six highly influential international artists–John Heartfield, Gustav Klutsis, El Lissitzky, Ladislav Sutnar, Karel Teige, and Piet Zwart –this exhibition features nearly 300 works from a landmark acquisition, including photography, photomontage, book and poster design, and household objects such as rare examples of porcelain and glassware. Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life is the first significant exhibition at the Art Institute to address any aspect of art east of Germany during the interwar decades.

The six artists featured in this exhibition shared a fervent belief that they could help restructure society by redesigning common or utilitarian items. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically in central and eastern Europe, they were fully informed about the history of art and the state of the world around them, and they formed networks to circulate ideas for changing that world through creative interventions of all kinds in everyday life.

Books, prints, posters, table settings, postage stamps, illustrated magazines, clothing, exhibition installations, building proposals–these artists energetically and zealously reached into every conceivable creative domain. They traded ideas through the mail, sharing published journal essays and original works in photography and graphic design. Across the boundaries of media, disciplines, and nationalities, these avant-garde artists presciently set the stage for today’s modern communications and advertising industries.

Piet Zwart (Dutch, 1885-1977) and Ladislav Sutnar (Czech, later American, 1897-1976) both helped invent the position of industrial designer, creating brand identities for companies by applying principles of standardization, serial production, and eye-catching clarity to advertising and domestic products.

Zwart brought his minimalist aesthetic vision to ubiquitous items like biscuit boxes and postage stamps, while his compatriot Sutnar brought modernist “good design” to tableware, clothing, and children’s toys. Karel Teige (1900-1951), the leader of the Czech avant-garde, and the immensely influential Russian artist Lazar (El) Lissitzky (1890-1941) developed the language of Constructivism in typography, architecture, exhibition designs, and critical essays.

Teige produced brilliant book and journal designs while Lissitzky created some of the most exciting poster and exhibition designs of the 1920s and 1930s in Germany and Russia.

John Heartfield (1891-1968), a native German who took an English name, and Latvian-born Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938), who worked in Soviet Russia, mastered the persuasive rhetoric of word-image combinations in photomontage, creating posters and magazines that were seen by tens of thousands at the time. Heartfield worked exclusively in photomontage to design book covers, journals, and agitational posters for the Communist cause; Klutsis also pioneered using photomontage for political purposes.

The objects featured in Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life come almost entirely from a recent major acquisition by the Art Institute: the Robert and June Leibowits Collection. This acquisition is the largest undertaking by the Department of Photography in 12 years and the first acquisition ever to be shared by multiple curatorial departments in the museum (the departments of Prints and Drawings, Architecture and Design, and Photography) and the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.

The Art Institute now has the second largest public holding in the United States of original issues of Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (1927-1936), the leftist propaganda weekly with photomontage designs by John Heartfield, and the greatest collection of Russian Futurist books outside of New York and Los Angeles. With this acquisition the museum has also significantly strengthened its collection of works of Soviet, Czech, Dutch, and German Constructivism.

A beautifully designed 160-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life. Edited by Matthew S. Witkovsky, curator of the exhibition and chair of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute, the book contains essays written by a team of specialists–Jared Ash, Maria Gough, Jindrich Toman, Nancy J. Troy, and Andrés Mario Zervigón–on these six artists and their attraction to the dynamic realm of “everyday life.” The catalogue is available for purchase in the Art Institute’s Museum Shop for $50.

Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, curator and chair of the Department of Photography. Major funding is provided by Robert and June Leibowits. Generous support is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Goldman Sachs, Kenneth and Anne Griffin, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, Donna and Howard Stone, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sullivan, and an anonymous donor.

The Art Institute of Chicago Hosts Snap: the Fourth Photography Benefit Gala 9/22/11

The Art Institute of Chicago’s Photography Department will host one of the most anticipated events of the year, Snap, in celebration of the major exhibition, Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life, on September 22, 2011. The event this year, co-chaired by Brenda Shapiro and Ikram and Josh Goldman , will raise funds for the Photography Gala Endowment for future acquisitions.

The evening’s sponsors are Harris Bank and Christie’s. For tickets or more information, please visit www.artic.edu/snap, call (312) 857-7640, or e-mail snapgala@artic.edu.

‘Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life’ Opens at the Art Institute June 11 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

“It was just instinct,” said her mother, Doris Frame, of Batavia.

But Frame’s close friend and collaborating artist, Flo McGarrell, who got a master’s degree in 2004 from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, wasn’t so lucky. He paused too long and couldn’t escape before the building collapsed, killing him instantly, Doris Frame said.

The message of survival and death didn’t reach Frame’s parents until Wednesday night, when a Haitian friend with e-mail access relayed a hand-scrawled note from their daughter.

“I am fine,” the note read. “Tell my parents. Flo is not. I am spending every day getting Flo out. I will find a way to tell his parents. No airports and no roads. But I am safe and healthy.”

“It was jubilation and total sorrow,” Doris Frame said of hearing about the situation.

In response, a group of Chicago artists is raising money and trying to raise consciousness about the destruction in Jacmel, about 20 miles from the capital of Port-au-Prince. As relief has poured into the capital, it’s been slower to get to Jacmel, according to Alex Polotsky, a Chicagoan and close friend of both artists.

“The rate of aid is much slower than needs to be to save lives currently in danger,” he said. “The road from Port-au-Prince has been rendered impassable, so the only aid entering is through one or two planes landing at the airport.”

In Sue Frame’s only phone conversation with her parents since the quake, she told her mother she was OK and that her mother is lucky to have a daughter. But she also made a plea.

“We need to stay on the government to get American citizens out of Jacmel and heavy equipment in to rescue people,” she told her mother.

Polotsky, who has been to Haiti with Frame and McGarrell, started a Web site, haitiaidraffle.wordpress.com, to collect donations. Artists can donate artwork that will be raffled off, he said, while others can buy raffle tickets, with their donations going toward relief groups already established in Jacmel such as Doctors Without Borders.

Frame, 35, a sculptor and woodworker, was in Jacmel for a few weeks teaching Haitian women woodworking skills to help them get jobs, her mother said. She’s assistant director of the Sharp Instructional Shops at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had collected discarded tools and materials from the Chicago area to donate to needy Haitian artisans, Polotsky said.

McGarrell, 36, a sculptor and multimedia artist, had been director of a nonprofit art center in Jacmel since October. McGarrell, who was born female but identified as a male in recent years, was remembered by friends and fellow artists for his bold style and humanitarian focus.

“He was a filmmaker, a good-natured troublemaker and an inspiration to all around him to live life to the fullest,” Polotsky said.

Frame and McGarrell met while undergraduate students at a Baltimore art school, Doris Frame said. They have remained sometime roommates and close friends ever since, and McGarrell helped arrange Frame’s current trip to Haiti, she said.

Sue Frame talked with McGarrell’s parents, James and Ann McGarrell of Newbury, Vt., Doris Frame said, and vowed not to come home without her friend.

“She said she’d remain in Jacmel until she could bring Flo’s ashes home for a memorial,” her mother said.

dtsimmons@tribune.com

Read the original article from Tribune News Services.

Artist survives quake, friend dies | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Your design could be selected to be featured in an exhibition in the museum!

Chicagoans are invited to contribute to the “500-Ways Project,” a city-wide art project that supports “500 Ways of Looking at Modern,” the Art Institute’s season celebrating the opening of the Modern Wing.

Whether you found one of the 500 cubes scattered around the city, or simply downloaded the 501st cube online, artists are encouraged to participate in the project by completing the unique tasks assigned to their cube.

The installation–a selection of the best entries–will run for the entire month of March, featuring sculpture, video, photography, poetry, and prose.

Submit your creations by posting projects to 500-ways.com, tweeting @artinstitutechi, leaving a message on our Facebook page, or dropping your artwork off at the museum by Jan. 31, 2010.

Entries chosen for display will be returned at the end of the exhibition.

For a taste of what’s already been submitted, visit 500-ways.com or browse our Flickr gallery: flickr.com/photos/artinstitutechicago/sets/72157622920287664/

MEDIA CONTACT:

Katie Rahn, 312-443 3713
krahn@artic.edu

Chai Lee, 312-443 3625
clee4@artic.edu

Art Institute of Chicago Calls for Public’s Creative Feedback as Part of Its 500 Ways of Looking Modern “Red Cubes” Exhibit | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008–on view from Feb. 27 through May 23, 2010, in the Modern Wing’s Abbott Galleries (G182, G184) and Carolyn S. and Matthew Bucksbaum Gallery (G188)–is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Memphis-based contemporary photographer.

The exhibition brings together more than 150 extraordinary images of familiar, everyday subjects with lesser-known, early black-and-white prints and provocative video recordings, all produced over a five-decade period.

Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, William Eggleston held a casual interest in photography until 1959, when he came across photo books by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.

Among his earliest pictures, made during stints at universities in Tennessee and Mississippi, were black-and-white scenes found in his native South, as well as portraits of friends and family members.

By the 1960s and early 1970s he had begun experimenting with color film, and he eventually produced rich, vivid prints through the dye transfer process-prints that are created through the alignment of three separate matrices (cyan, magenta, and yellow) generated from three separate negatives (red, green, and blue filters).

The resulting prints are known for the vividness and permanence of their colors. Hence, Eggleston is often credited for single-handedly ushering in the era of color art photography.

Eager to show his work to a broader audience, Eggleston traveled to New York with a suitcase of slides and prints to meet with Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator John Szarkowski.

This visit eventually yielded a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976–MoMA’s first solo show to feature color photographs–and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide.

At this point in his career, Eggleston had already distinguished himself by treating color as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 demonstrates Eggleston’s “democratic” approach to his photographic subjects in both color and black-and-white.

Everything that happens in front of the camera is worthy of becoming a picture for the artist–no matter how seemingly circumstantial or trivial. Eggleston finds his motifs in everyday life, resulting in telling portrayals of American culture.

His iconic images such as Elvis’s Graceland, a supermarket clerk corralling grocery carts in the afternoon sunlight, and a freezer stuffed with food proves that the photographer points his “democratic camera” at everything.

Eggleston’s quiet, thoughtful pictures have profoundly impacted subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and scholars.

The exhibition also includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. In the 1960s, Eggleston used film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but ultimately abandoned the film project.

Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people’s homes; sometimes he shot monologues friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, Stranded in Canton , recently restored and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s color photographs.

Internationally acclaimed, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing around the world, responding intuitively to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and specific expressions of local color.

By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing even the seemingly banal, Eggleston convinces us completely of the idea of the democratic camera.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

Numbering 320 pages and including 240 color and black-and-white illustrations, the book is filled with new scholarship about the artist and proves to be the standard reference to Eggleston’s photographs for years to come. The catalogue is available at the Art Institute’s Museum Shop for $65.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in association with Haus der Kunst in Munich.

The exhibition is co-curated by Elisabeth Sussman, curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Thomas Weski, former deputy director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, now professor of the study of curatorial cultures at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig.

The Chicago presentation of William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 is curated by Katherine Bussard, associate curator of photography, the Art Institute of Chicago.

Generous support for William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008  is provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc., Norman and Melissa Selby, The John and Annamaria Phillips Foundation, Marcia Dunn & Jonathan Sobel, Diane and Tom Tuft, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support is provided by the Stephen C. and Katherine D. Sherrill Foundation, Lauren and Louis DePalo, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and The Gage Fund.

The Chicago presentation is generously funded in part by Jay and Gretchen Jordan. Additional support is provided by Joyce Chelberg.

IMAGES:

• William Eggleston, Untitled,  1973, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20″, Collection of Winston Eggleston, © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
• William Eggleston, Untitled, n.d. from Los Alamos, 1965-68 and 1972-74 (published 2003), Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12″, Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
• William Eggleston, Memphis , c. 1969-71, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 24 x 20″, Collection of John Cheim, © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

William Eggleston’s “Democratic Images” of American Culture Revealed at Art Institute; Iconic Artist’s First Retrospective Comes to Chicago | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

New Blood III presents a provocative vision of the next wave of performance art, and the artists featured in this weekend of performances blur the boundaries between theater, movement, and the visual arts.

Participating artists include:

• Chris Bradley
• Allison Fall
• Alan and Michael Fleming
• Elise Goldstein
• Millie Kapp
  
• Isabella Ng
• André Lenox
  
• Evan Lenox
• Noah Derek Logan
• Jennifer Mills
• Libby O’Bryan
• Marissa Perel
• Chloe Seibert
• Colin Self
• Jillian Soto

Students of SAIC choreographed by Stephanie Bailey, Chryssa Tsampazi in collaboration with five unemployed people, and Ethan A. White.

The New Blood III performance schedule is:

• Friday, Nov. 20, 7pm
  Studio Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center
  Entrance at 77 East Randolph Street
  Free, but reservations highly suggested at dcatheater.org or 312-742-TIXS (8497)

  André Lenox & Evan Lenox, Jennifer Mills, Libby O’Bryan, Marissa Perel, and Chryssa Tsampazi in collaboration with five unemployed people

• Saturday, Nov. 21, 7pm
  Studio Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center
  Entrance at 77 East Randolph Street
  Free, but reservations highly suggested at dcatheater.org or 312-742-TIXS (8497)

  Millie Kapp, Isabella Ng, Chloe Seibert, Colin Self, and Ethan A.  White

• Sunday, Nov. 22, 6pm
  Throughout the Chicago Cultural Center
  Entrance at 77 East Randolph Street
  Free, reservations not needed

  Chris Bradley, Allison Fall, Elise Goldstein, and Jillian Soto

Additional performances each evening will be presented by Alan and Michael Fleming, Noah Derek Logan, and students of SAIC choreographed by Stephanie Bailey.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Presents “New Blood III” Student Performance Festival at DCA Theater | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Astronaut John Grunsfeld aboard the space shuttle Atlantis during the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission last May

The free event is open to the public.

Grunsfeld will share his experiences of working in orbit on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the latest scientific results that the instruments he helped install are producing.

President Obama recently called Grunsfeld “The Hubble Repairman.”

Grunsfeld has flown on three Hubble Space Telescope missions.

A veteran of five space shuttle missions since 1995, Grunsfeld, SM’84, PhD’88, has logged 58 days in orbit, during which he completed eight space walks totaling nearly 60 hours.

“The Hubble is now equipped with a full complement of working, state-of-the-art instruments and is much better than new,” said Michael Turner, the Bruce and Diana Rauner Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University.

Grunsfeld served as lead spacewalker in charge of spacewalking and Hubble Space Telescope activities in last May’s space shuttle mission to upgrade HST with new cameras and instruments and make repairs. He also led spacewalking and HST servicing during the March 2002 mission to the telescope.

Last May’s mission was HST’s fifth and possibly final. During the course of 12 days in orbit, two teams of astronauts, including Grunsfeld, performed five space walks. In a salute to another UChicago alumnus, Grunsfeld also carried into space a memento from Hubble’s days as an intercollegiate basketball player.

Hubble, SB,1910, PhD,1917, played forward on the Maroons’ Big Ten champion basketball teams of 1907-08 and 1908-09.

Grunsfeld will return the basketball—the game ball from a 1909 victory over the University of Indiana—in a ceremony on Friday, Oct. 30 at UChicago’s Gerald Ratner Athletic Center, home of Jay Berwanger’s 1935 Heisman Trophy. During his visit he also will deliver the physics department’s Zachariasen Lecture on Oct. 29.

Grunsfeld’s Oct. 28 presentation is sponsored by the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the Chicago Council on Science and Technology.

Astronaut and University of Chicago Alumnus John Grunsfeld to Describe Space Adventures at Art Institute Oct. 28 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The Art Institute of Chicago has organized a major exhibition that, for the first time, traces the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain through its manifestation in Chicago.

Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago, on view from Nov. 7, 2009 to Jan. 31, 2010 , presents nearly 190 outstanding examples by the movement’s British originators, such as William Morris, Elbert Hubbard, and Charles Robert Ashbee, as well as its greatest American practitioners, including Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The exhibition highlights a wide range of objects that encompasses ceramics, furniture, metalwork, paintings, photographs, and textiles. With a strong emphasis on Chicago’s absorption and interpretation of the movement, Apostles of Beauty draws deep on Chicago’s rich collections of Arts and Crafts objects, featuring works culled from the University of Chicago, the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Crab Tree Farm, private collections, and the Art Institute’s own superb permanent collection.

This is the first Arts and Crafts exhibition mounted at the Art Institute in more than three decades.

“Chicago, as the home of such architects and designers as Frank Lloyd Wright, is justly proud of its contributions to one of the most politically progressive and aesthetically compelling artistic movements of modern times,” said Judith Barter, curator of the exhibition and Field-McCormick Chair of American Art at the Art Institute.

“Apostles of Beauty is intended to place the work of such figures in the full philosophical, political, and artistic context of the Arts and Crafts movement as it developed in Britain, tracing direct links across the Atlantic to the flowering of Arts and Crafts in the East and West Coasts, and specifically in Chicago. No other city has such a wealth of art from this period, and we are pleased to exhibit here works from private collections rarely shown before that show the reach, depth, and aspirations of the movement.”

Apostles of Beauty traces the history of the Arts and Crafts movement through its complex stylistic and philosophical influences. The exhibition begins with an exploration of the movement’s early roots in Britain, particularly the impact of designer William Morris and his circle on the subsequent generation of architects and designers, and examines the phenomenon of “Japanism” in both British and American design.

As the exhibition develops the history of the movement, it also importantly delineates how the style moved from the artist’s workshop to the consumer’s home, particularly through the popularization of the style via specialized periodicals, also on view here.

Turning to the relationship between the movement’s philosophies and pictorialist photography, the exhibition extends the reach of Arts and Crafts beyond domestic design to progressive movements in other media.

Finally, the exhibition outlines Chicago’s early acceptance of the British model and its later role in uniting hand and machine in the service of beauty.

The Arts and Crafts movement began in Victorian England, the cradle of the industrial revolution, the heart of mechanization, and, at the time, the epitome of capitalist thinking.

Rebelling against the cheap, mass-produced object populating the homes of the middle classes, the originators of the Arts and Crafts movement stressed anti-industrialism, the elevation of the individual worker, the belief in rewarding labor and the handmade object, and the ability of a beautiful and well designed environment to provide moral uplift.

The movement was both a philosophy and a style that permeated domestic interiors, including decorative arts and furniture, painting, and textiles. Particularly in Britain, the movement critiqued the values of Victorian society and its increasingly rigid class structure and exploitation of the laboring classes.

The socially progressive ambitions of the Arts and Crafts movement were accompanied by a new aesthetic focus that sought to integrate art into daily life. In their rejection of the current industrialist ethos, theorists and designers looked to the pre-industrial medieval past, the natural world, and non-western (particularly Japanese) culture for aesthetic inspiration.

The forms of Arts and Crafts objects are varied and organic, and rooted in an integrity of materials and straightforward construction. As the movement developed, and certainly by the time it began to flower in the United States in the 1890s, it reached a rapprochement with industrial culture, recognizing that fully handmade materials were expensive and time-consuming to produce and instead opting to retain the look and spirit of handcraft while attempting broader production.

The movement had special resonance in Chicago, one of the most industrial of American cities at the turn of the 20th century. It was well suited to Chicago’s established reform movement, exemplified by Jane Addams and the Hull House.

There immigrants and women received training in handicraft skills not only to beautify domestic life but also to provide them with viable, honorable work. As a result, Chicago is seen as one of the most important centers of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States: by the 1890s, the city was home to a wide range of people and organizations committed to progressive beliefs–from Addams to John Dewey–and to reshaping the social order.

The union of the movement with the machine aesthetic of Chicago launched the beginning of modern design in the city.

Apostles of Beauty offers one of the most comprehensive presentations of the Arts and Crafts movement ever mounted, due to the depth of local and private collections in the greater Chicago area.

The exhibition, which can only be seen at the Art Institute, allows visitors the rare opportunity to see the movement unfold in the city where it reached its full manifestation and where many of its treasures still reside.

Accompanying Apostles of Beauty are programs for visitors of all ages. Highlights include a screening of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s film Frank Lloyd Wright; a lecture about the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the Cotswolds with scholar Mary Greensted; weekday gallery talks on the exhibition; and hands-on art activities in the Ryan Education Center for the whole family.

For a complete list of programs, please check out the Art Institute’s Web site: artinstituteofchicago.org

Major Art Institute Exhibition Traces the History of Arts and Crafts Movement from Britain to Chicago | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The talent and creativity of SAIC students is on display at this unique sale, which offers exquisite one-of-a-kind gifts such as photographs, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, prints and drawings, jewelry, fashion accessories and handmade paper designs.

Participating students receive 85 percent of their total sales; the remaining 15 percent goes to the SAIC Student Association to support the Art Sale and to fund future projects and programs.

For more information, please call 312-629-6880 or visit saic.edu.

About the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

A leader in educating artists, designers, and scholars since 1866, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) offers undergraduate, graduate and post-baccalaureate programs to nearly 3,000 students from across the globe.

Located in the heart of Chicago, SAIC’s educational philosophy is built upon a multidisciplinary approach to art and design, giving students unparalleled opportunities to develop their creative and critical abilities, while working with renowned faculty who include many of the leading practitioners in their field.

SAIC’s resources include the Art Institute of Chicago and its new Modern Wing, numerous special collections and programming venues provide students with exceptional exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances.

For more information, please visit saic.edu.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Hosts Free Holiday Art Sale Nov. 20-21; All Art Created by SAIC Students | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The Art Institute of Chicago has been awarded a $2 million challenge grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to aid the museum’s efforts in conservation and scientific research on its collections.

Of this generous grant, $1.5 million, to be matched by $500,000, will be used to endow a new position for an associate conservation scientist within the museum’s Department of Conservation.

The remaining $500,000 of the grant will support, over a four-year period, the continuation and expansion, in both depth and scope, of the art conservation and scientific research collaboration the museum has recently undertaken with colleagues at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory.

“The work of our world-class conservation department is absolutely vital to the mission of the Art Institute,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the museum. “The department is charged not only with maintaining the collection but also with performing highly technical analysis of our objects to better understand how they were made and where they came from. This research has led to many conferences, colloquia, and scientific papers that showcase the state-of-the-art techniques and processes of the conservation department while also revealing a great deal about the art objects we hold for the public. We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation, whose early support was critical to the development of the department and whose continuing support, with this award, allows us to continue this significant and often revelatory work.”

The conservation department, now led by Frank Zuccari, Grainger Executive Director of Conservation, was founded in 1962.

Since that time, the Art Institute has developed extensive facilities for the conservation of paintings, works on paper, textiles, photographs, three-dimensional objects, and books.

The staff in the department consists of 20 conservators, museum professionals who work in concert with curators to preserve the collection and conduct intensive study of the approximately 270,000 objects–from many cultures and all time periods, from ancient to modern–in their care.

The results of their research are shared with a variety of audiences through exhibitions, exhibition catalogues, scholarly catalogues of the permanent collection, articles in the museum’s semi-annual Museum Studies journal, presentations at professional meetings, publication in professional and scientific journals, public lectures, and tours of the galleries and conservation facilities.

The Mellon Foundation grant will both strengthen the Art Institute’s research capabilities and allow the museum to continue to develop its Conservation Science Initiative, spearheaded by Francesca Casadio, A. W. Mellon Senior Conservation Scientist at the Art Institute, and supported in part by the first ever National Science Foundation grant to the Art Institute in 2007.

The Conservation Science Initiative is a national model for integrative and cross-disciplinary collaboration among museums, universities, and scientific institutions with the goal of enhancing the field of cultural heritage science in the U.S.

This initiative has not only provided access to the latest equipment and expertise used for materials science, chemistry, and computer science but has also offered opportunities for young scientists to understand the various applications of scientific tools to the care, preservation, and conservation of art objects.

The work of the Conservation Science Initiative has already produced significant results, including articles in both scientific journals and general interest publications.

Its objects of study have ranged from ancient Chinese jades and bronzes to prints by the Mexican artist José Guadelupe Posada to house paints used by Pablo Picasso and the Art Institute’s monumental painting by Henri Matisse, Bathers by a River, which will be the subject of a major exhibition next spring.

The efforts of the collaboration have been published in such journals as Analytical Chemistry, Applied Spectroscopy, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, andAnalytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Erin Hogan, 312-443-3664
ehogan@artic.edu

Chai Lee, 312-443-3625
clee4@artic.edu

The Art Institute of Chicago Awarded Major Grant for Conservation Research from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects (AIADO) of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) proudly hosts The Association for Computer Aided Design In Architecture (ACADIA) 2009 international conference, ACADIA 09: reForm() Oct. 22–25.

At this critical juncture in history when the world seeks to create new models of sustainability to build newer, more productive and responsible urban environments, ACADIA 09: reForm() will present 40 papers by leading architects, engineers, artists, and designers from the U.S. and abroad that explore ideas for using new hardware, software and networking technologies to positively transform the performance and operation of cities and buildings.

Tickets for the four-day conference and workshops are available at acadia.org/register.html.

ACADIA 09: reForm() also features public keynote lectures by Kai Strelkhe, Head of Design Technology, Herzog & de Meuron Architekten (Oct. 22 at 6 p.m.); Dr. Robert Aish, Director of Software Development, Autodesk (Oct. 23 at 6 p.m.); and Dr. Peter W. Singer, Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, the Brookings Institution (Oct. 24 at 6 p.m.).

Separate keynote tickets are available to the general public at the door for $10 at the Art Institute of Chicago Fullerton Hall (111 S. Michigan Ave.).

“As an architect and urban designer who is responsible for leading the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s leading educational institutions built upon a trans-disciplinary approach to art and design, I am thrilled to host ACADIA 09: reForm() in Chicago, a city so vibrant and rich in architectural history,” said SAIC President Wellington Reiter, FAIA, who will offer opening remarks at the conference. “SAIC strives to be an innovator in creating new models of sustainability, and through hosting ACADIA we are proud to present cutting-edge, real-world ideas from international scholars that may help transform our city as well as urban environments throughout the world.”

ACADIA 09: reFORM() KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

A highlight of ACADIA 09: reForm() will be the public keynote addresses by three internationally recognized leaders and innovators in the field, followed by panel discussions. Separate tickets for each keynote are $10, available to the general public at the door at The Art Institute of Chicago Fullerton Hall (111 S. Michigan Ave.).

Keynotes include:

The Art of Architectural Programming at Herzog & de Meuron
Kai Strelkhe, Head of Design Technology, Herzog & de Meuron Architekten
Thursday, Oct. 22 at 6 p.m.
Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) Rubloff Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

About Kai Strelkhe

Since 2005, Strelkhe has been instrumental in advancing Herzog & de Meuron’s technological abilities, methodologies and techniques.

In 2001, firm partners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron won the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Strelkhe will discuss the working design methodology at Herzog & de Meuron, known throughout the world for its projects of extremely high quality, intention and craftsmanship.

Recognizable designs by the firm include the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics National Stadium (commonly referred to as the “Bird’s Nest”) and the Tate Modern Museum in London.

Strehlke will also explore the interplay between mediation of traditional design, digital design and fabrication. His keynote will be followed by a panel discussion about parametric design and the role of computation in contemporary architecture and design.

Design Language: Representation & Interaction
Dr. Robert Aish, Director of Software Development, Autodesk
Friday, Oct. 23 at 6 p.m.
AIC Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

About Dr. Robert Aish

In 2005, Dr. Robert Aish was named a top ten innovator in British Architecture by Building Design Magazine (UK). He is a co-founder of the SmartGeometry Group, and a visiting professor of Design Computation at the University of Bath’s School of Architecture.

As Director of Software Development at Autodesk, Dr. Aish converges advanced computational design techniques with mainstream tools. He will discuss how software and systems change to produce better buildings, and conversely how buildings work to produce better-situated software and information tools.

Dr. Aish’s keynote lecture will be followed by a panel discussion about the design of software tools for the architectural and engineering communities.

Wired for War: What Happens When Science Fiction Becomes Battlefield Reality?
Dr. Peter W. Singer, Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative
The Brookings Institution
Saturday, Oct. 24 at 6 p.m.
AIC Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

About Dr. Peter Singer

Dr. Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare. Singer served in a personal capacity as coordinator of the Obama 2008 campaign’s defense policy task force.

He is also a founder and organizer of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a global conference that brings together leaders from across the US and the Muslim worlds.

Dr. Singer wrote the first books to explore the cutting edge topics of private military contractors (Corporate Warriors), child soldiers (Children at War), and in 2009 published Wired for War, which explores the implications of robotics and other new technologies for war, politics, ethics, and law in the 21st century.

Wired for War made the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list in its first week of release, and John Stewart of The Daily Show raved that the book is “awesome.”

Dr. Singer’s keynote lecture will be followed by a panel discussion about the role of robotic and network technologies in and beyond social, environmental, political and constructed environments.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Elysia Borowy-Reeder, 312-560-9780

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Hosts International Architecture and Technology Conference ACADIA 09: reFORM() Oct. 22–25 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Continuing its tradition of collaborating with other Chicago cultural institutions to offer yearlong programming around a central theme, the Art Institute of Chicago announces its 2009-2010 season as “500 Ways of Looking at Modern.”

Partnering with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Poetry Foundation, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the museum will present 500 lectures, programs, exhibitions, readings, and performances on the theme of the modern–from avant-garde art to points throughout world history in which conventions were overturned and new world views emerged.

Highlights of the season include the first ever residency of a major dance company, the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, at an art museum; a major exhibition that reframes the work of artist Henri Matisse; and a very rare loan from the National Gallery of London of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, one of the very few times a Caravaggio has been seen in Chicago.

“500 Ways of Looking at Modern” begins on September 3, with actors from Steppenwolf Theatre performing highlights from plays by Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and others, and ends in June 2010, with the one-year anniversary of the Modern Wing.

“The opening of the Modern Wing in May gives us an opportunity to examine moments of monumental change in world history,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “We are thrilled to be working once again with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Poetry Foundation, and we welcome our new partner, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, whose members will be choreographing and performing works based on our permanent collection. The Modern Wing is a celebration of the new and the revelatory in the visual arts, and we will be collaborating with our partners to bring visitors a better understanding of the new and the revelatory across history and cultural expressions.”

Four years ago, the Art Institute partnered with the City of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble to offer a yearlong exploration of the Silk Road and the cultural exchanges it brought about. Since that time, the museum, working with partners around the city, has presented similar themed seasons in which programs and exhibitions were developed around such topics as American identities, globalism, and, for 2009-2010, “the modern.”

While people and institutions have throughout history always said, done, and created new forms, ideas, inventions, and objects, the idea that these activities were “modern” did not emerge until the historian Jakob Burkhardt in 1867 looked back to the Renaissance and argued that it was during this flowering of artistic expression and political change that individuals became the engines of significant change. The season “500 Ways of Looking at Modern” launches from this fundamental idea to present those individuals and ideas that literally changed the world.

On Thursday evenings, the museum will present lectures by such noted speakers as Alex Ross (the author of The Rest is Noise ), Glenn Lowry (the director of the Museum of Modern Art), and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams. These Thursday night talks will address a wide range of topics, from twentieth-century music to the poetry of Robert Lowell to the life and work of Caravaggio.

The Art Institute will also present chamber music concerts with the CSO as well as CSO previews; conversations about music and theater with composers, musicians, and actors; and poetry readings by C. D. Wright, Derek Walcott, and Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate of Great Britain.

Also offered is a symposium on contemporary art and a full slate of exhibitions at the museum, including works by contemporary designer Konstantin Grcic and contemporary artist Monica Bonvicini; Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago; and Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917.

A full calendar of events, exhibitions, and programs is available at artinstituteofchicago.org.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Erin Hogan, 312-443-3664
ehogan@artic.edu

Chicago’s Art Institute Celebrates “500 Ways of Looking at Modern” With Modern Season 2009-2010 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to host the first comprehensive museum exhibition of art by James Castle (1899-1977), one of the most enigmatic and extraordinary self-taught artists to emerge in the United States during the 20th century.

James Castle: A Retrospective–on view in the Jean and Steven Goldman Prints and Drawings Galleries in the Richard and Mary L. Gray Wing of the Art Institute (G124-127) from October 10, 2009 through Jan. 3, 2010–examines the full range of the artist’s work, bringing together more than 200 drawings, books, and constructions from across the United States. This exhibition marks the largest presentation of Castle’s work ever to be seen in Chicago.

Castle, who had no formal artistic training, has received growing attention over the past few decades for his distinctive, searching works with their unique handmade quality, graphic skill, and visual and conceptual range.

Deaf since birth, Castle never adopted speech, sign language, lip-reading, writing, or any of the usual modes of communicating with other people. Instead, he pursued art as his primary means of communication, drawing nearly every day of his relatively secluded life in Idaho and structuring his own sense of place through the precise architectural and spatial references of his familiar surroundings.

Though he led a somewhat isolated life, only attending school for approximately five years, he used magazines, books, catalogues, advertisements, commercial packaging, newspapers, and cartoons as sources for inspiration, transforming ordinary into extraordinary images with his constantly investigative and analytical mind.

James Castle: A Retrospective is comprised of a wide selection of images and objects in the media most often used by the artist: drawing, collage, and assemblage. Castle developed his favorite medium and method of working at a young age: mixing stove soot with saliva and applying this “ink” with sharpened sticks and cotton wads to such found materials as product packaging and discarded paper.

These everyday materials give his works a singular, immediate, and appealing natural quality that perfectly complements the skill and acuteness with which he manipulated his materials. Many of his soot and spit drawings depict rooms in his family’s farmhouse and outdoor views of buildings on the property, usually represented from memory and often embellished with odd surrealistic images.

These drawings exhibit a superb handling of stick-applied line and deft tonal washes. Evident in this exhibition are Castle’s mastery of linear perspective and the pleasure he took in creating such architectonic renderings.

The exhibition also includes Castle’s remarkable works in color, often based in home-found materials such as laundry bluing, face powder, or color leached out of crepe paper by soaking.

These compositions, stemming from appropriated images from popular publications and mass-produced printed materials, are often characterized by startlingly “surreal” shifts in scale or are peopled with fantasy figures like women with cat heads or wheel feet.

Castle also worked three-dimensionally, creating “constructions” or assemblages of people, barnyard fowl, articles of clothing, household objects and furniture, and architectural elements such as doors or windows. These constructions are small, abstracted explorations of common objects, yet they are also extremely complicated, requiring skillful cutting, tearing, folding, stitching, and gluing of his found papers and cardboards.

The artist garnered some local acclaim during his lifetime (including exhibitions in 1963 and 1976 at the Boise Gallery of Art) but only achieved international recognition decades after his death in 1977. Castle’s work is now included in major museum collections throughout the U.S., including the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; the Boise Art Museum; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Castle: A Retrospective was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Chicago presentation of James Castle: A Retrospective is curated by Mark Pascale, Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Castle: A Retrospective is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, a 272-page volume that is the definitive treatment of Castle’s work and life. It is accompanied by the 53-minute documentary DVD James Castle: Portrait of an Artist. James Castle: A Retrospective numbers 272 pages and includes more than 350 full-color reproductions. The catalogue is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Fund for Scholarly Publications.

James Castle: A Retrospective is made possible by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Additional funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius. Major funding for the Chicago presentation of James Castle: A Retrospective is made possible through the generosity of an Anonymous Donor.

Additional funding is provided by Deone Jackman and Eugene Goldwasser, Dr. Robert Grossett, and Linda and Jerome Meyer. Further support is provided by Jeffrey M. Goldberg, Willa and Scott Lang, and James A. Young, M.D.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Erin Hogan, 312-443-3664
ehogan@artic.edu

James Castle’s First Museum Survey on View at the Art Institute of Chicago October 10 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Discover these visual art gems off Jewelers’ Row all season long, along with more SAIC Faculty accomplishments featured below.

Sullivan Galleries

• New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work
• Learning Modern 
• Fall Undergraduate Exhibition
• New Media Poetics Sound Installation
• Picturing the Studio

Rymer Gallery

• Faculty Projects
• Hypothetical Planets
• Text Off the Page

Student Union Galleries (SUGs): LG Space and Gallery X

• Lilya Lifanova: Anatomy is Destiny
• Ingrid Olson & Olivia Wendel: Together Apart
• Beth Cohen: The Elizabeth Interviews
• Katie Waugh: Stutter, Interrupt
• Clare Rosean: Good Clean Fun
• Matt Nichols: Lexiconography

Learning Modern installation-in-progress, Sullivan Galleries
Kay Rosen, Divisibility; Kenneth Isaacs, Knowledge Box; Stafan Schmidt, Modernity Retired. Photo by James Prinz

Sullivan Galleries
33 S. State St., 7th floor
Tue—Sat, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
312-629-6635

New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work
Through September 26
Reception: Friday, September 25, 4:30-7 p.m.

Current students and recent alumni from SAIC reveal their newest works. Artists include Anida Yoeu Ali, Nadav Assor, Elijah Burgher, Rachelle Cohen, Matias Cuevas, Patrick Cunningham, Katrina Erickson, Daniel Everett, Eric J. Garcia, Yasi Ghanbari, Elise Goldstein, Sharon Hayes, Emily Hermant, Tara Hills, Jesse Jagtiani, Jesus Javier, James Kubie, Rachel Mason, David McClain, Jesse McLean, Matt Nichols, Olea Nova, Angel Otero, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Clare Rosean, Hyun Ji Sim, Luke Stettner, Stephanie Syjuco, Sebastian Vallejo, Maria Astrid Vergara, and HyounSang Yoo.

Learning Modern
September 26-January 9, 2010
Reception: Friday, September 25, 4:30-7 p.m.

This exhibition features projects by artists and architects, ranging in age from their 20s to 80s, who today continue a legacy of interdisciplinary innovation for better living, while exploring the central role of experiential education in the modern vision. On view are works by: BlackBox Studio/SOM Chicago, Thom Faulders, Angela Ferreira, Andrea Fraser, Charles Harrison, Walter Hood, Ken Isaacs, Narelle Jubelin, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Helen-Maria Nugent, Liisa Roberts, Kay Rosen, Staffan Schmidt, Jan Tichy, Arturo Vittori, Catherine Yass, and the Mark-Mark-and-Matt Collaboration.

This exhibition is a program of Living Modern Chicago, a collaboration of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mies van der Rohe Society/Illinois Institute of Technology. It is also made possible in part by the William and Anne Hokin Exhibition Research Fund, Alicia Rosauer and Robert Segal, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Getty Images, Tracy Dillard/Koenig & Strey GMAC Real Estate, illy caffe North America, Inc., Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Fall Undergraduate Exhibition
October 31-November 14
Reception: Friday, October 30, 7-9 p.m.

Nearly fifty talented SAIC students completing undergraduate degrees this Fall exhibit their innovative work. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago promotes crossing disciplines and challenging assumptions. The results of this approach are showcased in the exhibition.

New Media Poetics Sound Installation
November 6-25
For more information, visit saic.edu/exhibitions

Picturing the Studio
December 12, 2009-February 13, 2010
Reception: Friday, December 11, 4:30-7 p.m.

This exhibition explores the complex politically- and psychologically charged notions of the artist’s studio today.

Presented in conjunction with the College Art Association’s 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 11-13, 2010. Also part of Studio Chicago, a collaborative project.

Lorraine Peltz, Playdate, 2009 (detail). From the exhibition Faculty Projects (through Sept. 25). Image courtesy of the artist

Rymer Gallery
280 S. Columbus Dr., 1st floor
Tue-Sat, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
312.629.6635

Faculty Projects
Through September 25
Reception: Friday, September 11, 4:30-7 p.m.

This exhibition features select projects by faculty at SAIC who are returning from their sabbatical leaves. Artists include Ben Chang, Jim Elniski, Stephen Farrell, Michiko Itatani, Lorraine Peltz, and Karl Wirsum. Special lectures and screenings are presented throughout the Fall semester in conjunction with this exhibition. For more information, visit saic.edu/exhibitions

Hypothetical Planets
October 13-November 20
Reception: Friday, October 23, 4:30-7 p.m.

Current students in performance and fiber and material studies transform the gallery into a working laboratory for experimentation, collaboration, and the traces they leave behind. Through performance, architectural intervention, and material accumulation the classes engage in an ongoing dialogue over the course of the exhibition.

Text Off the Page
December 12-January 8
Reception: Friday, December 11, 4:30-7 p.m.

This exhibition features new works as developed in the Fall semester courses Text Off the Page and Video Installation II.

Katie Waugh, from Stutter, Interrupt. Image courtesy of the artist

Student Union Galleries (SUGs)

LG Space
37 S. Wabash Ave., 2nd floor
Tue-Fri, 12:30-5:30 p.m.
Sat., by appointment
312-899-5131

Gallery X
280 S. Columbus Dr., 1st floor
Tue-Fri, 12:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
312-857-7140

Liliya Lifanova: Anatomy is Destiny
September 8-October 3
Gallery X

Anatomy is Destiny is both installation and choreographed performance piece, as the artist uses a human-scale game of chess to investigate the relational issues between audience and objects.

Katie Waugh: Stutter, Interrupt
September 10-Friday, October 2
LG Space

Addressing the materiality of the increasingly ubiquitous moving image, Waugh dissects the stuttering, mutated, visually brilliant language of streaming video as it attempts to convey the highly regimented world of public policy debate. What remains is a series of interruptions, false starts, and reductive grandstanding.

Ingrid Olson & Olivia Wendel: Together Apart
October 20-November 6
Gallery X

This exhibition will be a visual dialogue between two artists’ work: a conversation in which subject matter, formal aesthetics, and material choices collide.

Clare Rosean: Good Clean Fun
October 22-November 6
LG Space

Rosean creates maps that illustrate everyday scenarios, plotting the absurdities of human folly and crisis. Humorous and lighthearted, the artist casually examines the individual and his or her place in the big picture.

Beth Cohen: The Elizabeth Interviews
December 1-Friday, December 18
Gallery X

Cohen’s work investigates trauma as a universal heritage—a shared territory we traverse together. In the Elizabeth Interviews, women reenact an interview with a sixteen-year-old girl discussing her experience of being raped at fourteen, raising issues of memory, agency, and power.

Matt Nichols: LEXICONOGRAPHY
LG Space

November 19-December 16
This exhibition is an investigation into cultural conditioning, playing upon ambiguity as a cornerstone for conceptual departure through works comprised of devalued objects, prints, and drawings that pull from recognizable sources.

SAIC Faculty Accomplishments

Art & Technology Faculty member Eduardo Kac is this year’s winner of the Prix Ars Electronica in the Hybrid Art category for his work on the project Natural History of Enigma with partners from the University of Minnesota. Kac extracted a gene from his DNA and spliced it with that of a flower for the project. One of the most important awards for creativity in the field of digital media, the Prix—also known as the Golden Nica—has been issued annually in eight categories by the Austria-based Ars Electronica Foundation since 1987.

Visual Communication Faculty member Peggy Macnamara is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden through September 28. Macnamara teaches Scientific Illustration at SAIC and is Artist in Residence at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she has worked with scientists for the past 20 years. The exhibition on view in the Garden’s Joutras Gallery, The Natural Art of Nests, features artwork from her recently published fourth book, Architecture by Birds & Insects. An article on her work is published in the September edition of North Shore magazine.

Free and Open to the Public: Fall Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610), The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 x 196.2 cm. The National Gallery, London, Presented by the Honorable George Vernon, 1839, NG172.

Coming from the National Gallery, London, The Supper at Emmaus is one of the most highly regarded paintings by one of the most influential of all Western artists, and it is a painting hardly ever seen outside of London. For these four months, it will be one of the few Caravaggios on view anywhere in the United States.

The Supper at Emmaus will serve as the centerpiece for a focus installation in Gallery 211 of the Art Institute’s collection of “Caravaggesque” paintings. Caravaggio’s insistence on heightened realism and the sculptural qualities of his figures, often brightly lit against a dark background, are evident in works such as Bartolomeo Manfredi’s Cupid Chastised and Cecco del Caravaggio’s The Resurrection.

A gallery brochure will also lead visitors to other galleries where the diffusion of Caravaggio’s style throughout Europe will be immediately apparent in works such as Rembrandt’s Old Man with a Gold Chain and Rubens’s The Capture of Samson.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) is an artist known not only for his groundbreaking paintings that heralded the emergence of the Baroque era but also for his profoundly tumultuous life.

Apprenticed at the age of 13 in Milan, the artist fled for Rome when he was 21, after an altercation with a police officer. In Rome, despite his unconventional style and penchant for bar brawls, he quickly attached himself to one of the favorite painters of Pope Clement VIII. His sensual depictions of both quotidian life and exalted religious subjects brought him to the attention of wealthy private patrons and influential members of the clergy, most notably Cardinal Francesco del Monte. The Supper at Emmaus was painted for one of the most avid collectors of art in Rome, Ciriaco de Mattei.

Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus , painted in 1601, depicts a dim tavern that forms the backdrop for a moment of profound revelation. Two men eating at a table, served by an innkeeper, realize that the guest who joined them at their meal is none other than Christ himself, reappearing to his disciples after his death and resurrection.

The painting is recognized as a superb example of Caravaggio’s style at its most mature and developed. Caravaggio has represented this scene with his sense of uncompromising realism, punctuated by his signature contrasts of light and dark, which lend a deeply dramatic sensitivity to the painting.

The moment of the disciples’ realization is pictured with radically foreshortened gestures of shock and disbelief: one disciple spreads his arms wide, demarcating the depth of the painting; the other leans forward abruptly, as if he were to jump out of his chair, shoulders hunched and hands gripping the arms of his seat.

Caravaggio has rendered all of the details–the food on the table, the worn wrinkles in the garments of the men–with crisp precision and an almost clinical handling of paint. Against this stark realism is counterposed the moment of religious epiphany, the sacred manifesting itself within the mundane setting of a dining room.

The Supper at Emmaus will take the place of The Crucifixion by Francisco de Zurbarán, which will play a key role in the National Gallery, London’s upcoming exhibition, The Sacred Made Real, Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, on view in London this fall.

The Chicago presentation of The Supper at Emmaus is curated by Christina Nielsen, Assistant Curator of Medieval Art, the Art Institute of Chicago.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Erin Hogan, 312-443-3664
ehogan@artic.edu

Caravaggio’s Masterpiece “The Supper at Emmaus” on View at the Art Institute of Chicago Starting Oct. 10 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Although collage is commonly thought of as a modern art form, the act of “playing with pictures” has a long, rich, and surprising history. Its roots are on full display in the unique exhibition Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, on view from October 10, 2009 through January 3, 2010, in Photography Galleries 1 and 2 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the little-known phenomenon of Victorian photocollage, presenting many eye-opening works that have rarely–and in many cases never–before been displayed or reproduced. Playing with Pictures will receive its world premiere at the Art Institute before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

A full 60 years ahead of the avant-garde–and more than a century before Photoshop–aristocratic Victorian women were already making radical experiments with photocollage. During the Victorian era, photography became remarkably popular and accessible, as people posed for studio portraits and exchanged these pictures on a vast scale. The makers of the collages shown here cut up these portraits and placed them in elaborate watercolor designs in albums.

With their sharp wit, absurd senses of humor, and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these photocollages stand the rather serious conventions of photography in the 1860s and 1870s on their heads, debunking stuffy Victorian clichés with surreal, subversive, and funny images.

Oftentimes, the combination of photographic portraits with painted settings inspired dreamlike and even bizarre results: placing human heads on animal bodies; situating people in imaginary landscapes; and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers, as they take on new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict boundaries of aristocratic society. Together they provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the Victorian era and enduring inspiration for photographic experimentation today.

Playing with Pictures showcases the best of these albums and loose pages from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia; 40 pages are shown in frames on the wall, while 11 separate albums are displayed in cases, accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors for visitor interaction. One of the highlights of the exhibition is an exciting addition to the Art Institute’s permanent collection: the Madame B Album , a fascinating album of more than 140 pages of photographs and watercolor designs, which was acquired in 2005 and is on public display for the first time.

“Madame B” has been identified as Blanche Fournier, the wife of a French diplomat. In her clever, whimsical, and surreal world, photographic portraits dot the tail feathers of a turkey, faces decorate the wings of a colorful butterfly, and a secret language of flowers communicates hidden meanings.

Two catalogues, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage by Elizabeth Siegel and The Marvelous Album of Madame B: Being the Handiwork of a Victorian Lady of Considerable Talent by Elizabeth Siegel and Martha Packer, will accompany this exhibition.

The Art of Victorian Photocollage constitutes the first full-length scholarly examination of the phenomenon of photocollage in the Victorian era, focusing on the themes and social meanings of photocollage as well as the avant-garde character of the art form. Published by Yale University Press for the Art Institute, the book reproduces 140 illustrations, most of which have never been printed before, and features essays by Elizabeth Siegel, Patrizia Di Bello, and Marta Weiss, and contributions by Miranda Hofelt. The Marvelous Album of Madame B reflects on both the experiences of the album’s creator, Blanche Fournier, as well as the history behind the photocollage album.

With more than 55 pages filled with photographs, collages, and watercolor designs, the book features repeating pictorial themes such as pattern, the animal kingdom, and keepsakes. The Marvelous Album of Madame B is published by Scala Publishers for the Art Institute. Both volumes can be purchased at the Museum Shop of the Art Institute.

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is curated by Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from February 2 to May 9, 2010, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto from June 5 to September 5, 2010.

Major funding for Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is generously provided by ART MENTOR FOUNDATION LUCERNE, the Smart Family Foundation, and Brenda Shapiro in memory of Earl Shapiro. Additional support provided by The Hite Foundation in memory of Sybil Hite and by Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Erin Hogan, 312-443-3664
ehogan@artic.edu

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage Premieres at the Art Institute of Chicago October 10 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Grcic is known for his logical designs, driven by an honesty of materials and an appropriateness of production methods. His diverse output re-examines how an object should look, function, and what its inherent relationship to the user should be. The works featured at the Art Institute, while spanning his career, are united by his foundational principles of simplicity, irony, and subtle humor.

“The Art Institute opened the Modern Wing with a renewed commitment to showcase the work of designers who are at the forefront of progressive thinking and practice in the field of design,” said Zoë Ryan, Neville Bryan Curator of Design at the Art Institute and curator of the exhibition. “In this regard, there is no better inaugural design exhibition than the work of Konstantin Grcic. Equally attentive to form and function, Grcic’s inventive projects offer insightful and intelligent commentaries on the history and nature of design itself and the ways in which we interact with everyday objects.”

Grcic was born in Munich, Germany. He initially trained as a carpenter and cabinetmaker at Parnham College in Britain. He went on to receive a master’s degree in Industrial Design from the Royal College of Art in London. While working for designer Jasper Morrison, Grcic began to shape his own aesthetic, rooted in minimalism but leavened with humor and whimsy. In 1991, he founded his own studio, KGID.

KGID works for some of the leading brands of the international design industry–including ClassiCon, Luminaire, Magis, Moroso, Muji, Plank, Rosenthal, and Vitra–and specializes in various fields of design, ranging from furniture and industrial products to window displays and objects closely related to architecture.

Grcic is known for reinventing the forms of familiar industrial and interior objects–desks, chairs, benches, stools, kitchen equipment, lamps, or a set of salad servers–in an effort to reawaken our interests in our quotidian activities. He does so by an almost uncanny ability to redefine the personality of a product by closely examining its relationship with its user and by scrutinizing its materials.

In the process, Grcic creates innovative new archetypes of everyday objects that actually suggest or require new modes of behaviors, such as his Chaos Chair that is designed to let the user, rather than the chair, determine his or her posture. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Neue Sammlung in Munich.

The exhibition includes objects that are readily available to consumers as well as experiments that push the constraints of industrial production. Highlights of Decisive Design include the Myto chair, designed for Plank, a cantilevered chair named after the Mito sports motorbike made by Cagiva, whose low-slung thrust was made possible by using an advanced plastic polymer; the 360° chair designed for Magis, whose quirky form rethinks conventional office chairs; and the Mayday lamp, perhaps Grcic’s best known work, produced for Flos, which reinterprets the industrial lamps used in auto mechanic shops for a domestic setting.

The Mayday lamp won the prestigious Compasso d’Oro award at the Milan furniture fair in 2001 and the Myto chair won a Brit Insurance Design Award for Furniture  from the Design Museum in London in 2009. Reflecting Grcic’s adherence to industrial production, the Mayday lamp is widely accessible and is available in the Art Institute’s Modern Shop.

An engaging exhibition design created by Konstantin Grcic in collaboration with curator Zoë Ryan will enable visitors to explore the breadth of his output in a studio-like environment with a multi-layered presentation of projects, imagery, sketches, drawings, and background information that will help illuminate the complex process of industrial design. In addition, visitors will be encouraged to enter a central zone outfitted like a mini racetrack, a design that reflects Grcic’s long-standing interest in Formula 1 racing and the inspiration behind much of his work, in which they can try out some of his award-winning designs for themselves.

Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. This is the first publication to look specifically at Grcic’s work over the past five years, a period when he has harnessed an increased interest in new technologies and materials that allow him to produce furniture and product designs that are transforming the landscape of contemporary design.

Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and curated by Zoë Ryan, Neville Bryan Curator of Design in the Department of Architecture and Design. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Architecture & Design Society, the Fellows and Benefactors of the Architecture and Design Department, Celia and David Hilliard Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and Luminaire. In-kind support was provided by Bridgestone Americas.

IMAGES: Konstantin Grcic (German, born 1965). Manufacturer: Flos SpA (Italian, founded 1962). “Mayday” Lamp, 1998
Konstantin Grcic, German, born 1965. Manufacturer: Magis (Italian, founded 1976). chair_ONE, 2003

Konstantin Grcic will also be a curating a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary design at London’s Serpentine Gallery, Design Real, on view November 26, 2009 through February 7, 2010. Grcic’s selection will include a wide range of objects by leading international designers and manufacturers, from furniture and household products to technical and industrial innovations.

Konstantin Grcic’s “Decisive Designs” Showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing Nov. 18 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce a groundbreaking collaboration with the internationally praised and locally celebrated Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC). Over the coming ten months, from September 2009 through June 2010, HSDC will create original movement pieces within the context of the Art Institute’s renowned permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. HSDC is scheduled to present six performances and two discussions, all rooted in innovative dance, music, and visual arts, at the Art Institute. Additionally, dancers will be performing in the museum throughout the year on an unannounced schedule, surprising and delighting museum visitors with impromptu appearances and improvisations. The season’s collaboration concludes with the Choreographic Workshop Performance, “Inside/Out,” on June 17, 2010, when the full company of Hubbard Street dancers will showcase the works they have choreographed throughout the year in response to art on view in the museum’s Modern Wing galleries.

“This collaboration with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is truly a first for the Art Institute and for museums,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute. “This partnership will allow visitors to see the creative process in action, from the spark of inspiration through the rigors of development to final pieces, performed at the site of their inception. We here at the museum are very much looking forward to learning about our own collection from the HSDC dancers. They are offering us a completely new perspective on shape, movement, energy, and motion, and it will be a thrill for all of us at the Art Institute to see our works come to life through the superb talents of Hubbard Street.”

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is a major partner of the museum for the upcoming season 500 Ways of Looking at Modern , a celebration of the opening of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. The season title, inspired by poet Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” unites the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, HSDC, and Poetry Foundation to present a yearlong exploration of those moments in history in which conventions were overturned and individuals and ideas became the engines of significant change. Featuring such major exhibitions as Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago and Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 , the season also offers a weekly series of performances, readings, and lectures looking at “modern” from the perspective of artists, curators, dancers, museum directors, musicians, poets, and scholars. Each event offers a fresh way of “looking.” All events are free of charge and occur on Thursdays at 6:00 in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute, except where noted. For the entire season’s schedule, visit the Art Institute’s Web site at artinstituteofchicago.org.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, under the artistic leadership of Glenn Edgerton, is among the most original forces in contemporary dance. Critically acclaimed for its exuberant, athletic and innovative repertory, HSDC presents performances that inspire, challenge and engage audiences worldwide. Visit hubbardstreetdance.com for more information about the company and the 2009-10 Chicago performance dates.

HSDC RESIDENCY AT THE ART INSTITUTE

All events are FREE and scheduled for Thursday evenings at 6:00 pm in Fullerton Hall, unless noted. Throughout the year, HSDC dancers will also offer unscheduled impromptu performances in the Modern Wing.

September 24: Disturb the Universe—In Search of Modern

Bold and evocative French writers and artists crafted modernism in the immediate moment of contemporary life. Goodman Theatre actors cite memorable passages from writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Bréton, while dancers from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago improvise in response. Presented with Poetry Foundation.

October 29: HSDC Installed

Dancers from Hubbard Street 2 enliven Griffin Court with choreography inspired by works of art in the museum’s collection.

November 27, 11am: Wreathing of the Lions

HSDC dancers celebrate the holiday season at the Art Institute’s annual “Wreathing of the Lions” event.

January 21: HSDC in the Collection

HSDC Artistic Director Glenn Edgerton comments on selected modern and contemporary works on view, followed by short performances.

February 20, 11:00 am: HS2 in Griffin Court

Guest choreographer Jonathan Fredrickson works with dancers in Griffin Court. This program is designed with audience of all ages in mind.

March 18: Conversation—HSDC in Dialogue

HSDC artistic staff and designers review the process of creating an entire visual environment for dance,  based on HSDC’s experiences on stage and in nontraditional spaces including galleries.

June 3: Dance and Conversation—HSDC in Dialogue

HSDC artistic staff and dancers preview two new works to be premiered later that evening. An art commentary on related works on view in the Modern Wing is also offered.

June 17: HSDC’s Choreographic Workshop Performance “Inside/Out”

The full company of Hubbard Street dancers showcase their new works choreographed throughout the year in response to art on view in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing.

Hubbard Street Dance Company to Create Choreography Inspired by Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern and Contemporary Collections | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Developed by the Art Institute in collaboration with Sandbox Studio, Inc., a design company dedicated to educational programs and technology, Curious Corner is now accessible on the Web as well as on dedicated computers inside the museum.

“Opening the new Ryan Education Center in the Modern Wing has really been a catalyst for us to bring the world of museum education into the twenty-first century,” said Robert Eskridge, the Woman’s Board Endowed Executive Director of the Department of Museum Education. “The education center is now fully equipped with state-of-the-art computer terminals, wireless laptops and interactive whiteboard technology, and, in the classrooms and studios, multimedia projection and display systems. With Curious Corner on the Web, we’re now able to bring all the advances of the Ryan Education Center into the homes of families and visitors.”

Curious Corner introduces families, children, and educators to the Art Institute’s diverse collection, teaches basic visual skills, and promotes the museum in a stimulating, intuitive, and appealing way. The activities allow children to “learn by doing”: children can interact with works of art through both words and pictures, experiment with visual elements and principles, and use different styles of design to create something new. The broad selection of artworks featured in the program include American and European paintings, African masks, Indian artifacts, and contemporary works-offering children of all ages ample opportunity to encounter and discover a diverse array of styles, media, and cultures.

On the homepage of Curious Corner, users can choose from three different activities: “Story Time,” “Match Up,” and “Play with Art.” “Story Time” enables children to explore the background behind three different art objects with animated tales that allow web visitors to click on components throughout. “Match Up” teaches careful looking skills to children through the act of combining textures, shapes, and sounds with details in famous artworks. The third section, “Play with Art,” encourages kids to create their own mask or Joseph Cornell box and match faces to famous portraits–all while teaching them about the art that inspired the game.

Curious Corner is one of many ongoing technology initiatives that the Art Institute’s Museum Education department has developed in recent years for its audiences, both online and inside the museum. It continues the museum’s award-winning tradition of innovation in education that can be found in previous interactive exhibitions such as Telling Images and Faces, Places, and Inner Spaces.

Curious Corner can be accessed through one of the computer terminals found in the Vitale Family Room of the Ryan Education Center in the Modern Wing or online at artic.edu/aic/education/CC. This program is one of many that support the Art Institute’s goals to serve families and enhance the appreciation and enjoyment of art.

Art Institute of Chicago Engages Children’s Creativity with “Curious Corner,” a New Interactive Web Site | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

Today the Art Institute of Chicago launched Pathfinder, the museum’s new interactive floor plan and virtual gallery tour system on its Web site. The first art museum in the world to dynamically combine its floor plan with fully up-to-date high-definition and panoramic views of its galleries, the Art Institute now offers web surfers and visitors planning a trip to the museum a completely unique experience of the galleries.

Pathfinder features not only the interactive floor plan, which is part of the wayfinding system installed throughout the museum for the opening of the Modern Wing, but also the ability to zoom in and out of the panoramic views for closer looks at works of art, direct links to the available catalog information for individual works, and Spanish-language prompts and on-screen navigation tools. The initial launch of Pathfinder includes views of nearly a third of the museum’s permanent collection galleries, with images of the remaining galleries to be added throughout the year.

“The Modern Wing has really been the impetus for numerous widespread changes in the ways the museum makes itself accessible to all visitors, both virtual and real,” said James Cuno, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute. “We have a new building, with its fresh approach to our collections, to the city, and to the landscape around us. And now, with our new interactive pathfinder on the web, we are bringing these fresh approaches to the hundreds of thousands of people who come to our website seeking information about our museum and collections. This pioneering development is a testament to the efforts of our information technology department and our constant quest to serve our visitors to the best of our abilities.”

Led by Sam Quigley, museum Vice President for Collections Management, Imaging, and Information Technology, the Art Institute team worked with Slate Roof Studio, designers of interactive media, and AvantLogic Corporation, the creators of the interactive mapping software MapsAlive. The web version of Pathfinder is based on the new interactive digital wayfinding system which was installed in the museum on touch screens in May for the opening of the Modern Wing. Taking the wayfinding system to the museum’s website offered the museum the opportunity to link it to other web-based resources, such as the online collection catalog and information about daily programs and current exhibitions. Now web visitors are able to view the complete floor plans, click an icon for gallery shots, and virtually “wander” through specific galleries via high-definition digital images that have been stitched together to create 360-degree views of the galleries. Viewers now also have the ability to navigate within the “virtual” galleries by zooming in on individual works of art for a better look or seeing them with other works displayed nearby, the way the curators arranged the galleries. Web surfers can also click on the images to access full information and often descriptive label text about the work using the online collection catalog.

Pathfinder additionally offers information about daily programming and gallery tours, all current exhibitions, special activities in the new Ryan Education Center, and visitor amenities such as restaurants and shops. The site is available in an English language version as well as a Spanish language version. The museum will continue the ongoing process of photographing all the permanent collection galleries throughout the summer, fall, and winter, with the goal of making available every Modern Wing gallery by December. The remainder of the permanent collection galleries will be available online as they are reinstalled as part of the museum-wide renovation project.

About the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is a museum in Chicago’s Grant Park, located across from Millennium Park. Visitors can enter the museum via the Michigan Avenue entrance or the Millennium Park entrance on Monroe Street.

Art Institute of Chicago Launches Interactive Virtual Gallery Tour on Museum Web Site | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.