Review: Homage to a City’s Queer History / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Edie Fake is a radical punk queer feminist activist. He is currently “at large” in Chicago. Before that, he was driving around the country in a yellow school bus doing the gay performance “Fingers.” At the opening of his solo exhibition Memory Palaces at...
Top 5 Chicago Shows of 2012 / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Let’s get one thing straight, East and West Coasters: Chicago is not just that city of corrupt politicians, huge gusts of wind, lake effect snow, too much beer, deep-dish pizza, da Bears, the forever-losing Cubs, the Renzo Piano Modern Wing at the Art...
Review: The Failures of an Artist Versus the Failures of America / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Artist Paul Perkins sees the problems created by capitalism. But, instead of providing subtle critique or some perceptive angle or even a conversation starter, he regurgitates what we already know. Perkins’s exhibition at Chicago’s Peanut Gallery attempts to...
Review: Artistic Bootlegging Begins in Cincinnati and Ends in China / Hyperallergic
KANSAS CITY, MO — If Chairman Mao were actually a monkey with prison tattoos, and if Alphonso Taft didn’t have that bump on the left side of his forehead, artists Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis wouldn’t have had as much fun playing with form in their whimsical...
Interviews: How Two Curators Will Bring a Chicago Sensibility to the 2014 Whitney Biennial / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — The 2014 Whitney Biennial won’t be like every biennial before it. The always anticipated art world event will partly be a response to the Occupy movement’s call to end the Whitney Biennial, which charged that the major exhibition was just another art world...
Review: The Snake and the Lost War Diary / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Irena Knezevic’s exhibition Night of the World: Flatworks, Multiples and Music Programs embodies a heavy-handedness that could only come from the mind of a Serbian artist living in America post-Yugoslav Wars. The exhibition takes its inspiration not from a...
Alicia Eler, Chicago Correspondent for Hyperallergic
Woohoo! I'm pleased to announced that I am an official Chicago correspondent for NYC-based art blog hyperallergic. If you have a Chicago show that you think I should write about, email me at alicia@hyperallergic.com. Hyperallergic is an online publication that brings...
Review: The Great Refusal: Videos Taking on New Queer Aesthetics / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics induces a sort of lonely feel, one that falls closer in line with Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which argues that “the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to...
Small Town Gay Community / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — In the United States, the idea of a rural gay community may bring to mind snapshots from the 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar, which captures the goings-on of two gay bars in the rural Deep South. Historically, the gay bar has been a community gathering...
Queer Art’s Not Just About Gender—A Chicago Survey / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Just because you say art’s queer doesn’t mean it’s about depictions of dicks and vajayjays, man. Over the past few months, two large-scale exhibitions dealing with changing notions of what “queer art” even is have overflowed into Chicago’s art world. The...
The Best of Chicago’s MDW Art Fair: Cat Taxidermy, Tarot, and Interactive Icebergs / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — MDW is not an art fair focused on sales and bringing in big-name collectors. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Co-founded and co-directed by threewalls, Roots & Culture, Document, and Public Media Institute, and run entirely collaboratively, MDW offers...
Review: A Wild Forest of Queer Aesthetics / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Curator Danny Orendorff’s 19-artist exhibition All Good Things Become Wild and Free at Carthage College’s H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art located in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a textually rich, difficult-to-describe arrangement. It is a forest plucked from the...
Review: Surreal Sculptures Remixing Nature Provoke Environmentalist Concerns / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Walking down an urban Chicago street on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I noticed a gathering of greenery nestled in the crack of a sidewalk jutting up against a cement wall. These small moments of nature poking through the urban landscape reveal themselves when...
There’s An Emoji For That / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Instead of saying to yourself, “There’s an app for that,” repeat after me: “There’s an emoji for that.” In our technology-inundated world of constantly being glued to the glowing screens of our iPhones and Androids, more apps are not the answer to our...
Review: Artists Ask What It Means to Like, Share, Follow / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — In an ideal social media universe, Facebook users would feel comfortable enough to openly tell all of their friends whether or not they’re organ donors, what they’re up to this weekend, and if they are in a relationship, single, or looking. There would be no...
Review: A Designer Reimagines Contemporary Office Space / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Given that most of us labor in virtual space these days and our work requires little more than a desk, a computer, and a keyboard to get done, why do we stick to such outmoded concepts as cubicles and cafeterias? A current exhibition at the Art Institute of...
Art News: Ukrainian Catholic Church Declares Taras Polataiko’s Sleeping Beauty Project “Lesbian Propaganda” / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — Fairytales are make-believe until a country’s Catholic Church decides to protest them. Ukranian-Canadian artist Taras Polataiko’s experimental performance work “Sleeping Beauty,” a modern-day retelling of the titular fairytale restaged at the National Museum...
Review: Artists Point the Way Toward a New Queer Aesthetic (NSFW) / Hyperallergic
I’d cruise slick Chicago boy bodies at the infamous bathhouse Steamworks if I were a cisboy, or at least marginally passable as an effeminate dude. Suffice it to say that my gender isn’t welcome amidst the mist of those showers. My desire for dick instead led me...
Art News: Expo Marks the Beginning of Chicago’s New Art Identity in Post-Mayor Daley Era / Hyperallergic
CHICAGO — The excitement and buzz around Expo Chicago, the Windy City’s resurgence into the international art world, felt deafening. Practically every artist in the city who knew how to handle art was in some way involved with the fair. Newcitynewspaper, the city’s #1...
Art News: “Did Lady Gaga Rip Off Artist Taras Polataiko?” / Hyperallergic
By Alicia Eler Lady Gaga hosted the last big party of fashion week on September 14 by creating “Sleeping With Gaga,” a performance that has uncomfortable similarities with Canadian-Ukranian artist Taras Polataiko’s recent Sleeping Beauty. After drawing a lot of...