Michelle Grabner

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  picks March 16, 2017

  Jeffrey Gibson

  For two days during the winter of 1993, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco performed as ostensible natives from the mythical island of Guatinaui in the main lobby of Chicago’s Field Museum. In a sturdy cage, the pair of artists enacted supposedly traditional dances, crafted voodoo dolls, watched TV, and paced the interior perimeter of their confine. Fusco wore a grass skirt and face paint, while Gómez-Peña donned a wrestling mask and blue shorts. The performance was an act of absurdist cultural appropriation, which in turn exposed the unethical and routine practices of Western colonization and

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  picks January 31, 2017

  Albert Oehlen

  Since the 1980s, Albert Oehlen has routinely deployed the tree as a programmatic conceit, a rudimentary scheme that has allowed for mischievous invention within the language of painting. As a rhizomatic figure, the tree offers vast and circuitous navigation potential. It possesses a core (trunk), diverging pathways (branches), and an infinite number of regenerating underground conduits (roots), and thus it is an ideal trope for routing and re-routing painting’s histories and influences. It is not surprising that the artist insists on using the anatomy of a plant over purely abstract and inorganic

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  print December 2016

  Fred Wilson

  Fred Wilson’s exhibitions “Wildfire Test Pit” and “Black to the Powers of Ten,” which have taken over two galleries of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, a venerated teaching collection at Oberlin College, are sagacious follow-ups to the artist’s recent installation at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In the CMA’s Glass Box Gallery, an architecturally scaled glass vitrine inserted into the museum’s original Beaux Arts edifice, Wilson presented a spare installation of merely four works. Conversely, these exhibitions represent his largest combined project to date: an abundant gathering of the artist’s

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  previews May 2016

  “Louise Fishman: Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock”

  In tandem with an independently organized retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, this hometown survey of Fishman’s fifty-year-long career features the painter’s esteemed large-scale gestural abstractions alongside a selection of intimate studio investigations—an assortment of miniature paintings, sketchbooks, and small sculptures—that share the same physicality and unapologetic emotional punch as her bigger, iconic works. The exhibition’s hinge is Self-Portrait, Fishman’s 1960 self-portrait as a boxer,

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  print March 2016

  Paul McCarthy

  White Snow Placemat Drawings, WS, 2013–14, a set of six scallop-edged paper place mats, each depicting an assortment of quickly drawn, naked, dripping, hairy figures engaged in various acts of dominance or submission, set the tone for this simultaneously abject and exuberant show. The coffee and grease stains absorbed into the paper fibers of the place mats evoke bodily fluids discharged by the penciled figures inhabiting the indeterminate pictorial spaces that crowd the savaged found supports. These works were among the fifty-seven included in what was—somewhat unbelievably—Paul

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  print December 2015

  Joseph Yoakum

  The fabulist and inveterate drifter Joseph Yoakum was known to claim that he had traveled the world as a circus man, a soldier, and a train porter during the first six or so decades of his life. In 1962, at the age of seventy-one, he took up drawing and began working out of a storefront gallery on Chicago’s South Side, quickly becoming the self-taught paragon of the city’s art community. Yoakum’s visionary landscapes had an especially profound impact on the developing visual styles of the Chicago Imagists, who were rising to international prominence in the late ’60s (and who made him an honorary

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  print Summer 2015

  Erika Rothenberg

  Since 1991, Erika Rothenberg has employed the form and generic sentimentality of the greeting card as a means of examining a vast range of social ills and political injustices. Rothenberg’s cards, executed simply in gouache and watercolor, evidence the artist’s active imagination and keen facility for satire, tackling themes (per the plaques that served to organize this exhibition) of “religion,” “crime,” “arts and culture,” “sexual abuse,” “abortion,” “civil rights,” “health,” and “education”—in sharp contrast to the congratulations and well wishes one might expect. The resulting compositions

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  print May 2015

  Michael Kaysen

  The exuberant pre-crash 2007 exhibition “Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramics,” in which sixty-four ceramic objects by thirty-one artists crowded Chelsea’s Gladstone Gallery, was a watershed moment for the medium. Today, it’s difficult to remember a time when ceramics was largely relegated to the world of craft, where its forms were attentively cultivated, assessed, and distributed. Or an art world without Sterling Ruby’s basins or Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s slovenly ceramic and furniture sculptures. Michael Kaysen’s exhibition of twenty-one vessels, each titled Bottle and collectively dating

• previews May 2015

  “Arlene Shechet: All at Once”

  For more than twenty years, Arlene Shechet has rigorously worked at the material limits of plaster, paper pulp, and glass. In the past ten, she has also—and with increasing concentration—explored the possibilities of clay. Her experimental work in ceramics demonstrates a fierce aptitude for uninhibited, even overelaborate, sculptural form. Artists such as Jessica Jackson Hutchins and William O’Brien are indebted to Shechet’s ongoing interrogations of brash color, texture, and mischievous display tactics, including mash-ups of functional objects with idiosyncratic

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  print March 2015

  Walter Robinson

  As Walter Robinson’s paintings have evolved, they’ve come to serve as an uncannily accurate gauge for the American art world’s analogously shifting, and increasingly nuanced, attitudes toward consumerism and mass culture. The artist’s early-1980s works—straightforward depictions of drugstore purchases, Budweiser beer cans, a plastic My Little Pony figurine, and Robinson’s personal friends, the artists Martin Wong and Mike Bidlo and critic Carlo McCormick—feature banal subjects facilely scumbled in acrylic paint and initially registered as an ironic wink to the viewer. The portraits

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  picks February 12, 2015

  “Implicated and Immune”

  In 1981, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Over ten years later—the year that drug-therapy “cocktails” became an effective treatment in slowing down the disease—the first exhibition to respond to the epidemic in Auckland, “Implicated and Immune: Artists’ Responses to AIDS,” opened in 1992 at the Fisher Gallery. That milestone featured work from artists including Jack Body, Fiona Clark, L. Budd, and Fiona Pardington. Carrying forward the discourses that have shaped the social and cultural impact of HIV/AIDS in New Zealand, this reprise of that

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  print February 2015

  Lucie Stahl

  Lucie Stahl’s exhibition at the venerated apartment gallery Queer Thoughts in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood was a fitting last project before the gallery relocates to downtown Manhattan. Known for featuring work that embraces the shape-shifting properties associated with the concept of “postidentity,” Queer Thoughts reaffirmed its agenda with a corporeally charged installation punctuated by several cast-polyurethane molds of hands and faces and three of Stahl’s characteristic polymer-coated ink-jet prints of body parts submerged in gel. Stahl ferreted into the private domain of the third-floor