The viewer may find it disconcerting when Vincent Fecteau’s wonderfully erudite abstract sculptures reveal themselves, on close inspection, to be made of papier-mâché. Plaster, ceramic, or cast bronze seem the obvious media in which to produce such classically formal exercises reveling in unpretentious plays of shape, volume, color, and contour. But Fecteau is not compelled by elaborate lost-wax casting techniques; instead he uses simple means, building up these recent works with paper, glue, and gesso.

Curator James Rondeau notes in the exhibition brochure that “few artists have made such

Conversations about Jim Lutes regularly devolve into assessments of his “Chicago-ness,” or the degree to which the artist from Washington State who relocated to Chicago for his MFA and remained here has absorbed deep-seated local traditions into his art. Is Lutes heir to the roughneck figural surrealism dating back to Chicago artists such as Ivan Albright, Seymour Rosofsky, and Ed Paschke? Is his predilection for exploring blue-collar themes with an assertive “up yours” cynicism and dark humor an act of seamless continuity, the artist a working-class Chicago craftsman with a paintbrush? This