THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS: In 1966, friends and recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduates Jim Falconer and Jim Nutt approached Don Baum, director of the Hyde Park Art Center, about mounting a series of small group exhibitions featuring young artists. The first of these, “Hairy Who,” comprising works by Falconer, Nutt, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, and, at Baum’s suggestion, Karl Wirsum, opened later that year. Swiftly embraced by local and national critics, the exhibition announced an open, nondogmatic mode of artmaking, materially polymorphous and engaged with, but not

All was not as it seemed in the garden of silk flowers, bejeweled resin roosters, glittering jacquard tapestries, and shimmering bug brooches that comprised Ebony G. Patterson’s “ . . . for those who bear/bare witness. . . .” Concurrent with her major museum exhibitions in Baltimore and Miami, Patterson’s fourth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche included ten of her most recent installations (all 2018), whose lush representations of flora and fauna transformed the gallery into a tropical landscape “gone awry,” as the artist described it.

Eschewing white walls, Patterson covered the gallery in

Robert Lostutter’s exhilaration with drawing—“Nothing excites me more than a sharpened pencil and a clean white sheet of paper,” he has said—was abundantly evident in “Kyōsei,” his third exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey. Twenty-six meticulously crafted graphite-on-paper images lined the gallery’s walls. In each of the smaller, ten-inch-square works that hung on one wall, a single masculine head occupied the center of a delicately hatched ground. Facing them, two larger drawings—Kyōsei 1 Deep Night Garden and Kyōsei 2 Deep Night Garden, both 2018—depicted figures from the chest up. This intimate