Praeterita

  DUTCH SHOES, 27 inches high. Clay, wood, objects, charcoal, graphite Melissa Stern is a New York-based artist and writer who is exhibiting work at Firecat Projects in Chicago, in a solo show titled Does She or Doesn't She? The art consists of paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures and found object assemblages, in all of which we see a common feature: hair. Specifically, a female face or head or form with the hair styled in every imaginable fashion (and probably some beyond imagining). The theme is both playful and serious. Serious, because the idea underpinning the subject matter is the way in which a woman's hair has, since time immemorial, been one of the key ways in which female identity is determined. The title of the show derives from an old advert for hair products, and the unsubtle message that when a woman "fixes" her hair, her personality is completed, which comes with the opposite corollary that "unfixed" hair leads to a socially incomplete wom...

Between 2011 and 2018 I was the Chicago correspondent for Hyperallergic , the New York-based art blog read throughout the global art world. This post is part of a series on my blog devoted to writing about artists in Chicago. Eden Unluata-Foley is a multi-discplinary artist based in Chicago. He is currently (summer 2020) taking part in a city-wide exhibition of public art called Art in Place , for which artists exhibit work outside their homes as a way to continue connecting their practice with the community during the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic-induced social lockdown.  Unluata-Foley's work is a sculpture titled Staffs of Memories and Knowledge . All kinds of common and unusual objects (household items such as buckets, old cameras, a model car, a Moorish-style lamp, gourds, cans) are glued together in seemingly random chains around lengths of wood. The ensemble is then painted a uniform yellow that serves to harmonise the mix of items and render some of them difficu...

A few weeks ago I saw a show of work by Chicago artist Ahavani Mullen in the beautiful space of the Chicago Art Source on Clybourn. Her paintings are abstract collections of marks and skeins of paint which hover between texture and liquid space, like pools of water through which float branches, sand, stone, and slowly dissolving ink. In the photo above, you can also see her experiments in transferring the discoveries she's made in painting to three dimensions. Talking to the artist, we covered a range of topics: the process of painting; how a series of seemingly automatic gestures often arrives at the point where one large shape occupies the centre of the canvas/panel; how one knows when a painting is finished; artist's residencies such as the Vermont Studio Center; the importance of an artist having a studio. Mullen's work is extremely subtle, yet it catches the eye immediately and draws you in for a closer look. To see more of her work, here is her website .

I took this picture in the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago. These are three terracotta figures made in southern Mexico or central America, some time between 200 BCE and 400 CE. Meso-American art is one of my favourite things to look at in museums. They could not be more different from the sculpture produced in Greece and Rome during the same time period, but to me they are the equal of classical sculpture in their expressiveness. NB: It's probably inaccurate to call them sculptures, because the anonymous craftsmen who created them may have done so for religious reasons. That is, they were creating figures for ritual use, rather than works of art. Though just as in Western art, there's no reason why those should be mutually exclusive. Another thing: having worked on making my own little figures in clay recently, I have a deep appreciation for the skill it takes to make figures like this -- particularly feet and hands!

During my last visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I came across these old favourites of mine: a cabinet full of little bronze sculptures by Daumier: There are about thirty of them, each one a caricature of a French politician or public figure from the 1830s. Daumier fashioned them in clay in about 1835, but they weren't cast in bronze until nearly a century later. What I love about them is not just that they are wickedly exaggerated, but that each one is so intensely individualised, so that even though we don't know who any of these people are, we have no doubt that they are accurate exaggerations of real people, with their twisted faces, daft hairstyles, ogreishly ugly faces, and mean expressions. They may be satirical, like cartoons in three dimensions, but they are still so very skilful and so very beautiful.

I had a minor scrape with the car at the weekend, which meant that I had to take it to the dealer yesterday to get it repaired. This meant that I had to go out to the northwestern part of Chicago, to a suburb called Niles (where my wife was raised, as it happens). There's not a lot to do there while you're waiting for four hours, so I walked a few miles to a Catholic cemetery. When I got to the middle of the cemetery, I came across a series of well-designed memorial chapels faced with this mosaic mural: I think the artist was somebody called Wilfredo Bonsol, thought I couldn't find any information on him online, so I'm not sure. But the skill in the mosaic tiling is really impressive. Look at the gradation of tones and hues in the sky: In between the interment crypts, I found a bronze statue of the baptism of Christ, again a well-executed piece, kind of old fashioned in its theme, but made in a style that reminds me of religious sculpture from the 1950s: ...

My installation COALTOWN is now on show at Terrain Exhibitions, an experimental outdoor art space in Oak Park, Illinois (which is adjacent to Chicago going west). I spent a long day in the studio last Saturday getting the diorama finished. This is a short video I made at the end of the day: And here is how it looks in situ , together with some pieces installed in the garden/yard in front of the house: The work originates in memories of growing up in a mining town in the north of England, and is preoccupied with how to represent memory, industry, violence, death. You know, small subjects.

"in their clothes", branches, shrink wrap, tape, 12' x 18' x 14', 2015 Oak Park, famous as the home of the young Ernest Hemingway and the slightly less young Frank Lloyd Wright, is a separate township about ten miles due west of downtown Chicago, though it merges almost seamlessly with the city in a way that makes you feel you’re visiting a leafy Chicago neighborhood. Speaking of leafy, Josh Garber ’s installation at Terrain , Oak Park, consists of tree branches and limbs connected by shrink wrap and tape that clamber up off the ground and claw spikily at the air, denuded of foliage but seemingly revivified into a new stage of growth. Titled “in their clothes,” the sculpture is 12 feet x 18 feet x 14 feet, and is placed like all of the exhibitions at Terrain on the streetside lawn between two houses, opposite a local school and open to all weather which on the day I visited was warm, but not enough to melt the piles of surrounding snow. The whiten...

Rita Grendze has a studio at Water Street Studios in Batavia, Illinois. It's in a beautiful sandstone building near the Fox River, in an area of similar buildings that have been converted into studios and spaces for artists, designers, small contemporary businesses, and so on. Rita's space is on the small side, but it's full of light and has everything an artist needs, such as a comfortable chair. Her work is object-based, mainly involving the transformation of found objects or pre-existing materials into new configurations, the better to bring out their semantic relations to one another, or perhaps to stumble upon new meanings. The work in progress that was attached to the wall when I visited was made up of old music scores, rolled up and tied together to make a structure that looks like a giant molecular diagram. The age of the paper means that it has a pleasant ivory colour, which makes the sculpture/piece seem more solid and marble-like. You can find mor...

Continuing the interview series in which I pose the same six questions to each artist. Today's interviewee is Donna Hapac, an artist from Chicago who makes intricate sculptures from natural materials, twine, and pigment, that extend up from the floor or out from the wall in a process of improvised growth. You can see more of her work here . "Figure 8 Infinity," 2011 ,  21" x 16" x 43",  reed, wood, waxed linen, wood stain PH: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?   DH : I primarily use natural materials, such as reed, cane, and waxed linen. I like their flexibility and resilience. I initially was drawn to painting and drawing, which I pursued for many years. Then I discovered fiber art about 25 years ago and was very much taken with the idea of building forms out of these materials. They are drawings in space and containers of meaning. The forms, structures, and patterns that I find in nature inspire me. My process is very meditative and...

Part 26 of an interview series in which I pose the same six questions to artists of all types, to find out their individual mechanisms of creativity  (previous interviews:  1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ,  6 ,  7 ,  8 ,  9 ,  10 ,  11 ,  12 ,   13 ,   14 ,  15 ,  16 ,  17 ,  18 ,  19 ,  20 ,  21 ,  22 ,  23 ,  24 , 25 ) . This interview is with Seth Friedman , a sculptor living in the Pacific northwestern United States. I first encountered him via Twitter , a sort of throw-away social medium that led me in fact to a website full of work that combines hefty materials like stone with real wit. "I Like Arabia and Arabia Likes Me," 2011, Persian travertine, 14" x 22" x 17" PH: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?  SF : I feel like Richard Simmons’ to rocks: pretty much any kind will do. My special affection is saved for marble (Italian Carrara/Irania...

(L) Jan Chenoweth: 'Graves on a hill', Acrylic on canvas, 24" by 24"                                                             (R) Roger Halligan: 'Fortune Flowers I', 11" x 4.5" x 4.5"                     When I was in Chattanooga last weekend, I visited a number of artists' studios on the south side, an area that has been transformed in recent years by the arrival of painters, sculptors, glass artists, furniture makers, and other creative people. The two artists who impressed me the most were painter Janet Chenoweth and sculptor Roger Halligan , who have a building near Main Street that combines a large workshop and studio area at the back with a beautiful gallery area at the front. They were kind enough to agree to a joint interview, and I began by asking them to talk about their wo...

This week's Meditation is on a sculpture by David Smith (1906-1965).   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This week's (slightly late) Meditation is on a sculpture by American artist Jim Dine that I saw in the Denver Art Museum. If you have any thoughts on the opinion expressed in this short talk, please leave a comment.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader