Leigh Ledare film premiere at the Art Institute is both awful and spellbinding
Sometimes the most awful artworks are also the best. “The Plot,” an exhibition by Leigh Ledare up at the Art Institute through the end of the year, is just that...
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The Roundhouse is a stunner, and the art show is good, too
The most jaw-dropping new art space in Chicago isn’t a multimillion-dollar museum expansion designed by a five-star architect and funded by a major capital campaign. That may be the international...
How do objects become art? Roman Ondak’s Arts Club show tries to explain
The largest found object Roman Ondak ever included in an exhibition was the wing of a Boeing 737 aircraft. The wildest were full-grown trees and bushes. The most ephemeral were...
The violent left, abstracted in video trilogy
The title of an exhibition at the Logan Center of experimental videos by artist Cinthia Marcelle and filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado gives pause. "Divine Violence," it's called, and can there...
Suddenly, artist Amanda Williams is everywhere
"It feels like it's been one long day since October 2015." Amanda Williams tells me this, and I believe her. Seemingly overnight, the voluble Bronzeville resident went from relative obscurity...
Art for fall 2017: From revolution to architecture
It's going to be a festive fall in the art world of Chicago: the Architecture Biennial turns 2, the Terrain Biennial turns 3, the MCA turns 50, Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"...
Why we need the Picasso in my front yard
One of the iconic images of Chicago is a bunch of 50-foot-tall pieces of rusty steel that, seen from the right angle, resembles a mix of a woman, an Afghan...
Candida Alvarez’s work has something for everyone
You might think painting's an easy enough task, if you're not a painter. Pick a subject, dip brush in medium, apply color to canvas and voila — something to hang...
Murakami and Perez Cordova form an unexpected symmetry at the MCA
Taken together, two solo exhibitions currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art demand this odd question. The shows are "The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg," a blockbuster retrospective...
National Museum of Mexican Art celebrates its 30th with a protest party
It's tempting to begin this review of "Memoria Presente: An Artistic Journey," the National Museum of Mexican Art's 30th anniversary exhibition, with an update on the Trump administration's plans for...