Tricia Van Eck, the curator down the block
On an unassuming street in Edgewater, amid 1960s apartment blocks housing immigrants from Ethiopia, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, sits a dilapidated mansion with kale and basil in its flowerpots...
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Top 10 art shows for the fall
Do I need to list the humanitarian, environmental, economic or political problems facing the world today? Consult every other page of this newspaper for details. Here find 10 upcoming fall...
‘Rudzienko’: Girls in the forest
Two teenage girls lie on the floor of a pine forest. The brash bottle-red hair of one rests on the tight black jean-clad legs of the other, hands end in...
Say yes: Phyllis Bramson abounds at the Cultural Center
Longtime Chicagoan and veteran art professor Phyllis Bramson has a career retrospective up this summer at the Cultural Center. "Under the Pleasure Dome" is a glorious whirlwind of excess, kitsch...
Here’s why you should visit the National Museum of Mexican Art
There are many good reasons to visit the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen this summer. The most economic is that the museum, which was founded three decades ago...
Old masters, new master — Kerry James Marshall at the MCA
To walk through the top floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art these days is to take a trip across an alternate universe, one where elite cultural institutions aren't filled...
Doubt blooms at the Ren
My grandmother, who died two months ago at the age of 92, was an atheist in her youth. Over time she grew less sure of that position and preferred to...
‘Monster Roster,’ ‘Poor Traits’ look at Chicago artists of 1950s to the ’70s
Chicagoans have a rare opportunity to dive deep into local waters, encounter vital and scarcely seen monsters and emerge alive, perhaps even renewed. The monsters aren't metaphor. In the haunting...
Tony Tasset’s monuments to everyone and everything
The market is up. The market is down. Does it ever go sideways? I wondered this while standing amid the dizzying pointers of Tony Tasset's "Me And My Arrow," a...
The wonders of it all: Exhibitions by Theo Jansen and David Wallace Haskins
Watching Theo Jansen's "Strandbeests" walk feels like seeing the impossible happen. There goes a giant creature made of plumbing supplies, trotting like a horse-cum-centipede-cum-human. The wind gives it a boost,...