Monthly Archives: May, 2006

...a life-size cardboard cut-out in the center of a patch of red carpeting, behind a knee-high pile of tabloid newspapers titled Celebrity Artist. The front-page photo was the same couple from Lazerhappy. The headline said, “Dominique’s Secret! What she’s keeping from him may end in more heartache.”

Throughout your first three years of undergrad at SAIC, the BFA Show looms in your future, a monolithic inevitability. You put it out of your mind. “It’s a long way off,” you tell yourself, and then, during your last semester, the BFA Show is suddenly upon you. E-mails about mandatory meetings and space claims prompt a fine sweat to bloom at the back of your neck.

Graduating seniors, disappointed by low attendance and shortened exhibition hours, turned critique Hotspot, the BFA Show preview event.

A short review of the BFA show by Katrina Kuntz About 45 minutes into the closing night of the BFA Show, I stumbled into an installation...

Warhol shows are too often loud, lack focus and are filled with work of varying quality. That’s what I was expecting when I recently visited Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to see Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964. What I found was something quite different: a show that is small, intimate and macabre.

The night before interviewing renowned performance artist Karen Finley, I stayed up late and read her new book, George and Martha. The walls of my apartment are thin, and if my laughter kept the neighbors up, it’s all Karen’s fault.

Sex and violence, specifically as they occur in the paintings and drawings of artist Nancy Spero, were the topics of the well-attended April 6 lecture by art historian Mignon Nixon at SAIC.

Chicago podcasters Red Bar Radio, whose game is “pop culture, politics, life and almost anything else, and Bad at Sports.

David Gista's works feature weeping backgrounds, waterfalls of paint and silhouetted, isolated figures, that are generally depicted as if they are walking away from the viewer.

What happened March 10 was an important event in Chicago’s history: over 100,000 people had taken to, and taken over, the streets in peaceful, yet highly impassioned protest against a proposed bill that would make illegal immigrant status a federal offense.

Dean Byington was born in Southern California in 1958 and received his training at the Universities of California Santa Cruz and Berkeley. He continues to live and work in the Bay Area, and has exhibited in San Francisco for the last 12 years.

Seymour Hersh says the Bush Administration is preparing for a possible nuclear strike against Iran; the immigration bill fails in the Senate; retired generals call for Rumsfeld's resignation; new HHS guidelines for abstinence-based sex education; murder of gay Iraqis.

Jerry Saltz’s recent nomination for the Pulitzer in Criticism is highly commendable. In addition to teaching at SAIC, Saltz has done an impressive amount of work in the fields of art criticism and history—he currently serves as Senior Art Critic for the Village Voice, was appointed Advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and has lectured at such institutions as Harvard University and the Guggenheim Museum.

Heartbeat Swap's altruistic priorities benefit disadvantaged Chicagoans. Heartbeat SWAP (Salon for Waking Altruistic Priorities) began in the wake of a field trip to the Chicago Center for Green Technology, a building on North Sacramento Boulevard that was designed and functions using green technology, and that rents space to companies providing environmental services and products.

Readers respond to Emile Ferris's article in our April issue, "Rachel Corrie is not done talking," about the New York Theatre Workshop's canceling its production of "My Name is Rachel Corrie."