Monthly Archives: November, 2006

increasingly, MySpace profiles are being used for less social purposes. MySpace’s astronomical growth has led the site to be taken seriously by many companies, and changes to the site have made it far easier to search the content of profiles. Businesses and journalists are using the site to find out about youth trends, while employers, educational institutions and law enforcement officials are starting to use the site as a means of finding information about specific individuals.

Reasons for voting, reasons for impeachment, UK campaign against Muslims and "the veil," US to militarize space, sentencing of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart.

Kathy Richland Pick and Tricia Moreau Sweeney win grant from National Museum of Women in the Arts, in an event developed by board member and SAIC Arts Administration graduate student Michal Russo.

Sally Mann’s photographs, idyllic depictions of both her children and the Southern landscape, are created on an enlarger that is over sixty years old and held together by duct tape. Mann was more than willing to share this and other trade secrets with the sizable crowd that gathered to hear her speak about her work. “It’s like snake handling,” she said, describing her practice, “there’s potential for both danger and transcendence.”

A conversation between photographers Tina Barney and Larry Sultan regarding their artistic practices over the past decades at the Art Institute of Chicago, an opening lecture at the exhibition "So the Story Goes." The formal dialogue between the two highlighted similarities between their works, particularly their common interests in family and the representation of everyday experience.

Entering the tenebrous Gallery X to see Yong Hyun Chung’s show “Trans” is like stumbling into a private wonderland. The four columns of what seem to be spinning totems of pots, bowls, and vessels subvert their conventional functions as they transport the viewer to a place of self-reflective contemplation.

Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being, a mini-exhibition at the Smart Museum. Piper’s character of the Mythic Being has often been interpreted as a symbol of the “threatening” black man; she, a multiracial woman, adopts stereotypically masculine behavior, swaggering and sitting with legs spread, to accompany her Afro wig and fake mustache. Political events of the time, such as the bombing of Cambodia, the Kent State massacre, the women’s movement, and the proliferation of conceptual art shows led Piper to create the persona in order to address current issues and remake herself as an art object.

"Most Sincerely Yours," a small group show in the Wendy Cooper Gallery Project Room, presents the work of Harrell Fletcher, Peter Gallo, Mathew Sawyer, and collaborators Aline Bouvy and John Gillis. Curated by director John McKinnon, a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the show’s work follows in the footsteps of artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres by taking on the issue of relational aesthetics, as first proposed by theorist Pierre Bourdieu and more recently by Nicolas Bourriaud. According to such thinking, an artist’s role is not to reflect social surroundings, but instead to create and complicate situations that will generate new understandings of how we interact as human beings.

Chicago fashion designer and visiting artist from Germany, Anke Loh, who currently teaches in SAIC’s fashion department, is the first fashion designer to incorporate Lumalive in her work. She used the technology to display video of Chicago and Antwerp’s city life. The square panels occupy the fronts of her black and cream dresses. Loh’s designs were clean, sleek, and restrained, yet elegant.

Natalie solves your relationship problems with tender, nurturing care, this time with a recipe for baking bread.

Natalie solves your relationship problems with tender, nurturing care, this time with a recipe for baking bread.

Culture-jamming performance artists, the Yes Men, called public attention to the ongoing post-Katrina housing crisis in New Orleans on August 28th 2006. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano posed as representatives of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and took the stage alongside New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco at the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit held in Kenner, Louisiana.

Director Hans Neuenfeld's production of Mozart's Idomeneo censored in Berlin; giant slides in the Tate Modern; high school art teacher suspended for recommending figure drawing with nude models; Singapore visual arts biennial.