For nearly 75 years since its initial unveiling at the eponymous exhibition dedicated to him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1947, Mies van der Rohe’s “Fox River House” (as it was originally referred to) captured the attention of the world of architecture and the national press. Mired in mystery, metaphysics and controversy, Farnsworth House has been variously depicted as the pinnacle of the modern architect’s spiritual quest to capture the immaterial within the material or the hubristic flapping of architecture’s wax wings.

In 1945 Edith Farnsworth commissioned Mies to design and eventually construct a weekend country house located in Plano, a rural site along the Fox River west of Chicago. The Fox River was infamous for overflowing its banks each spring. Despite this fact, the client and architect, each interested in situating the house within the landscape and to engage a specimen black sugar maple sited the fireplace so that it “stands directly opposite” and that the “sitting area is framed by the fire and tree through which one looks out to the larger landscape and the Fox River.”

My Eyes, Your Gaze, a book by my friend Darya Foroohar, begins with an intense discomfort with the body. “I always feel weird looking in the mirror,” Foroohar writes, the illustrated version of her leaning towards a mirror that glares back, both suspicious of the other. “My body has changed so much that no version of me looks right anymore.”

It’s a sentiment that I think many readers can relate to—I certainly do. The cognitive dissonance of looking at yourself and seeing something foreign, surprising, even existentially terrifying. I’m not sure I can name a single young woman, or any-aged woman for that matter, who hasn’t felt some variation of this discomfort with the body.

I moved to Chicago because I wanted to make art with my friends. I wanted to find them. My friends. We had always thought the world was ending, and especially then we believed it was ending because of ignorance. A dangerous position, teetering on narcissism, but not an unhealthy one for kids looking for work. I believed art could change worlds—yours, if you were alone, which means if you didn’t belong to the dominant world, and ours. On a fundamental but not always practical level, I considered us as one organism, like how moss softens noise or octopi store ganglia and forty million neurons in each of their arms. I still believe this, that we are one and also not. I believe it for the young and therefore, for all of us. 

Haegue Yang: Flat Works at The Arts Club of Chicago presents a remarkable retrospective of Yang’s two-dimensional works spanning three decades. While Yang is celebrated internationally for her sculptural and immersive installations, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse into her flat works, which are often overshadowed elements of her practice. These include series like Hardware Store Collages, Lacquer Paintings, Non-Foldings, and Mesmerizing Mesh, as well as works from her Trustworthies and Edibles series, all highlighting her nuanced exploration of the concept of “flatness.”

In fifth grade, I was the new kid in school, an outsider, teased by other girls for my unusual height. It didn’t help when our class read the novel that won the Newbery Award that year: Sarah, Plain and Tall. In bed at night, I would bring myself to tears, recalling the day’s indignities. Inspired by Tom Sawyer, I would imagine that I could attend my own funeral, where my callous classmates would weep over how they’d mistreated me.

“Poor Sarah!” they would say. “If only we’d known how she suffered!”

One night, my sadness led to action. I had seen an episode of Magnum P.I. in which a blonde woman emptied the powdery contents of a handful of capsules into a tub of vanilla ice cream, then tearfully spooned the ice cream into her mouth as the credits rolled to “Rich Girl” by Hall & Oates. When I reached for a bottle of pills on my mother’s side of my parents’ bathroom cabinet, I didn’t know what the pills were for. I only knew that taking a lot of pills was something a person could do to stop hurting. I poured all the pills into my hand, swallowed them, and went to bed.

THE 3320 DANCE SERIES IS A NEW TWO-WEEKEND MINI-FESTIVAL held in the transformed garage space at Dovetail Studios—a large studio in the front of the building reimagined as a black box theater with ample pipe and drape. Lit by large LED lights mounted on tripods to the front and back, the visuals and audio were masterfully managed by A/V technician Richard Norwood.

It feels like a deep reconsolidation of the dance scene in general in Chicago, which in recent months has been rocked with largely (and inexplicably, even criminally) unreported closings and turmoil.

While most art today is shown in bare-bones white cubes which do nothing for the work that lies within, certain venues are able to impart an ineffable vitality on their inhabitants. Whatever’s shown on their interior is assimilated flawlessly into the space and, in a process only attributable to magic, suffused with new life. It’s no coincidence that most of these spaces—think of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall or the Guggenheim’s ubiquitous spiral ramp—are grand beyond conception, decked out with high ceilings and opulent skylights. Every one of these boxes is checked by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center, where a topical show entitled “Surviving the Long Wars: Transformative Threads” is on view until December.

The most memorable exhibits in these spaces tend to be those which do the least, letting the space work its magic. (Hence the adulatory praise afforded to Olafur Eliasson’s unembellished sun at Turbine Hall or Gego’s rudimentary geometries shown at the Guggenheim.) “Surviving the Long Wars: Transformative Threads” is no exception, allowing the GAR Hall’s monumental ornateness—gilded lunettes with inlaid floral decoration, ten-light chandeliers hung by chains, and a coffered ceiling with more awe-inspiring starbursts than I could count—to frame and inform its ideological project.

I was shopping for a suit to attend several weddings in the summer of 2023 at an obscure vintage clothing store in Knights Hill, London which I initially mistook for being closed. I rang the buzzer twice before a short, well-dressed Italian led me from the sparse alley into a room densely packed with clothes, where you had to maneuver between stacks of pants, shirts and stands overflowing with belts. The proprietor, Massimo, brought me one suit after another, making adjustments to his mental estimate of my frame, while fabric piled over the door of the change room, 

It’s not enough to like it, you only leave with a suit you love, 

he said, and heaped another three over the top. The brown suit with stout, retro collars caught my attention and fit me well. I bought it and traveled the forty minutes back to where I was staying with a sense of achievement, but while unbagging the garment I was met with outsize disappointment. Reading in Italian the materials 75% poliestere, 25% viscosa, the suit changed before my eyes into a drab costume, the glow of this experience, searching for the store, the individuating feeling of talking to Massimo—to be seen, and fitted—all of this interaction instantly subverted. I left with something I loved, I arrived with something I resented. 

As the editor of The Genocide House and the live-in partner of its author, Robert Kloss, I feel an aura of intimacy and unfamiliarity around its construction. I have seen Robert typing at his desk every day, working on something (or somethings?). I have seen the stacks of books beside his desk, growing and morphing in theme. I have seen stray print-outs of pages punctuated with — s, filled with notes in Robert’s intimidating hand, his weird, wild script, like words carved out with a knife. But even after reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading The Genocide House, much of Robert’s process remained a mystery to me. So, on an unseasonably hot afternoon in September, I communed with this maker of mysteries.

Ágota Kristóf is, on the one hand, a highly acclaimed writer whose best work is on syllabi internationally. On the other hand, she is so widely unknown that a joke circulates, started by Slavoj Žižek, that she is a mispronunciation of Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime. She’s not.

Ágota Kristóf is a Hungarian refugee who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. She was born in the village of Csikvánd, Hungary in 1935 to an art professor mother and schoolteacher father. Kristóf had an early appetite for reading and creating stories. The idyllic childhood adventures she shared with two brothers were curtailed by war and its aftermath, and by the criminal conviction of her father. At 19, Kristóf married her former teacher. Two years later, when the Soviet military violently suppressed the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Kristóf, her husband, and their infant child fled the country, as did a quarter million Hungarians.

I could spend days wondering if I should’ve chosen differently or how I could've said it another way filling myself with dread as those thoughts pick me apart. Could I imagine confronting myself in front of an audience while trying to paint or draw that feeling? Gods, no. In The Monster Studio, Riva Lehrer invites authors, performers, podcasters, a sculptor, art critic and theorist to do just that. To think of themselves as agents of change, how they are disruptors in the world and to see themselves as “actors rather than acted upon.” Collaborators join Lehrer in a smaller, private recreation of her studio for a public conversation on the idea of the monster.

Furthering the collaborative aspect, audience members are welcomed to share their thoughts and questions in their own way disrupting the flow and find themselves a voice in what would otherwise be a private conversation. Bringing a subject together with the audience to explore some shared feelings practices a communal bonding that I feel continues to turn Lehrer’s practice inside-out. At the end of their sessions, the pieces are hung in the front of the gallery for everyone to come and enjoy.

Andrea Carlson speaks gently in a short documentary for her exhibition at the MCA: “Historically, landscape painting is violent. It’s about possession of the land, even though it might be plastered over with beautiful lighting and vast views: it’s based on empty landscape. Well, how did the landscape get emptied?”

Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizon is the latest of MCA’s Chicago Works series. In this exhibit, the artist invites the viewer to investigate the dehumanizing nature of landscape paintings, which excavate the surroundings of their memories, identities, symbols, culture, creatures, people, heritages, and histories.

Landscape paintings hold a special romantic position in art history. The wall paintings in the Greek and Roman eras captured the marvels of the great empires, followed by religious paintings using the forests and creeks as the backdrop of divine encounters. In the 16th century, the landscape began to be regarded as an independent subject, corresponding to the rising interest in the natural world during the Renaissance era. Classical landscapes, modernist landscapes, impressionist landscapes, even photography…the sceneries have changed, but some characteristics of landscape art remained painfully cohesive: the brutal suspension of the land into statisity.

Heather McAdams was a legendary name in Chicago during the halcyon seventies and eighties, when her wackadoodle comics appeared regularly in the Chicago Reader. The shambling goofballs who frequented her panels—which, unlike the blockheaded vulgarity of the 60s comix scene, opted for risible personal anecdotes—effected a congeniality among viewers that only her rough-around-the-edges style could achieve. Decades after her long stint at the Reader, McAdams’s career is being memorialized at Firecat Projects, where a smorgasbord of work from recent years is on display. 

McAdams wasn’t a vocational cartoonist by any means. She started at the Reader to fund her true passion, avant-garde filmmaking. (Every bit as bumbling and aimless as the characters in her panels, when she did make her foray into the world of movies, she frequently introduced herself as “a part-time cartoonist, performance artist, film instructor, junk salesperson, sculptor, painter, movie star, and ardent supporter of the Woolworth’s lunch counter.” (Layer upon layer of camp.) But her cartoons began a fecund artistic practice that came to encompass pencil and watercolor portraits, which make up the bulk of this show.

I’d passed out on a frail settee, legs dangling over an arm, the leopard print button-down I’d bought at Brown Elephant torn along a flank. On the top unit of a weathered three-flat. Piles of videocassettes lined the walls. Potted ivies decayed on a windowsill. A stuffed, one-eyed macaw sat perched in a birdcage on a bulging U-Haul box. The stench of fungal tomatoes wafted from a ripped Hefty bag dumped by the front door.

“You need to go,” the woman said.

“Easy,” I told her. “Where am I?”

She broke apart cookie dough on her kitchenette counter. “Logan. Get out.”

This pre-dawn birdie I remembered had been a suave master of gargantuan sexuality. Complete lack of hesitation to caress Evan Junior, in public, at her whim, but at the same time not touching it gratuitously, only at those pitch-perfect moments when our eyes locked and the liquor lightening was flashing. Talking the way that erotic goddess still strutting through the jazzy ghettos of my memory would move her petite, jeans-bound ass in slow-motion samba and at the same time keep her head still as an Ancient Greek bust.

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” I first encountered this quote when visiting the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in New Mexico and her estate at Ghost Ranch, where I was introduced to her work. I’m not often one who is deeply impacted by quotes, but once I read this sentence in 2020, Georgia O'Keeffe's words became the first day of the rest of my life. At the time, something struck me about her work that I could not understand as a budding artist. But I’m not the only one O’Keeffe has inspired.

The current exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago titled “Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance” brings together for the first time the complete series of collages that Kelly produced in Paris between 1951 and 1953. The series consists of nine works on paper and one painting made in September of 1953 to bring the investigation to completion. The format of the works consists of one initial longish rectangle and then eight squares “arranged by chance in a 40-inch-wide grid formation” (quoted from the exhibitions literature). Again, as stated in the exhibition notes, these works were produced during a crucial phase of development in the artist’s career.

At the time, Kelly was continuing to move away from his traditional atelier type education of drawing from the figure in the morning and painting from the figure in the afternoon and these collages deepened his commitment to chance-based techniques and non-compositional strategies. Kelly was also attracted to papier gomette, a commercially produced “gum-backed colored paper commonly used by French schoolchildren” in 20 available colors in order to free himself from expected color combinations. He was also attracted by the humble nature of the material to undercut the work as a precious art object.

Personal adornment is as much a form of concealing as revealing. I approach “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” from the perspective of fashion. The artist was a painter who knew how to sew, holding a lifelong fascination with fashion, observing its trends, ideals, and fetishes with a critical eye since her early years watching her mother get dressed. The artist made much of her own clothing, given fashion’s limited offerings for a woman of her 6’ 1” stature. Fashion was one of many visual sources that fueled Ramberg’s creative practice.

A little setup to get us going. The opening lines (in part) of the interview with Richard Rorty in Volume 2, number 2 of the Bridge Journal by Sam Fleischacker are:

“Philosophers used to be heavily in the business of arguing for or against religious faith of various kinds. Most of us have stopped doing that, but in a time where the return to a very traditional and non-rational Christianity, Islam and Judaism has become such a prominent, and dangerous, feature of the world’s political landscape, isn’t this a job to do which we should return? On your views, though, it would be difficult to do that, no?

“It was in great part to prove or disprove the existence of God, miracles, an afterlife, etc. that much of the heavy machinery of the metaphysical and epistomological systems you oppose was developed. It is hard to imagine launching a useful argument on these questions using merely the tools of science, literature, or its political rhetoric. So if you agree with me that it is imperative to return to that issue—and maybe you don’t—how would you think we should go about doing it?”

“‘Only in Dark the Light’ is Pooja Pittie’s third solo exhibition at McCormick Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2016. The seven paintings and three fiber art installations on view were made in 2023 and 2024. The paintings build upon yet depart from the artist’s previous work, while the fiber art carries her evocative abstraction, exuberant color, and irregular lines into a new medium.

“My first impression of the show was formed on the sidewalk. Two intriguing works—’Nowhere to Hide’ and ‘Be in Softness’—were on view through the windows. Nowhere to Hide is a 40-inch square of colors laid in rhythmic, choppy strips. I misperceived it as collage, but once in the gallery, saw that it was canvas painted with acrylics—greens, yellows, reds, and blues washed the surface like watercolors. What I had seen as collage were actually wavering lines in the foreground that appeared to segment the color-washed background into strips.”

A late October Saturday night wind off the lake cut through Henry’s bulky olive winter parka, prickly wool suitcoat, and button-down, heavily starched white shirt. Before dinner, playing two-hand touch anywhere in Lincoln Park, low clouds had threatened snow. Now, yellow streetlights lit the Inner Drive’s sidewalk as Wes and Henry slogged their way south to the Fortnightly.