We’re on Summer Break!

As part of Intuit Art Museum’s recent reopening, Chicago-based artist and designer Bob Faust unveiled a striking new architectural intervention that reimagines the museum’s façade as both signal and symbol. Wrapping the building in bold, layered imagery drawn from works in Intuit’s permanent collection—including pieces by Henry Darger, Mr. Imagination, and Pauline Simon—the project draws passersby into playful yet reflective encounters. From afar, the vinyl wrap suggests modernist patterning, but closer inspection reveals figurative fragments and gestures that hint at the stories inside.

While different in scope from his recent Wayfindings public sculpture on the West Side, both projects reflect Faust’s commitment to building visual infrastructures of participation, layered with memory, identity, and place. The Intuit project stands as a quietly radical gesture—an outward-facing museum façade that listens back. Bridge Couture Editor Kristin Mariani sat down with Faust to discuss these projects and more in the interview below.

Kristin Mariani: I am so excited to talk about Wayfindings and your façade intervention at the Intuit Art Museum.

Bob Faust: Thank you, thank you. 

Yes, yes. Would you like to start with the more recent Intuit Art Museum project, or Wayfindings? Do you have a preference?

Let's go to Wayfindings first, I think. It has a lot in it.

Great, It's such a beautiful project. Let's begin with community engagement. Wayfindings is a major public art initiative that deeply involves community interaction, located on the city’s new Joint Public Safety Training Campus and newest Boys & Girls Club at 4433 W. Chicago Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. Can you talk about how this participatory process influenced the design that you created? 

Absolutely. It was a big project that took place kind of fast for something as large as it is. It included stakeholders even before anything was done—just the RFP process involved working with the stakeholders. It included: the police department, the fire department, the Boys and Girls Club, Alderman Mitts’ office, and a lot of neighborhood leaders including a few pastors, business leaders, block club leaders, art leaders, and DCASE of course. And then the kicker to it was that there were three architecture firms involved, as well as a landscape architect. So it was a lot of folks that had vested interest and wanted to know that all of their concerns, excitement, and opportunities were going to be acknowledged and worked into the final product.

When the MCA postponed the career-spanning show Indulge Me by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal for a whole year, some hearsay from my gossip network suggested that it was due to the postponement of a rocket launch. The work in question is Canto III (2015), a response the artist made to a rumorhe heard: Saddam Hussein's political party, the Ba'athists, wanted to launch gold busts of the leader to outer space and directly above Baghdad, so the busts, like a satellite, would forever orbit around Earth and be “watching” Iraq. The installation of Canto III further conceptualizes the materialization of this “crazy” space Saddam project, but with a satirical twist. It imagines sending a miniature bust, equipped with a selfie cam, to just below the orbit: close enough that it would send live feed for a year or so before burning into dust by gravity, but not enough to be granted eternity in space (albeit comically as a piece of space junk).

The Ba’athists’ project was never realized, nor did Bilal’s miniature make it to space. But I wasn’t surprised when unverified intel pointed to that the daredevil artist did seek options to tag the sculpture to some commercial rocket launch. After all, it’s not like artists haven’t done it before. Trevor Paglen did it; recently Eduardo Kac did it too. But there’s something strangely poetic about an imaginary project that stems from a rumor and becomes the subject of gossip for a show. It shrouds itself with irresistible myths that point to alternative realities, where what could have happened becomes the focus of interest.

Global contemporary fashion does not have an obvious home in Chicago's museums. The Art Institute has not collected tailored garments as earnestly as they have collected textiles; the MCA’s flirtations with fashion are sporadic; the Chicago History Museum has a mandate to only acquire clothing with local connections; and while the Design Museum could be a promising site for fashion, it has yet to build a serious collection. This leaves the city with a noticeable gap in fashion collection and exhibition norms. When the UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum began shopping its blockbuster exhibition, Africa Fashion, it wasn’t clear a Chicago institution would bid to host it. Surprisingly, the Field Museum, best known for its flora and fauna specimens and towering presence of Sue the T. rex, came forward. But the Field is only partially comprised of wonders of the natural world; it is also rich with marvels of human culture and creation. Fashion in the past and present is how we create and communicate our identities, individually and in community, and with this exhibition the Field has created new narratives for its collections, boldly linking them to contemporary design, and human futures.

Exhibiting African fashion in an institution that had historically displayed cultural objects and garments from indigenous cultures and the Global South (as though those societies had been subsumed and did not have a place in the modern dialogue) helps to reintegrate the relevance of those societies in our continuing human chronicle. Perhaps this is a story of revisions and reparations in a museum collection, or perhaps it is a story of how colonization did not eliminate the traditions of making and dressing—they remained, they were adapted, and with independence, they have shone forth. The pieces in Africa Fashion speak to tradition, but also resilience, self-definition, and a defiant modernity.

April 17, 1975 lives on in infamy as the date of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia’s capitol city, Phnom Penh. This watershed event ushered in the Communist rule of Cambodia which lasted for three grueling years, eight months, and twenty days. During this condensed period, as estimated two to four million people died of starvation, disease or disappearance. Urban centers in Cambodia were emptied and all organized educational, religious, and cultural institutions were abolished. Cambodia was effectively cut off from the rest of world in what has since been called the Cambodian genocide.

The tragedy of this period continues to haunt communities living inside and outside of Cambodia, but it should not be mistaken as a solely defining event. Genocide survivors, as well as second and third generation survivors are also embodiments of bravery and resilience. While committed to sharing stories from this dark history, survivors are also committed to recovering cultural practices, engaging in trauma recovery and moving forward. April 17 th remains a significant date for continuing the work of honoring the past but also casting a prospective future. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the takeover of Phnom Penh, which catalyzed meetings between Cambodian community members around the world.

In Mexican history, the charro—a skilled horseman and master of cattle work—emerged as a national icon during the colonial period and solidified his status in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Dressed in elaborately adorned suits and wide-brimmed sombreros, the charro became a symbol of rural pride, tradition, and patriotic masculinity. His image would come to define la charreada, Mexico’s official national sport, and spread into popular culture as a paragon of honor, discipline, and strength.

This figure finds its echo in the American cowboy, who, though mythologized in different ways, likewise became central to national identity—particularly in the narrative of Manifest Destiny and the mass-murderous, genocidal settling of the American West. In both contexts, the cowboy has been held up as a hyper-masculine archetype: stoic, solitary, shaped by conquest and tethered to land and cattle. But these histories, deeply entangled with colonialism, erasure, and exclusion, often obscure the roles women and Indigenous peoples played in shaping equestrian traditions.

One thing that sets EXPO Chicago apart from many other major art fairs is its deep connection with Chicago’s art community as a whole. While the on-site fair at Navy Pier has come to an end, remember: there are still plenty of things to do at this year’s off-site partners. If you weren’t able to make it to this year’s EXPO Chicago due to travel limitations or scheduling conflicts, you still have some time left to visit the off-site events and exhibitions hosted by EXPO ART WEEK partners.

Rhythms beyond conventional time are what govern nature: cycles of tumult and rest, fertility and decay. Seasons become one way of measuring this change and invoking these rhythms. And seasons are the most salient reminders that we, of the human world, are intimately bound to nature’s rhythms––but only if we can listen and see and feel them. In Fallow Season, a wide-ranging exhibition of works exploring the affective force of the natural world, Detroit-based artist and environmentalist Kristina Sheufelt proposes inventive methods for restoring our relationship to the earth and its cadences.

Situated in the first floor galleries of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Fallow Season is the latest exhibition in the Museum’s Michigan Artist Series. This emphasis on featuring regional talent and uplifting local stories is one of the most appealing aspects of GRAM, positioning itself as an approachable space for artists and audiences alike. For Sheufelt, whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in ecopsychology, cybernetics, and the ecologies of Michigan and the Great Lakes, the museum space itself might be the challenge. How can artwork that is dependent on the transcendent sensory experiences of nature convey its message in a pristine gallery space? The strategies that Sheufelt devises are imaginative and surprising: from photography made on a remote archipelago and videos made under a microscope, to data-informed sculptures and haunting poetry.

Photography has long been thought of as a definitive source for truth and documentation. Lucy Wood Baird’s solo exhibition of mixed media works, entitled What do I call you? challenges this notion by considering photography’s fickle and slippery nature. The show’s title catalyzes questions like: How should Baird’s multi-dimensional and multi-temporal mixed media works be understood and engaged with? Are Baird’s sculptures actual stone or just images of stone? Where did the photographs that make up these stone replicas come from? And, who took these photographs and why?

What do I call you? comprises five works (all for sale by the artist) fabricated by collecting images of marble and stone from various sources. The images are transferred into a manipulatable digital image that is later printed and superimposed onto plexiglass and other layerable platforms. Collaged images are then constructed into tabletop models. These maquettes are then scaled up into the form of mixed media sculptures which combine photography, stone, mirror paper, and plexiglass sheets.

I shuffle, quietly so no one will know I’m awake. I deal ten hands, five cards each. One by one I turn up the hands to see the families. Two remaining cards lie on the pillow. The rule is you can add them later to fix a family if you need to, make it perfect. Tonight, even with extra cards, there are no perfect families. Usually there aren’t. 

Now I sort them, first by suit, then in order of age, and put them away in their box. I say each one’s name as I pick it up from the blanket, before I put them to bed. Goodnight sleep tight, I whisper. 

Spencer and Susanna, King and Queen Spade, are the father and mother. He is handsome and strong and stern, possibly a little cruel, and she is matronly and stern and probably also cruel but beautiful in a thick-faced, confident way. You wouldn’t want to make her mad. They both dress up. Everyone does but especially the Spades. Ace the grandmother is wizened (we learned this word in school but I already knew what it meant), tapered at the top like an A, with brittle elbows and chin. Sometimes Ace is the nanny. Her name is Sue-Ann. Everyone in the family is dark-haired and fair-skinned and severe, and the adults all have deep voices, even Sue-Ann who is the grandmother or the nanny or the aunt or sometimes the baby, when Aces are low. 

It wasn't the record-breaking season on Broadway that drew me out for George Clooney's outing in the stage adaptation of his 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck. I didn’t intend to write about, but felt gravitationally moved to do so. I should state up-front that it’s based on a preview performance I attended on Saturday, March 29, ahead of the show’s official slated opening night on April 3. So, as is standard with previews, some tiny production polishes are still evolving, though the core performances and direction are largely in place.

It’s already a hit, of course, as has been widely reported. Broadway in general is having an over-the-top moment, with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal headlining their own record-breaking run of Othello at the Ethel Barrymore, and Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and Bill Burr in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Palace Theater. So much celebrity yottawattage! Out of all of these, however, I couldn't help but be drawn to the play written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, and directed by David Cromer, telling the story as it does of Edward R. Murrow’s reporting from the heart of the Red Scare, and his transformative tangles with Joseph McCarthy, “the junior senator from Wisconsin.” It stands as one of the most significant markers in my field of study; McCarthyism, after all, fundamentally reshaped the profession of journalism. Those old principles about objective fact, once a cherished guardrail principle and guiding beacon for anyone who cared to call themselves a serious reporter, failed during this era in a way that helped support the Red Scare tactics and necessitated, post-McCarthyism, a shift in journalism to not only writing about the facts of what happened, but also the embrace of a new, important, and world-changing necessity to cover political thought.

Welcome to baby-land, the best spot in town for having kids. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had one. Here cried the future of Glenwood, Ohio, where children never had to dream about tidy sidewalks and friendly cul-de-sacs and a nice new house with a puppy in the yard. They already had it, and their own babies would have it too. 

Just look at the one across the street. A baby boy on his grandfather’s lap. His tiny hands steering the wheel of a Mustang convertible. In the driveway, his parents vroomed like happy idiots. 

For a second, I thought of my mother serving beers at The Buck back home in Lewiston, Pennsylvania. Did that shithole survive? I could still hear the clack of the pool table, still see Mom behind the bar, even if she wasn’t anymore, even if I hadn’t been back in almost ten years.

It’s 32 degrees at the University of Chicago after a busy week of cultural events and programming across the city hosted by the Chicago Panafrica Constellation. A reception is in full swing at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery celebrating Betye Saar’s exhibit, Let’s Get it On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar. The artist is present, and the room is full of enthusiastic admirers. A young woman dressed in a dandelion yellow puffer jacket eagerly approaches the crowd circling the artist, matching the bright yellow exhibit card held in her hand waiting for Saar’s signature. She spots the artist between onlookers and exclaims, "I can't believe it! There she is. This woman made me want to be an artist."

Betye Saar is 99 years old and still making art. She describes the roots of her creative energies grounded in family, growing up alongside people who worked with their hands and made things. Her mother was a seamstress and they made clothes together. Growing up in Los Angeles on visits to her paternal grandmother, she frequently walked by Watts Towers while Italian artist Simon Rodia was building the site. In a 2018 interview with her daughter, also an artist, Saar recalls, “I was a kid who loved the mysterious, the magical, the unknown, the other, and here was the unknown being constructed.”

On view until July 13, 2025, Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland is an exhibition curated through the voices of four artists—Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, Nora Moore Lloyd, and Jason Wesaw. The exhibition serves as both a recognition and a reclamation of Indigenous art histories often sidelined in the dominant narratives of the art scene in the Illinois region (& also beyond).

The exhibition experience begins outside, where three striking pieces adorn the glass exterior, immediately signaling a dialogue between the artworks and the cityscape. Once inside, visitors ascend to the exhibition space, where the objects are safeguarded from sunlight behind imposing metal doors. Inside, Indigenous American art fills the space, offering an immersive experience that is a sensory and intellectual overload in the best possible way. Many guests commented on the smell of sweetgrass that was constant throughout the gallery, after being greeted at the entry by Indigenous voices at an ambient volume.

Though the reputation of Frederick Kiesler has to some degree been resuscitated over the last few decades, he is still perceived as an elusive figure and his career a fly-over realm between (or across) previous and current disciplines.

As an architect Kiesler’s only projects that are generally still discussed are the Art of This Century Gallery for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942 and his continuously evolving Endless House. He is still portrayed as the “greatest non-building architect of our time” a somewhat backhanded compliment by Philip Johnson and reinforced in 1960 by Ada Louise Huxtable the legendary New York Times architecture critic. In addition Huxtable also accused Kiesler’s concept of architecture as being insufficiently architectural and amounted to a kind of “unpardonable reversal of legitimate architectural procedures.”

The idea of an objective image is a premise that never had a solid foundation within the history of photography. While the fidelity of a photographic capture of the scene before the lens proffers a factual image, the meaning remains contingent. Indeed, some of photography’s earliest practitioners and theorists readily understood that the constructed space of the photograph and the visual culture in which it circulated were contentious terrains.

The current photography exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media, cautiously circumnavigates this tension––with a touch of irony in that title––through an exploration of the relationship between photography and the news. Drawing from the Museum’s permanent collection and installed in the Museum’s Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts, the exhibition includes more than 100 objects that trace a twentieth-century chronology of the ways that photographers utilized and leveraged the medium to capture current events and convey a story.

Brutal Companion, Ruben Quesada’s latest collection (Barrow Street Press), delves into mortality, myth, and queerness with striking intimacy. A former Angeleno and founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, Quesada explores themes of cultural displacement, intimacy, and life’s fragility in a way that reaches out to readers like a whispered confession. Anchored in his past work across Revelations (2018) and Next Extinct Mammal (2011), this newest collection often returns to explore themes of cultural displacement, intimacy, and the fragility of life. Reading these tenderly constructed verses, you can sense the sweat, the high, the sadness just on the other side of the page, reaching out to you.

This excellent, visionary and pulsatingly alive volume of Quesada’s work, a product of the Barrow Street Editors Prize, is heavy on all the above themes (delving as it does partly into his devastating 2016 HIV diagnosis), while also diving deep to interrogate memory, loss, damage and transformative personal experiences through the fractures of this diagnosis—and the serrate sting of it seen through a prism of time, aging and illness.

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.