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. 

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.