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.

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.