Last week, word started circulating quickly that Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton had died at the age of 74. I’ve known and been friends with Cynthia since the late 1990’s, where I met her in the music scene, out every weekend at rock shows at Lounge Ax, The Hideout, Empty Bottle — all the usual haunts that dot the landscape of the Chicago’s vast and sprawling music scene.

As someone who spent a little more than a decade (from around 2003-2015) staging art expositions, I watched with amusement as the latest edition of EXPO Chicago went up and came down, to muted praise, just over a week ago. 

When I first encountered the phenomenon of the international art fair in my late twenties (I organized my first exposition at the tender age of 33, just as I was becoming a new father), Chicago was the center of the global art fair market, back then mostly a nationalist phenomenon, and had been for decades. Every country had its own art exposition, but members of the Paris, London, New York and other major art world communities came to Chicago every year on mother’s day weekend for what was then a high-energy, high dollar trade event that had the feeling of something necessary to helping art flourish.

This House is Mine is an in-depth retrospective on late African-American painter Bob Thomas, housed at the Smart Museum in Hyde Park and curated by Diana Tuite. The exhibition is a much-needed reminder of the topicality and poignancy of Thomas' work, being the first museum show on the renowned artist in over two decades.

Ray Johnson c/o is a major exhibition featuring more than thousand pieces, with over one hundred collages alone, spanning at least 6 rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago. Johnson, commonly referred to as the “most unknown artist in New York,” was a trailblazer for mail art in the 1960’s.

“Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970-1995” is a “they don’t make ’em like that anymore!” goldmine placed in the basement galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago. The crème walls and light paired with the vintage magazines and zines hung on the wall brings visitors back to the ‘80s.

The Arnold J. Kemp exhibition currently on view at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery is subtle, but demanding in its subtlety; the way the objects are situated in the spare academic hollow on the University of Chicago’s campus.

Erica McKeehen’s AUTHORING ALLURE is a visual invitation to explore sexuality, growth, identity. Through the lens of portraiture, she captures the vibrancy of burlesque performers and sex workers in their homes and shares the joys and realities of the freelance artist life, doing it all, and dealing with shame. McKeehen says “through my work in burlesque… I have learned to not only love my body but discover the strength and satisfaction of expressing my sexuality proudly.”

We Hold Your Gaze was an exhibition in the Catacombs, the basement of Epiphany Center for the Arts in West Loop, that ran until this weekend. The exhibition was put on by Like Queer Animals, a multi-project collaborative duo made up of artist Jessie Mott and writer and scholar Chantal Nadeau. We Hold Your Gaze featured a series of fantastical hybrid animals painted mostly in water color and accompanied by a series of poems by Nadeau, which center queer rage and experiences of trauma and violence.

Three years and two completed volumes of the Bridge Journal into our publishing and programming history since Bridge emerged as an artistic collective, then evolved into a 501 (c) 3 again, it has again coalesced as a point of conversation that much important, thoughtful, sometimes even new groundbreaking art in our fair city is presented, lauded and promptly forgotten.