ART SCENE: Chicago 2000
By Ivy Sundell
Crow Woods, 159 pages, $29.95 paper
Color radiates from this book of paintings, collages and drawings in an almost tropical profusion, a curious phenomenon given that it presents the works of 71 artists living in Chicago, a city that is so often a study in grays. But Chicago art has always tended toward the chromatic and highly energized, from the paintings of Archibald J. Motley to Barbara Rossi, a reflection of the vigor of the city’s people and the transformative power of the imagination. This handsome volume displays a dazzling diversity of artistic styles and points of view, and — surprise — includes none of Chicago’s most famous visual artists.
Evanston publisher, author and arts advocate Ivy Sundell’s commendable mission is to showcase artists established and emerging whose work deserves to be better known, and to that end, just as she did with her first in-print group show, “The Chicago Art Scene” (1999), she launched a competition for area artists. Two-hundred seventy-nine entered, and their slides were evaluated by jurors Robert G. Donnelley, a director of Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art; Jennifer Robertson Norback, gallery director at Hart Gallery; and Charles Thurow, executive director of the Hyde Park Art Center. The artists selected for inclusion then paid a fee to defray book-production costs. The result is a felicitously nonacademic and unabashedly grass-roots publication.
Each artist gets a two-page spread that features lustrous and sharp color reproductions, his or her artist’s statement, and a concise biography, a welcoming format that engenders an almost trancelike attentiveness as the viewer-reader absorbs each work and picks favorites. Contemplation of these handmade works, including Deborah Maris Lader’s evocatively diagrammatic drawings of tools, kindles thoughts about how our increasingly sophisticated electronic technologies extend our reach physically and conceptually but also distance us from the immediacy and sensuousness of traditional, truly hands-on skills. This catalog presents reassuring testimony to the vitality and significance of the venerable and revelatory arts of drawing and painting.
The Chicago artists Sundell showcases are native sons and daughters and artists from such distant lands as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, China and Japan. Few works are overtly Chicago-oriented, but those that are offer searching interpretations of the city. Christopher T. Buoscio and Roland Kulla discern the poetry of nighttime cityscapes, while Carol Luc paints muted sunlight filtered through city windows. The legacy of the imagist painters of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hairy Who, is evident in the book’s more inventive and funkier works, such as John Kurtz’s hyperdetailed scenes from his “secret planet,” and E. Charles Rolwing III’s dreamlike watercolors.
The weakest offerings are portraits and allegorical compositions, while abstract paintings and collages are the most intriguing, particularly the elegantly watery studies of Pala Townsend, the microscopically patterned and richly textured creations of Kathleen King, and Annette Turow’s shaped collages. Beautifully rendered traditional landscapes and still lives round out the survey, leaving the viewer-reader with an enlivening sense of the vibrant creativity that percolates throughout the grid of the city, art that ultimately transcends place and time.
