Annette LePique, author at Chicago Reader

Close up photo shows a chain of crystals lined along the wooden baseboard of the gallery.

Obfuscation as survival

by Annette LePique May 31, 2023May 31, 2023

As the womxn of Ruschwoman gallery are much smarter than I, I could not tell you what the “game of pearls” entails in the gallery’s current show: “The Game of Pearls, Prune de Madame, and Other Phantasia (As Confided to the Rusch Womxn).” However, for an exhibition as intricately laced as this one—featuring art as […]

On the right of the frame sits a large black soft floor sculpture in the shape on a whale's tail. To its left hangs a soft sculpture in the shape if an eye. On the walls of the gallery are a series of frames collages by James Hosking.

Arts & Culture

Common threads

by Annette LePique May 22, 2023May 12, 2023

Picture a strand of thread, feel it in your hands, make a knot. In Japanese folklore, there is a story that each and every person is born with a red thread around their finger. This thread connects them to another person: a pair destined to make indelible marks on the lives of one another. In […]

On the left side of the photo is an orange paraffin sculpture of an armless torso. To the right, on the wall are two black and white drawings of figures in repose.

Arts & Culture

Seeing double

by Annette LePique May 19, 2023May 22, 2023

Pleasure is unruly, sometimes fickle, and always ungovernable. These are the joys that aren’t beholden to any algorithmic assignation; they’re not necessarily good for you, they don’t materially or superficially “support” you, and neither do they usually make sense. Artist Iris Bernblum intimately understands such frictions, the spaces between what we say we want and […]

Installation photo shows two paintings hanging across from each other in the corner of the gallery. The walls are brown, with vertical dark brown lines and one dark horizontal line. The large paintings are in whites and blues, depicting cold, arctic scenes.

Arts & Culture

Searching for enlightenment

by Annette LePique April 21, 2023April 19, 2023

Artist Theodora Allen’s work has long reminded me of the Major Arcana tarot or a deck of playing cards; her paintings, both intimate and grand, are worlds ripe with hidden meanings. This merge of the physical with the metaphysical produces an uncanny sensation in the viewer. One might reasonably expect The Lovers, The Queen of […]

On the left panel, a person covered head to toe in a pink bodysuit reclines on a chaise longue. They hold a pink balloon and have cucumber slices over their eyes.

Arts & Culture

‘Serenity, NOW’

by Annette LePique April 6, 2023April 5, 2023

“SPACORE,” a group show curated by Serena JV Elston and Rudolf Lingens, is anarchically funny. Currently up at Co-Prosperity, the exhibition’s 45 artists utilize humor to reveal the hollow white supremacist capitalist fantasies that uphold the personal wellness industry. Through the collective’s desire to “situate wellness within the horror genre,” they present a model of […]

Photographs shows a vast wall of books, and a table featuring books in the foreground. On the table is a sign that reads "Abortion is older than the church and police and much more popular."

Best of Chicago

Best bookstore tote bag

by Annette LePique April 5, 2023April 9, 2023

This is not just a tote bag (though their new caterpillar design by the local Bear Wood Editions is adorable and helps support the Atlanta Solidarity Fund). Pilsen Community Books is a neighborhood bookstore that actually serves their neighborhood. Located on 18th Street in Pilsen, PCB offers a variety of bilingual programming (book clubs and […]

a funky mural with a lit up 400 in the center

Best of Chicago

Best movie theater to relive your teen years

by Annette LePique April 5, 2023April 9, 2023

It’s something special to see a movie at the New 400, Chicago’s longest-running movie theater. Up in Rogers Park, the New 400’s tickets are half the price of any AMC, their concessions are astoundingly affordable (go for it and get the popcorn), and their day-glo interiors are reminiscent of an 80s arcade or Jerry Garcia’s […]

Arts & Culture

Memory as devotion

by Annette LePique March 13, 2023March 22, 2023

Myra Greene’s “Kept,” the Atlanta artist’s third solo exhibition at Patron, interrogates notions of archive and intervention with deft and delicate hands. The act of care drives Greene’s mediation as the exhibition is composed from a collection of her grandmother’s personal photos. Greene selected and reprinted specific images as ambrotypes in order to challenge assumptions […]

An ornate gold chandelier hangs in the upper left portion on the frame. In the background is the work "WALLPAPER of Respect," featuring gold ledger paper from the Freedman's Bank, the artist has screenprinted images of flowers over the documents.

Arts & Culture

‘Don’t Act Like You Forgot:’ Shonna Pryor’s ‘Fiscal Frontiers’

by Annette LePique March 1, 2023March 8, 2023

A portal can be a gate, a door, a website. A pathway is what exists beyond the gate, the door, the webpage. Portals are changed by the people who once occupied their ether, just as pathways are shaped by all those who’ve traveled their twists and turns. This is good, this is how futures begin. […]

A black and white portrait of the artist, wearing a three-piece suit, and standing with his hand touching the side of his face.

Arts & Culture

The afterlives of Lawrence Steger

by Annette LePique January 26, 2023January 25, 2023

“What could be worse than not finding the right story?” Lawrence Steger, a Chicago performance artist, stated those words to audiences in his final performance work, Draft (1998). The same sentiment infuses the lively spirit of Gallery 400’s “Reckless Rolodex,” the first comprehensive retrospective of Steger’s massive body of work. Where else could one find […]

Various parts of the body are cut out in two dimensions, and hang from invisible string from the ceiling. Fullerton street can be seen out the gallery window.

Arts & Culture

Boundary pushing

by Annette LePique January 17, 2023January 3, 2023

“A Natural Turn,” curated by Ionit Behar and up at DePaul Art Museum, centers the impossibility of articulating the boundaries between the real and the artificial. With work by artists María Berrío (Colombian), Joiri Minaya (Dominican-United Statesian), Rosana Paulino (Brazilian), and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Indo-Guadeloupean), the show tackles the elusiveness of the self for women […]

Two colorful abstract wall works hang in the gallery

Arts & Culture

What makes America what it is

by Annette LePique January 2, 2023December 21, 2022

Curator Matt Morris’s “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is,” up at Loyola University’s Ralph Arnold Gallery, is a full-hearted and generous analysis of Kim Krause, Morgan, and Sabina Ott’s bodies of work. The exhibition is strikingly expansive, explicitly positioned within the histories of modernism and postmodernism. […]

An aerial rendering of the proposed 63rd House site

Arts & Culture

Building 63rd House

by Annette LePique January 21, 2022January 21, 2022

On August 5, 1966, near Marquette Park, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked while leading a protest to demand housing desegregation. Several blocks away from this spot stands 3055 W. 63rd, a formerly abandoned post office that turned 100 years old in 2020. This is the location where Blue Tin Production (a […]