Author Archives: Bonnie McLaughlin

TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE: A DIALOGUE WITH FEAR at Gallery 2 If walls could speak, it’s sometimes asked, what would they say? In two of the installations in “Territorial Imperative: A Dialogue With Fear,” a group exhibition of women who are School of the Art Institute alumni or current graduate students, the walls do speak: urgently whispering, […]

STRETCHING OUR ROOTS at the Textile Arts Centre Appropriately, the Textile Arts Centre has opened the new season with a show that draws attention to contemporary fiber artists’ diverse processes and ideas. After all, pluralism is no stranger to the textile arts, which have long embraced styles ranging from the abstract to the figurative, and […]

CARMEN LOMAS GARZA: PEDACITO DE MI CORAZON (A LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART) at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum San Francisco artist Carmen Lomas Garza has painted scenes of childhood and family life–not often treated in contemporary painting–for most of the past two decades. She came to her subject when she was a young […]

JACOB LAWRENCE: THE FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND HARRIET TUBMAN SERIES OF NARRATIVE PAINTINGS at the Art Institute of Chicago Early in his long career, Jacob Lawrence demonstrated a keen understanding of the importance of symbols in art that aims to educate and enlighten. Of the 31 paintings in his 1939-’40 series about the life of Harriet […]

RISA SEKIGUCHI: RECENT PAINTINGS at the Chicago Cultural Center Who has twisted us around like this, so that / no matter what we do, we are in the posture / of someone going away? Just as, upon / the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley / one last time, he turns, stops, lingers–, […]

BACKTALK at the Randolph Street Gallery The phrase “talking back” connotes a certain amount of defiance, a tone with an edge, probably confrontational. But the works included in the current show of five artists at Randolph Street Gallery are anything but overtly confrontational. They’re thoughtful, complex, and even poetic, which is not to say they […]

HEARTFELT/HANDMADE: EARLY ILLINOIS FOLK ART at the State of Illinois Art Gallery Cameras have made it a simple and convenient matter to obtain pictures of people and places, yet they have also meant a certain loss for most people: the experience of making pictures. Gone from everyday life is the kind of patient looking that […]

MEMORY AND METAPHOR: THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN, 1940-1987 at the Museum of Contemporary Art By 1964, at the age of 52, the African American painter Romare Bearden was a success. He’d earned a BS in mathematics from New York University and had studied art with George Grosz at the Art Students League in New […]

SOWERS OF MYTH at the Chicago Cultural Center It would be a shame if the exhibit hall on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, with its high coffered ceiling and tall windows overlooking Grant Park, were ever to close permanently. Here Chicagoans have been introduced to the work of local painters and sculptors […]

TOI UNGKAVATANAPONG at Artemisia We think of sight as the most important means of experiencing paintings and sculptures–and in the case of representational painting, which relies heavily on visual illusions, sight is primary. But the sense of touch plays a major if not always obvious role in both the creation and understanding of works of […]

SOURCE MATERIAL: A GLIMPSE INTO THE ARTIST’S STUDIO at the Center for Contemporary Art Artists have often made paintings of their studios. What they offer the viewer, however, is rarely a snapshot of everything visible. They give only limited access, carefully controlling what we see. Vermeer’s The Studio, for instance, presents us with an orderly […]