Over the last several years, Bernard Williams has helped to restore four significant outdoor murals from the 1970s. But the 37-year-old Roseland native is also an artist and muralist in his own right. He shows his paintings–largely drawn from African-American history–at Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago and G.R. N’Namdi Gallery in Detroit, and he’s exhibited […]
Author Archives: J.H.
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The CPAG Watch List
The Chicago Public Art Group’s list of endangered classics changes frequently. Some murals drop from the list after they’ve been restored, while others disappear due to demolitions and rehabilitations. For now, CPAG hopes to get enough money to restore the following: All of Mankind by William Walker, 617 W. Evergreen. Painted in 1971-’73 at the […]
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Still Waiting…
The Columbus mosaics are hardly the only pieces of public art languishing in storage. John Warner Norton’s 1929 mural Printing the News, Distributing the News, Transporting the News, removed from the concourse ceiling of the Riverside Plaza building more than five years ago, is still rolled up in a warehouse on the northwest side. The […]
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Alison Ruttan
After graduating from the School of the Art Institute, Alison Ruttan spent much of the 1980s in New York exhibiting at alternative art spaces. She returned to Chicago in 1990, got a job teaching at SAIC, and soon began showing her work at Beret International. Her fall ’95 show featured “Play Balls,” a series of […]
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JNO Cook
When Schwartz claims that his gallery caters to the artist as “mad scientist,” he may be thinking of Jno Cook, who’s been associated with Beret since its first show. Trained as an industrial engineer, Cook constructs amusingly nonfunctional kinetic contraptions from scavenged household appliances. Like much of the art at Beret, Cook’s work has drawn […]
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Dennis Kowalski
In November 1993 Chicago Tribune art critic Alan Artner called Dennis Kowalski “one of the few real maverick artists in the city, one who occasionally has prefigured here kinds of work that eventually caught on in more open art centers.” Kowalski, a sculpture professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a 25-year veteran […]