Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and 20th-Century Mexican Art at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, through April 27 Before globalism, there was internationalism. Modernism was inseparable from that movement. In the first half of the 20th century, artists and writers traveled throughout Europe and the Americas exchanging ideas and images, hoping to create a new […]
Author Archives: Janina A. Ciezadlo
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Performance Art
William Kentridge at the Museum of Contemporary Art, through January 20 The vitality of his drawing was what first attracted me to the work of South African artist William Kentridge, whose short animated films, installations, and drawings are on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In his films Kentridge makes large drawings, then changes […]
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A World of Her Own
The Magic of Remedios Varo at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, through August 20 By Janina A. Ciezadlo This summer the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum hosts a traveling retrospective, curated in Mexico, of captivating, subversive work by an important 20th-century woman artist, “The Magic of Remedios Varo.” Each of the 77 detailed, meticulous […]
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Real Magic
Graciela Iturbide: Images of the Spirit at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, through August 29 By Janina A. Ciezadlo A muscular young man is partly visible behind a curtain formed by what seem to be angel wings. Apparently impersonating a god, he wears a crown of thorns twisted from ocotillo cactus–a ubiquitous plant in […]
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A Woman’s Place
Illinois Women Artists: The New Millennium at the Illinois Art Gallery, through July 30 By Janina A. Ciezadlo Just a little over 100 years ago, Pierre-Auguste Renoir declared, “I consider women writers, lawyers and politicians…as monsters and nothing but five-legged calves. The woman artist is merely ridiculous, but I am in favor of the female […]
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One of Two Cities
THE PERFECT CITY: PHOTOGRAPHS OF CHICAGO BY BOB THALL at the Art Institute of Chicago, through December 4 I find the title of this exhibit almost as engaging as Bob Thall’s photographs. “The perfect city” is so distant from the other epithets associated with Chicago, and yet there is an inherent ideal, a geometric beauty […]
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New Signs of the Feminine
NANCY HILD: STILL LIFE at North Park College, Carlson Tower Gallery, through September 20 Social movements tend to create new language, either by adapting existing language or by prescribing new words. The National Convention of the French Revolution changed the names of the months according to its vision of a new society; the coinage of […]
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Mother and Things
DIANE LEVESQUE at the Chicago Cultural Center, through September 11 I don’t know if Diane Levesque has children, but I think she probably does, and that they’ve left their stuff all over her house. Women’s lives have always been taken up with objects. Several of Levesque’s superb paintings–eight large oils on canvas and a series […]