After more than an hour in traffic on Lake Shore Drive, I made it to the Renaissance Society Thursday night just minutes before they closed. (The gallery had special afternoon hours for those attending its annual gala, the RenBen.) The unnamed exhibition on view, seemingly organized by Bruce Hainley and Shahryar Nashat, is just the […]
Author Archives: Kerry Cardoza
Posted inArts & Culture
An artistic life
“I always said I was going to be an artist,” Kay Hofmann says. “It’s all I was interested in.” The 90-year-old artist has a startlingly clear statement of purpose: to make art, primarily hand-carved stone sculptures, no matter what. And she has done exactly that, creating countless works over her long and storied career, just […]
Posted inArt Feature
Spell casting
A sigil is a symbol believed to have supernatural powers. In Simiya, an Islamic branch of occult practice, letters and numbers are arranged into sigils in order to conjure up metaphysical powers, like the ability to fly or to disappear. Artist Maryam Taghavi has long been drawn to these sigils, and other magic-imbued symbols, ornamented […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best art show on the southeast side’s ecology
It can be hard to wrap your head around the complex ecological makeup of the areas surrounding the Calumet and Little Calumet rivers. Formerly heavily concentrated sites of industry, parts of these southeast neighborhoods are now in the slow process of getting cleaned up, via the green development of places like the Marian R. Byrnes […]
Posted inCity Life
Best abolition-oriented mutual aid project
Chicago Community Jail Support is one of many vital mutual-aid groups that sprung up following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as local protests against racism and police brutality resulted in mass arrests of demonstrators. The all-volunteer effort aims to support anyone being released from Cook County Jail, the majority of whom are discharged with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best NSFW nihilistic queer punk artist
Chaos reigns in the artwork of Mony Nuñez, aka Mony Kaos. Drawing from the aesthetics of Tom of Finland, anarcho-punk iconography, vintage gay porn, and cutesy cultural figures like Betty Boop, Kaos’s NSFW compositions—which take the form of screenprints, air-brushed banners, fliers, zines, ceramics, T-shirts, hooked rugs, and illustrations—explode with color and attitude. In her […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Best experiment in utopian living disguised as a backyard farm
From afar, artist, educator, and organizer Jen Delos Reyes seems tireless. She splits her time between Ithaca, New York—where she works at Cornell as an associate professor in the art department and as the inaugural associate dean of diversity and equity for the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning—and Chicago, where she runs Side by […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best book about women in punk by a local author
History is supposedly written by the victors. Most devotees of early American punk and hardcore could probably rattle off the travails of Henry Rollins’s time in Black Flag or Ian MacKaye’s memories of the 80s D.C. hardcore scene, as the two have told their stories ad nauseam. But how many know the story of the […]
Posted inMusic
Kate Fagan cements her place in Chicago punk history with a new reissue
Before she began fronting trailblazing Chicago ska band Heavy Manners in the early 80s, Kate Fagan was a new-wave powerhouse. Her 1980 single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” became the best-selling local release at Wax Trax. Since then, unfortunately, physical copies have been all but impossible to come by. A house fire destroyed its […]
Posted inCity Life
Perfection from the pieces
If you’ve ever dabbled in woodworking, you probably have a sense of just how much scrap material can go to waste. Lumber is sold in predetermined sizes, like the ubiquitous 2×4, so once you have the cuts you need, you’re likely to end up with various odds and ends that are hard to put to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Artists are all-in for Brandon Johnson
In the 2019 mayoral election, Lori Lightfoot stood out with her platform for supporting the arts in Chicago. Out of a crowded field of 14 candidates, she was the only one to hone in on the arts with a detailed plan. Not so this time around. Instead, candidate Brandon Johnson, who has recently surged in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The next Great Migration
There were 18 extreme weather events with losses in excess of $1 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. There was the heat dome in the southwest in September, which put more than 61 million people under extreme heat advisories and broke heat records in California. There were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Present absence
“Regarding the Missing Objects,” a group exhibition on view at the Hyde Park Art Center, takes absence as its theme. There is the absence of one of the artists whose work is included in the show, Dana Carter, who died before the exhibition opened. Then there are the missing objects of the show’s title, a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ways of seeing
Stepping into “Exact Dutch Yellow” is like finding a cool spot of shade on a scorching hot day. The light in the darkened fourth-floor galleries mainly comes from the work itself, LED- and neon-lit installations that seem to play tricks before our eyes. The exhibition plumbs the history of color classification, a subject that seems […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The growing pains of AI art
The Wikipedia image for stable diffusion, an AI platform that generates images from text prompts, is a surrealist photo showing an astronaut atop a horse. At first glance, it scans as realistic, the horse in mid-trot, a forest in the background. But a closer inspection reveals that the astronaut seems to have no hands or […]