Visual Arts Picks
off
November 12 - June 17
Beauty Beyond Nature: The Glass Art of Paul Stankard
In a recent news article, Patti Smith responded to suggestions that her memoir, Just Kids, showed “hero worship” in her fondness for poets like Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman. “I feel magnified by these people,” she said. Paul Stankard, considered to be the father of modern glass paperweights, feels a similar kinship with Whitman. “I have internalized his works with my feelings to recapitulate and rework those feelings in glass,” he writes. The artists’ subjects are identical—“birth and decay.” For Stankard, this manifests in referentially botanical scenes suspended in orbs. His...
off
December 9 - July 1
Theaster Gates: The Listening Room
When Dr. Wax (a small record shop on Chicago’s South Side) shuttered, 2011 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellow Theaster Gates moved the closing inventory to his art complex Dorchester Projects, where a resident artist explored it through potluck listening sessions this summer. The 8,000 LPs from the ’60s to the ’80s include one of Chicago’s best jazz collections, as well as a complete Adventures in Negro History series, Dr. Martin Luther King’s A Knock at Midnight and other rarities. Gates told a Slog reporter earlier this year that he’d like to build a “...
off
January 19 - June 17
Push Play: The 2012 NCECA Invitational
The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts holds their 46th Annual Conference in Seattle this month, while work from more than 35 important and emerging ceramic artists is on display at BAM. The show is rooted in the concept of play, though not only for fun and games. “It is also serious business, teaching essential life skills and developing healthy, well-balanced lives through the pleasure of participation.” Yoko Sekino-Bove’s jubilantly colored porcelain tea ware is called “Hanafuda Sake Drinking Game Set,” and “Swan, Awareness Series” is Adrian Arleo’s eye-covered bird....
off
February 7 - June 17
Knitted, Knotted, Twisted & Twined
The jewelry of Mary Lee Hu is almost certainly unlike any you’ve seen before. By using wire the way hand weavers use thread, Hu’s innovative work (encompassing 40 years) spins praying mantises and whorled, oceanic forms from one of the seemingly daintiest of materials. Metalsmithing and textile techniques inform her use of the wire’s lines. This showing features more than 90 earrings, rings, brooches and neckpieces drawn from international public and private collections.
