Ray Yoshida’s Museum Of Extraordinary Values by Karen Patterson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ray Yoshida’s art collection only twice, the first time in 1994 when I was co-curating a show of bottle-cap art for Chicago’s Intuit. Ray was gracious and loaned some pieces. His collection was spectacular, but tellingly, it did not seem out of the ordinary. If it was finer than many I had seen (my own included), it was not fundamentally different in style and approach. The mix of Maxwell Street flea-market finds with masterpieces is a hallmark of the
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An Appetite For Abstraction
Abstraction occurs all over. Can you guess where these abstract images are from? Click on the individual images below this group to find out.
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Southeast Sider Art
Chicago’s Southeast Side easily looks like a wasteland to drivers taking the Chicago Skyway as the shortest, though most expensive, path to get from the city to Michigan. But of course there are glimpses of a more interesting reality. The most obvious are the dramatic railroad bridges you see as you cross the Calumet River near 95th Street. They are some of Chicago’s finest, and always the best part of a Skyway trip. But if you get off the expressway you can find great examples of the vernacular art that lines most of the Chicago area’s off-the-beaten-track commercial districts.
Continue readingShort Review: Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto
Camilo Jose Vergara brings a fine photographic eye, a sociologist’s curiosity and expertise, and tremendous commitment to his explorations of cities, their decay and their resilience. This study of Harlem is most enlightening.
Continue readingTour the Lakefront Stone Carvings: Oct. 11
Chicago is home to the greatest collection of outdoor stone carvings in urban America. Generations of beach-going carvers whiling away the hours left their marks on huge limestone blocks installed during the Depression to improve and protect the city’s park-lined lakefront. Many of these anonymous carvings have been destroyed as part of more recent anti-erosion projects. But the stretch of shoreline between Bryn Mawr and Montrose Avenues still boasts dozens of these small wonders — animals, bathing beauties, presidents, deities, buildings and, of course, initials, names and eternal professions of love. It’s the best public art that no one sees. They’re
Continue readingFood Truck Visions: A Street Food Environment
The vibrant visual environment created by food trucks on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is a longtime favorite at Interesting Ideas. These photos of this vernacular art experience are from our third session there, in August 2015. You can also see some glorious details at Food Truck Visions: Art of Street Food, D.C. . See our existing National Mall food truck gallery.
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The Stanley Szwarc Boxes
Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011) was a prolific artist, and boxes were his most frequent creation. There are thousands of these floating around the Chicago area, ranging from tiny ones barely a couple of inches wide to bruisers that could take up the corner of a desk. In his basement were closets and trunks filled with layers of boxes stacked up and divided by sheets of cardboard. “No two alike,” he would always say. As with all his work, the ornamentation is brilliantly creative. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases Stanley
Continue readingShort Review: David Plowden’s A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America
David Plowden’s photos in A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America are marvelously evocative as always. His introductory text moves them to a dimension beyond ruin porn. Usually when you see pictures of rural decay you respond to that evocativeness and to the formal beauty of the scenes. Plowdwn connects you to the stories behind these mostly Midwestern images in the same way that he’s connected, by talking about what these places (and the people who once populated them) were like when he first photographed them years ago. There really is a narrative behind almost every ruined farmhouse or boarded-up store.
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Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Cross Purposes
Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011), a Polish book keeper turned metal worker and then artist after arriving in the United States, gave no indication of being particularly religious, but he did like making crosses. A prolific creator of objects from scrap stainless steel, always demonstrating over-the-top imagination, Szwarc made hundreds of crosses, if not thousands. He produced jewelry, he made crosses to be hung on the wall, and he crafted cruciform objects with no apparent use other than to be carriers of his endless combinations of geometric shapes. Szwarc liked to say that no two of his objects, be they crosses, vases, key fobs or boxes, were alike. The evidence plainly supports that contention while demonstrating a virtuosic artistic vision
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Vernacular Art Spectacular, DuSable High School
This group of drawings turned up at Maxwell Street some years ago. With the possible exception of “Take your cross and follow me,” which is an earlier piece, they were executed by students of Ethel Nolan, an artist and art teacher at DuSable High School on Chicago’s South Side. I’m guessing she might have saved the best of her students’ work, as represented here. Super fine vernacular art.
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