The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art, by Leisa Rundquist, Routledge, New York, 126 pages, 13 b/w Illustrations, 2021. ISBN: 9781138314559. Hardcover, $59.95 In this admirably concise volume, Lisa Rundquist works diligently to normalize Henry Darger. That seems like fair play considering how he’s been pathologized. Being a working-class self-taught artist and a loner made him vulnerable to whatever excesses of interpretation anyone wanted to throw at him. The eccentric and sometimes extreme nature of his art was a contributing factor. But, in effect, Darger remained a victim of the same epithet applied to him in his youth:
Continue readingReview: Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors
Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston, by Margaret Hodges and Derin Bray. Rake House, Portsmouth, N.H., 160 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9780578758404. Hardcover, $70 This volume presents a nicely balanced combination of tattoo art and tattoo lore. The book by its own account “looks beyond the connoisseurship of historical flash art” to tell the story of the tattooers, “an often transient, marginalized group,” which it does effectively, in the form of one family. The 70 pages devoted to flash art aren’t bad, but the most exceptional part of the book is
Continue readingReview: Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective
Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective, by Elaine Y. Yau, Lawrence Rinder and Horace Ballard. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 175 pages 2020. ISBN: 9780983881384. Paperback, $39.95 Here’s another pandemic art disappointment—the grand exhibition of Rosie Lee Tompkins’ quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Like Elijah Pierce’s carvings at the Barnes Foundation, these quilts clearly need to be experienced in person to get a true sense of their scale and material impact. Tompkins is widely praised as the greatest quilter of her time, certainly up there with the women of Gees
Continue readingReview: Prisoners’ Inventions
Prisoners’ Inventions, written and illustrated by Angelo in collaboration with Temporary Services. Half Letter Press, Chicago, 200 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9781732051423. Paperback, $20 If you’re looking for conventional prison art, this book isn’t the place. No warrior princesses or hands holding bars here. But if you are interested in the incredible creativity that incarceration can generate, this book is a good place to start. In the first instance, there is the creativity of “Angelo,” the one-time California prison inmate who made the drawings featured here and who is responsible for most of the text. His sketches are both interesting and
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How To Make A Bottle Cap Figure
Unsealed: Bottle Cap Art | The Woolseys | The Patent Drawings | How To | The Race Question | The Blockbuster The Galleries: Masterworks | Troops | Signed | Flashers | Other Shapes | Mine | Bottle Cap Inn | Two Monuments Since co-curating a large-scale bottle-cap art exhibit in the 1990s I’ve been trying to find published instructions for how to make the little two-bowled figures that were once ubiquitous in thrift stores across the Midwest. It seemed there must be some kind of master blueprint somewhere to explain the existence of so many identical copies of these kitschy figures. Patent drawings exist for one kind of figure, but
Continue readingHyde Park Lakefront Carvings By The Date
Many stone carvers along Chicago’s lakefront thoughtfully included a date with their work, allowing us a sense of how this art took shape over the decades. At places like Promontory Point and Morgan Shoal, these dates also allow us to better understand the historic character of the quarry-stone revetments, some of which are approaching the century mark in age. Unfortunately, the blocks and their carvings are in imminent danger of disappearing in the name of lakeshore reconstruction. (More on that here.) Below are photo galleries for the two sites, including all the dated carvings I’ve been able to find so
Continue readingLakefront Anonymous in the Stores
Lakefront Anonymous: Chicago’s Unknown Art Gallery is available at these fine stores: Or you can order it online here.
Continue readingWorld’s Largest Small-Town Collection of Big Things
Little Casey, Illinois, is in possession of a number of world’s largest things as certified by Guinness, which requires largest things to be at least theoretically functional. Accordingly, in addition to its largest things, the town also boasts quite a few just large things, which are at least as cool as the largest things even if not putatively functional. Why all the big things? A brilliant idea, it seems, to draw tourists to a small town of no particular distinction in the middle of downstate Illinois. And it works. We were there on an October Tuesday afternoon and there were
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Lakefront Anonymous Book Release and Photo Exhibit Extended to Nov. 20 and 21
Join Aron Packer and me to help celebrate publication of Lakefront Anonymous: Chicago’s Unknown Art Gallery, our book about the thousands of vernacular stone carvings that line much of the city’s shoreline. We’ll be signing books as well as exhibiting some of the best images and giving talks about these magnificent works of art Saturday November 20 and Sunday November 21, 12-5 p.m., at 1100 Florence, Evanston. Talks at 2 p.m. each day. Aron and I have been discovering and documenting the carvings for decades, even tracking down a few of the carvers. The carvings, ranging from minimalist initials to
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The Mid Century Glories of Peterson Avenue
Peterson Avenue: A cynic might say it’s where Prairie style went to die, and I’d say, yes and an honorable death. The mid-century buildings on this commercial strip range from late moderne to proto-post modern, with lots of typical Mid Century Modern buildings in between, all showing a range of Prairie influences. Peterson, from Western Avenue west to Central Park Avenue, is a case where economic stagnation (as opposed to decline) might be the best preservative for under-valued architecture. I doubt whether Peterson was ever a hot neighborhood, and it’s hardly hot now. But it’s also not falling apart. There
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