Last month took me to Chicago to meet up with my mom, run around with art friends and old professors, and see art at my speed. When I moved there to attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for undergrad I had never heard phrases or ideas like neocolonialism, sustainability (I knew we should all recycle), or parallel practice (that was so the zeitgeist in the late aughts). I learned how to ride a bike in the city, practice yoga, and how to eat with health in mind. I somehow forgot how much I love Chicago in the intervening years of living in New York City.
The Rebecca Morris exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art left me thoroughly obsessed and run over in the best ways. Her sense of space and playfulness as she constructs abstract shapes, marks, and grids in the paintings mixed with an astute color palette, added with her epic scale lets it be known that she is singular in her devotion to abstraction and process.
The Remedios Varo: Science Fictions at The Art Institute of Chicago was a wishlist exhibition for us in the “amazing female artists over looked in history” category. She’s an artist that found a home in Mexico after fleeing wars in Spain and France in the middle of the last century. Her surrealism is grounded, strange, and familiar, pulling from Renaissance painting, animism, Jung and Gurdjief, and mystic traditions to name but a few influences. Viewing this accomplished and soulful body of work left me annoyed that I was taught Dali ad nauseam in survey books and early arts education while never hearing her name. She runs circles around his content and techniques. (The ever enthusiastic Katy Hessel on The Great Women Artists Podcast episode 101 talks to art historian and curator Tere Arcq about all things Varo: listen HERE.)
There was more art: the galleries in town were fresh, the perfect simplicity of Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings and stunning sculptures and exhibition design of the Camille Claudel exhibit at AIC kept me buzzing, and a stop at the Chicago Cultural Center to bask in the Tiffany Dome rounded out a perfect fast paced weekend.
