I had mentioned the work of Dawolu Jabari Anderson in a previous post. I recently learned that he has been awarded an Artadia artists fellowship for artists in the Houston area. I thought this was as good an excuse as any to share his work with viewers who may not be familiar it, and to extend a congratulatory word to Jabari. Anderson is a member of the Otabenga Jones and Associates artists collective in Houston, which also includes the spirit of the eponymous Jones, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert Pruitt. In late 2007 they did an installation at the Menil Collection which mined the museum's collection for materials that took on new meanings and resonance in their hands. The year before they made an appearance in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
3

I came to my appreciation of Sol LeWitt's work late in my career as an artist. To be sure, I had known about his work for many years, but it just never resonated with my the way some other artists had. But that changed one day in winter of 1994 when I stepped into Pace Wildenstein's downtown space on Greene Street. I had probably been more fully alerted to LeWitt's work by my time spent at the Addison Gallery of American Art, and by Jock Reynold's unabashed enthusiasm for LeWitt's work.
4

I've been teaching now for some thirty-three years, thirty four or five if you count at least one informal situation. My continuing sense of what makes teaching meaningful as an artist still springs from those earlier situations. Though, in what now seems like another life, I taught for a year as a remedial reading teacher in an elementary school in Queens, NY where I am from, I came to teaching photography initially entirely by chance.
4

Along with the shows mentioned in the previous entry, there is one more show opening this week that you should check out. Yes, it contains two more former Columbia College MFA photography grads, Jason Lazarus and Brian Ulrich in this case. These two have been in numerous shows throughout the US and abroad. Here in Chicago Lazarus had a show recently at Bucket Rider Gallery. Ulrich shows with Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

This Friday you have the opportunity to see firsthand the work of Columbia College Chicago's graduating MFA and BFA/BA Photography students. Opening Friday evening, the exhibitions feature the work of students who you will no doubt be seeing in galleries, museums, and publications in the near future. As informed readers already know, Columbia College Chicago has long set the standard for photography in the Windy City. Visit these two shows and you'll see why.

I'm from New York, so I can't say I was entirely ready for the level of racial segregation I found here in Chicago upon moving here some ten years ago. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I hadn't been here before. I've had family here for twenty-one years, did a Public Art commission years ago (when Hamza Walker was still running that program), and have shown with Rhona Hoffman Gallery for fifteen years.
25

I like Paul Klein. Feisty, smart, passionate, and not one to sit on his hands and fret, he embodies for me what active citizenship is all about. I was introduced to him by my good friend and long time Chicagoan Jim Parker, who took me by Klein's gallery in the West Loop (I'm not sure they had even come up that name then) about eleven or twelve years ago before I was living in Chicago. Parker is someone who knows everyone, and he thought I should know Paul.
4

Now that Polaroid has announced that it will cease manufacturing its instant film in 2009 another death knell has sounded in the world of analog photography. With both the radically changed technological landscape and Polaroid's own habit of being one or two steps behind every possible innovation curve, the end is near for a fundamental tool of photographic practice.
2

Among the recently opened exhibitions here in Chicago, it has been a particular pleasure to see the new exhibitions of work by Ben Gest and Cecil McDonald Jr. I've known both of them for some time, and it's been gratifying to see them continue to take their work to even more interesting and engaging levels of conceptual and formal production. I first met Ben Gest when I was still teaching at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts from 1995-98.
1

I first met Alex Harsley in the early 1970s when I drifted into his storefront gallery space in New York's East Village. Not sure at first what to make of the widely eclectic work he was doing--photographs mounting to planks of tree trunk, montage printing of images made in different historical eras, nudes, haunting cityscapes--I nonetheless continued to return to the space, eventually striking up conversations with Alex that lasted for hours.
1
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
OTHER BLOGS / OTHER SITES
OTHER BLOGS / OTHER SITES
Blog Archive
Blog Archive
Loading