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. So he drove me over there one day to see the current show. Immediately outgoing, Paul struck me as a down to earth person. Years later once  I was living here I finally got to one of his legendary art community pancake breakfasts that were held annually during art fair season on the large patio/courtyard behind the gallery. It was obvious that Paul loved playing host to the wide ranging, free wheeling community of artists and art lovers in Chicago. Every community needs a place to come together, a place to engage, and interact periodically as a way of affirming their connection to each other. Paul Klein's annual community breakfasts did that in a wonderfully relaxed way. Sometime after, trying to both reflect and anticipate where he thought art was going, he decided to take his gallery in a new direction, and began showing a new roster of artists who were engaged in new media work. It struck me as something my dad--who was an electrical engineer--would have gotten a kick out of: everything had wires, all seemed elaborately programmed, and everything moved. Everything seemed attached to a very interesting circuit board. Surely all of these artists didn't have advanced degrees in engineering! How they figured out how to make these things was beyond me. And that, of course, was part of the fascination, as well as the ideas behind the objects themselves.

As much as I find the work of Sabrina Raaf (my favorite) and others he was showing to be engaging, I couldn't for the life of me imagine that there was a strong enough collector base for this ambitious and somewhat futuristic new media work to sustain a gallery year in and year out. This work was so far from the largely gestural abstraction paintings that he had been known for exhibiting over the years, it practically dared the audience to come along for the ride. It was indeed a bold second act, but one which seemed to have left him so far ahead of the crowd that he outpaced his hoped for audience...or at least those with the means, space, and inclination to take one of these sometimes large, blinking, moving, complex, and engaging aesthetic contraptions home. Whether that was the reason or not, Paul closed soon after.

At which point he emerged as a self appointed critical voice of Chicago's art scene. He began publishing on online Art Letter (www.artletter.com) in which he held forth--in his gregarious and nakedly subjective style--on the art on view around town. No matter what his own opinion of the work on view--and he alternately loaths and loves what he was seeing--he always encourages readers to go out and experience it firsthand for themselves. In this way he was a shameless and giddy booster, taking joy in the plethora of art the city had to offer, and pushing others to enrich their lives by being a part of it. Paul publishes the Art Letter periodically, usually to coincide with openings around the city. Subscribe. Along with The Art Letter, Paul has kept busy, snagging the position of consultant (curator) of the newly opened west wing of McCormick Place, being a persistent gadfly by taking on the mayor and urging artists to organize against the city's new public art ordinance, and pushing for the formation of a more inclusive Chicago artists museum. In the case of the ordinance and museum, Paul's agitation didn't come to positive fruition. And who even knows if it should or could have under the circumstances. The point is when he sees something he thinks needs doing, or something he doesn't like, or something he does like, he doesn't stand on the sidelines and keep it to himself, he tries to do something and get others involved in his passions. That's what active citizenship is. We need more folks with the passion of Paul Klein. I hope he keeps getting folks in this town both excited and pissed off for a long time.

Photograph: A. Jackson/The Chicago Reader
Posted by
4

View comments

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
3

On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
4

Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
6

The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
2

Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
7

John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
6

A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
4
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