On a sunny Saturday, amidst the live music, water balloon fights, and petitions at Woodlawn’s Art in Action festival, four University of Chicago students were manning a table, armed with markers and blank maps of Chicago, and encouraging passersby to make their own maps. Their idea was to produce a collection of maps that would chart people’s impressions of where the neighborhood of Hyde Park begins and ends. The mapping society provided three blank maps: one of Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Kenwood, and Washington Park; another of the greater South Side, extending south to 95th, further west, and north through Bronzeville; and a map of the entire city of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Alone on the second floor of the Hyde Park Art Center, I push aside thin felt curtains to enter a gallery featuring “The City,” the first of four video installation programs in “Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism.” There are two pieces in this exhibition, Sarah Morris’s “Midtown” and Bertrand Lamarche’s “Autobrouillard.” The second is playing. Read the rest of this entry »

In her last days as a University of Chicago student, fourth-year Jackie Todd hopes to revive “Vita Excolatur,” the sex publication made by and for students that contains questionably pornographic material. Taking its name from the University’s motto, the magazine attempts to show “the life enriched” by sexuality. Although “Vita” has been short of writers, photographers, models, and a leadership structure since the magazine last made it to print in 2007, Todd has a strong interest in carrying out the project she inherited after her first year at the College. Many have expressed interest in “Vita” since then, but Todd says the problem has been students’ fears of commitment. Getting people to lay bare their bodies and thoughts about sex has proven difficult, even in a periodical that anticipates selling only 200 printed copies and will not be posted online, and editors have received last-minute requests to use pseudonyms or pull nude portraits. Contributors to the magazine cite anxiety of potential discovery by future employers or law school admissions officers as reasons for their preference for anonymity. Todd, calling herself the “Vita girl,” does not share this anxiety, stating plainly, “This is the bed I made for myself.”

UofC second-year and photographer Edward Menéndez, the only other actually named Vita contributor, is proud of the work he has submitted, although it was not shot for the magazine specifically. Like many UofC students, Menéndez is interested in questioning sex and gender roles, and believes “Vita” would be the appropriate venue. In this upcoming issue, he poses one female model in such a way that “it’s hard to draw sex out of the image.” A black-and-white side profile of a girl staring into a window located outside of the frame, the light spilling onto her slightly slumped shoulders, offers to its viewers no suggestions that are explicitly sexual. And yet by virtue of the fact that she is a naked woman, he admits that her image is sexualized. Menéndez prefers to inspire reflection rather than hand viewers any definite assignment or conclusions. “It’s a provocation, be it sexual, physical, psychological.”

As a rule, Todd would not ask “Vita” contributors to do something that she herself would not feel comfortable doing, which includes shots of penetration or masturbation. For her, a spread that involved any live sex act would be “crossing a line I’m not comfortable with,” adding, “There are some things you don’t get to see.” Though Todd’s boundaries may have influenced the direction of this last issue, her bold direction sets the bar high for issues to come, as she will be posing for “Vita”’s staple photo of “hot chicks reading books.” Said one of the magazine’s photographers, Tuncay Esref, “People are scared of other people’s judgments, which I think is why ‘Vita’ is necessary.” Esref hopes to find a future venue for “a shoot that involved sweat and bulges of skin and pubic hair.” With Todd graduating in just a few short days, her hope to “bring sex to a more public arena,” beginning with her own full exposure, is the first step to reclaiming the world of academic erotica. And with students like Esref and Menéndez sticking around, “Vita Excolatur” will live on as the counterpart to this crescat scientia institution.
“Vita” will be printed and ready for sale by the start of the second week in June in the UofC Reynolds Club.

Moments. Slices of reality. The daily progression of the world. This is the subject matter for Cecil McDonald, Jr., a photographer based on the far South Side. Dramatic lighting and glowing jewel tones predominate his images, carefully staged reproductions of the everyday. His photographs are largely of intimate domestic scenes, his wife, his daughters, and himself the subjects. McDonald speaks slowly when describing his work, taking thoughtful pauses and emphasizing certain words, as if relishing their weight in his mouth. “I don’t know if I am making pictures that are going to change people’s opinion about anything,” he says, “but I am hoping that I am making pictures that people come to, look at, are excited, feel inspired in some way.” He is quick to qualify: “Not inspired in some way that they’re going to change the world, but even if it’s just for a minute while they’re in front of the picture. I think that those kind of small steps along the way in life, they really move life along. And they’re just as important as big bold sweeping statements.” Read the rest of this entry »

All-white walls enclose an unidentifiable treadmill-like device, the whoop, whoop, whoop-ing of its enormous belts sounding throughout the room. This gallery-within-a-gallery at the University of Chicago’s DOVA Temporary exhibition space in Harper Court was created by graduating Master of Fine Arts candidate David Cordero. The artist began thinking about his thesis project, “Grind,” using a set of tiny models set in shoebox-sized boxes, as a live sketchbook for the works he could create for a full gallery exhibit. This “testing space” for his ideas required the construction of simple, recognizable objects scaled down to thumb-size. Playing with the ambiguity of those shapes we commonly utilize, the blown-up result is majestic proof of technological innovation; it’s confusing and beautiful, and mechanically perfect, begging the question, so what does it do? Read the rest of this entry »

By 6:30am, Justin Kern is already done with the day’s shoot. He sits by Grant Park’s Buckingham Fountain, burdened with a tripod, a large wide-angle lens, and a digital camera with a plastic cover to protect it from the rain. In his pictures, Kern approaches the man-made structures that make up the cityscape the way a landscape photographer would approach a national park. He maintains a blog with fellow photographer Mike Boehmer for people to view one or more of these photographs every day. Their website, the Windy Pixel, receives up to 40,000 views per month. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past three weeks, the fourth floor of the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall has been a bustle of construction. Slowly taking shape inside the Renaissance Society is “The Seductiveness of the Interval,” a two-story structure integrating a series of art pieces by three Romanian artists. Walking through the yet-to-be-completed structure, with its unpainted walls and unfinished floors and with loose wires hanging out of its walls, it is hard to imagine the installation in its fully furnished final form. But in less than a week, this ambitious project will be open to the public. Read the rest of this entry »

“Every year we have the same intention. We want to widen the networks and nodes of various groups so we can grow a multiplicity of milieus in the art world,” explains Ed “Edmar” Marszewski. He’s talking about the Version Festival, an annual eleven-day arts festival that he founded and co-curates, which celebrates social and activist art in Bridgeport and on Chicago’s South Side. The theme of this year’s festival, “Infrastructure and Territories,” is appropriate to the history of the festival and the community that has grown up around it. Read the rest of this entry »