“Natural Selection” features four artists: Jessica Hogberg, Kristen Maniscalco, Grace Scott, and Mark Yee. Although their respective styles vary in medium, texture, and style, all of their works explore ecological themes—a premise powerful enough to make the vibe of the show feel cohesive. Acrylic paintings, ink drawings, and ceramic sculptures create pieces of hazy abstraction and lustrous realism, yet all the works come together under a unifying palette.

The plain white walls and wood floors of the gallery allow colors to shine through the distraction of the evening’s bumping mash-ups and crowd. Shadowy greys, ranging from metallic to clay, merged viscously with feathery greens and blues. Cool shades are so prominent in the works that brighter colors, when they do emerge, are striking. The parallel themes and colors of the artists’ oeuvre are so arresting that it takes a good deal of examination to get to know the character of the individual work of each, to be able to distinguish each artist from another, and to start to understand their distinct purposes and goals.

Hogberg, a young, pretty, tall, and down-to-earth brunette, is concerned with systems—how harmonious, self-contained orders form from the interactions of tiny individual organisms, how even the most minute creature can retain its own unique qualities, but almost become an environment or a landscape when part of a group. This concept of the aggregative clockwork of autonomous living things can be seen throughout her work, in the repetition of donut/bacteria-like shapes in cool greys and teal-greens, each distinctive but contributing to an elegant whole when perusing through her paintings.

Maniscalco is responsible for the exhibition’s intriguing, lifelike, and oft-cryptic ceramic sculptures. She displays bulbous spheres arranged in herd-like formations and a grotesquely realistic and fascinating snake whose head is devouring a human heart and whose body is cut into sections that become maze-like tunnels for mice. Although Maniscalco’s work is perhaps the most impenetrable of the exhibit’s abstract collection, the theme of environmentalism offers a helpful entryway into understanding her pieces. “My work is a reaction to our exponential population increase, and communicates the importance of respectful forethought regarding our natural resources,” she writes in her introduction to her contribution to “Natural Selection.” With this lens, spheres become symbols of subjugated womankind in “Dwindling Matriarchy.” The snake and mice become, perhaps, an emblem of the cyclical and balanced relationships in nature, even between predator and prey.

Scott’s work represents the most diverse and versatile use of media and style of the four artists, with pieces displaying an expertise in both tattoo-style inkings of whales and in glossily surrealistic oil paintings featuring icy landscapes and falling blackbirds. In her introduction to Natural Selection, Scott discusses “integrating the ‘myth’ ” into her work, allowing her to “juxtapose it with the harsh realities of the modern world.” The presence of myth becomes obvious in pieces like “Eden,” an ink print of a female bodied, raven-headed, satyr-footed creature clutching the infamous apple in its beak, a take on the Paradise Lost myth that makes the viewer question the relationship of man and beast and the spiraling after-effects of human nature on nature in general.

Finally, Mark Yee is a stylish and polished ex-financier who makes larger-than-life, cloudy, abstract paintings in mixtures of acrylics, chalk, and oils. His hilly, three-dimensional pieces are reminiscent of landscapes. Like Hogberg, his inspiration comes from the synthesis of “energy and rest, peace and strife, yin and yang.” These notions can coexist “simultaneously in natural phenomena,” he writes on Black Cloud’s website. Simultaneity is visible in works like “Piece 57,” where primordial mists are at the same time flat and highly textured, colorful, and cool—as if each painting coincidentally captures an instant and eon within the borders of its canvas.

Black Cloud Gallery, 1909 S. Halsted St. Through May 30. Monday ,10am-3pm; Wednesday, 11am-6pm. Free. (773) 678 3950. blackcloudgallery.net

(Courtesy of Ten Thousand Ripples)

The intersection of East 87th Street and South Commercial Avenue in South Chicago appears safe, spacious, and lively. Countdown timers usher groups of pedestrians across the wide streets, through an intersection framed by a dollar store, car dealership, and liquor store. The streets are made of solid and unblemished concrete, the buildings of weather-worn brick. For the residents of this neighborhood, the corner’s banality has veiled a terrible memory.

On November 13, 2009, Latin Kings member Michael Vilella was shot and killed while standing near the intersection with a female companion in the early morning. Five days later, Luis Garcia stood at a small, temporary memorial for his fallen friend. Garcia had tried to transfer high schools to leave behind his gang and start anew, but failed due to poor grades and his criminal record. In a space for grief and reflection on the awful consequences of the gang violence he grew up in, he was fatally shot through the chest by a gunman some 400 feet away.

The intersection sits at the crossroads of the Latin Kings, Ambrose, and Latin Dragons territory. It’s not an easy life to escape; the death of these two boys serves as a painful reminder of that fact.  Since the shootings, the community of South Chicago has held this memory as a symbol of the uphill battle for safety. Indira Johnson’s new project, Ten Thousand Ripples, hopes to offer the neighborhood a new perspective on the future.

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“So, it doesn’t seem like this is about the physical Buddha heads,” I tell her. We’re sitting in a busy Uptown Starbucks near one of the proposed locations for the 100 Buddha heads she plans to build. According to the plans, the heads will be three feet in diameter and seemingly half-submerged in the ground.

She laughs and elaborates on the project’s goal: “I guess a lot of the communities are looking for a way to get people to come together and talk to each other.” There are ten participating organizations in ten Chicago neighborhoods. Each hopes to bring a Buddha head to their community and start a conversation about an issue important to their quality of life. “It’s more about the fact that the Buddha [head] will be there,” she explains.

Johnson is white-haired and kind, a full-time practicing artist and peace activist for over 20 years. Her work has appeared across the United States, in Mumbai, and in Brussels; her solo exhibitions have made it throughout Chicago and the Midwest, including a spot in the Museum of Contemporary Art. She draws inspiration from the same man as her artist father and activist mother: Gandhi. “They said he was the half-naked man who took on the British Empire!” she says joyfully.

Jackie Samuel, New Communities Program Director of the South Chicago host organization, Claretian Associates, shares Johnson’s spiritual affinity for peace rhetoric. “I’m hoping that people see the Buddha head and go, ‘What’s that? Why is it here?’ So that when…that conversation starts, we can start engaging the community. People will talk about what we need, and that need is peace.”

More so than Johnson, Samuel appears to feel the burden of her community on her shoulders. She grew up nearby, and now works towards “positive economic, physical, and social change” though the arts. There’s real hope that this new project will work to create just that, ten thousand ripples throughout Chicago.

First, the host organizations will survey residents to help decide on a location for the Buddha head based on how they want to help their community. For South Chicago, it’s definitely an issue of safety. The heads will stand three feet tall, emerging from concrete, gravel, or grass, a completely white face with revealed nose, eyes, and hair tied in a bun, hopefully accompanied by a QR code on the side.

It is striking, unavoidable—you have to wonder why it’s there. Or that’s what Johnson hopes. Like Samuel, she envisions residents striking up a conversation about it with a stranger on the street. As these conversations occur over and over, a broader dialogue can grow to bring the whole community closer.

But really, why the half-Buddha head?

“It stemmed from the image of the Buddha in my art,” Johnson tells me. Large Buddha heads were placed in the center of a carpet on a platform as part of a previous solo exhibition of hers. Without any prompting, people naturally began sitting down in groups in front of the Buddha. She tried it again and again. No matter where the exhibition was, they all felt the “same response of feeling peaceful,” says Johnson. A simple concept, to be sure, but she wondered, “if we had them out in the streets, what could the response be?”

As a universal icon for peace, a balance of the secular and spiritual, it’s hoped the Buddha head will resonate with all people, no matter their race or religion. The project knows itself to be “ambitious in its breadth, and bold in its objective,” according to Kickstarter.com.

As of press time, the Kickstarter campaign to fund Ten Thousand Ripples is unaccomplished. The website warns, “This project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Sunday, May 20, 4:59AM GMT.” A donation to the project is a gamble in favor of unnamed groups for undecided purposes, a risked dollar in faith that these Chicago communities can succeed in a creative pursuit for peace. Some may argue that if money will be spent, it should go elsewhere—to the schools and police. But this project offers a new solution for a problem that is becomingly uncomfortably familiar.

Claire Withycombe

Eerie, watery chants sung by a chorus of female voices echo out onto the street in a quiet residential block. The ebb and flow of the music pulls the curious pedestrian into the set of open doors and through to the back of a modest gallery, where black-and-white vintage footage of young female gymnasts flits on a small screen. Their bodies glide, somersault, leap, and twirl forwards, backwards, and around in a series of roughly cut and rewound frames to the haunting movements of the music. “Collective Magnetism,” by Sara Mosk, is an appropriate introduction to “Black Arts,” both for the magnetic pull of its sounds and images, and for its place in the collective spirit of this group exhibit at Pilsen’s Roxaboxen Minicastle.

At first, the feeling in the gallery suggests the sensation of hearing lonely footsteps on an empty Pilsen street: a few viewers mosey around the two open rooms, and the disjointed creepiness of the individual works dictates the mood. A striking duo of sketches of prone women’s bodies by Jenny Kendler hangs on the front right. The top image, entitled “Oh, Give Me a Home,” features buffalo thundering across a woman’s back. In the sketch below, entitled “Sibling Rivalry (Love Bites),” another woman is mounted by a furry animal. Glance to the left, and a drawing depicts soft grey lines wriggling across sketch paper like the shadowy traces of charcoal worms. A shroud covering an elliptical form resting in a metal frame points across the space toward a giant paisley plume, rendered in black upholstery with touches of orange and sapphire.

As the night goes on, the tiny space fills with a crowd of exuberant folk, and lively conversations bubble to the surface. A woman in a pink wig and heavy makeup saunters up to a college kid in black cargo pants. They hit it off and start chatting about the work in front of them: a piece by Alex Chitty, a burnt six-foot ladder situated between a sketch of dismantled cougar skin and a photograph of a mouthless mask superimposed on a satin curtain.

In assembling the exhibit, curator Liz McCarthy drew from her personal network of female artists, looking for “icons of the individual [artist]” she had in mind. Some pieces were created for the exhibit, but most were personally selected by McCarthy from each artist’s extant oeuvre. All but one of the fourteen artists are based in Chicago. McCarthy sought to gather different individuals’ takes on an archetype widely explored and exploited in human history through folklore—that of the “strong, independent female outcast from…daily life,” she says.

Walking through the exhibit, McCarthy explains the structure of the exhibition space as a transition between two major manifestations of artistic work: formal “approaches to making images,” such as watercolors and photographs situated in frames, and less formal work that reflects ideas of environment and embodiment in more abstract or unconventional media. Traces of the two themes present themselves in different regions of the space, but the human body is of central concern at the front (with the Kendler pieces, and other works that use the image of the human body), while moving through the exhibit, “the body becoming environment” comes to the fore. This second idea is exemplified in a sculpture that manipulates objects of interior environments and challenges notions of females as vessels of content domesticity: Chitty’s ladder, despite reaching to some higher goal, is burnt to a crisp; a work by Melissa Damasauskas entitled “Powers That Be”—a chair snaked in masses of velveteen black ribbons—is shoved up against a doorknob. McCarthy describes the progression of the exhibit as a “buildup” which seems to culminate in the hypnotic footage “Collective Magnetism.”

The choice to run the exhibit during the spring, according to McCarthy, dovetails with the traditional associations of fertility with the season—and by extension, of the fertile with the feminine. A nearly exclusive use of black and white in each of the pieces references the notion that this fertility springs from the “dark, rich soil” built up during the burial of organic matter during the winter.

Ultimately, “Black Arts” is worth a visit. The exhibit is united not just by form or by meaning but also organically and communally, by the biological femaleness shared by the artists themselves and by the supportive structure of the exhibit’s origins. While each piece certainly provokes thought individually, the exhibit’s greatest charm is to be experienced in the way those individual pieces act in concert with the others.

Roxaboxen Exhibitions, 2130 W. 21st St. Through June 2. Hours by appointment through roxaboxen.minicastle@gmail.com. Free.

Cynthia Albritton, a Chicago native and South Side resident better known as “Cynthia Plaster Caster,” has lived the dream of teenage girls around the world. A self-titled “recovering groupie,” she has been making plaster casts of rock stars’ naughty bits since 1968. It all started in her college art class, where she was given the assignment to “plaster cast something solid that could retain its shape.” The Dick Clark Caravan of Stars happened to be in town that weekend, so Cynthia and her friend Pest decided to approach band members at the event in search of willing castees. While the weekend ended without a cast, she ended up losing her virginity to a member of Paul Revere and the Raiders—and, as she says on her website, “‘The Plaster Casters of Chicago’ were thus born.”

Cynthia is currently working on her autobiography. A complete list of her castees, a scrapbook of totally safe-for-work photos (she doesn’t publish photos of her “sweet babies” online), and a list of “Upcumming Events” are available on her website.

I called Cynthia five minutes before the scheduled time for our interview and she insisted I call her back; she was not kidding when she told me a few days before that she has been incredibly busy. Her voice boomed with assertiveness and I was almost too terrified to go through with the interview, but when she answered again, she was engaging and warm. She even spent our last few minutes asking me questions—the highest of honors coming from someone who, at my age, plucked Jimi Hendrix’s pubic hair one by one from an un-lubricated plaster mold. For a woman who’s seen more in her life than any teen girl (on the outside or inside) could ever hope to see, Cynthia “Plaster Caster” has maintained a giggly humility. Her life is a shining example for those hoping to find something they love and run with it—or dip it in dental alginate.

So, I guess my first question has to be…how’s the autobiography coming?

Yeah, that’s my big baby. I call my plaster casts my sweet babies, but my storybook is my big baby. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of this year.

I read an earlier interview that said your parents never found out about what you do. Is your mother still in the dark? Even with the autobiography coming out?

Well my mother passed away a few years ago. She never found out. It would’ve been perhaps less scary if my father found out. He would probably think it was funny. I realized that too late. But my mother would never understand. Never, ever, ever understand. I’d need to hire a bodyguard if she ever found out.

You were a young woman alone (or semi-alone) with celebrities in hotel rooms; was it ever scary? Did you ever feel unsafe?

Umm, yeah I mean I was and still am a shy girl and well, you know, I found it to be…I realized later it was kind of dangerous to be alone with anybody in a confined area without anybody around, but I was initially pretty tongue-tied being in the awesome presence of these so-called “rock gods” in or out of hotel rooms. It was overwhelming, unbelievable that they were actually talking to me. It’s dangerous, and I had a bad experience with Led Zeppelin—but that’s all I’m going to tell you about that.

Right, I’ve read that you’re going to include that in the autobiography.

Yeah. Never go to a guy’s room unattended unless you’ve checked out their background carefully. Interviews especially—the way they talk, the way they answer questions. If you do enough research you can get a sense of how wild they are.

Do you feel that Chicago’s music scene was the best for what you were doing back then? I know you moved to LA for a little while, but did you ever consider going to other cities?

Yeah, I dreamed about moving to London. But I didn’t have the money to move anywhere so I just stayed in Chicago, not really knowing how I’d get out of here until Frank Zappa came along. He was the one who thought I should move to LA, because he wanted to help finance this idea I had for a Plaster Caster museum. He said “LA is where the rock stars roam,” so that’s why I moved to LA.

How was the Chicago scene then compared to now?

Back then it was mainly a blues scene in Chicago, and there were some garage bands. They were modeled along the lines of the British Invasion and later that name applied. I didn’t really care for Chicago garage bands—the best were elsewhere. The music scene really sucked, except for the blues. And I was only interested in mop-top boys. But some of my favorite music now comes from Chicago.

Like who?

Right now I like a guy called Ezra Furman, originally from Evanston. And I liked The Redwalls when they were still around. I think Wilco is pretty great. Gosh, there’s quite a few. I’m not really a fan of The Smashing Pumpkins, but I think they got the ball rolling in terms of Chicago being a good place to live and make music. I tend to like bands that are relatively unknown, so I can say I saw them first, and hopefully they’ll be willing to pose for me.

Does anything bother you about today’s music scene, their groupies, etc.?

Groupies still are like groupies…but I think it was more exciting back in the ’60s because it was new and we were creating the formula as we went along. It was more of a challenge and there were more interesting personalities amongst just regular girls that became fans because of their love of music, and maybe other reasons. And now the only groupies that I know of with any notoriety are movie stars or musicians, like Courtney Love or Winona Ryder. I recommend it as a lifestyle to check out. Well maybe not a lifestyle, but an experience to have. It really taught me about who I am and who I was not.

Who was your most recent subject?

Unfortunately I haven’t cast anyone in a couple of years. The last one was Ariel Pink. I’d never heard of him. I think it was a Saturday night. My friend was going to the show and insisted I go with him, and by 1am Ariel Pink was in my apartment. I was so impressed with his music. We didn’t have a fluffer because he didn’t know anyone in Chicago…that person usually is—preferably—a wife or girlfriend of the subject. He had to take care of things himself. He wasn’t representing his full “capability” [laughs]. The dental mold is like a camera; it takes a picture of a moment in time and space. And he’s always welcome for a return, because he has way more “capability” than has been shown.

Have you ever gotten any stern rejections when you’ve asked to cast someone?

Well I’m very careful about reading people beforehand, because I don’t want to be rejected. I realized I had to research them before being alone with them. I’m a big analyst—I guess that’s the Gemini in me. I watch them onstage, watch their body language, see what’ll happen if I get backstage…I also don’t just flatly go up to them and hand them my calling card, as I used to. I like to take some time to get to know them, and them to know me, hopefully without telling them who I am. And if they seem like they have a heart of plaster, I’ll pop the question!

Would you ever cast someone because they were particularly famous?

Well, now not because they’re famous but because they’ve done something extraordinary—make my life better, make me happy. I’ve fantasized about casting Barack Obama. A lot of fantasies I might have, about someone who happens to be well known. That kind of person, especially a politician, is likely not to do it. It might not be good for their career, and it’s always a crapshoot how they’re gonna come out in the mold. Wayne Kramer, if people didn’t know better—it looks like he has no penis at all, just because of the way the mold looked that night. I’m not a fame queen and I’m not a size queen, I’m just a talent queen.

Have you gone out of your way (travelling-wise) to cast a particular celebrity/normal person? Or do you always let them come to you?

No. I mean I have travelled. I did travel to see MC5 and I had my kit with me. I was actually coming from New York and I had a stopover. I was planning on coming straight to Chicago but someone told me to stop in Detroit. But no; at this point, I’ve never gone out of my way to travel just to cast someone. It’s sort of a spontaneous thing.

Which makes it better, I guess.

Yeah, because they might change their mind if they think about it too long!

Where, besides New York and San Francisco, have you exhibited your work?

The Jimi Hendrix cast was very briefly displayed in Boston, but it was banned because the owner of the gallery was afraid that the parents of some kids would get mad at him because there was also a restaurant next to this gallery and the kids might ask some difficult questions about this sort-of lifelike cast. That’s the reason he gave; who knows. I’m hoping to have more exhibits after I finish my book.

Will you be exhibiting your work in the Chicago area anytime soon?

I’d like to, since I’m born and bred here, but it has to be the right gallery. There isn’t that great of a choice of galleries in Chicago, compared to the rest of the world.

You ran for mayor in 2010. How was that?

Yeah, it came about suddenly over a couple of margaritas, and Daley was stepping down, and I knew there would never be an election like this again. The race was up for grabs and I had to throw my hat in. I know very little about politics and I’m still just learning. I don’t think it’s important. The mayor should bring people together and have more forums and town hall meetings, discussions about what people want and need. And also, all these political speeches are very boring—so boring that you can’t listen to them long enough to get the platforms. The whole process needs to be less boring. Change the language. I thought Rahm Emanuel would be good at that, but he’s not. Where’s the potty mouth?!

I may run again. I’m thinking about it. I’ll be more prepared—I was really taken by surprise the first time, people talked me into it. I didn’t get registered as a write-in, and I’ll make sure next time I will be.

Sabina Bremner

In 1988, Adelheid Mers—curator of “Hairy Blob,” currently on view at the Hyde Park Arts Center—received a yearlong grant for graduate study at the University of Chicago’s Committee on the Visual Arts. “I spent all of my time in the Regenstein,” she says, “reading everything I could get my hands on about space.”

For twenty years, she kept that knowledge stored away. Then she turned to time as a theme for her art, and she found a natural outlet for those hours of studying. Time, she has come to believe, is intimately bound up with our conception of space. “We think of time metaphorically, in terms of space,” she says.

These considerations are central to “Hairy Blob,” whose aim is to reconceptualize time. She explains, “I came to realize that our everyday, traditional understanding of time as past, present, and future leads us to use the past to validate certain traditions, and to use the future to justify things we want today; it helps us to avoid thoughtfully thinking through things.”

She pauses and begins to speak slowly, each word suffused with weight. “It seemed to me that past and future were thought constructions used to leverage power, and if we could think about time differently, social justice and sustainability thinking could be furthered.”

The title of the exhibit is a metaphor for our experience on Earth: we are just transitory ‘hairs’ on a spinning blob. The show includes cityscapes made of cardboard, a column of gilded encyclopedias entitled “Sunsets,” and a net suspending ping-pong balls scrawled on by viewers contributing their own opinions on the nature of time.

One video installation documents a bicycle ride through industrial Chicago neighborhoods, its frames aligned both spatially and temporally. “Piers,” a glossy photograph encompassing an entire wall, features its artist, Sarah FitzSimons, overlooking a barren, mountainous landscape on a boardwalk inscribed, “In memory of ancient seas, and for those waters yet to come.” Emily Newman’s video triptych “Polyteknicheskaya (Don’t Love Here)” elegizes a decaying Soviet-planned suburb slated for redevelopment: in a spare, candid style, it presents several intimate portrayals of the culture that has organically emerged there.

Faheem Majeed’s installation, “Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden,” takes up an entire room. It features a table piled high with found objects—books, paint cans, photographs, and knickknacks—which he thinks of collectively as a cityscape. These ephemeral objects have not been imbued with a monolithic social value; they are poised to be discarded and forgotten. As such, their positioning in the installation strikes the viewer as particularly personal.

“Viewers may be frustrated,” Majeed says, “by the fact that they don’t know why these objects were selected, what their explicit meaning was.” But that is part of the installation’s aim: to rethink the way we select history, valuing certain objects over others through archiving and documentation. Here, that process is turned on its head. Reconceived as art, these objects have been imbued with new meaning both individually, through the personal relationship Majeed shares with them, and socially, in their new role as art objects. The connection between time and space is rendered explicit in the way the piece also documents the history of a given space—the South Side Community Arts Center, the previous home of the objects.

In keeping with the theme of temporality, the pieces will evolve during the course of the exhibition. “It’s very important that the show not be static,” Mers comments. “Otherwise it’s just the same thing all over again: it becomes just another archive that gets reinterpreted.”

Kirsten Leenaars’ piece, “Rising and Falling Actions (Everything is imprinted forever with what it once is),” is currently an incomplete wall drawing featuring the words “TIME AS WE KNOW IT IS COMING TO AN END” in bold text. It will be filled in with the unfolding plot lines of a science fiction video she will create during a residency at the Center, in which the Center itself metamorphoses into “a flagship on a time mission.” Becky Alprin’s cardboard cityscapes will march across the gallery space day by day, a process that will be documented in stop-motion animation.

“Hairy Blob” itself is accompanied by a website, “The Asteroid Belt” at hairyblob.net, on which contributors post stories and essays consistent with the exhibition’s themes. As for Majeed’s piece, the gallery put up a “Do not touch” sign next to his installation, inadvertently forcing viewers to choose whether to transgress the prohibition. As gallery staff and viewers interact with the piece, it changes to reflect their modifications. Majeed claims that “Planting” is “the most unintentionally interactive he’s ever made.”

Mers remarks that “we’re more networked now than we have ever been.” The accelerating social change of postindustrialism affords us a novel vantage point from which to view, and therefore to reconceive, time. “Hairy Blob” seeks to take advantage of this particular moment, and Mers thinks that the response to it has reflected the unique nature of the show. “It’s a dialogue starter,” she says.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through July 29. Monday-Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Nandini Ramakrishnan

Behind most provocative art one expects to find a big personality and big opinions. But the face behind all of the genitalia, racial slurs, vomit, tongues, human feces, urine, breasts, and crude depictions of “Coco River Fudge Street” is a reticent, mild-mannered, and self-critical man in his early thirties. At the closing of his exhibition last Sunday at the Hyde Park Art Center, David Leggett was dressed in faded jeans, a hoodie, and old Nike sneakers—a guy you would not look twice at walking down Michigan Avenue, nor expect to have an imagination to rival the most hormonally-infused of teenage boys.

A Chicago resident and a graduate of the Savannah School of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute, Leggett’s work has been showcased at a range of venerable institutions, including the New Museum in New York City and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Yet during his talk, Leggett had little to say, and almost none of what he did say was positive about the outcome of his exhibition, a collection of colored-pencil drawings created daily in 2011 and posted on his Tumblr. “I was very tired by the end,” he said apathetically, when coaxed by the curator to make a remark. Despite Leggett’s reticence, there is, in fact, a lot to be said about his work.

From Obama’s healthcare policy to teenage pregnancy to hustler culture and a whole lot of sex, most of Leggett’s 152 pieces address some social, political, or economic issue, usually pertaining to the African-American experience. With a quick glance across one of the rows of drawings in the hallway gallery  at HPAC, you’ll see a toilet overflowing with urine; the head of a black man on a rainbow swastika; a possessed  doctor with the words “Obamacare” hovering above a fat, sunburnt white man; and a chubby, unkempt black guy who’s thinking about his penis while a Cyclops stands behind him. The work is accompanied by the text, “All my work is about my mom.”

Most of the pieces contain some text written out in schoolboy penmanship with atrocious grammar, and the majority contain the word “niggah.” Besides colored pencil, Leggett also uses other “low tech materials,” such as glitter and felt. At times, his collection feels autobiographical, at others times it seems controversial purely for the sake of being controversial. “I’m not trying to be a moral compass,” he says.

Although Leggett’s drawings are humorous and brutally honest vignettes about society—in the gallery, you would often hear a patron chuckling under her breath—some of his work verges on complete arbitrariness. The Pablo Picasso stamps that fill a number of his drawings, for example, have nothing to do with the subject matter of the other drawings. Some works seem needlessly provocative; one piece consists of a simple phallic scribble below the word “penis,” and some drawings verge on the pornographic. His collection also seems unedited—this is perhaps the point—to the extent that it looks more like a series of exercises rather than a selection that is ready for show. Regardless, the best of his work sticks to the African-American experience.

It is clear Leggett uses his art and the Internet as a means to express that suppressed teenage boy inside him. His project began on a Tumblr account, where he posted his daily drawings and took requests from the public once a week. Since the inception of his blog, he has amassed a huge cult following of, believe it or not, teenage boys—a couple of whom eagerly waited in line at the closing of his show to ask him questions. This is perhaps the only thing he expressed an inkling of enthusiasm about; “I find it fun to talk to teenagers,” he said, “looking at what fifteen year olds are doing and then there’s me, 31, doing the same thing.”

At the end of his interview, the curator asked him, “Do you have any questions for the audience about their perceptions of your work?” “No, not really,” he said, staring into space. Then a member of the audience asked a question about working on Tumblr.  He paused and said, “Online is great because people think I’m much cooler than I am.”

(Meaghan Murphy)

“This is a powerf**k” is an apt tagline for Slow Gallery’s current exhibition. “It ain’t over…” is all about power and how we mess with it—it’s about breaking rules, challenging assumptions, confronting ourselves and our relationship with power of any kind.

In the gallery, there’s a telephone pole lying on the floor. Too big for the stark and white-walled space, it extends into the furnished apartment of the gallery’s director. Separated by a door and an obvious change in décor the two pieces seem separate, making the viewer unsure if both spaces are open or not. After a few tentative looks around, one crosses the threshold to find a lamp post protruding out of the end of the pole, illuminating the apartment’s bed. On one of the gallery’s walls there is a looped video of two men chopping down a tall, bare tree in a misty wooded landscape. On another wall hang two plastic axes, filled with watery fake blood—a powerful statement, indeed. Axes, tree, pole: it’s an obvious connection, but it takes a moment to register.

Slow is a gallery that prides itself on its small shows and its careful pairing of artists, as well as its commitment to a down-to-earth vibe. It’s a place that’s over irony, a Pilsen gallery focused on “frankness.” With this exhibition, there’s definitely a lot of frankness in the room.

At a quick glance, the show’s pieces could appear unrelated and random, but it seems intentional. Slow’s director and curator Paul Hopkin—or as he introduces himself to guests at the opening, simply, “Slow Gallery Paul”—explained that these pieces are about power in a “comically literal way.” It’s so obvious, you might miss it. Body power, phallic power, electrical power, it’s “so stupid to even say it out loud,” he says.

The axes, the telephone pole, and the tree trunk video are all part of a sequence by Brent Garbowski and Joe Mault called, “It’s So Hard to Take What is Mine.” It’s “cyclical,” says Hopkin. “The ax is a way of taking power,” he says, but it’s filled with blood—“The weapon takes its owner’s blood.” Garbowski, a former student of Hopkin’s, mentioned that the original idea for the axes was to use a replica of the axes in the video, but the artists decided that would be too literal and not comedic enough.

Barbara DeGenevieve’s video piece showcases a large nude woman singing jazz standards directly to the camera. Her gaze is as confident as her voice crooning “Fever,” though her voice is almost more naked than her body. Her complete self-assuredness confronts your conceptions of what a naked body and voice should be like—objectified, ashamed, inhibited—without making viewers uncomfortable. It’s a fine line, and both the artist and her model get it right. There’s a power to it, but also a humor. Because of her model’s aplomb and poise, it’s funny when she forgets a bit of the lyrics, not awkward. You’re invited in on the joke, you’re invited to laugh. DeGenevieve’s model is not the traditional subject and her viewer is not the traditional gazer. These traditional lines are effaced, and what’s left is a completely sincere depiction of body and voice.

Hopkin hopes that the show succeeds in conveying a sense of humor beyond the trite and oft-relied upon sense of irony. “I’m very disappointed by irony. I see it as a lazy kind of humor,” he  says. With the curation of this exhibit, it’s clear he wants to find humor within power and the ways we construct it. And he succeeds. There’s something bare and bold to these pieces and their humor. Unencumbered by irony, power is all that’s left.

Slow Gallery, 2153 W. 21st St. Saturdays, 12-5pm. (773)-645-8803. paul-is-slow.info

The first collection in the space is entitled “Kaleidoscope Heart: An Exercise in Perception through Optics,” by Laura Fenwick. Eight brightly colored, square-cropped images created using self-modified lenses line the walls. The subjects of the photographs are unclear, but each image is titled with GPS coordinates. “I wanted to go into very public places where things might be overlooked or taken for granted,” she says. As for the coordinates, they allow viewers to “go back to that exact location.” She points out a particular image and explains that although the photograph is dominated by blues and greens, the subject—a rock formation on NIU’s campus that is, as she describes it, “grossly overlooked”—is, in reality, the color of most rock formations: brown. “Ultimately, my goal is for people to know that they can control the way they perceive things even though they can’t control how they see them,” Fenwick concludes.

Jessica Bronge’s statement begins and ends with the sentence, “Dreams are a small fragment in our lives; most of us pay no attention to them.” Her digital collages suggest things seen before—perhaps in a dream. Murky, muted colors and high contrast define Bronge’s dreamscapes, creating an otherworldly haze. The most striking image, titled “John the Baptist,” shows a man’s blurry, disembodied head superimposed on a tiled alcove, lit by a skylight. And some are more cryptic than others; determining their actual subjects takes study.

Recycled frames made of rough, light-colored wood outline Sarah Furman’s collection, whose colors and subjects incite a nostalgia more suggestive of film photography than digital. In fact, some of the images are scanned archival photographs of the artist and her family members. “They all have some sort of new element to them,” she says, alluding to the subtle architectural and textural overlays that make each image seem like a double-exposure. Some of the alterations and edits are almost imperceptible, including a thin mesh pattern on top of a self-portrait. She says that this collection has been her way of documenting “how relationships have changed my life, including my relationship with myself.” This turn inwards and backwards seems fitting for that period of impending graduation, and the general infatuation that our generation has with the question, “Why?”

“I’ve never been one to be in front of the camera, so this is very unusual,” Steven Connolly says of his collection, “Both sides of a Decision.” Presented via dye-sublimation on large rectangles of aluminum, his collection juxtaposes two different “sides” of himself, separated by the desire and motivation to lose weight. This literal take on the artist’s inner struggles proves not only courage on Connolly’s part, but also superb talent in post-processing and editing techniques. He says in his statement, “There is a side of me that is always trying to improve myself…this half is the one that sets goals and tries working towards them. Then there is the other side…this half questions everything that I do, undermines my progress and points out my flaws.” In one image, one side chooses a leaf blower and the other a rake; in another, one rides a bicycle uphill as the other sits in a black Jeep oriented downhill. One image even combines the two halves, showing him peering apprehensively into a mirror while his reflection points at him and yells.

Somehow, despite the wide range of both theme and technique throughout the individual collections, the four artists come together to make visual the journey of self-realization that has led up to this event.

Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halstead St. Free. (312) 725-4223. chicagoartdepartment.org

“When we moved into the building, there was a sense we would do something,” said economics professor and art director Canice Prendergast referring to the business school’s occupation of the Rafael Viñoly-designed Harper Center. That “something” turned out to be a collection of contemporary art. Prendergast was joined by Suzanne Deal Booth, contemporary art director of the Art Institute James Rondeau, Rennaisance Society director Suzanne Ghez, and UofC alum and art collector Dean Valentine to seek and select the art.

The committee travels internationally, from Los Angeles to Switzerland, to find new and exciting works. They operate democratically, selecting pieces by vote. “Everybody’s had their feelings hurt,” Prendergast laughed. “I suggest what I think is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone says no, it’s terrible, and I kind of sulk for a bit.”

He doesn’t sulk for long. Big names in contemporary art grace the walls—Andre Butzer, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hanne Darboven, to name a few. The collection’s burgeoning esteem, as well as the clout of the committee members, gains them access to increasingly rare and high-end art. “There are certain artists where demand far exceeds supply, so you basically have to make a case to the gallery,” Prendergast explained. “It took us a while to get to that stage, but now people know we’re a serious collection.”

The collection has caught the eye of galleries in New York. A work by Anna Shteynshleyger currently sits on loan in the International Center for Photography. In the past, the New Museum and the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art have also loaned pieces from the collection. The Booth School also has an agreement with the Smart Museum to lend out any piece at their request.

The unusual set-up of the collection, which is scattered throughout the building, gives the committee unique parameters within which to work. They have to appeal to a much wider audience, one that is not necessarily educated in art. “We are mindful of diversity on every level—medium, scale, subject matter, gender, geographic points of origin, etc.,” Rondeau said. The committee toyed with adopting a specific theme for the collection, but decided to leave it open-ended to avoid narrowing the scope of the work.

Certain motifs do inevitably crop up, connecting the works: the photographs, in particular, exude political messages, almost in response to their business school surroundings. Globalization, imperialism, cultural clashes, and industrialization are but few of the issues represented. For Prendergast, this complements the education at Booth, urging students to think broadly about the world.

Many of the photographs have a wry attitude toward their political subjects, like Tacita Dean’s “The Russian Ending.”  This series of photographs places handwritten stage directions above gruesome images of explosions, deaths, and shipwrecks, a jab at the practice of lightening the endings to Russian films so they’re easier for American audiences to handle.

Another series by Cao Fei focuses on Chinese teenagers who don the bright costumes of Japanese anime characters, acting out scenes in front of drab skyscrapers and overpasses. Other works deal with African independence, the endangered tenets of democracy, and industrial Germany.

The collection’s paintings are far more abstract than the photography. Prendergast jokingly admits that, although this wasn’t anyone’s intention, there are very few figurative paintings in the entire collection. The conceptual nature of the art, according to Prendergast, mirrors the conceptual approach to education at the university.

Prendergast hopes to integrate the collection with the rest of the university, and especially with DoVA.  He plans on inviting art classes to view the pieces,and aspires to create a series of podcasts to guide viewers through the collection. Currently, visitors can pick up a brochure at the front desk that highlights certain works on each floor.

For now, the collection remains largely unknown to much of the university. Booth students and faculty are certainly aware of the collection—one researcher in the Becker Institute professed that trips to look at the art were a nice break from her windowless office. However, this much could not be said about the undergraduates studying in the lobby of the Harper Center itself, who were surprised to hear of the collection that, unbeknownst to them, was all around.

Claire Withycombe

As you come off the sidewalk and enter the Beverly Art Center through glass double doors, the staff greets you with smiles and points you toward your destination. Tap shoes stomp in synch with British pop, and a violin lesson echoes down the hall. The center teems with artistry, and Rick Therrio’s exhibit is at home in this space. “Murky Stories” explores the warped and bizarre corners of the human mind, and the uncertain nature of past and present.  The hallway leading up to the exhibition space gives nod to the more twisted elements of thought.  An inscription on the wall reads, “Life in general, its hard to get at the truth because every time someone tells a story they tell it in their perspective so the stories change.”

The exhibition, which showcases Therrio’s earlier work from the eighties, uses a variety of media, including sculpture and colored pencil. In his sculpture work, Therrio uses found objects to craft the likeness of distorted faces.  He layers bits of plastic leftover from manufacturing plants with electronic parts, nails, wire, and paint to create some semblance of a face. Not quite human, these faces appear to have escaped from a science lab. Each face’s flesh crawls with beautiful scars. These sculptures aren’t merely bizarre or disturbing— they provoke a feeling of uneasiness towards the future. Therrio’s science fiction references ask the questions, “Will our view of beauty and humanness someday become so distorted that this is what people will view as beautiful?” The pieces hang on the wall and stare down visitors as they enter the exhibit.

Again drawing from science fiction, Therrio’s colored pencil works depict cityscapes warped by unknown creatures, and the daily life of an intelligent race of insects. In the drawing “Victims of an Angry Skin,” he depicts a realistic city’s absorption by a tight-skinned and inhuman menace called “the skin creature.” A piece titled “The Deliberations” melds together the distant past of The Elizabethan Era with a futuristic life. This drawing shows insects interacting intelligently, dressed in royal robes and high Elizabethan collars. Details of human history can be gleaned by looking deeply and closely at the details. One insect holds a book inscribed with hieroglyphics.  For Therrio, every object is an opportunity to further the story.

Therrio’s work is often inspired by surrealists like Salvador Dali, and this influence is evident in works like “Victims of an Angry Skin.” He renders the movement of the skin creature in a manner similar to the melting effect used on the clocks in Dali’s famous piece “The Persistence of Memory.” Therrio’s work, additionally, does not hesitate to meld together the past and future. His interest in science fiction permits the warping of reality, and frequently the confusing becomes the ideal.

Though “Murky Stories” highlights Therrio’s earlier work, he is quick to separate the past and the future when it comes to his own career. “I’d like to think I’ve improved over time,” he quips. The earlier pieces displayed at the Beverly Art Center are generally in line with the rest of his body of work, though some of his more violent and disturbing pieces had to be excluded from the exhibition to meet the venue’s family-friendly guidelines. Though the pieces on display are futuristic and unsettling, they are in no way Therrio’s most graphic work.

In “Murky Stories,” seemingly bizarre pieces fit together and convey the title of the collection, which comments upon the uncertainty of both the past and present.