Neighborhood
Guns, Birds, & Steel
Just west of Torrence Avenue, 134th Street acts as a divide. To the south, the fringes of a junkyard gradually merge with warehouses and factories. Some of the street signs are hand-painted. There are cattails and prairie grasses that soar 12 feet into the air. A few feet away, a rusted-out shell of a... »
Do Not Touch
Just before last Sunday’s opening of Cathy Wilkes’s exhibit “I Give You All My Money,” Renaissance Society staff briefly convened to determine where the installation’s borders were supposed to lay. One staff member suggested that gallery-goers should be permitted to step over the small purple roses scattered on the floor. Another staffer agreed, but... »
High Visibility
“I am an invisible man.” To begin a play with that phrase can’t help but raise expectations. Court Theatre’s current run of “Invisible Man” has especially high expectations to reckon with, owing to both the long history of the celebrated novel and the nature of the production: this is the first time the book... »
Domestic Nightmares
There’s a phrase often repeated among surrealists, Dadaists, and those attempting to explain the artistic oddities of those first two groups. Echoing André Breton’s sentiment, the surreal, they say, is “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an ironing board.” By mixing totally disjointed objects and materials, these artists believed... »
Squaring the Circle
If Jean-Michel Basquiat, Edward Munch, and Willem de Kooning were to combine their artistic genes and make a baby, the result would be the work of German artist André Butzer. Or at least, the work he used to make. Fast-forward five years and it seems that this artistic ménage à trois has disbanded. In... »
Out of Hiding
Bernard Scavella, the veteran saxophonist, is a man of few words. His breath seems like a terrible thing to waste. The virtuoso divides his time between his work as a pharmacist and mesmerizing gaggles of jazz buffs on the weekends. Scavella has grown a little hoary around the temples, and his face registered a... »
Colombian Exposition
“What I love about cumbia is that it’s the music of the people,” said Tiff Itzi-Nallah. Itzi-Nallah spun last Thursday at Zhou B. Arts Center with the People’s DJs Collective, bringing the popular art form into a new context. Traditionally the music of the Colombian peasantry with a distinctive Afro-Caribbean beat, cumbia has begun... »
Creative Futures
Bruce Taylor began the first day of class by asking his nine students why they were given their first names. “I was named Joy,” responded one student, “because my daddy said I brought joy into his life.” After two beats of respectful silence a single giggle escaped from someone’s mouth. The class erupted in... »
