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 »

As denizens of the neighborhood nurse their thirsty vehicles at the BP station on East Hyde Park Boulevard, just east of the Metra tracks, they can already hear it. Perhaps they are distracted by the hiss of the frothing pump or are inside buying a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos; but if you pause and look around, they all appear to be swaying to a subdued bass line and a chilling croon with no ostensible earthly source. Around the corner, the street is showered from above with dense light. Clouds and skulls dance before the sidewalk on a monolithic screen, accompanied by a tune that has already become to local residents disarmingly familiar.

This nightly apparition that haunts the corner of East Hyde Park and Cornell every night from 4 to 10pm is only a peripheral component of “Notes to Nonself,” an installation that has been hosted at the Hyde Park Art Center for the past 21 days and will remain until May 2. Read the rest of this entry »

Lines are being blurred in the Chicago art scene. As demonstrated by last Saturday’s Artist Run Spaces Tour, organized by the Hyde Park Art Center, the divisions between artist and curator, studio and gallery, office and home really aren’t so defined after all. The Artist Run Spaces Tour represents HPAC’s contribution to the year-long Studio Chicago project, a collaborative project that seeks to celebrate methods and places of artistic production. Read the rest of this entry »

Featuring a selection of work by its artist faculty, the Hyde Park Art Center’s (HPAC) new exhibition explores the “repetitive, compulsive and often deceptive nature of retrospection.” Titled “(Re)Collect,” it’s curated by interim Exhibitions Manager Francesca Wilmott. HPAC provides adult, pre-school and youth classes to the general community and across all skill levels; small wonder that the instructors’ works span a range of media, including unconventional ones like used coffee filters, organic onion skins and eggshells. Read the rest of this entry »

Hyde Park can sometimes seem like its own little world. In fact, it hosted one near the beginning of its existence: The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which attracted over 20 million people in six months, was held on the Midway Plaisance and in Jackson Park. Meanwhile, at the western end of the Midway, the nascent University of Chicago had just completed its first year of classes. Over the next 60 years, the rest of the neighborhood grew up around the expanding university and the hotels, transportation network, and neoclassical museum left behind by the World’s Fair. In the 1950s, two more events changed the course of the neighborhood forever: urban renewal and integration. Disturbed by the level of crime that came with Hyde Park’s status as a South Side entertainment destination, the University, in cooperation with the city and the federal government, managed to level almost all of the bars, nightclubs, and music venues that formerly lined 55th Street. Meanwhile, neighborhood residents united in the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference to try to ease the transition to a racially diverse neighborhood. From the looks of today’s Hyde Park, they seem to have succeeded: Where racial succession, riots, and gang warfare devastated other South Side neighborhoods, Hyde Park is a stable, tight-knit community that was ranked the third most diverse neighborhood in the city by a 2008 DePaul study. North of Hyde Park Boulevard lies Kenwood, a neighborhood whose leafy southern half, south of 47th Street, includes mansions and celebrities (Louis Farrakhan, Barack Obama) that are often grouped with Hyde Park. Read the rest of this entry »

The uneasy imagery of sliced-open skulls in Matthew Harris’s “Beyond China” is a reflection of the tensions the artist observed between traditional and Western-influenced culture on a research trip to China. Harris, a ceramicist by training, presents smooth-surfaced terracotta busts of bodhisattvas and Buddhist priests in classical Chinese idiom, their heads cleanly split between the eyes or at the temples to reveal silkscreened inner surfaces of factory workers, luxury goods, and other symbols of modern China. Peering between the two lobes of an aged priest’s head to catch a glimpse of assembly line workers feels like discovering a dirty secret, while other scenes boast of the triumph of the old over the new. One bodhisattva’s head, heavy-lidded and jowly, has been sliced both at the forehead and at the ears. The earless half-heads gaze at each other in profile, while on one smooth plane old men pick through trash heaps in front of high-rises; on the other, an earthmoving machine extends a claw above a corbeled building with cupola. At the other end of the gallery, the bodhisattva’s ears instead offer portraits of two female factory workers staring directly back at the viewer. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the “Artists Run Chicago” exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center, the proprietors of Deluxe Projects reflected on the experience of creating an artist-run space, hoping to pass their wisdom on to future generations. Their piece, “Instructions for Running a DIY Art Space,” starts like this:
1. Fall in love with art.
2. Go to a party, a bar, an opening, a lecture, etc.—anywhere where you can see art and find conversation. Get out of your studio.
3. Find other artists there who are as desperate as you are to explode into the world! Read the rest of this entry »

A community fixture for seven decades, the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) is getting ready to celebrate its legacy thus far with more than two months of events and programs entitled “70 Days for 70 Years.” In addition to inviting visitors to take in the Center’s artwork (photographs by local high school students are currently featured; see facing page), lectures, demonstrations, and performance pieces offer the opportunity to do everything from learn to make kimchi to hobnob with a former member of the Weather Underground. Read the rest of this entry »