The evening features drinks with conceptual artist Tom Marioni as part of his social artwork The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art and a performance by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi.

Plus, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) will be parked outside serving regional Iraqi cuisine on limited edition paper replicas of Saddam Hussein’s china all night long.

Feast surveys the history of the artist-orchestrated meal, presenting the work of more than thirty artists and artist groups who have transformed the simple act of eating together into a compelling artistic medium. Through a presentation within the Smart Museum and new commissions in public spaces, the exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to other influential artists, from the Italian Futurists and Gordon Matta-Clark to Marina Abramović and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Feast addresses the radical hospitality embodied by these artists and the social, commercial, and political structures that surround the experience of eating together.

The evening features drinks served as part of Tom Marioni’s social artwork The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art and a performance by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi.

Plus, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen food truck will be parked outside serving regional Iraqi cuisine on paper replicas of Saddam Hussein’s china all night long.

Image: Michael Rakowitz, detail of working sketch for the Enemy Kitchen food truck, courtesy of the artist.

Over the past five years, Irish artist Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966) has garnered international attention for her installations whose signature elements are set amongst, and outfitted with, accoutrements of an abject, quotidian nature. Wilkes’ highly subjective work consists of objects (strollers, soiled dishes, dolls, dried flower petals) that recur as symbolic leitmotifs. Her process of selection and arrangement of materials is measured and refined, drawing equally on a precise formal language and the most intimate of personal experiences to create a compelling autobiographical thread. The Renaissance Society will present “I Give You All My Money” whose title, like that of several other works, has a biblical reference regarding sacrifice.

This event is FREE and open to the public. For upcoming events presented in conjunction with this exhibition, see The Renaissance Society website – www.renaissancesociety.org

The daylong event includes panel discussions and the keynote addresses “From Activists to Followers: Children in the Soviet Imaginary” by Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford) and “Neither God nor Master” by William Ayers (formerly University of Illinois at Chicago) and Bernardine Dohrn (Northwestern University).

Free, but space is limited. Register to attend and find a full schedule at http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/symposium.”

SHoP will house a small-press library and book exchange; Red Flags Salon and Tap serving local brews, handcrafted cocktails, and lemonade; a wood shop and sign-up project space; the Hyde Park Kunstverein, a Berlin-style community art museum featuring local collections and artists; CurioPantry, an ongoing exhibition space within a Victorian pantry; a time-bank, where you can trade your skills for other goods and services; a seed bank; a fort-building room and kids’ wood shop; a movement and bodywork space; a film screening room; ongoing art installations; and more!

This is an all-ages event. Childcare provided from 4:00 to 10:00pm. Suggested donation of $10-$30, or volunteer for service in the building.

Featured artists:

John Preus: Slow Recovery (Main Room)
David Cox and Alexis Grinbold
Maria Constanza Garrido
Katherine Harvath
Kevin Reiswig
Heather Mullins and Meaghan Burritt
Heather Mullins and Hannah Givler
Jennifer Yorke
Adam Rose
South Side Projections: Michael W. Phillips, Jr.
The Cinema Culture: Amir George
JayVe Montgomery
Vicky Yen
Hyde Park Kunstverein: George Kagan

The opening features a panel discussion (at 5:30 pm) with curators Robert Bird, Christopher Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and Tumelo Mosaka followed by a reception.

Drawing inspiration from his youth as a grocery store bagger in the Milwaukee suburbs, as well as his side-gig as a commercial photography assistant, Gent addresses the simultaneously intimate and revealing practice of consumption. The title, Not Quite As Good Because of You, comes from an inspiring and intimidating message from the company president in the Publix Employee Handbook. The exhibition features photographs of consumer products that appear unfinished or slightly off, and outtakes from commercial shoots that seem in-progress. In combination with the photographs, Gent will bag all the actual contents in his bedroom, even his bed. This installation flips the grocery-bagger-as-voyeur paradigm on its head by allowing the viewer to scan the items of Gent’s life in neat everyday packages.

Gent states, “While being a bagger you see peoples consumption habits, you observe the intimacy and consistency in which people purchase goods.” Gent articulates this intimacy through the carefully selected items found in the photographs. The outtakes from commercial shoots show a far less polished side of consumer advertisement, playing on the consumer’s own expectations of quality.

A sacramental deity, food, friend, or foe? Does the animal represent wild abandon or domesticated companionship? Is animality something (or someone) that is on the other side of humanity? Or: is it an element that wells up from the depths of humanity itself? Primordial and otherworldly, what is animal might be thought of as that which resists the symbolic chain of language, yet forms a link between sentient beings through varied modes of sensorial transactions and as such forms something of a peculiar kinship with the arts.

Animality, the exhibition, grew out of an interdisciplinary OPC seminar held this past spring that incorporated a series of visiting lecturers who discussed the subject of “the animal” in relation to their own work. The series included: artist, Pierre Huyghe; scientist, Dr. Roland Kays; media theorist & University of Chicago professor, W.J.T. Mitchell; and art critic, Jan Verwoert. Through the lecture series, discussions, films, and field trips seminar participants endeavored to question the orthodoxy that maintains the line separating humans from animals and the ways in which art itself figures into the debates surrounding animal life.

The exhibition is not intended as a didactic argument lodged in the field of animal studies, but is more of a messy thesis, one which is not hemmed in by the strictures of its own conceits, modestly seeking instead to comprehend something like an animal aesthetic. In keeping with its categorical blurriness or blurry categorizations (classroom as animal, exhibition as menagerie, education in/of the field), the show includes art and artists from beyond the territorial boundaries of the seminar that expand the definition of animality.

Contributors to the exhibition include: Marius Aleksa, Theresa Ganz, Sara Garth, David Giordano, Jacqueline Hendrickson, Samantha Jones, Stacee Kalmanovsky, Melanie Kassel, Jessie Mott, Jasmine Neal, Elle Opitz, Hannah Pae, Valentina Solano, Cassandra Troyan, Jan Verwoert, Erik Wenzel and May Yeung.

Despite their varied approaches to media and subject, these artists are bound by their sustained engagement with the human figure and by their use of pattern as a visual strategy to enhance, entice, or complicate our viewing experience. Go Figure brings together exemplary paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the Smart Museum and other collections throughout Chicago. Together, these works explore issues of identity, personal history, and social change and, in doing so, reveal the versatile capacity of art to capture the diversity and complexity of contemporary human experience.

Work by Gabrielle Garland, Jacqueline Hendrickson and Emily Jones.

O’Brien’s increasingly inventive sculpture work displays a messy exuberance that is, on the one hand, distinctly anti-Minimalist in its sensibility. On the other hand, his work resists the sentimentality in the recent revival of “the handmade,” even while using materials, like ceramic or yarn, that are almost synonymous with old notions of craft. While no material appears to be off limits for O’Brien, an important uniting tie is a certain attitude toward the role of the pedestal—the pedestal is not a vehicle for display, but is integral to each work.

Sponsored by The Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts and the Art|Science Initiative at University of Chicago.

In her art, Jones suggests that sensitivity to topical issues is predominately a matter of our relationship to the respective genres that mobilize them, rather than what’s innate to the issues themselves. Likewise, the substance of her art is as much its subject matter as it is the void of artistic or moral directives. For over a year she has been working exclusively with African-American actor Darren Jones on video performances called The Emancipation Of The Women.

Take Back The Night is the first public presentation of that work, less the initial recording that played somewhere at the groundbreaking of the Logan Center last year and will play here this May 18-21.

Emily’s videos are distributed in part by V-Tape (Toronto), but she also gives them away. They are not yet seen on Youtube, but this week at the Gallery you’ll see at once:

For more information, see the event website.

David Cordero and Elliot Layda contemplate ineffectual attempts of togetherness and self-improvement in a collaborative installation at DOVA Temporary in Hyde Park.

Panel includes Rachel Harrison (sculptor), Miwon Kwon (Professor of Art History, UCLA), James Meyer (Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University) and David Raskin (Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

Curated and introduced by Artemis Willis, Ph.D candidate, Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

“We asked a painter and a performer to make portraits of each other, swap them, and then make a body of new work in response to the initial swapped portrait…It’s a show about how we become strange to ourselves through dialogue.”

Judd’s multiple roles as artist, critic, designer, activist, and curator will form the basis for discussion led by Mehring. The roundtable’s four participants—Erica Cooke, Jadine Colingwood, Solveig Nelson and Jennifer Sichel—will present research based on issues raised in Mehring’s Judd seminar, which took place Fall of 2010.

Panelists include Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago; Barry Blinderman, Director, University Galleries, Illinois State University; Betty Farrell, Director of the Cultural Policy Center, The Harris School, University of Chicago; and Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago. Moderated by Jenn Sichel, PhD student in Art History at the University of Chicago and a research assistant who worked on the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek.

This exhibition is co-curated by Renee Stout and Rebecca Zorach in conjunction with their CAA Centennial Panel, Our Demons.

Work by Carol A. Beane, John W. Ford, Maria Jönsson, Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Mary Patten, Michael B. Platt, Laurie Jo Reynolds, roycrosse and travis.

An excerpt of the work was recently removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture following protests by a religious group and conservative politicians. In response to the Smithsonian’s decision to pull the work, institutions around the country have joined together to host screenings as a way to draw attention to its removal and to foster discussion around the work and issues of censorship.

The Smart Museum will be screening the original, 13-minute version of the film edited by Wojnarowicz in 1986–87 followed by a 7-minute additional chapter that was later found in his collection. It will be playing on continuous loop in a black box screening area.

The show will be presented in collaboration with The Art Institute of Chicago, where three new site-specific bronzes will be installed on the Bluhm Family Terrace above the new Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing. Placed in the open air against the dramatic Chicago skyline, Warren’s sculptures morph and abstract the human form, providing an organic counterpoint to the linearity of the cityscape.

Exhibiting artists include Dawn Brennan (MFA 2002), Benjamin King (MFA 2005), Jennifer Krantz (MFA 2008), Carey Lin (MFA 2007), Nicole Mauser (MFA 2010), Brian McNearney (MFA 2007), Matthew Metzger (MFA 2009), Martina Nerhling (MFA 2001), Jenny Roberts (MFA 2003) and Valerie Snobeck (MFA 2008).

Roger Brown was a collector as much as he was an artist. The SAIC alumnus and Hyde Park Art Center exhibited artist filled his home and studio in La Conchita, California with hundreds of domestic objects—vernacular ceramics, southwestern knickknacks, and pop culture ephemera—all meticulously arranged and occasionally incorporated into his artwork. Calif. U.S.A. explores Brown’s process of collecting and arranging, which was distilled into his Virtual Still Life series—paintings turned three-dimensional with ceramics on shelves in the foreground. Exhibited together for the first time, these extraordinary paintings and arrangements (or tableaux) of objects reference and echo each other, as combined reflections on landscape, heritage, religion, history, life, and death.

With a history of shows like Hairy Who?, a definitive exhibition featuring the Chicago Imagists movement of the late 60s, Hyde Park Art Center has been at the forefront of encouraging Chicago-based artistic practice. In keeping with the mission to “stimulate and sustain visual arts in the city of Chicago,” this exhibition questions if there is a decisive Chicago style happening in art being produced right now.

The 2010 exhibition features new and never before exhibited work by the following artists: Daniel Bruttig, Katy Collier, Chris Cuellar, Bonnie Fortune, Maria Gaspar, Joe Grimm, Adam Grossi, Emily Hermant, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Samantha Jaffe, Daniel Lavitt, Lisa Lindvay, Brian Matthew, Jesse McLean, Matthew Metzger, Jessie Mott, Eliza Myrie, Jennifer Ray, Mia Rollow, Michael Sirianni and Olivia Valentine. The artists hail from a broad range of schools that offer graduate level fine art degrees, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois (-Chicago and Springfield), Northwestern University, Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Op Shop is dedicated to creating alternative sites of exchange around art in vacant urban spaces. Come be a part of its second iteration at 1530 E. 53rd Street, Hyde Park, where local, national and international artists come together to creatively facilitate conversation and community interaction in a dynamic art environment.

This large one story building, made available by The University of Chicago, offers a chance to create innovative encounters between artists and audiences, and new ways of connecting art to urban change.

Artists Todd Chilton (Chicago), Pete Fagundo (Evanston), Carrie Gundersdorf (Chicago), Katy Heinlein (Houston), Jessica Labatte (Chicago), Andrea Myers (Chicago) and Tessa Windt (Phoenix) all work formally, producing work that is notable for its materiality. Conjuring a firm, optimistic agency in their application of both their materials (fabric, foam, discarded furniture, pencil and paint) as well as an evident hand (draping, dripping, stitching), they work in the service of an up front and open formalism, confidently considering the possibility of a truthful object.

The exhibition is co-curated by Laura Letinsky, Professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts, and Katherine Griefen, Director of A.I.R. Gallery in New York City.

Aspen Mays employs an array of non-traditional techniques in her work as a means of exploring cosmological questions through everyday materials. For example, she once captured fireflies inside a medium format camera and developed the film revealing a brilliant chartreuse from the chemical reaction. Often embodying the persona of an amateur scientist, Mays blends humor, popular culture and performative experimentation for the camera in attempt to locate the limits of both her own personal understanding of these fundamental questions of existence as well as the horizons of understanding within larger human endeavors.

Ghost Town is a solo exhibition of work by Andreas Fischer held in two concurrent locations: the Sunday Best series contains portraits and will be on view at the Hyde Park Art Center. The sister-series Original Location, features landscapes and will be on view at the Gahlberg Gallery/McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage from January 21 to February 27, 2010. A joint publication will accompany the exhibitions and discuss the work in both shows with an essay by Claudine Ise.

Salavon’s exhibition experiments with the artistic possibilities of information technology and unconventional source materials. In this large-scale projection on the Hyde Park Art Center’s façade, pulsating fields of color serve as the background for rapidly emerging pieces of text; these images alternate with multicolored, interlocking squares that recede and project in a dynamic rhythm.

The Op Shop is dedicated to creating alternative sites of exchange around art in vacant urban spaces. Come be a part of its first incarnation on East 55th Street, where local artists have produced an evolving, total installation of video, photography, drawing, and sculpture.

This large storefront, made available by Mac Properties for a token fee, offers a chance to create innovative encounters between artists and audiences, and new ways of connecting art to urban change.

Delving beyond the purely sentimental, (Re)Collect intertwines personal and material memory to question the reliability of recollections. Despite the range of art forms featured in the exhibition—including painting, photography, video work, performances, and site-specific installations—each artist explores the unique properties of their medium in conjunction with personal narratives. As the artists build up the material and conceptual layers of their work, the object retains traces of its history, acting as a temporary antidote to memory’s elusive and ever-shifting nature. Whether the works rest more heavily on documentation or on artful revision, they ultimately reveal the malleability of reality and fiction when fashioning personal histories. As material collections collide with personal recollections, memory leaves the realm of nostalgia to achieve contemporary relevance.

Together, the artworks demonstrate the repetitive, compulsive, and often deceptive, nature of retrospection.

The Art Center currently has over 40 practicing artists who instruct hands-on studio art programs either on-site or through the Art Center’s many partner programs. Participating artists include Ani Afshar, Alison Balcanoff, Brad Biancardi, Holly Cahill, Elke Claus, Linda Cohn, Adam Ekberg, Sarah Elliott, Aron Gent, Monica Herrera, Sara Holwerda, Roxane Hopper, Katie Jost, Sarah Kaiser, Shannon Kerrigan, Julia Klein, Katharine Lion, Krystal Meisel, Olivia Schreiner, Suzanne Sebold-Suso, Kat Silverstein, Aurora Tabar, Valerie Wallace, Jessi T. Walsh, Julian Williams and Justin Witte.

The ARC Digest is meant to archive in print the activities of Chicago’s artist-run spaces between 1999-2009. It acts both as a companion to the exhibition and an extension of that project with interviews by Dan Gunn, essays by Abigail Satinsky, The Pond, Scott Speh and John Neff, Mary Jane Jacob and Lori Waxman, and an accompanying audio program by Bad At Sports featuring an interview with Temporary Services and a panel of Chicago artist-run media organizers.

Interviews, essays and responses along with floorplans, exhibition histories and other visuals archive and present a 10-year time period in Chicago’s artist-run culture while providing history, reflection, critique and dialog about artist-run culture, its importance, difficulties, sustainability and necessity as well as its specificity to a community and generation.

Just Good Art continues the tradition of catering to both novice and seasoned art collectors by offering a unique opportunity to purchase new works by well-respected artists at very reasonable costs while supporting Chicago’s oldest alternative art institution. All proceeds from the auction go to the Hyde Park Art Center’s Exhibitions and Education programming.

Heartland features site-specific installations and performances as well as drawing, photography, and video by artists and artist groups who are working in—and in response to—Detroit, Kansas City, and other cities and rural communities across the region. The exhibition premieres new commissions and presents recent works by Carnal Torpor, Compass Group, Cody Critcheloe, Jeremiah Day, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Design 99, Scott Hocking, Kerry James Marshall, Greely Myatt, Marjetica Potrč, Julika Rudelius, Artur Silva, Deb Sokolow and Whoop Dee Doo.

Together with an extensive series of programs and lectures, Heartland challenges our understandings of place, community, and the role of contemporary art in our changing world.

In addition to being outstanding documentary photography in its own right, Sekula’s work is also a critique of the genre. Sekula’s examination of the theory and practice of photography is as important as his inquiry into labor history and economics. Central to his work is an interest in documentation–as pictorial form, method of recording, narrative device, historical memory, and medium of social engagement. Sekula’s work poses the rhetorical questions, “Is it possible to discuss photography as a medium separate from the thing being photographed?” Put another way, is a photograph in and of itself capable of being self reflexive while critiquing its subject? Sekula’s answer is no. An integral part of his practice is writing, an activity he has maintained since the outset of his career 35 years ago. His writings expose the inherent limits of a documentary genre based purely on photographic imagery. Together, Sekula’s images and text constitute a trenchant and rigorous photographic discourse on globalization.

Though Salavon works with a range of material forms—from photographic prints to video installations and real-time software—the common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters. Largely influenced by American popular culture and innovations in information technology, Jason Salavon’s work manipulates digitized material while presenting unique approaches to familiar iconography. This exhibition is held in honor of Hyde Park Art Center Board Member and Chair Emeritus, Deone Jackman.