The panel discussion will take place at Iceberg Projects on Sunday, December 4th, 2011 from 2-4pm.

Panelists:
Claire Pentecost
Kymberly N. Pinder
Faheem Majeed

Claire Pentecost lives and works in Chicago. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, often focusing on nature and artificiality. Her work positions artistic practice as a research practice, advocating for the role of the amateur in the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of information. (info via The Creative Time Summit)

Kymberly N. Pinder, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches, writes and lectures on representations of religion, history and race in American Art. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Art Bulletin, The Art Journal, Third Text, Outsider, and the American Art Journal. She is the editor of Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (Routledge, 2002) and is completing a manuscript on murals in Chicago’s African American churches entitled Black Public Art and Religion.

Faheem Majeed is an artist, curator, and community facilitator. From 2005-2011, he served as Executive Director and Curator for the South Side Community Art Center(SSCAC). During his time with the SSCAC, Majeed curated exhibitions of numerous artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Dr. David Driskell, Charles White, Jonathan Green, and Theaster Gates. He received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While at UIC, he received both the Lincoln and DFI Fellowships and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. He has participated in multiple panels, committees, and lectures at various institutions including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 3Arts, and the Hyde Park Art Center. He is a faculty member at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Chicago State.

www.icebergchicago.com

Iceberg Projects
7714 N Sheridan Rd.
Chicago, IL 60626

Panel Discussion: December 4, 2011 from 2-4pm.

Faheem Majeed is an artist, curator, and community facilitator. From 2005-2011, he served as Executive Director and Curator for the South Side Community Art Center(SSCAC). During his time with the SSCAC, Majeed curated exhibitions of numerous artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Dr. David Driskell, Charles White, Jonathan Green, and Theaster Gates. He received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While at UIC, he received both the Lincoln and DFI Fellowships and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. He has participated in multiple panels, committees, and lectures at various institutions including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 3Arts, and the Hyde Park Art Center. He is a faculty member at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Chicago State.

http://www.icebergchicago.com

Millie Wilson has exhibited her work internationally and is Regular Faculty in the Program in Art, School of Art, California Institute of the Arts. Select exhibition venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Matthew Marks Gallery, New Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She has received numerous grants including the NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a City of Los Angeles Artists Grant.

Curated by Andrew J. Greene.

The insect repairs from the series Misplaced Altruism/Vanities of Aid are grotesque mortuarial attempts to preserve or mend, meticulous gestures executed on found carcasses, symbolic of an impulse to restore order in a fragile environment and to fill a void created by patheticness in form. This adornment or patching of battered insect bodies is misplaced altruism, which quells the vanities in aid or pity by indulging the most absurd and effete of generosities: squandered restoration and functionless beauty. The youthful naivete of bottling butterflies or lightening bugs for collection is replicated in Glebes’ process here as fruitless containment and embellishment.

The seemingly benign dandelion is similarly sterilized and preserved via misplaced altruistic protective gestures that either attempt to permanatize ephemeral moments or protect from perceived and circumscribed threats. Simultaneously terrorist of the front lawn and childhood plaything, the dandelion is used here to symbolically dissect the fragility and absurdity of our received suburban values.

Like the insect and the dandelion, the paper airplane is object of both rebellion and control. It is a classroom revolt, is exactitude and precision. The paper airplane’s inherent dichotomies again erupt as toy becomes precious object, and failures of construction erode sculpture into plaything. Through the dandelion, the paper airplane, and the other objects, No Ball Playing: Objects of Rebellion and Control flirts with obsessive structure to address issues of the urban and suburban environment, the character and power of the artist, and the potential agency of the art object as a tool for social change.

Borodowitz wrote: “Parts of the body are objects. That sentence almost cost me a toe. I was descending a staircase, feeling my way down the carpet in sock feet. My leg slipped and a crucial memory was stirred. Quick to dismiss the severity of the fall, I tried to ignore the situation even though the damage was evident. A bloodstain appeared through the wool… There is injury and there is art. These two facts merely coincide. Ultimately, composition does not heal. It does not mend. We pretend that there are meaningful connections. Still, things move without us.”

The installation hinges on a central sculpture which links the existing skylight in the room to a floor plan of the artist’s studio. The main space of the gallery is transformed into a time piece as the angle of the sun shifts across the skylight. Constant traits in the artist’s work: refraction, absorption, accumulation, and darkness, come together to raise the question “who draws the line?”

Fabric scrims interface with the paltry distant horizon of a western-headed rail line, as Carter addresses transference from the role of viewer/observer to the role of maker and back again; a parallel to the role of belief and isolation in an artist’s practice. Treating windows as thresholds of entry and exit, the works in the space conflate portals from her present studio with memory of spaces once lived in.

See the website for the screening dates and schedule.

“We, the men of these images and I, might not sit at an equal distance from the center, but we all have a complicated relationship to what is considered normal—to our benefit and our destruction.”

Work by Jason Hanasik

Artists included in the silent auction: Paul Chan, William Cordova, Jamal Cyrus, Torkwase Dyson, Kianga Ford, Kira Lynn Harris, Lauren Kelly, Rodney MacMillian, Adia Millet, Pamela Phatsumo, Robert Pruitt, Carrie Schneider and Ishmael Randall Weeks.

Carrie Schneider will introduce Cauleen Smith, who will speak about and screen clips from the in-process project.

RSVP required.

MacNeill’s sculptural mix of dualities – heavy/light, permanent/ephemeral, lofty/grounded, static/moving – results in works that become contradictions of themselves, calling into question the true nature and substantiality of their materials. Things lose substance, defy gravity, and become reversed, tentative, or unsettled. A massive wall of hand-made concrete blocks is rendered delicate and ephemeral by the undulating folds cast into its surface; ribbon-like strips of fabric soaked in plaster form airy networks of parabolas that are frozen in space as they reach upward; an arrangement of wood fragments seems to hover unsupported above the floor. Through these and other works, the artist pushes the dualities of matter into a sculptural statement which disrupts the structuring and substance of materials, creating works that underscore fractured elements of doubt in the solidity of the contemporary world.