Interview with Monika Fabijanska
On the occasion of the traveling exhibition Women at War on view at the Chicago Cultural Center (August 17-December 8, 2024), I spoke with curator Monika Fabijanska about the impact of art in documenting history, the potential of feminist historiography, and the realities of life under war in Ukraine.
Review: Andrea Carlson at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Inspired by the terrain of her native Minnesota, Anishinaabe storytelling, and popular culture and film, the artist realizes her reimagined vistas in a variety of media, including this exhibition’s one sculpture and four paintings.
Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away
Once the largest African American–owned public enterprise in the United States, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, producer of Ebony and Jet magazines, documented and helped define the postwar Black experience. It transformed print journalism through articles that celebrated Black achievement, beauty, and culture until the changing media landscape forced it to sell its assets and iconic building in 2011. Since then, the Rebuild Foundation, a cultural platform established by Theaster Gates, has been the steward of JPC’s legacy, including its furniture, prestigious art collection, and twelve-thousand-volume library.
Dawit L. Petros: Prospetto a mare
Along the Lakefront Trail near Chicago’s Soldier Field stands an unassuming
Corinthian column atop a stone plinth. It is, in fact, a monument gifted by
Benito Mussolini to commemorate Italo Balboa’s famed transatlantic flight
from Italy to Chicago during the 1933–34 World’s Fair, the worn inscription
of which originally hailed the “Fascist Era.” The monument has become a
contested site within the city’s commemorative landscape and is the
provenance for Dawit L. Petros’s fascinating exhibition, “Prospetto a Mare”(Sea View), exploring the specter of fascism on Chicago’s built environment and Italy’s colonial legacies in North and East Africa.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) occupies a unique place within Chicago
Imagism. Like her contemporaries, she shared an interest in the human
form as a source of expressive meaning. Yet her covert images of the female
body, offering a decidedly feminist view of women’s identity and desire, have
only recently been given their rightful due.
Gary Cannone: Manet/Degas
Inspired by Conceptualism’s object-word plays and the comedy icons of his youth, Gary Cannone infuses his work with a wink and a rim shot. In the artist’s exhibition here, the show’s namesake, Manet/Degas, 2024—a yellow warning sign bearing the titular Impressionists’ names planted in this experimental gallery’s front yard—signals viewers to the art-historical tropes that fuel Cannone’s droll pastiches.
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s
At the entrance to the Walker Art Center’s “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s,” viewers are met by Hungarian artist László Fehér’s Underground Passage I., 1975, a black-and-white, hyperrealist painting of passengers ascending the subway stairs as a solitary figure descends.
Dala Nasser: Adonis River
Adonis River, 2023, the most recent installation by Lebanese artist Dala Nasser, is both an elegy to a mythical past and a monument to the losses (human, ecological, and otherwise) that plague our precarious present. Navigated from multiple points of entry, Nasser’s site-specific environment offered a refuge for pause and intuitive looking while responding to the interior architecture of the Renaissance Society’s somewhat ecclesiastical space, with its high-vaulted ceiling and clerestory windows that fill the gallery with radiant streams of light. By combining classical vertical forms that reference Doric columns and towering wooden constructions layered with earthen-dyed fabrics, the artist explored the intersections between history and materiality as rich metaphors for current geopolitical conflicts, particularly those related to lineages of water and land.
Interview with Monika Fabijanska: Women at War
Women at War gathers the works of twelve Ukrainian artists who employ a variety of media to address the Russian war against Ukraine, from its beginning in 2014 to the full-scale invasion in February 2022, through the lens of gendered experience. The exhibition explores the struggle for Ukrainian independence and women’s equality against the backdrop of the war and its impact on both the national and individual psyche while giving voice to women as narrators of history and agents of change. Curated by Monika Fabijanska, Women at War premiered at Fridman Gallery, New York, in the summer of 2022, and continues its North American tour through 2025.(1) I recently spoke with Fabijanska, known for her critically acclaimed exhibitions focusing on women and women’s art, about the challenges of organizing an exhibition about war alongside the show’s many themes of loss and resiliency, national identity, and feminism.
Edra Soto, Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT
For Chicago-based, Puerto Rican–born artist Edra Soto, home is a psychic,
geographic place as well as a locus for gathering and community. It is also a
political space that defines who we are as civic and social beings. The complex
relationships between citizenship and migration, displacement and belonging,
inform the impressive suite of sculptural installations comprising
“Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT,” an unconventional survey
celebrating ten years of this ongoing project by Soto.
Luftwerk: Exact Dutch Yellow
“Color is the most relative medium in art,” according to Josef Albers. Its relativity, along with the subjective nature of visual perception, forms the basis of the immersive light installations that comprise “Exact Dutch Yellow,” the most recent exhibition of Chicago-based collaborative Luftwerk (Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero), who transformed the fourth-floor galleries of this cultural institution into an oasis of complex optical phenomena.
Chris Larson: The Residue of Labor
Shunning mere esthetic representations of industrial ruin, the strength of Chris Larson’s project is the artist’s deep engagement with the material conditions of the factory itself—from its textile remnants to its architecture to its deserted machinery—and with the residual traces of human labor that such objects bear.