Carmon Colangelo intervenes on the modern. Gestural abstraction, informal geometries, diaristic ephemera, surrealist afterimages, and architectonic montage all inform his practice. He fills work with happenstance, surfing through printmaking, drawing, painting and digital media to reconsider a principal birthright of…
Leslie Bellavance was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a member of West Hubbard Gallery, and a contributor to and regional editor of the New Art Examiner when I first met her in 1982. She was a recent…
Oscar Gillespie is the consummate picture maker. He’s recognized as one of the most inventive and technically fluent artists in academia, a leader in the discipline of engraving in which he’s exhibited and conducted workshops for over 30 years. One…
Terry Karpowicz is a builder. His sculpture is recognizable to most viewers as large-scale welded and bolted, generally mechanistic abstractions. His work has distinguished numerous public sites in Chicago and the Midwest, beginning in the late 1970s. While fond of…
The widely respected book artist and writer Buzz Spector began his career in Chicago in the mid ’70s. His text-based projects have included installation, papermaking, printmaking, drawing and collage. A connoisseur of cartography, Spector’s words and images get uniform scrutiny.…
Chicago’s Hubbard Street district was a coalescent site of experimental art in the ’70s and ’80s. For artists and designers, the street had a radical presence that was distinctive, nurturing and pleasurable. Loft buildings and raw spaces hosted enormous crowds…
Rosalyn Schwartz’s most recent work stems from an appraisal of avant-gardism and the shallow consensus about the status of studio art and contemplative art in general. She responds by addressing critical forms and subjects that question the nature of beauty…
“The falling away of illusion” is a description that Buzz Spector, artist, writer and longtime colleague of painter Dan Ramirez, uses in discussing perception in the artist’s “Contemplation of the Virgin: var#3.” The essay appears in Ramirez’s “Certainty & Doubt”…
In the recent Central Time Ceramics exhibition at Bradley University Angela Dieffenbach’s entry from her “Pharma Farma Series” deadpanned a bit of veiled theater. “Aunt Dolly” an earthenware lamb’s head secured at eye level was an interloper in the midst…
John Phillips began painting in earnest about the time that the medium was relinquishing its preeminent avant-garde station, leaving painters with the task of buttressing and re-defining the practice. Its formal contours had been turned inside out or neglected in…
