This event has passed.
Previously on view in The Drawing Room: works by Artist Fellows Leah Ke Yi Zheng and Danny Bredar
Current Arts Club Fellows Leah Ke Yi Zheng & Danny Bredar have installed a series of works in The Arts Club’s Drawing Room and various nooks and utility spaces of the building, revolving around their fictional gallery, Currency, and its director construct, Wenzel Beckenbauer.
The project is viewable January 11 – February 8. On Fridays from 4 – 6pm and Saturdays from 1 – 3pm from January 14 through February 5, Zheng and Bredar will hold regular office hours to discuss their work with visitors. Viewings outside of office hours may be accommodated by appointment. Email information@artsclubchicago.org to schedule.
Image Credit: Guanyu Gary Xu
Out of an abundance of caution and in keeping with recommendations by the CDC and the WHO, The Arts Club of Chicago will close to members and the public effective 9 pm on Friday, March 13, 2020 until further notice. We will proceed with installing the upcoming exhibition Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure although the Opening Reception and Lecture have been cancelled. We look forward to publishing the images of the exhibition in the near future.
The following events are postponed until further notice in order to encourage social distancing. :
3/19: Exhibition Opening Tea/ Reception/ Dinner: Jennie C. Jones
3/20: Jennie C. Jones in Conversation
All member events scheduled through the month of April have been postponedWe hope to make content available online of both planned and historical programming.
The staff of The Arts Club with advisement of the Executive Committee are watching the updates and will be in touch. If you have any questions, please email info@artsclubchicago.org. We encourage you to check your email and our website for further updates.
We wish you all the best and robust health in the meantime and regret any inconveniences that may be caused.
Sincerely,
Janine Mileaf
Resources
Resources for Artists in Chicago
New Music Solidarity Fund
Lawyers for the Creative Arts
Events Calendar for Members
WHO Coronavirus Homepage
CDC Coronavirus Homepage
Cook County Resources
This landmark of modernism in Chicago [The Arts Club of Chicago] is now filled with so many precisely rendered fantastic landscapes; claustrophobic, psychologically coded interiors; a mise en abyme of pictures within pictures; and a menagerie of symbolically resonant household pets. Mileaf underscores the intentionality of this juxtaposition by unfolding the exhibition around a turned wood mantle evoking the vernacular interior decor of nineteenth-century Chicago, which any native Chicagoan will recognize as an “original detail” still common in local dwellings. Camouflaged in a monochrome coat of paint making it continuous with the wall, the mantle functions as an apparition of homely domesticity beneath a hovering group of the exhibition’s smaller paintings hung salon-style. Situated in view of a significant artifact of architectural modernism in Chicago—the elegant steel staircase with a travertine marble surround designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1951 and salvaged as the central feature of the building when the Club moved to its present location in 1997— the anachronism of the display crystallizes what is most striking about Mileaf ’s curatorial strategy.1 The juxtaposition of these interior features—each representing divergent genres of interior space at midcentury—appears to propose an alternative timeline of the exhibition history of the Arts Club of Chicago. In assembling an underappreciated cross section of artists, a loose grouping united by overlapping social circles and shared exhibitions or formation, as if it were a contemporary group show, she essentially recasts the Arts Club’s defining role in the history of the reception of Surrealism in Chicago as it might have been.
Please click here to read the exhibition review of A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, by art historian Jennifer R. Cohen in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. The exhibition ran at The Arts Club from June 7–August 15, 2018.
About the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas:
The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas focuses on the subject of modern European and American intellectuals’ obsession with the “New World.” This obsession—the very heart of Surrealism—extended not only to North American sites, but also to Latin America, the Caribbean, and to the numerous indigenous cultures located there. The journal invites essays that examine aspects of the actual and fantasized travel of these European and American intellectuals throughout the Americas, and their creative response to indigenous art and culture, including their anthropological and collecting activities, and their interpretations of the various geographic, political, and cultural landscapes of the Americas. We furthermore intend to investigate the interventions / negotiations / repudiations of European/American or other Surrealisms, by indigenous as well as other artists, writers and filmmakers.
Journalist Gary Zidek interviewed Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford at The Arts Club of Chicago, on the occasion of his exhibition entitled Garden Gipsoteca. The show, which includes works of cast sculpture, is the latest work commissioned by The Arts Club in our Garden Projects series. Listen here.
To learn more about Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and Garden Gipsoteca, join us for an artist talk and activation on Friday, May 3rd at 6 pm. Historian Jonathan Levy will join the artist in a discussion about the role of reproduction in taste-making, value, status-signaling, and social relations. Free and open to all!
Our current exhibition, Thessia Machado: Toward the Unsound was listed in Newcity’s Art Top 5 for February, 2019.
Click here to read the full story.
Toward the Unsound presents sculptural works by the New York based visual artist whose practice is deeply influenced by legacies of experimental sound performance and a deep care for found technology. The exhibition includes site-specific installations, designed for the particular sonic and architectural footprint of The Arts Club. Sounding and visual works are presented together in counterpoint–each contributing to, reflecting upon, and infiltrating the other. A catalogue, designed by Sonnenzimmer, was published on the occasion of the exhibition. It features an essay by the curator Jenna Lyle and a sound appendix with studio recordings of the works in the show. We hope that you’ll stop by to look and listen!
Thessia Machado’s installations and video pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin and Athens. She has been awarded residencies at Homesession, Barcelona, the NARS Foundation, NY, I-Park, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Vermont Studio Center and is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Experimental Television Center, The Bronx Museum, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017 she was a recipient of an Artists Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
