Freeark GALLERY & sculpture garden exhibitions
The Riverside Brookfield Advanced Placement High School Art Exhibition | April 16 - May 15, 2021
Madelyn Roldan | senior, Class of 2021. RBHS High
Sweet and complicated | The Riverside Brookfield High School Advanced Placement Art Exhibition
April 16 - May 15, 2021
Work by RBHS High School Student Isabella O'Brien, junior, Class of 2022. Marker, Ink, Watercolor, Gold Leaf, on Paper | 9 x 12 inches
In this exhibition we celebrate students, their teachers, and the next generation of artists.
The gallery is open by appointment. We are thrilled to schedule visits to see the work in person.
Gallery hours: 1:00- 5:00 Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
Schedule an appointment to see the show! email info@riversideartscenter.com
The 2021 exhibition of work by Riverside/Brookfield High School’s Advance Placement art students presents the work of students who have overcome unique challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. These challenges to the rising young artists include: learning art skills virtually, sharing explorations of materials, concepts and critiques in a screen’s-eye-view. These students have risen to the challenge and created works that are a testament to the power and importance of art. We are thrilled to celebrate their works, in collaboration with their teachers and mentors: Blair Jensen, Nadine Michl and Suzanne Zimmerman.
This exhibition celebrates the students, their teachers, and the next generation of artists.
Visitors welcome!
Make an appointment to see the show
Gallery hours: 1:00- 5:00 Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
Please email info@riversideartscenter.com to make an appointment.
Masks and social distancing required. RAC is observing current State of Illinois COVID-19 protocols. We are practicing social distancing, with lower capacities in the gallery at one time. All visitors are required to wear a mask. Walk-ins welcome if space allows
Our world needs artists and their voices.
These accomplished young artists will certainly make their marks in our world!
The Kitchen Sink | February 21- April 3, 2021
Zehra Khan | Sampler, Age 37
Bimbola Akinbola
Zehra Khan
Mari Eastman, Notebooks
Featuring works by: Bimbola Akinbola, Cassidy Early, Mari Eastman, Zehra Khan, and Kelly Neibert
Curated by Salim Moore
Curator’s and Artists’ Zoom conversation and discussion: Sunday, March 21 at 2:00 pm. Access the Zoom link through Eventbrite.
All RAC events are free and open to the public.
“Everything but the kitchen sink” is an English language idiom that connotes something that consists of a hodgepodge of a variety of elements or ingredients. The phrase also means a very large number of things, much more than necessary really, and the phrase can also be taken to mean the final item imaginable on any extensive list. Following this same spirit of making do and getting by we invited a group of artists to present those works that are representative of the kitchen sinks of their own studios.
Curator and artist, Solomon Salim Moore is a visual artist and curator who was born in Pasadena, CA, which is located in the unincorporated foothills of Los Angeles. He received his BA in Art History from Reed College in 2011 and his MFA from the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently works at the Benton Museum of Art in Claremont, California.
Kelly Neibert
Bimbola Akinbola
Bimbola Akinbola
Camille Silverman: Softening Space
Camille Silverman, Forever Painting. 2017-2020
January 14, 2021 - February 11, 2021
Artist talk: Sunday, January 24, 2021 | 2:00 PM
Join us on Zoom via eventbrite:
Gallery hours are 1-5 PM Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Please email info@riversideartscenter.com to make an appointment to visit.
Masks and social distancing required.
RAC is observing current State of Illinois COVID-19 protocols.
Camille Silverman, I don’t recall making you. 2020
Camille Silverman’s recent artistic processes have focused on mixed media assemblage and large installation works using what are often found and observed near her home in the Belmont Cragin area of Chicago. She then builds upon multiple ideas using patterned mark, ephemeral materials while applying shifting surfaces to construct a body of work that often relaxes set positions and seeks to explore unknowingness as a possibility for acceptance and change. Softening Spaces pins together humor, ideas of the flexibility of time, the draw of risk, the possibility of play, and an openness for the wish of a “me + you”.
This exhibit rethinks assumptions about form, boundaries, and the rollercoaster of our lives due to the constant trickery of human perception. Always motivated by the idea of moving in and out of the transparent and the concrete object to encourage play and curiosity.
Softening Spaces presents constructions, installations and paintings of various predicaments and moods. These works have a complexity of optimism, while being a bit anxious or slipping in and out of one’s time and place. The works are always in the mist of figuring themselves out both in structure and as a mix of materials. Nothing is set, because nothing is set.
Camille currently lives in Chicago and has happily served as Riverside Arts Center’s Executive Director since March of 2017. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006 and was recently published in Studio Visit Magazine, New American Painting and the online Chicago publication Voyager. Recent exhibits include Prak-sis Gallery in Chicago, M.G. Nelson Gallery in Springfield and the Des Plaines Public Library. Riverside Town Hall will also be exhibiting Camille Silverman’s work in Storyboards for Installations and Assemblages December 15, 2020 – February, 25, 2021.
Camille Silverman, Me and You, 2020
Camille Silverman, A New Year, A New You, 2020
Humor Us
October 25th 2020 - January 2nd 2021
Humor Us is a group exhibition of artists working on the many locations of humor— from the comic object, the politically biting, the silly, the prop, where the overlooked meets the hilarious, and the pun. The world needs humor now. Humor is a salve, it’s a politic, a laugh, and a poetic.
From the curator:
Mark Twain wrote, “Humor is the good-natured side of a truth.” While much of our current public sphere is acutely arduous, humor creates an alternative lens within which to view and critique our cultures and ourselves. Humor is an essential component of humanity, and humanity is exactly what is needed and necessary, especially now.
Curated by Stephanie Brooks
Artists:
Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
Caroline Dahlberg
Cara Dunkerley
David Holt
Olivia Jobbe
Coco Menk
Mads Reardon
Morgan Richardson
Oli Watt
Conversation with Gary Cannone and Stephanie Brooks - View PDF HERE
Morgan Richardson
Claire Ashley
David Robbins
JERRY BLEEM
September 6 – October 17, 2020
Reception: Sunday, September 6, 12 ‐ 6pm
Gallery hours Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 1-5pm, by appointment.
Masks and social distancing are required.
Curated by Anne Harris
Exhibition essay by Anne Harris: Jerry Bleem: STILL
List of works in the exhibition: Jerry Bleem: STILL - List of Works
Video Jerry Bleem: YEARNING Emma Lazarus' poem The New Colossus is spoken in a number of languages as Jerry Bleem crochets work from a stripped U.S.A. flag.
Jerry Bleem and Anne Harris Virtual Performance and Conversation on Zoom Saturday, October 10, 2020 from 2:00-3:00 PM
Jerry Bleem, Potholder for a Large Hot Potato When Nationalism Polices the World, 2009, U.S.A. flags, linen cord, 54 x 54 x 3
The RAC is pleased to present Jerry Bleem’s solo exhibition Still, which will take place in both our Freeark and FlexSpace galleries. This exhibition is a continuation of Jerry Bleem’s extended series, Nationalism. Begun in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Bleem transforms well-used American flags into contemplative objects. He does this by cutting each flag into a single, narrow, continuous strip which he then crochets into artwork ranging from wall-sized tapestries to palm-sized soft sculptures.
This by-hand process negates the mass-production of the repurposed flags. Instead, crochet evokes earlier hand-stitched banners, ritualistic repetition, as well as ceremonial hand-carrying and hand-folding. The pieces themselves are organically patterned, with weathered color and seductive surfaces. They invite aesthetic pondering and art history connections, from Jasper Johns to David Hammons. Their challenge lies in their relationship to politics and culture.
This work builds on our history of displaying, manipulating and dissembling the flag in celebration, ceremony, fashion, decoration, propaganda and protest. In the end, Bleem’s work is distinct. By using our flag as both material and subject, he transforms it from the symbol of American patriotism into a metaphor for our complicated, contradictory history.
Bleem states, “By rearranging the surface of the flag, I hope to turn it from something familiar into something that must be deciphered. In the process, I hope a viewer might wonder how the flag (to which we ‘pledge our allegiance’) also measures our failure to extend ‘liberty and justice for all.’” --Anne Harris
Jerry Bleem, The Flag of the Un-United States of America, 2006, U.S.A. and Texas flags, 54” x 90”
About the Artist Jerry Bleem is a Chicago based artist as well as a teacher, writer, Franciscan friar and Catholic priest. His work has been exhibited at venues ranging from the Chicago Cultural Center to the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland, and is in such public collections as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and the Museum of Art and Design (NYC). Awards received include numerous Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, as well as Arts Midwest and NEA Regional Fellowships. Bleem has also been awarded fifteen artist residencies ranging from the Roswell Artist in Residency program (Roswell, NM) to the Lacawac Sanctuary and Biological Field Station (Lake Ariel, PA). Bleem’s writing accomplishments include his regular column “Eye of the Beholder,” for U.S. Catholic Magazine, as well as contributions to Surface Design Journal, Fiber Arts, and numerous other publications and catalogs. Bleem is also Associate Professor, Adj., at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies.
Jerry Bleem, Decorative Nationalism, 2006 through present, U.S.A. flags (each element is a single flag), heights range from 4.5” to 7.5”
Gallery Hours: Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays, 1-5pm by appointment only. Masks required. All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter.com or contact Freeark Gallery Director Stephanie Brooks at sbrooks@riversideartscenter.com
This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
Oli Watt
March 1 and extended through August 18, 2020
Oli Watt: What?
Oli Watt is a woodworker, printmaker, and sculptor whose works engage with popular culture, the everyday and the egalitarian experiential in their material sources. Through re-forming the familiar, the works create an exciting affective turn and bring to the surface the inherent humor of the forms.
Oli is an Assistant Professor in the Printmedia Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jennifer Oldis-Kryczka
Alex
Oil on masonite
(Finalist, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
“People. We are a complicated, inspired, diverse, haunted, gifted,
disabled, disciplined, perpetrating, effected, affected, joyous, broken,
enlightened, suffering, consuming, entitled, changing, unknowable
species.
We are formed by our Intrinsic natures, but also molded by our
experiences, evolving into an always different form of ourselves.
I capture a moment, but also reveal traces of the subject’s past– while
suggesting the infinite possibilities of who they may become in the
future.
Who are you today? Who were you ten years ago? Who will you be in
15? How have the people in your life evolved? Affected history? And
who will they become?
I develop my portraits slowly, building thin layers of oil deposited over
time. Through this process I explore the color relationships and forms,
and encounter—and hopefully reveal—the inner essence and potential
of the subject.” — Jennifer Oldis-Kryczka
Read an interview with Jennifer Oldis-Kryczka at Voyage Chicago
Diana Gabriel and Azadeh Gholizadeh
January 12, 3-6 pm
Curated by Claudine Isé
December 6, 2019 – January 4th, 2020
Reception for the Artist on Sunday, December 8, 3-6pm
Diana Gabriel
Pesca
Wire and acrylic on panel
8” x 8”
2019
“Tumbaga” is the name of the gold, copper, and silver alloy often used to create ceremonial adornments by the Pre-Columbian indigenous people of Colombia and other countries in the lower Americas. Once the Spanish arrived, a large portion of these cultural artifacts were melted for gold and shipped back to Spain. By using tumbaga colors in my work, I not only reference the awe and loss I felt while visiting the remaining cultural relics at the Museo del Oro in Bogota, but also the awe and loss inherent in my relationship to my own Colombian heritage. Assimilating to American culture as an adolescent, I became disconnected from aspects of Colombian culture that were so potent in my memories of mud vases, crocheted doilies, knit “ruanas,” and hand-woven tablecloths, hammocks and handbags. Using line and geometry, I forge a connection with the kind of Colombian handicrafts I deeply revere but never learned, “restitching” the rift created by my migration.
– Diana Gabriel
Azadeh Gholizadeh: The Park
Linen, mohair, silk, cotton on canvas
34” x 32”
2019
In her current practice Azadeh Gholizadeh explores body, landscape and fragmentation of identity by examining her emotional connections to belonging. Azadeh’s work adapts the forms and scenes recovered from her memories of landscape. In the absence of the tangible elements of these places, Azadeh explores the fragility of home through landscape tapestries and drawings and creates a new language of longing to re-discover the meaning of landscape. It transposes memories and creates a momentary tangible space of tenderness and hope.
Mauricio Forero
Oct 1 - Nov 23, 2019
Gallery hours are Tu-Sat, 1-5pm
Guest Curated by Bob Faust
Mauricio Forero, "Flag not Flag." Embroidered thread on canvas, wood, staples.
The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Souths & Norths, a solo exhibition of works by Mauricio Forero, curated by Bob Faust. The exhibition opens on Sunday, October 20th, with an artist's reception from 3-6pm, and runs through November 23rd.
A native of South America, Mauricio Forero grew up watching American Westerns: “I wanted to be the cowboy.” Not until later, well into his adulthood, he realized he was on the side against his own culture.
Forero explores the ambiguous relationship of south with north — the cultural tug of war in the Western Hemisphere, and how that seeps into contemporary underdeveloped societies struggling for a voice. Central to this struggle is the immigrant — alone, in need of basic necessities, acknowledgement and understanding, regardless of origin. The paths they seek directly impact both "norths" and "souths."
The exhibition includes 6 works — 3 installations and 3 wall-hung pieces that employ simple objects and materials, both found and made. Many have universal uses, such as pots, stools, tables, shelves and firewood that symbolize the building blocks of our shared humanity. Others find voice through “modernspeak,” Forero's invented words that run through the pieces. Featured in the show is a hand embroidered wall hanging titled "Flag not Flag." The sewn thread on canvas is used as a means to illustrate as well as an homage to his grandparents, both tailors, whose house Mauricio grew up in, in Bogotá, Colombia.
Mauricio’s voice — at times inquisitive and hope-filled, other times, more critical, echoes throughout the exhibition, nudging us to see our own truths and each other more clearly.
“Why did I root for the cowboy? He was against my own culture. How did I not even see that?” — MAURICIO FORERO
(Text by Bob Faust)
"Planet with a Developed Country." Mixed media collage.
“Ollaso” (detail).
“Ultrapro” (detail).
About the artist:
Born in Colombia in 1963, Mauricio Forero began his art career at business school in Bogota. He studied screen and printing while drawing for Leo Burnett in national advertising campaigns. He then went to Sears Roebuck’s publicity department as residential artist for in-store copy. Later, he drew for Santillana Press and Harcourt Brace to illustrate the children’s books Song of the Gecko and When My Papa Comes Home. Mauricio also created posters for Harcourt Brace’s Latino poetry series for bilingual education textbooks used throughout the southwestern U.S.
Arriving in the States in 1990, Mauricio showed in galleries like El Taller of Austin, and Dagen Bella of San Antonio. His first solo exhibit was in Fort Worth in 1995 at Magnolia Gallery where he gained critical acclaim by the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Mauricio later moved to Chicago, showing at the Hyde Park Art Center, Harold Washington College, Lake Forest College, Pilsen’s ShowPODs, and University of Chicago’s Southside Hub of Production alongside artists such as Dan Peterman. His latest installation, entitled SCHLEPP, was a collaboration with his wife Sophia Forero. Part of Anthony Overton Creative Grounds, the 2019 day of art activism was held in conjuction with the Chicago Architecture Biennial- the Foreros presented an interactive piece that spoke to educational differentials in the US.
About the curator:
By drawing upon the language and tools of the design world and capitalizing on his expertise as a typographer, Bob Faust creates visual, visceral and contextual art experiences that inform, empower and/or instigate in the service or celebration of human difference. Faust is also the principal and creative director for Faust, a cultural branding studio, as well as the studio/special projects director for artist Nick Cave, and has been recognized nationally and internationally for his creativity and clarity through many prestigious exhibitions and publications including: About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art (Wrightwood 659, 2019), Great Ideas of Humanity: Out of the Container (Chicago Design Museum, 2018), GU LTY / NNOCENT (Call-and-Response to Nick Cave's UNTIL, MASS MoCA, 2017) Nick Cave: Kaleidoscopic Playground (MASS MoCA, 2017) Fluid Bound (Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2016), Unfolded: Made with Paper (Chicago Design Museum, 2016), Bob Faust: Peace Pop (Chicago Cultural Center, 2016), Bob Faust: Betweens (Riverside Arts Center, 2016), CHGO DSGN (Chicago Cultural Center, 2014), Nick Cave: Body Work (ICA Boston, 2014) Bob Faust: Ipseity (Manifold Gallery, 2013), Collection (Society of Typographic Arts).
RAC Sculpture Garden: Jaclyn Jacunski, Dream Additions
ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 8, 2019 THROUGH THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER
ARTIST’S RECEPTION SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 8, 3-6PM
+
**Special Event** Sunday, September 22 from 1-3pm
Participate in THE MURMUR OF DEMOCRACY amidst Jaclyn Jacunski’s installation in the RAC Sculpture Garden
Installation detail of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
RAC is pleased to announce Dream Additions, a new installation by Jaclyn Jacunski for the RAC Sculpture Garden.
Jacunski’s installation reassembles a batting cage to merge narratives of public parks, sports and play as a site of friendship and agency. Notes the artist, “the work folds in multiple meanings that go beyond gentrification and systems of capitalist property, to where the possibilities for a non-alienated life could spill into our desire for change in these times of distress and division.”
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
A chain-link fence is an object devoid of color, scaled-down, and abstracted by repeated patterns. Typically, chain-link is a gritty and sobering architectural object surrounding and dividing private property and vacant lots. This object becomes especially charged when taken out of context. The chain link’s geometric pattern builds a frame to look through, to observe the landscape, speculate, and selectively view what lies beyond.
Jacunski’s steel chain-link makes a framework, a warp and weft that is filled in and woven on the surface with geometric patterns and embellished with light-reflecting colored acrylic, providing a counterweight that mutates perspectives for the viewers who walk through and around the piece.
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
HERE
In my neighborhood
buildings
homes
and lots
guarded by chain-link fences.
The fence keeps out wind
collecting menus
flamin’ Cheeto bags
plastic grocery bags
cigarillo wrappers
green, brown, and clear glass bottles.
It is a crude security system
deterring little shits
jumping the twisted rose wall
and stealing your bike.
Walking my block, I squint
Take in the warm coral West Side sunset
cars play music so loud
the base shakes my earrings
My body vibrates.
My neighbor pushes a snack cart
coming from the baseball games in the park.
It jiggles and has a bike horn
decorated with dangling
stuffed bags of bright orange chicarone.
She calls to tell me
She is here
I get cherry flavored ice
She turns and murmurs something in Spanish
To the boys playing soccer in the street
the man sitting on the stoop.
Then she says back to me
“Come buy my tamales
I have bean and chicken.”
We pass the chain link fence woven with
yellow
red
pink roses
I am invited in.
Smiling faces in the kitchen
hugs and I stumble through kisses
on both cheeks
Aunts
Uncles
a grandmother
cousins
are all there.
I like their home.
She explained to me
her husband bought the property
when no one would even
drive through
the neighborhood
She points to her neighbor
who has video cameras dotted all over his house
that wasn’t very long ago.
Her husband planted the roses
for her
when they moved in.
“And now,
look at you
here”
More of their family moved in
they saved
to expand the kitchen
and now
she has grandchildren
has things to protect
here
each adds to the dream
–Jaclyn Jacunski
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
Artist’s Bio:
Jaclyn Jacunski is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who has been exhibited locally and nationally in museums, public spaces, and galleries. Her work engages the intersections of the aesthetic and the political by using research as a tool to interrogate contested spaces. The interrogation is a search for understanding in political controversies that surround land, communities, and acts of resistance. Known for using materials scavenged from building sites, often in Chicago neighborhoods, Jacunski reveals how neighborhood landscapes become expressions of a lived experience resisting powerful cultural systems such as gentrification, environmental threats, and state violence. Currently, she is the Director of Community Engagement at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she works closely with local leaders and residents of the west side neighborhood of North Lawndale to develop art and design programming with the community. Jacunski has an M.F.A. in Printmaking from SAIC and a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and has taught at SAIC and Harrington College of Design.
Janice Nowinski | Bodies of Paint | September 8 - October 12, 2019
Curated by Anne Harris
Janice Nowinski, Reclining Nude, Back View, 2018, oil on board, 8” x 10”
Artist's Reception/Gallery Talk: Saturday, September 28, 2 - 5pm
Gallery Talk with Janice Nowinski and Kyle Staver, moderated by Anne Harris at 3pm
The RAC is pleased to present Brooklyn-based painter Janice Nowinski’s solo exhibition Bodies of Paint. This is the artist’s first exhibition in the Chicago area. We’ll be exhibiting nineteen paintings. The earliest is from 2009, but most were made in the last four years.
Janice Nowinski spends months, sometimes years, working on small figurative paintings. Her subjects are suspended between flesh and paint. They barely cohere—one slip, and they’re just a smear. The paintings are felt into place to find a just-so balance of opposites: blunt, tender, awkward, graceful, remote, intimate and exposed. This is the result of perfect pitch painting—the subtlest color, the most nuanced edges, figure/ground finesse, and again, that tightly stretched line between paint and its transformation into light, air, space, weight and flesh.
Nowinski is now associated with current trends in contemporary figuration—painterly allegorical inventions that channel art history and politics. However, that connection is happenstance. Her work today actually reflects 40 years of slow maturation. She is sincerely old-school, part of a tribe of painters who build on tradition and share faith that tenacity and dissatisfaction will lead to originality. Her inspirations are numerous but obviously include Rembrandt, Cezanne and Soutine. She’s in conversation with leading contemporary figurative artists but also stands alone. Her work’s intimacy, subtlety, slowness and deliberate lack of grandeur sets it apart. Leon Kossoff comes to mind. She’s a painter’s painter.
“Painting is damn difficult—you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.” –Paul Cezanne
–Anne Harris
Link to Janice Nowinski’s Bodies of Paint exhibition catalogue essay by Anne Harris.
Janice Nowinski, Pink Bathing Suit VI, 2019, oil on board, 7” x 5”
Janice Nowinski lives and paints in Brooklyn, NY. She studied painting at the Art Students League and the New York Studio School and then received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art. Her work has been exhibited at venues ranging from the American Academy of Arts and Letters National Academy Museum (NYC) to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center (Washington D.C.), to John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY), Zurcher Gallery (NYC), Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects (NYC), and Kent Fine Arts (NYC). She is the recipient of a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured and reviewed in such publications as the New Criterion, Hyperallergic and Huffington Post. She is represented by the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York.
Janice Nowinski, Nude on a Red Couch, 2018, oil on board, 6” x 6”
Janice Nowinski, Man at Table, 2016, oil on canvas, 11” x 14”
2019 Annual Members Show
Our annual Members Exhibition and RAC Kids Shows will take place from June 23- July 27, 2019. All current RAC members are invited to submit artwork for inclusion in this celebratory summer show! The Members Show will take place in the Freeark Gallery, with an exhibition focused on art made by kids in the RAC community on view next door in our FlexSpace. If you are an artist who’d like to exhibit your work at the Riverside Arts Center, this is a wonderful opportunity to do so!
Drop-off dates (artwork accepted from current RAC members and students only): Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, June 12-15, from 1-5pm.
Artists’ Reception: Sunday, June 23, 3-6pm
Guidelines: Each member and student is invited to submit one piece, no larger than 24″ in any direction. All work must arrive framed and/or ready for hanging or display with wire hanger or sawtooth hanger affixed to back. RAC Kids’ Show artists must be 18 or younger. When you deliver your work to the gallery, please include the following information: artist’s name, title of artwork, medium, and price (if for sale). For your convenience, you can download and print out a Member’s Entry Form from our website. Please include this form with your artwork submission when dropping off, so we can properly label your work in the exhibition.
Sculpture Garden | Jordan Martins: stay out come in stay in come out
Jordan Martins’ site-specific installation consists of two barricade structures with a striped “dazzle” camouflage pattern based on the colors of the immediate surroundings of the location where they are placed. The patterns are designed to both attract attention and at the same time visually obfuscate the form of whatever or whomever is behind them. The barricades are constructed in a modular fashion to allow and suggest different configurations–a wall, a shelter, a fortress, a scattered cluster–with a bench built into the anterior side of each.
The barricade structure was chosen for its function as a barrier that is both firm but permeable: it marks a line between inside/outside, allowed/not-allowed, and public/private, but it functions differently according to who is implicitly or explicitly granted access to one side or the other. By making this installation re-configurable, various publics are encouraged to create their own spaces with it, or imagine how a structure that limits movement could be a space that is protective, inviting, or empowering.
With each new location that stay out come in stay in come out occupies, the patterns are added onto and adapted to respond to the particular visual conditions of those surroundings, leaving visible traces of the previous locations as they are adapted.
Artist’s Bio:
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, and educator. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil in 2007, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and North Park University. He is the executive director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Goldfinch, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH program in 2013. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago.
Monica Rezman and Beth Bradfish: Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space
May 5 – June 15, 2019
Sculpture by Monica Rezman
Composter/Sound Artist Beth Bradfish
Opening reception Sunday, May 5, 3-6pm * Artists’ Talk Saturday May 25 at 2pm
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space, a collaborative two-person show by Chicago-based artists Monica Rezman and Beth Bradfish. Rezman, a visual artist, and Bradfish, a composer and sound artist, here combine sound art and visual art work in ways that are responsive to one another. Rezman has worked in abstraction for a number of years, producing sculptural works that originate from her classical drawing background – using everyday materials such as discarded cardboard, pieces of past drawings, and reclaimed coffee sacks. Bradfish, as a sound composer, creates sound environments for both aural and tactile experiences. In this exhibition Bradfish responds to Rezman’s work and the site with sound that resonates within the environment and seduces the viewer around and through the installed pieces. Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space is a play on the relationship between sound and vision, and asks the question, what if visual art could make sound?
Artist Bios:
Monica Rezman is a multi media artist using painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and textiles, exploring intimacy within abstraction through the representation of hair and everyday materials such as cardboard. She studied fine art and textile design at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Instituto Allende in Mexico, and classical drawing and painting in Italy and The School of Representational Art in Chicago. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally including at Govern State University Gallery, South Bend Regional Museum of Art and the Chicago Cultural Center. In 2017/2018 she was Artist-In-Residence at Field/Works, Chicago Artist Coalition and the Hyde Park Arts Center.
Beth Bradfish is a composer and sound artist dividing her time between Michigan and Chicago. In 2013, she was commissioned by Access Contemporary Music as part of the Open House Chicago celebration of the Chicago Architectural Foundation. Her work has been performed at Spectrum NYC, Constellation (Chicago), Issue Project Room (NYC) and she was selected as a featured composer in the Oscillations series of Experimental Sound Studio. She is president of Chicago Composers’ Consortium and teaches as an artist in residence at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has been awarded an artist residency fellowship at Ragdale and Field/Work, Chicago Artists Coalition. In 2018 she participated in the New Works Residency with Harvestworks New Media (NYC) and awarded an Individual Artist Support grant from DCASE, also receiving sponsorship at High Concept Laboratories (Chicago) in the same year. She received her MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015.
RBHS AP Art Show 2019
Marina Silvestri, 10th grade, “Toothbrushes.”
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden and Riverside Brookfield High School are excited to announce our 10th annual presentation of exceptional artworks made by students enrolled in RBHS’s AP Art class. This group exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs by students in their sophomore, junior and senior years.
The exhibition of approximately 40 artworks is on view for three weeks, from April 6th through 27th. Come share the creativity of our community’s young artists by joining us for a celebratory reception on the evening of Friday April 13th from 6-8pm! Pizza from Paisans Pizzaria, light snacks and refreshments will be served. Thank you to our sponsors, Brookfield’s Paisans Pizzaria for providing food for the reception!
Undiscoverable Country
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce Undiscoverable Country, a two-person exhibition with work by Kate McQuillen and Gina Hunt, guest curated by Robert Burnier. The opening reception will take place Sunday, February 24, 2019 from 3-6pm.
Out of virtually limitless nature, our concepts might be considered as attempts to bring order to chaos, to bring desire within reach. But as they grow and multiply, they become a new, mysterious forest, an ever expanding, perpetually untraversed land; an undiscoverable country. We look upon these synthetic landscapes, and wonder if we can ever know them, whether reconciliation with unknowing could be itself a kind of knowledge.
The works in this exhibition share a tension between precision and openness. Each of them goes to great lengths to create their manifestations and phenomena, and yet each finds itself at the precipice of a new level of uncertainty or a threshold between feeling and fact. Even as they succeed brilliantly in what they set out to do, they reveal something else about ourselves as viewers, about our notions as thinkers, that we may find harder to define. The works prompt us not to consider the usual breaking of boundaries that art commonly proclaims, but perhaps to consider what a boundary really consists of.
–Robert Burnier, Guest Curator
About the Artists:
Kate McQuillen, “No Concrete Plan”, acrylic on panel, 20” x 16” x 1.5”, 2019.
KATE MCQUILLEN works primarily as a printmaker who is exploring the limits of the process to create painting-like images rich in color and depth. The surfaces have a strong, direct, tactile matteness that plays against the near infinities of the spaces they seem to depict. If the Renaissance was fascinated with reproducing the structure of seeing and perspective, McQuillen appears to be employing a depth that reverberates both outwardly and inwardly, touching on the ways we see and the ways we draw from within to create what we see. The works are themselves lush presentations of color that have an immediacy and formal coherence but also will evade any particular, identifiable tonality. The subtlety of shifting hues and coruscating relationships bear up to extended looking and invite us to roam among the bright tensions within.
Agraduate of York University School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, in Toronto, Ontario, McQuillen is currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited extensively across the United States and Canada while making contributions as an art critic, writer and curator for the Super Duchess project space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Recent exhibition venues for her work also include Johalla Project Space, Chicago, Goldfinch, Chicago and the Massey Klein Gallery, NYC.
Gina Hunt, “Partition”, Hand-dyed scrim, oak, brass nails, and brass hinges, dimensions variable depending on configuration; full dimensions measure 66 inches x 81 inches, 2018.
GINA HUNT is a painter and sculptor who explores physical, spatial relationships largely within the bounds of painting. The “pictures” emerge from a series of relationships among carefully calibrated, placed and offset lattices, grids and patterns. The canvas and its wooden support become image, object, and subject. Referencing the lineages of Op art, Process Art, and hard edged abstraction, her work presents an immediate aesthetic impact by challenging structures that draw the viewer deeper into experiencing them as objects as well as sites of perceptual phenomena. We are left to wonder about the “how” as we regard them pleasurably as form. The artist has developed an extensive language for approaching the construction of the works that brings a certain utility, craft, and drama into their making. Observational representation gives way to observational discovery, and the production of conditions for a broader, even cosmic experience. But if there is magic, it is of a decidedly earthbound origin, as playful forces among the parts turn structural integrity into other kinds of meaning.
Hunt creates abstract paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations as interdisciplinary platforms to research the complexities of vision and the subjectivity of visual experience. Gina has presented her work nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at The Franklin, 65Grand, University Galleries at Illinois State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar, along with group shows at Chicago Artists Coalition, Alan Koppel Gallery, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Drew University, Baby Blue Gallery, Practise, DEMO Project, E. Tay Gallery, Elmhurst Art Museum, Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, and Front Room Gallery, among others. Hunt has received artist residency awards from Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Hinge Arts, and the Badlands National Park. Her work has been featured in reviews and publications such as The Rib, Gulf Times (Doha, Qatar), Salt Hill, and New American Paintings. Hunt currently lives and works in Chicago, where she is a faculty member within the Drawing, Painting and Printmaking Department at Loyola University Chicago.
About the guest curator:
ROBERT BURNIER (American, b. 1969) is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute in Painting and Drawing in 2016. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania (1991). Exhibitions include Black Tibernius at the Chicago Riverwalk, Of No Particular King, at Arts Club of Chicago, Primary, at Korn Gallery, Drew University, New Jersey, Lip To My Ear, at Vacation Gallery, New York, Objectified, at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, So That Justice Should be Tyrant, at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Ghost Nature, curated by Caroline Picard, at Gallery 400, Chicago, IL and La Box, Bourges, France, The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, Imaginary Landscapes, curated by Allison Glenn, at Chicago Urban Art Society and Jenny From the Color Block, at the Cincinnati Art Academy. His work has been exhibited at art fairs in Miami, New York, Chicago and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has served on the boards of several arts organizations, including Heaven Gallery and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago.
Sculpture Garden Installation: Lynn Basa, “Nomads”
Lynn Basa, Nomads, 2019 (detail). Mixed media, papier-mâché, wire, garden torches.
Nomads are a troupe of paintings migrating through Chicago on their way to becoming something else.
Lynn Basa’s paintings have started taking on lives of their own. At first, she says, they would merely “whisper free associations to her inner voice” as she was working on them. But then the voices became so distinct while making the works in her Happy Place series that she began to let the paintings speak for themselves and even included an interview with them in the exhibition catalogue. The group of paintings that followed, known as the Pods, “left the wall and spun a tale of being found in the woods where they were created by ‘animals with thumbs,’ creatures who had no knowledge of art history and were free of self-judgment,” as the artist describes it. Basa sees Nomads as the latest manifestation of this evolution. “With them, creative time overlaps with physical space and time. These paintings need to exist, then leave, to make room for whatever is supposed to happen next.”
About the artist
LYNN BASA is a full-time artist with a studio in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. She is a painter who also does public art commissions. She is the founder of The Corner Project, a community-based practice focused on the people and places of Milwaukee Avenue between Kimball and Central Park. She is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Public Art, which will be updated and reissued as a second edition in 2019.
Lynn Basa’s Nomads is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Natalie Krick: Natural Deceptions
Natalie Krick, “Me posing as Mom posing as Marilyn,” 2014.
RAC is pleased to announce Natural Deceptions, the first solo exhibition in the Chicago area by Seattle-based photographer Natalie Krick. Inspired by magazine spreads and celebrity pinups, Natural Deceptions is a biting yet witty sendup of popular portrayals of feminine beauty and sexuality. Krick’s photographs are fueled by a conflicting attraction and aversion to images of glamorous women. Along with her mother and sister, she poses for the camera, reimagining the highly formalized images that taught them what it meant to be beautiful. Krick favors a harsh flash and vivid color to accentuate the superficiality and the façade of glamour that are the hallmarks of fashion media. “My mother, my sister, and I perform for each other, for the camera, and ultimately for you,” says Krick. “We impersonate each other and ourselves, emulating imagery that taught us to be beautiful.” The resulting images, piercing portraits and fragmented studies of their stylized bodies, mimic the allure and artifice found in magazines while mocking the idea that such images are easy on the eyes. Krick’s charged photographs, enthralling as any glossy picture, portray beauty as at once synthetic, flawed, threatening, seductive and garish.
–Paul D’Amato, Guest Curator
Visit Skylark Editions to purchase the book Natalie Krick: Natural Deceptions
About the Artist
Natalie Krick (b. 1986, Portland, Oregon) currently lives in Seattle. She received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2008 and her MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2012. She has recently exhibited at SOIL Gallery, Seattle; Webber Represents, London; Aperture Gallery, New York; and Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago. In 2015 she received an Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation.
RAC Spotlight | Kim Piotrowski
“Lost Laurels”, 2018. Acrylic ink, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72” x 54”
The RAC is pleased to present Kim Piotrowski’s solo exhibition While Here. This is part of RAC’s Spotlight Exhibitionseries, which highlights artists who are part of the RAC community.
For sixteen years Kim Piotrowski has balanced parenting and art-making here in Riverside. In that time, she’s made hundreds of paintings and drawings, exhibited across the country and in Europe, while developing a vivid body of work notable for its fluid restlessness. Although defined as an abstract painter, she still depicts. Guns, crowns, beds, water and war are among her subject matter, but all congeal and melt into Piotrowsk’s marks — torqued, attenuated, with a graphic snap and deftness. Her touch is liquid and gentle. The overall effect, even in tiny pieces, combines intimacy with the monumental baroque. Mass spirals and space unfolds into painted worlds that are both tangible and enigmatic.
This site-specific exhibition will represent Piotrowski’s artistic growth and her personal balancing act. Every year of her life in Riverside will be represented in an installation that will fill the entire Freeark Gallery as well as our Flex Space. Old and new work will hang together, connected by marks—a visual thread formed by painting, drawing, writing and personal ephemera applied directly to the gallery walls. Our entire space will transform into a grand-scale embodiment of private experience — extroverted action depicting sixteen years of life, love, and painting.
–Anne Harris
Kim Piotrowski at the beginning stages of her painting “Lost Laurels”, 2018. Acrylic ink, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72” x 54”
Studio of Kim Piotrowski in Riverside, IL.
Kim Piotrowski at work in her Riverside, IL studio.
Daughters Stella (8) and Cora (10) in the studio with ‘Corner Lot”, 2011 mixed media on Yupo paper, 60” x 120”
Andreas Fischer: Are You OK?
Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.
Curated by Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé
Artist’s Talk: Saturday, November 10, 3-5pm
“Are You OK?” continues Chicago artist Andreas Fischer’s longstanding inquiry into the meanings, roles, pleasures and possibilities of painting today. In a recent artist’s statement, Fischer writes that “confusion is all we really have, particularly about the everyday – the usual, the common – mainly because they seem so neutral. Nothing is neutral, right? There is also confusion about whether qualifications of those concepts resist exploding well enough for them to mean anything. Your everyday is not our everyday. Can we talk about this?” Fischer’s exhibition at RAC stages the conversation these words invite. Each of Fischer’s paintings is a conundrum, positing itself simultaneously as a mirror, a window, an arena, as a form of escape and an indexical confrontation with who he, the artist, and we, his viewers, think we are. So too, Fischer’s paintings put forth propositions, statements, mixed-messages, affirmations, apologies and perhaps most importantly, a series of open-ended questions, starting with: ‘Are you OK?’ Which may in turn lead to other questions, like: ‘Is it ok for me to be me? For you to be you? For us to be ourselves, together?’ In this way, Fischer’s paintings combine the metaphorical, the lyrical and the literal as they enact the questions and struggles of what it means to be human together, with and through the medium of painting.
–Claudine Isé, Director, Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
Top image caption:
Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.
