Review: 29Rooms Inspires Creativity in Chicago
For the first time since its inception in 2015, Refinery29’s travelling art exhibition, 29Rooms, made its way over to the Midwest, having its inaugural launch in Chicago for an excitement-filled, […]
Review: Ai Weiwei’s Trace: a Sobering Look at the Price Paid by Dissidents
The first thing that struck me walking into the building that houses Trace, a four-story art installation created by Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei, was the stark stone staircase […]
Global Citizen of Conscience: Ai Weiwei At the Auditorium Theatre
In 2011, multi-disciplinary artist Ai Weiwei was detained by the Chinese government, held captive for 81 days in an unknown place without any explanation, threatened with 11 years of imprisonment, […]
Get It On, Bang Some Gongs with Mind Over Mirror’s Bellowing Sun
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art co-commissioned Bellowing Sun, the sixth album from Jaime Fennelly’s Mind Over Mirrors, once a solo project and now a quartet including Jim Becker, violinist from […]
Energy Efficient Architecture in Chicago and the World Shared in Peter Land Retrospective
British-born architect Peter Land has taught at Harvard and here in Chicago for over four decades at the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which recently hosted […]
TheMART Looks to Become World’s Largest Canvas for theARTs – Is That a Good Thing?
Merchandise Mart is something of a marvel. When it was completed in 1931, it wasn’t just the largest building in the world, taking up two city blocks and boasting over […]
Artists Connect: Bit Bash – Interactive Influence at Art Institute
Some may argue that video games don’t have a place amongst world famous works of art, but on Thursday night at the Art Institute we got to experience just that […]
Film Review: Starring Anton Yelchin, Porto Is Melancholy and Marvelous
Porto, the feature debut by former Chicago film critic Gabe Klinger (his follow-up to the engaging 2013 documentary Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater), is a film about being […]
Specter of Housing Insecurity Exorcised in Theater Oobleck’s A Memory Palace of Fear
Rust Belt Chicago’s editor/writer Martha Bayne and artist Andrea Jablonski co-curate Theater Oobleck’s unique haunted house, tapping into fears about housing insecurity. A rainy, raw fall day was an apt […]
The Rise of Integrated New Media Installations: What It Means When Public Art & Architecture Go Digital
No new building in Chicago was as highly anticipated in recent times as the engineering marvel that is 150 N. Riverside Plaza. The 54-story glass office tower–noted for its sharply […]
Yvette Mayorga’s Artistic Contribution to the Immigration Conversation
Entering Yvette Mayorga’s exhibition, The Politics of Desire, at Chicago Artists Coalition is a deliberate, and thoughtful, experience of visual sensory overload. Comprised of densely-placed paintings and sculptures, the works […]
‘The Beginning and End of things’ Only Scratches Surface of Artist’s Potential
At the quaint gallery space of The Comfort Station, located at the heart of Chicago’s Logan Square, is Sae Jun Kim’s new solo exhibition, The Beginning and End of things. […]