S.O.S.

For 22 years, Woman Made Gallery has supported the work of woman-identified artists through exhibitions and professional development opportunities. Exhibitions at the gallery address not only feminist issues, but also those critical questions we all encounter every day –­ gender, race, the environment and economic inequality. The gallery also serves the public, celebrating women, community and Chicago in a meaningful and thoughtful way. The most recent exhibition, ABANDONED MARGINS: POLICING THE BLACK FEMALE BODY, received national attention.

Woman Made has been profoundly and negatively impacted by the Illinois Budget crisis. Grants that have historically provided organizational support have evaporated. An organization that has, for more than two decades, employed, supported and educated members of our community, is struggling financially.

You can help Woman Made Gallery survive. Your membership and/or charitable contribution will insure the gallery’s future – no monetary contribution is too small. Let’s not lose this important pillar of Chicago’s cultural edifice. And don’t forget! After making your contribution, plan a visit to the gallery to enjoy and learn from the important work that will be shared in upcoming exhibitions and literary events.

storm drain

Rebecca Morgan
Installation View: "Where I Have Lived and What I Live For"
Gasser Grunert, 2010
all works believed lost





I believe that some of the art I make is good. I also believe that my best work is produced when I am making a lot of it. In addition, if the project is well conceived before I ever put a pencil or paint to surface, the result is better. It is sometimes as though the work makes itself.

Right now I have a set of two unfinished paintings tacked to my studio wall. They're stuck. I keep trying to complete them but I remain indecisive. I have been working on them for more than a year. Sometimes the size and complexity of work requires a substantial period of time for completion. These paintings are neither complex nor large. They were incomplete from the get-go.

Years ago, my inability to complete these paintings would have rendered me unable to complete any other paintings. It wasn't perfectionism, it was ego and fear and procrastination. I would have fixated on how profound their narrative was, how complete they needed to be. I am fortunate that my practice has broadened enough that have I now have more ideas than time, and I no longer believe my work to be so weighty that a particular project's failure can hinder the production of other work.

I have been thinking about this a lot in the wake of Sandy, and her devastating impact on artists in the New York City area. I have several friends who have lost not just whole bodies of work, but also the spaces in which they create them.  News photos of Manhattan's Chelsea galleries and Brooklyn's Red Hook studios break my heart.While this devastation is certainly less tragic than the loss of lives and homes, I feel so sad for the artists and the hours of dedication and skill they had invested in their work.

But I am hopeful. The artists I know will continue to make good and perhaps even better work. All of their knowledge and skill will be enhanced by the personal experience of this loss. The community of artists will be strengthened by it. I believe this.

I'm looking at these two paintings again and I'm going to put them away or get rid of them outright. If by some calamity, in 10 years, my work was all destroyed, I would much rather go forward with the sense of accomplishment of having  made a substantive amount of work, good and bad. I would value the experience and craft gained in the process of making that work. The real tragedy would be in attempting, achieving and then losing nothing.

To all of my tribe who have lost studios and work due to Sandy, my heart breaks for you. But really... I can't wait to see the work that comes next.

jennifer bisbing

Chicago photographer Jennifer Bisbing’s personal work exists in response to the ultimate existentiality of being a human within landscape and social construct. Existing in those obscure places between dream, memory, consciousness and truth, her contemplative rural landscapes suggest both longing and nostalgia.

In contrast, Jennifer’s urban encounters are, like the city itself, much less forgiving. Still, they too emphasize the isolation of one’s existence, albeit in the hard steel and concrete framework that abets our anonymity. Her photos of Gary, Indiana, manage to maintain an exquisite aesthetic while documenting the vestiges of the Modernist failure that is that city’s legacy.

Jennifer is talented portrait photographer. Her project Wicker Women has been documenting women living and working in the Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park. While the face of this population has certainly changed in the 15 years since I worked there, Wicker Park demonstrates the lively, ever-evolving character of Chicago’s neighborhoods. In addition, all proceeds from the portrait sittings will benefit CAWC (Connections for Abused Women and their Children). This yearlong project will culminate with an exhibition benefit at Chrome Gallery, 1462 1/2 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, on October 10, 2009. Please help support this important organization and celebrate Jennifer’s impressive and dedicated work on its behalf. Complete information about the event is available on the Wicker Women Blog site accessible on my Blog list.

Veronika Szkudlarek

My previous post reviewed the thought provoking drama Ruined, by Lynn Nottage. I had the privilege of attending this performance with fellow painter, Veronika Szkudlarek. As there are no accidents, Veronika’s insight into the plight of African women was invaluable.

Informed by extensive travels throughout Africa, the Mid-East, Europe and North America, Veronika addresses the ignorance and cruelty of war. Through direct observation of its methods, its structure and its victims, she plants herself firmly in the center as an artist existing within and relevant to a global community.

Veronika’s mural for the Mother Theresa Missionaries of Charity orphanage in Kigali, Rwanda brought her into direct contact with the more than one- hundred women and children, survivors of the Rwandan Genocide, that are residents. It also facilitated conversations with government officials intent on building sustainable living conditions and meaningful lives for the victims of the atrocity.

Veronika’s work doesn’t depict images of the horrors of war, but rather the vestiges of those horrors. It is as though her paintings themselves weep, with surfaces of lachrymose paint, bleeding image into ground. This sensitive marriage of palette, medium and subject engenders the essentially hopeful role of the artist, as if stating that there is another way.

Veronika’s work is included at the upcoming exhibition "Skin Deep" at Kips Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY, August 18 through September 1, 2009.

d. stine

I am neither a music nor literary critic, and I have seen very little of his visual output, but I have been informed by the extremely informed, that musically, Chicago composer, poet and artist d. Stine is a talent dedicated to his pursuit of the craft. Recently, he has been working within the construct of The Banana Twins on noise and ambient compositions. The works are a requirement each time I need to settle myself into the studio. Independently, a series of harmonica compositions he created for the film The Brave and the Kind evoke the same melancholy reflection I experience looking down an abandoned stretch of railroad tracks on a humid August day.

In addition, d. Stine has just published his third volume of poetry, Abacus, following previous works, Directional Forensics and Litmus. The implication of these titles is the synchronic counting, measuring, and testing apparatuses symptomatic of Post Modernism. My sense here however, is that d. Stine is a cultural skeptic cautiously dipping his toe in a broader pool of experience. It is fortifying to watch.

I am consistently surprised at what I learn about myself when meeting other artists. Part of it is learning about your own limitations. Poetry and music, necessary to my own art production, are art forms I am incapable of producing. I have tremendous respect for those who, as in this case, do it well. The other aspect is discovering hidden aspects of your own personality. I was indeed surprised by the discovery that, I do, after all, possess a maternal instinct.

Maggie Meiners

Though she has an appreciation for beauty from an early age, anyone that knows Chicago photographer Maggie Meiners, suspects that what she considers to be beautiful has grown exponentially during the past several years.

Deceptively honest, Maggie’s work presupposes an informed, perceptive audience. It doesn’t proffer an opinion on what has been captured, nor does it assume circumstance. Rather, it offers generous space in which the viewer may perceive and construct their own experience of the content. This occurs, for example, in the non-narrative, non-editorial series Extractions, which is reminiscent of the mid-twentieth century work of Frederick Sommer.

Equally intriguing is her series, Childhood Contemplations. While the abstract body of work is devoid of nostalgia and sentimentality, it provides a photographic mandala or meditative gazing ball, through what one suspects is a personal conveyance of memory and color.

Select pieces from Childhood Contemplations are included in the exhibition Meditative Surfaces along with work by Charles Gniech and Deanna Krueger at Schoenherr Art Gallery in Naperville, Illinois. The exhibition opens this week on July 21 will run through August 21.

linda logan

Linda Logan is a Chicago-area artist who works in a variety of mediums. With a PhD in Geography, her work is often concerned with vestiges, or what remains from a speculative past that endures today. What do these vestiges mean?

I first became familiar with Linda’s work through her cave painting series. Though certainly informed by those found at Lascaux, these works are concerned with language and symbol, prehistoric and contemporary. The intuitive gestures of the paintings communicate deeper, more profound notions than the surface concerns of present-day society. One might think that her work will also endure for 40,000 years.

Recently, Linda has been working with digital photography. What is interesting and unusual is that she manipulates her photo before taking the picture, not in post. In essence, she is a sort of pre-deconstructionist – or perhaps a pre-constructionist. This technique was utilized in her gridded portrait of Mat illustrated above.

She is currently working on "Pentimento," a series of semi-abstract photographs where images from opposite sides of magazines or newspapers are photographed simultaneously by shooting the pictures through a very bright light. The melding of the images asks questions about the entire act of perceiving a photograph, or if indeed these even are photographs.

Linda is a member of Margin Art Gallery, a not for profit collective art gallery dedicated to nurturing artistic expression. Works from “Pentimento” were exhibited at Margin’s spring 2009 show.