Stephanie Syjuco's recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the moment of ...

Richter archivist Dietmar Elger presents his new book Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting. Benefiting from private interviews, Elger is able to elucidate Richter's aesthetics of detachment and ambiguity, providing a rich, personal, and vivid portrait of this important artist.

There appears to be a growing return to the book amongst younger artists, writers and thinkers. This move towards the material and physical may be in reaction to the vastness and immateriality of forms of cultural production in the Second Life era. This discussion centers around definitions of the publication as art object, as curated exhibition, as micro-archive, as well as phenomenological aspects of the publication—its tactility, personable and intimate dimensions, and the unique one-to-one relationship between reader/viewer and object. Bookmakers, editors, curators and scholars have been invited to this discussion to share their experiences as we ponder the significance ...

Artists discuss strategies for making work in their home or live/work space. With Lorelei Stewart, Director of Gallery 400, and artists Brian Kapernekas, Jason Lazarus and Georgina Valverde.

threewalls presents Latent Tendencies, a MCA Cabinet of Curiosities featuring "un-lectures" about artist’s 'other practices.' Hosted by Bad At Sports commentator and artist, Duncan MacKenzie, Latent Tendencies promises to expose what Chicago artists would rather be doing with their lives. Leslie Baum wonders how I might have been a potter: a timeline of the path not taken; Andrea Loest presents Karmic Numerology, a lecture on archetypal cosmology that determines an individual's karmic past, present, and future through the understanding of numerical systems and arrangement; Meg Duguid shares her love of juice in this conversation about fresh ...

Colombia-based artist Doris Salcedo explores the significance of everyday objects and their power to implicate history. Her sculptures and installations infuse domestic materials with gestures of political and psychological archeology, and their sense of absence hovers in the space between the empowered and voiceless.

Jan Tichy's installations address the multi-layered narratives of urban spaces and architectural contexts. Using light as his medium, his site-specific commission will animate the ground floor vestibule. His minimalist approach leaves his works open to interpretation, focusing attention on the impact of his materials to transform our experience.

Since the early part of the 20th century, artists have created works that might best be described as events: situated in place, unfolding in time, and often performative or interactive in approach, these works ask the audience to reconsider the very nature of the art experience. In recent years, event-based artworks and actions have proliferated in museums, galleries, and public spaces in Chicago and elsewhere. Moderated by art historian Irene V. Small, this panel discussion looks at the modes of art making and motivations that are leading artists to produce event-based works today, while connecting these current activities to earlier ...

Since the late 1960s, John Knight has utilized existing forms of distribution and communication—including magazine subscriptions, museum mailing lists, travel posters, recipes, and floor plans—to reconsider the social structures and value systems that support the exchange of ideas and commodities. By sublimating expected graphic identities, Knight’s work, as the artist explained, "puts into question how the design affect mediates ones understanding of subjects/objects, within their institutional registers." For example, in Museotypes, 1983 (created for an exhibition at the Renaissance Society and on view at the end of February at the Art Institute in gallery 294) 60 bone-china plates commemorate international ...

Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural, and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995 Franceschini founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists; in 2004 she co-founded Free Soil, a collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social and political organization of space.

Artist talk by Jorge Lucero.

"Petrified social conditions must be made to dance again by singing them their own song," the young Karl Marx once wrote. Hal Foster, Princeton University, looks at modernist art with an eye to this old imperative and a focus on the mimetic excess one finds in Dada and its progeny.

John Miller is an artist, writer and musician based in New York and Berlin. Among other things, his work considers questions of production, reception, and value as it relates to the making and circulation of art. Using deadpan humor, in combination with everyday debris, fake gold leaf, brown paint, and genre tableau, Miller creates sculpture, photography, painting, and writing that confound the distinctions in the spectacular, the exploitative, the everyday, and the value of craftsmanship. As a critic he is keenly interested in the role of aesthetics within mass culture.

Wesley Miller (Art:21) will touch on the filming process, the relationship of art history to narrative traditions, curating for television/media vs. exhibition spaces, shifts in media and perception, tensions around biography and art's meaning and the aesthetics of doubt.

The ancient art of cartography has mysterious and storied resonances of ignorance, journeys and discovery; idealized and paradisiacal utopias; Cartesian desires for quantifiable knowledge; and colonial powers and empires. Today, contemporary artists across the globe employ mapping and diagramming in their creative practice to incredibly diverse ends. Bourriaud locates this practice as characteristic of a new era in art in his curatorial essay on the "altermordern;" for the curator, it reflects our age of invisible but enforced borders; multiple passports; global culture and nomadism. Beyond the obvious socio-political qualities in the art of making a map, however, there is also ...

Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st-century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken's eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts. Aitken's work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images, and the rhythms of our surroundings.

Lauded in 2008 by New York Times critic Roberta Smith as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century," Sterling Ruby explores individual desire, transgression, social power structures, neurosis, and paranoia through a diverse practice that includes richly glazed amorphous ceramics, large-scale spray painted canvases, hypnotic videos, poured urethane sculptures, inscribed Formica monoliths, nail polish drawings, and collage. Fusing sources from various pop culture and art historical references—such as body builders, ancient art, graffiti, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, Minimalism, transvestites, pornography, cults, and gang members—Ruby’s art perhaps can be summed up best by his widely quoted ...

The InCUBATE-curated portion of the Cabinet of Curiosities series at the MCA, The Metaphysical Club, is a one-night-only re-convention of the historic conversational society that was active throughout the 1870s in Cambridge, MA. It counted among its members future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, psychologist William James, and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce. It was here that American Pragmatism was born as a "half-ironic half-defiant" reproach to European metaphysics. The event will feature presentations by Rozalinda Borcila, Joe Grimm, Liz Joynt-Sandberg, People Powered (Lora Lode & Kevin Kaempf), Bert Stabler and Fereshteh Toosi. We might think of ...

Nicolas Lampert (Justseeds Artists' Cooperative) will provide an overview of the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress, two leading voices for radical artists during the 1930s. Both organizations responded to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism with collective action, purposefully aligning themselves with working class labor movements. The lecture will segue into an open discussion about how artists are addressing the present-day economic crisis.

Michael Rakowitz's work confronts our shared political consciousness through performance, sculpture, graphic design and derives it particular poignancy from an engagement with the world that is at once pragmatic and poetic.

Coordinated by the Open Practice Committee at the University of Chicago, threewalls will host Pedagogy of the Periphery, a special workshop style event to compliment the Radical Caucus for Art's Autonomizing Practices panel at this year's College Art Association meeting. In conjunction with AREA Chicago's ninth issue, Peripheral Vision, Pedagogy of the Periphery will focus on the history, practice and theory of radical pedagogy inside and outside institutions. Together, educators and students will discuss pedagogical practices, broadly defined—their optimism, obstacles, methods, pleasures, and frustrations—with both short informal presentations and time for group discussion. Some discussion questions will be submitted ...

Featuring Nikhil Chopra, John Neff and Amanda Ross-Ho. Transformation, mediation, gesture, embodiment. The artist is both performer and observer in the studio, and the protagonist of the myths that surround this space. Three artists in the MCA exhibition Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out, discuss their own works in the show, using them as a springboards for reflecting on the creative acts of the studio.

SAIC alumna Saya Woolfalk (MFA 2004) will present her ongoing project No Place, a multimedia, fictional future that reworks tropes of sexual, racial, and gender difference. The characters and stories in Woolfalk’s constructed reality evoke travel narratives, science fiction, and the rhetoric of anthropology to investigate human possibilities (and impossibilities). Through diverse forms of installation, video, painting, drawing, performance, and sound, she reflects on human life and its future through configurations of biology, sociality, and the environment.

Research-based artistic practice seems to have greater currency today than perhaps ever before. Art projects begin to feel like dissertations; loaded with multivalent cultural, political, and historical references, this type of practice often doesn’t result in a traditional art object, but instead exists in performance, in conversations, in recreations of office spaces or archives within a gallery. Contemporary strains of this type of practice have had high visibility in Chicago recently, with exhibitions by Liam Gillick and Jeremy Diller at the MCA in the fall, and the knowledge-questioning investigation by Aspen Mays about to open at the ...

No Coast presents Heaven is Real, a collection of performances, presentations and activities themed around our abnormal/paranormal/celebratory/transcendent relationship with death and dying, as part of the Cabinet of Curiosities series. The MCA describes the event as "A grab bag of ‘un-lectures’ about a myriad of topics that create a variety show-like evening of artist presentations curated by different groups from around Chicago." We like to think of it as a morbidly fantastic show-n-tell. Featuring performances by Acephalous, Andre Callot, Aaron Dicks & Colin Self, Andrea Fritsch, Rebecca Gordon and Brandon Joyce, Ted Marino and Carnal Torpor. Hosted By Lil ...

William Cordova is a Peruvian-American artist working in various media to address the layered history of the urban landscape, mixing references to politics, history, race, and pop culture.

Join renowned artist Jason Salavon as he discusses his recent exhibitions Spigot, on view at the Hyde Park Art Center September 23 - February 6, 2010 on the Art Center’s Digital Catwalk Facade. Salavon’s exhibition experiments with the artistic possibilities of information technology and unconventional source materials. In this large-scale projection on the Hyde Park Art Center’s façade, pulsating fields of color serve as the background for rapidly emerging pieces of text; these images alternate with multicolored, interlocking squares that recede and project in a dynamic rhythm.

InCUBATE, the Stockyard Institute and Sarah Kavage invite you to join us for a dinner symposium in honor of the life, work and spirit of Michael Piazza. Space is limited. Please RSVP to sarah@gogoweb.com. The winter solstice is a time of rebirth, manifestation of ideas, and new beginnings. This final event in the Orientation Center space, on the eve of the solstice, will gather friends and supporters together to talk about how place and nourishment intertwine with creative practice. The evening will feature presentations by and about two artists whose work relates to both themes. Jim Duignan of ...