July 17 – Fullerton Hall – The Art Institute of Chicago 

Members Lecture, “Flesh: The Art of Ivan Albright” 

The lecture introduced Albright’s life and work, with a
thematic focus on his controversial and provocative treatment of the human body
throughout his career. 

The Art Institute of Chicago hosted a daylong “block party” celebrating the impact of Chicago art and design on American culture through talks, performances, and art making. The party filled the galleries, gardens, library, and public spaces. 

I joined print curator Mark Pascale for a show-and-tell event in the Prints and Drawings room, where we discussed prints produced under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in the 1930s and early 40s. Works on displays included etchings, lithographs, and screenprints by printmakers such as Ida Abelman, Hugo Gellert, Blanche Grambs, Carl Hoeckner, Louis Lozowick, Elizabeth Olds, Harry Sternberg, Dox Thrash. 

May 18 - Art Institute of Chicago

I joined Kelly Keegan, Associate Conservator of Paintings, to explore Flesh: Ivan Albright through both curatorial and conservation lenses.  

Photo credits: Art Institute of Chicago

I joined Marc Vitali for an in-gallery interview with WTTW Chicago for a segment on Flesh: Ivan Albright. 

April 25, 2018 - Harold Washington Library

In anticipation of the summer exhibitions Charles White : A Retrospective and Never a Lovely So Real : Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950 - 1980 and in tandem with the Chicago Public Library’s One Book, One Chicago 2018 selection, I’ll Take You There,
the Art Institute of Chicago and media sponsor WBEZ 91.5 celebrate
activism in Chicago with music, show-and-tell, and art making. 

Join special guests Ayana Contreras, John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, Tracy
Drake, Zakkiyyah Najeebah, Nicole Marroquin and John Murphy as we
highlight the vital role our city plays in American creativity as well
as the ways artists participate in the struggle for civil rights.

February 7, 2018 – Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

I had the privilege of participating in “Blake in Performance, Blake at the End Times,” a public program organized by the Block Museum as part of its William Blake in the Age of Aquarius exhibition. 

My talk considered the way artists and intellectuals in the 1960s looked to Blake as a prophet of nuclear apocalypse. In his book Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak — who popularized the word “counterculture” in the late 60s — argued that Blake spoke to an “apocalyptic era” threatened by nuclear holocaust. Blake “saw in the steady advance of science and machines,” Roszak wrote, “a terrifying aggression against precious human potentialities—and especially against visionary imagination.” 

Photo credits: Block Museum of Art

January 26, 2018 – Newberry Library, Chicago

I enjoyed workshopping a paper on the enigmatic and provocative Chicago painter Ivan Albright (1897-1983) as part of the Newberry Library’s seminar on American Art and Visual Culture. Here’s my abstract for the paper, “Flesh: Ivan Albright’s Weird, Ugly Realism”:

When avant-garde French painter Jean Dubuffet visited Chicago in 1951, there was one artist he wanted to meet: Ivan Albright. By 1951, Albright had established a reputation as a “master of the macabre” best known for his painstakingly executed paintings of morbid subjects: decaying bodies, rotting doors, and funereal still lifes. “There are few pictures as alarming as those of Albright,” said Dubuffet; Albright had abolished totally “what were our canons of beauty,” and swept away “all the criteria of order.” Dubuffet, a champion of art brut (raw art), recognized in Albright a kindred spirit, an antihumanist who employed Old Master techniques in order to undermine the most cherished beliefs and values of Western civilization. Drawing on archival research and unpublished source material (including Albright’s fifty notebooks housed at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson and Burnham Libraries), I argue that Albright, who seemed to have few contemporaries as a painter, is more productively understood as an antihumanist philosopher investigating the “aesthetics of ugliness” and the flat ontologies of humans and objects.