Category: Art

Stanley Szwarc: Box, 1990s, 5.5x4.165x2.685

The Stanley Szwarc Boxes

Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011) was a prolific artist, and boxes were his most frequent creation. There are thousands of these floating around the Chicago area, ranging from tiny ones barely a couple of inches wide to bruisers that could take up the corner of a desk. In his basement were closets and trunks filled with layers of boxes stacked up and divided by sheets of cardboard. “No two alike,” he would always say. As with all his work, the ornamentation is brilliantly creative. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases Stanley

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Stanley Szwarc stainless steel vase with strips

Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Vases

Vases by Stanley Szwarc, master of stainless steel, who died in 2011. Stanley complained that his vases took too much effort to make, but he kept creating them nonetheless. They are among his most elegant works. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery The Stanley Szwarc boxes Stanley Szwarc in color 2016 show at Intuit in Chicago Read The Stanley Szwarc story

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Stanley Szwarc stainless steel face box

Stanley Szwarc Portrait Gallery

Stanley Szwarc’s most typical creations are marvels of decoration, stainless steel boxes lathered in abstract ornamentation. But he also applied his geometric talent to creating faces, some ominous, some cartoony, some robotic, and some quite dressy. When the book keeper turned metal worker took up representational imagery, his imagination was stunning. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases The Stanley Szwarc boxes Stanley Szwarc in color 2016 show at Intuit in Chicago Read The Stanley Szwarc story

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Short Review: A New American Picture

This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” books, or more accurately, “I kind of thought of that but never got around to doing it” books. Doug Rickard travels the country via Google Street View and creates a virtual street photography from the massive library of automatically generated images. Rickard gravitates to images of more or less distressed locations that include people, which means he is drawing from a small percentage of available pictures. I’m impressed with the patience this must require. As the book notes, his approach lets him show places he’s never been and would

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Short Review: David Plowden’s A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America

David Plowden’s photos in A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America are marvelously evocative as always. His introductory text moves them to a dimension beyond ruin porn. Usually when you see pictures of rural decay you respond to that evocativeness and to the formal beauty of the scenes. Plowdwn connects you to the stories behind these mostly Midwestern images in the same way that he’s connected, by talking about what these places (and the people who once populated them) were like when he first photographed them years ago. There really is a narrative behind almost every ruined farmhouse or boarded-up store.

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Stanley-Szwarc-visionary-stainless-steel-cross-11282001-4x8-P1010443.jpg

Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Cross Purposes

Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011), a Polish book keeper turned metal worker and then artist after arriving in the United States, gave no indication of being particularly religious, but he did like making crosses. A prolific creator of objects from scrap stainless steel, always demonstrating over-the-top imagination, Szwarc made hundreds of crosses, if not thousands. He produced jewelry, he made crosses to be hung on the wall, and he crafted cruciform objects with no apparent use other than to be carriers of his endless combinations of geometric shapes. Szwarc liked to say that no two of his objects, be they crosses, vases, key fobs or boxes, were alike. The evidence plainly supports that contention while demonstrating a virtuosic artistic vision

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Skaters by Thomas Penn, DuSable High School

Vernacular Art Spectacular, DuSable High School

This group of drawings turned up at Maxwell Street some years ago. With the possible exception of “Take your cross and follow me,” which is an earlier piece, they were executed by students of Ethel Nolan, an artist and art teacher at DuSable High School on Chicago’s South Side. I’m guessing she might have saved the best of her students’ work, as represented here. Super fine vernacular art.

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