The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art, by Charlie English. Random House, 336 pages, 16 pages of plates, 2021. ISBN: 9780525512059. Hardcover, $28 Charlie English begins his history of Nazi cultural preoccupations— – and the genocides that followed— – with the story of Franz Karl Buhler, a German blacksmith who turned painter after he was overtaken by mental illness and entered an asylum. He also was an artist collected by the pioneering psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (who gave him the pseudonym Franz Pohl), and he was as well an early victim of Nazi genocidal policies. Prinzhorn, and his
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Jack Barker’s Metal Art Fantasyland
I don’t love junk metal art. The idea of turning scrap into art is usually better than the results. But occasionally a maker brings enough imagination and creativity to the work that it transcends its lawn-ornament origins. Tom Every and his epic Forevertron in Wisconsin is one of the more famous examples of this. Jack Barker, whose metal art filled his Essex, Illinois, yard, did not work on Every’s monumental scale — physically or conceptually — but his creations were if anything weirder than Dr. Evermore’s. Barker’s use of materials could be disconcerting, as could his imagery. The ways he
Continue readingMy Comments for The Army Corps Chicago Coastal Study
Please accept this comment for the NEPA review of the Chicago Coastal Storm Risk Management study. The historical limestone revetments and related structures at Morgan Shoal, Promontory Point and La Rabida have done more than protect the Chicago shoreline from erosion and flooding. They also have served as a canvas for thousands of mostly anonymous Chicagoans who have carved portraits and other images, names, messages and more into the rocks for almost a century. I have spent the last few decades documenting the carvings on the revetments all along the Chicago shoreline, researching their history, tracking down and interviewing carvers,
Continue readingGarage Doors of Chicagoland
In the 1990s Mark Williams and Anne Weitze conceived a project to document the garage doors of Olympia Fields, Illinois, Mark’s hometown. It was inspired in equal measure by the Dublin Doorways posters, whose quaintness was then ubiquitous, and by the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Mark never completed the project, but in his memory Anne and I proceeded with the not-so-great snapshots that they took as preliminary sketches, made serviceable through Anne’s Photoshop wizardry. These doors will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with mid-century suburban vistas. It was Mark’s brilliance to see past the apparently tacky
Continue readingLakefront Rock Carvings This Summer – Update
If you’re interested in Chicago’s unique lakefront rock carvings, there will be a number of opportunities in the summer and early fall of 2022 to see and appreciate them. The walking tour of the carvings at Promontory Point scheduled for Sept. 11 has been rescheduled because of weather to Sunday Oct. 9. We’ll start at 11:30 a.m. near the fountain. In addition to the many historical carvings around the Point, we’ll see new ones created just in the last few months! On Sept. 24 I’ll be doing a tour of the carving-rich area around Foster Beach for Friends of the
Continue readingLakefront Carvings This Summer
If you’re interested in Chicago’s unique lakefront rock carvings, there will be a number of opportunities in the summer of 2022 to see and appreciate them. Saturday, May 28, and Sunday, May 29, the Promontory Point Conservancy will be celebrating its first annual Point Day celebration. This is your chance to show your support for preservation of this historic site, and you can also join these three carving events: On Saturday at 10 a.m. Roman Villareal, carver of the mermaid that is now at Oakwood Beach, will be at the Point talking about that famous carving and other carvings. At
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Mid-Century Modern’s Midwestern Ugly Ducklings
If not yet beautiful, at least interesting
Continue readingReview: Elijah Pierce’s America
Elijah Pierce’s America, edited by Nancy Ireson and Zoé Whitley, with contributions by Sampada Aranke, Theaster Gates and Michael D. Hall. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, 120 color plates, 2020. ISBN: 9781911300878. Hardcover, $50 To the long list of reasons to resent the pandemic beyond death, sickness and unemployment, of course, we can add missing the opportunity to see Elijah Pierce’s carvings in person at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation. The retrospective ran from September 2020 to January 2021 and included more than 100 works. But pandemic
Continue readingReview: The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art
The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art, by Leisa Rundquist, Routledge, New York, 126 pages, 13 b/w Illustrations, 2021. ISBN: 9781138314559. Hardcover, $59.95 In this admirably concise volume, Lisa Rundquist works diligently to normalize Henry Darger. That seems like fair play considering how he’s been pathologized. Being a working-class self-taught artist and a loner made him vulnerable to whatever excesses of interpretation anyone wanted to throw at him. The eccentric and sometimes extreme nature of his art was a contributing factor. But, in effect, Darger remained a victim of the same epithet applied to him in his youth:
Continue readingReview: Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors
Loud, Naked, & In Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston, by Margaret Hodges and Derin Bray. Rake House, Portsmouth, N.H., 160 pages, 2020. ISBN: 9780578758404. Hardcover, $70 This volume presents a nicely balanced combination of tattoo art and tattoo lore. The book by its own account “looks beyond the connoisseurship of historical flash art” to tell the story of the tattooers, “an often transient, marginalized group,” which it does effectively, in the form of one family. The 70 pages devoted to flash art aren’t bad, but the most exceptional part of the book is
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