Category: Vernacular Art

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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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Book Review: Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments

Jo Farb Hernandez’s study of Spanish art environments is so epic that even a large-format volume of nearly 600 pages can’t get the job done, so a bonus CD adds thousands more thumbnail pictures and hundreds more pages of text. If creating a world-class art environment requires obsessive devotion, Hernandez is a match for the creators she studies. Her devotion demonstrates Spain is a match for the rest of the world, even if its environments have not received the same attention as the great sites in France or Wisconsin.

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The Art of Street Food

The National Mall, which stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol and features most of the Smithsonian museums, is lined with hot dog wagons and food trucks, at least in better times. When last I saw them many of these trucks were extravaganzas of hand-painted signs promoting colorful snacks and refreshments. I fear photographed images are overtaking the paintings, but that’s life on the roadside, and at least they remain exuberantly colorful. Here are images from this portable, spontaneous art environment, August 2009 and July 2014. Update The last gasp of hand-painted signs on the National Mall food trucks,

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Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum and Offensive Abstraction

Claus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, now recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hugely influential when I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1978. His collection of commercial tchotchkes (salt-and-pepper shakers, Plasticville train set buildings, robot toys, product packaging), shown with pieces of his own art and models for works in progress, validated my own nascent fascination with pop culture objects, proving that they were interesting in and of themselves. I was just starting to collect kitsch items, commercial paraphernalia, handicrafts — prosaic stuff that seemed to resonate with some kind of

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Book Review: South African Township Barbershops and Salons

South African Township Barbershops and Salons, Simon Weller, Mark Batty Publisher, 128 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935613-04-6. Hard cover $27.95 If African Signs, with its minimal text but rich collection of photographs, provides a window to African vernacular culture, South African Township Barbershops & Salons passes through that window to provide something of an inside tour. Simon Weller, a professional photographer, not only document numerous advertising signs but also spent time with the hair cutters and their customers as well as several sign painters. He aims not just to show the art but also the culture in which the art is

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Book Review: African Signs

African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45 Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the, African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured

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