Representational & Figurative Art

THE WORLD ON A SINGLE PLANE: JOSEPH E. YOAKUM AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

August 7, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Colbart of Nome Alaska, n.d., ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 12 by 19 in.PHOTO: ROBERT GERHARDT. COLLECTION OF CHERYL CIPRIANI

Joseph E. Yoakum’s origin story has long been inseparable from the reception of his artwork. In 1962, when he was a 71-year-old retiree living in a storefront apartment on Chicago’s South Side, Yoakum had a dream in which he was urged to make art. He drew nearly every day for the remaining ten years of his life, using inexpensive paper, ballpoint pens, pastels, colored pencils, and sometimes watercolors to create more than two thousand pieces that constitute an atlas of his psychic geography. Among his best-known works are undulant landscapes that are almost psychedelic in their vertiginous perspectives. “What I Saw,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, gathers nearly one hundred of these works, plus portraits, sketchbooks, and ephemera—a small but revelatory fraction of Yoakum’s singular output.

Jim Nutt, a fellow Chicago artist, and one of many influenced by his predecessor’s enigmatic oeuvre, once categorized Yoakum’s work as “exciting to ponder [but] difficult to describe.” That difficulty is two-pronged. The first issue is Yoakum’s disorienting style. His landscapes (named after real places, sometimes misspelled) typically occupy one visual plane, in which mountains, a ribbon of empty highway, and stands of conifers might coexist in woozy harmony.

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Move Over, New York; Chicago Comics Affirms a Vibrant Local Legacy

August 3, 2021 (updated August 3, 2021) Published by artistvenu

Installation view, Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, MCA Chicago, 2021. (© MCA Chicago; photo by Nathan Keay)

CHICAGO — When people think of comics, they typically think of New York, the historic home of the US comics industry. They might think of comic book legends like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby or the ubiquity of New York in superhero comics and movies. Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now, now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, makes a case for including Chicago in discussions of how the comics industry, massive and varied, has developed to this day. The show includes the work of major creators who were born, lived, and/or worked in the city such as Daniel Clowes of Ghost World, Nick Drnaso of Sabrina, and cartoonist Lynda Barry.

Integral to the show is its highlighting of the contributions of Black cartoonists who published their work in the Chicago Defender, Jet, and other Black Media outlets, and whose work has not received the same amount of attention as their white counterparts.

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The unseen masterpieces of Frida Kahlo

August 1, 2021 (updated August 1, 2021) Published by artistvenu

Frida in Flames (Self-portrait inside a Sunflower), 1953-54, is a powerful late painting (Credit: Private Collection, USA. Photo courtesy of Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art New York)

Lost or little-known works by the Mexican artist provide fresh insights into her life and work. Holly Williams explores the rarely seen art included in a new book of complete paintings.

You know Frida Kahlo – of course, you do. She is the most famous female artist of all time, and her image is instantly recognizable, and unavoidable. Kahlo can be found everywhere, on T-shirts and notebooks, and mugs. While writing this piece, I spotted a selection of cutesy cartoon Kahlo merchandise in the window of a shop, maybe three minutes’ walk from my home. I bet many readers are similarly in striking distance of some representation of her, with her monobrow and traditional Mexican clothing, her flowery headbands, and red lipstick.

Partly, this is because her own image was a major subject for Kahlo – around a third of her works were self-portraits. Although she died in 1954, her work still reads as bracingly fresh: her self-portraits speak volumes about identity, of the need to craft your own image and tell your own story. She paints herself looking out at the viewer: direct, fierce, challenging.

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The Feminist Power of Beauty

July 31, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Sarah Ann Weber, “Return no more” (2021), oil and colored pencil on panel, 72 x 96 inches

LOS ANGELES — I was recently on the East Coast for the first time in years, and I was stunned by the emerald landscape. Everywhere I looked, verdant trees towered, the likes of which simply do not exist where I live in Southern California. What Los Angeles has is the exoticism of desert plants, which defy imagination with their varied hues and surprising adaptations. Strong Blossoming Thing Forever, Sarah Ann Weber’s current exhibition at Anat Ebgi in Culver City, is a profusion of flora that evokes a coral reef on land, conjured in a color palette rich and tender, never blasting out its notes. The show includes works in paint and colored pencil, on either panel or paper. Female figures appear among the vegetation, featureless nudes whose empty forms are either blank or filled with leaves, vines, and flowers.

Weber’s floral landscape work emerged for the first time in 2017, at the now-closed Club Pro. At the time I was arrested by the energy in her packed, jungle-like overgrowths, more phantasmagoric than real. While you will not find any of Weber’s flowers in a field guide, she tells me they are inspired by frequent hikes around Los Angeles. Growing up in Chicago, she developed a love for the landscape by visiting the Fullersburg Woods with her family, where they would ride bicycles or hike in the summer and cross-country ski in the winter.

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Futurism Explained: Protest and Modernity in Art

July 23, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Speeding Train by Ivo Pannaggi, 1922, via Fondazione Carima-Museo Palazzo Ricci, Macerata

When hearing the word “futurism,” images of science fiction and utopian visions tend to come to mind. However, the term was not initially linked to spaceships, final frontiers, and surreal technologies. Instead, it was a celebration of the modern world and a dream of movement that never stops: a revolution in ideologies and perceptions.

Coined by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, the word “futurism” first appeared in the Italian Newspaper Gazzetta dell’Emilia on February 5th. A few weeks later, it was translated to French and published by the French newspaper Le Figaro. It was then that the idea took the world of culture by storm, reshaping first Italy and then spreading further to conquer new minds. Like various other art movements, Futurism took flight to break away from tradition and celebrate modernity. However, this movement was one of the first and the few that pushed nonconformism to its limits. With its unyielding militant nature, Futurist art and ideology were bound to become dictatorial; it sought to demolish the past and bring change, glorifying violent raptures.

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Frida Kahlo Is the Latest Artist to Get the Immersive Installation Treatment With a New Projected Light Show in Mexico City

July 23, 2021 (updated July 23, 2021) Published by artistvenu

Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.

There’s a new way to experience the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Art lovers making a pilgrimage to her hometown of Mexico City, where she lived at La Casa Azul with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, can now add a second stop to their itinerary: “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.”

That’s right, Kahlo, perhaps the world’s most famous woman artist, has gotten the “Immersive Van Gogh” treatment, with a 35-minute projected light show that animates 26 of the artist’s works in larger-than-life fashion. Because Kahlo specialized in self-portraits, the experience is something of an immersive autobiography, telling the story of her struggles with illness and disability, as well as her unconventional and often fraught romance with Rivera.

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How Joseph E. Yoakum, an Enigmatic Former Circus Hand and Untrained Artist, Found Drawing in His 70s—and the Hairy Who as Admirers

July 22, 2021 (updated July 22, 2021) Published by artistvenu

Joseph E. Yoakum, Waianae Mtn Range Entrance to Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Oahu of Hawaiian Islands (1968). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1962, Joseph E. Yoakum had a dream that told him to make drawings.

He was 71 then, a retired veteran and one-time circus hand living in Chicago. He had no experience making art. But for the next decade of his life—his last, it would turn out—drawing was what he did, churning out some 2,000 wondrous pieces in the process.

Most came in the form of dreamy landscapes, tethered equally to the natural world and the artist’s own fantastical one: scalloped mountains and pristine pools of water, forests that look like heads of romanesco, and winding roads that disappear into the horizon line. A sense of yearning pervades it all.

The old adage about the Velvet Underground—that only 10,000 people bought their first album, but that every one of them started a band—also applies to Yoakum. Not many people saw his drawings, but those who did came away as immediate and lifelong fans.

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A Flower Patch of Recycled Denim Grows from the Ceiling in Ian Berry’s ‘Secret Garden’

July 15, 2021 (updated July 16, 2021) Published by artistvenu

“Secret Garden,” New York Children’s Museum of the Arts. Photo by Will Ellis

Whimsical tendrils of vines, foliage, wisteria, and chrysanthemums sprout from artist Ian Berry’s wild, overgrown garden plots. Densely assembled and often suspended from the ceiling, his recurring “Secret Garden” is comprised of blooms and leafy plants created entirely from recycled denim, producing immersive spaces teeming with indigo botanicals in various washes and fades.

Since its debut at the New York Children’s Museum of the Arts, Berry’s site-specific installation has undergone a few iterations. “The first one was made with children in mind… hence the more magical secret garden angle,” he says, “just wanting to (ensure they think about) where the material comes from, see what they can make, and seek out outdoor places within a city.” It’s since traveled to London, Barcelona, The Netherlands, France, Kentucky, and the San Francisco Flower Mart, where it’s permanently installed as a trellis lining the space’s windows.

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Paulina Peavy, the Spiritualist Artist Who Channeled a UFO

July 15, 2021 (updated July 15, 2021) Published by artistvenu

Paulina Peavy, “Untitled” (circa 1930s to 1980s), oil paint on board, 16 x 16 inches (all images courtesy the Paulina Peavy Estate and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)

LOS ANGELES — In 1932 Paulina Peavy attended a séance at the home of spiritualist Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana, California. There, she channeled Lacamo, an extraterrestrial spirit, or UFO in her words, who revealed to her the secrets of the universe. The encounter was a defining moment for Peavy; then 31, she continued to channel Lacamo, whom she claimed as her artistic collaborator, until her death in 1999.

Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler at Beyond Baroque reintroduces Peavy to Southern California, where she lived from 1923 to ’43, first studying art at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now part of the California Institute of the Arts) and then teaching art and exhibiting her own work and that of others in her Peavy Art Gallery. The show at Beyond Baroque, curated by Laura Whitcomb, is the artist’s first on the West Coast in 75 years. Rare esoteric and hermetic literature presented in vitrines, and Peavy’s own writings, reflect her life and beliefs, which merged spiritualist and theosophical concepts and astroculture.

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