Given that the vast majority of the world’s lands have by now been modified by humans, urban gardens might be the best we can hope for.
Lori Waxman
Lori Waxman has been the Chicago Tribune’s primary art critic since 2009. She teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and performs occasionally as the “60 wrd/min art critic,” including at dOCUMENTA (13). She is the recipient of a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a 2018 Rabkin Prize. Her book, Keep Walking Intently (Sternberg Press), offers a history of walking as an art form.
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Theaster Gates’s House Museum Gone Wild
When Clouds Roll Away is an immersive viewing experience dedicated to the Johnson Publishing Company that prioritizes imaginative reuse over context.
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Chicago’s History of Radical Art Pedagogy
Two concurrent shows focused on the radical social and political possibilities of progressive art education in Chicago ask: Who is art really for?
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A Cry of Rage by Ukrainian Women Artists
In Women at War, art is a counterattack, a means by which a victimized populace fights back.
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Riva Lehrer’s Portraits Bring Out the Beauty in Difference
The artist has long been fighting for people with disabilities or marginalized identities, with sincerity, courage, and fierce love for the monsters in us all.
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Robert Earl Paige’s Colorful Textile Worlds
The 87-year-old artist is having one of those rare the-art-world-is-paying-attention moments, and it feels joyful and deserved.
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It’s Time for Chryssa’s Neon Art to Shine
Chryssa, it turns out, did everything that the famous Pop and New Media artists did, simultaneously or, in some instances, first.
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The Fetishistically Fantastic Art of Christina Ramberg
Ramberg was one of the lesser-known — but, to my mind, most exciting — artists often grouped together as the Chicago Imagists.
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A Rock and a Fry Pan Walked Into a Gallery
In addition to being some combination of formally delectable, politically astute, and historically poignant, five solo shows currently in Chicago are hilarious.
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Selva Aparicio’s Memorials to Loss and Renewal
Aparicio treats unwanted things with extreme sensitivity, personally gathering and storing them over many years, renewing them with remarkable vision.
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Two Chicago Artists Free Themselves From the Demands of Function
Artists Maryam Taghavi and Travis Morehead push their subjects to the utmost edge of transformation, with humor and grace.
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Deb Sokolow’s Wackadoodle World of Design
Sokolow’s overarching concern in her current exhibition, Visualizing is with the coercive potential of built environments.