Our latest episode of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ special podcast produced exclusively for the Art21 Blog has just posted — you can listen to it here. This month, we talk to artists Pamela Fraser and John Neff about Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations), the group exhibition they’ve curated for Gallery 400 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, which is on view through June 9, 2012. Spectral Landscape explores color “as both a formal and a social force,”  and arrays artworks around the gallery according to a loose color spectrum. We asked Fraser and Neff to tell us more about the concept behind this excursion into color, and as always, we bring you our picks for some of the most interesting events and exhibitions coming up this month in Chicago. So visit the Art21 blog to download the podcast and listen to the conversation. And thanks so much for tuning in!

All of us at Bad at Sports are deeply saddened to learn that Donald Young has died at the age of 69. Since its original launch in Chicago in 1983, the Donald Young Gallery has been among the premiere U.S. contemporary art galleries.  Prior to this, Young partnered with Rhona Hoffman in the Chicago gallery Young Hoffman (1976-1983); both Young and Hoffman subsequently struck out on their own to create two of the city’s most successful and long-running commercial art venues. In the early 1990s, Young and his family left Chicago for Seattle, where he opened Donald Young Gallery on Pike Street. They returned in 1999 because Young missed living in a large urban center. “When you live in a big urban city, at a certain point you think you want to move out, to go somewhere else,” Young told the Seattle Times in 1998. “Then you move, but after a point you realize that urban life is in your blood. You miss it. You miss the grittiness, the human contact, the abrasives of the big city. You miss the more outspokenness of the big city.”

Donald Young Gallery is one of a select few Chicago contemporary art galleries that exhibits and represents artists of international renown. The gallery has exhibited the work of Tony Cragg, Anne Chu, Dan Flavin, Rodney Graham, Bruce Nauman, Rosemarie Trockel, Josiah McElheny and many, many others. Most recently, Young himself curated a critically-lauded series of exhibitions at the gallery titled “In the Spirit of Walser” that is inspired by the short stories and “microscripts” of Robert Walser. In his curatorial statement, Young notes his fascination with Walser’s microscripts, which he had first seen in a 2008 exhibition in Berlin, and his interest in exploring the connections between Walser’s writings and contemporary artists like Fischli & Weiss, Tacita Dean, and Thomas Schütte, rather than produce an exhibition devoted to Walser himself. “Hundreds of artists have made work in homage to Walser, many of a highly personal and sometimes romantic and sentimental nature,” Young explained. “This is not an area that interests me personally and I am confident that the artists who have agreed to work on this project will produce work that is as original as its inspiration.”

Our thoughts and deepest condolences go out to Mr. Young’s family, as well as to his longtime gallery staff. Donald Young has made an indelible mark on Chicago’s cultural landscape, and his presence here will be sorely missed.

 

UPDATE :

The trib did a great job with their obituary for Donald. Check it out here.

It is time once again for another edition of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ Chicago-focused podcast produced for the Art21 Blog! In this month’s edition, we switch up formats and focus on a single topic: The Essential New Art Examiner (Northern Illinois University Press), edited by Kathryn Born, Janet Koplos and Terri Griffith, an anthology of writings from Chicago’s only major art periodical. Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and I sit down with Terri Griffith to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this anthology and learn why the NAE still inspires impassioned discussion today, a decade after it folded. And as always, we have our monthly picks for events and exhibitions taking place in the Chicagoland area and beyond. Click on over to the Art21 Blog to listen to the podcast and see our picks, and as always, thank you so much for listening!

Our latest podcast produced for the Art21 Blog just went live — check it out! This month, Duncan, Dan Gunn and I review the group exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art on view at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and we also talk about the pleasures and perils of making art in a city that is not New York. Plus, our monthly picks of the art stuff we’re most looking forward to in the coming weeks and months. Click here to be taken to Fielding Practice Podcast #13: “Feast” (or Famine?) on the Art21 Blog. Thanks to everyone for listening!

The latest episode of “Fielding Practice,” the Chicago-centric podcast/gabfest featuring Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and me has just been posted on the Art21 Blog as part of Bad at Sports’ ongoing Centerfield column.  This week, regular panelists Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and I discuss the demise of Next/Art Chicago–which up until last week had been the US’ longest-running art fair –and the subsequent rise of Expo, a new Chicago-based art fair slated to debut on Navy Pier in September 2012. We also review current exhibitions by Laura Letinsky at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, whose show Negative Joy is on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, plus we offer some “best bet” picks for the coming month in Chicago. As an added bonus, this week we keep the conversation blissfully short, at a running time of approximately 38 minutes — as always, thank you so much for tuning in!

Click here for Fielding Practice Episode 12 on the Art21 blog.