Ah yes, it’s that time again! Time for another panel discussion on art criticism in Chicago. Luckily for y’all, this one is filled with great folks who really know their stuff. AND: it’s been organized in celebration of The Essential New Art Examiner, a compendium edited by our friends Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith of the best writings from the venerable Chicago-based art journal. Born and Griffith will appear on tonight’s panel, along with BAS’ fabulous pal and dapper man-about-town Abraham Ritchie (Chicago editor of ArtSlant), Lori Waxman (Tribune), Jason Foumberg (New City), Steve Ruiz (The Visualist) and Ann Wiens, former New Art Examiner editor, all of whom represent different yet equally vibrant aspects of the Chicago critical scene. The whole shebang is moderated by critic and SAIC faculty member James Yood. So there you have it! Go go go! The panel takes place tonight, Tuesday, November 22nd at  6-8 pm in the Second Floor Ballroom of the MacLean Center (112 S. Michigan Avenue). The full, official-like press release info follows below.

The panel discussion “Art Criticism in Chicago: Past, Present, Future” will occur 6-8 pm on Tuesday, November 22 in the Second Floor Ballroom of the MacLean Center (112 S. Michigan Avenue). Organized in memory of distinguished art critics Kathryn Hixson and Polly Ullrich (both SAIC faculty and alumna), this wide-ranging investigation into the challenges and triumphs in art writing in Chicago also honors the recent publication of The Essential New Art Examiner, a compendium of essays originally printed in the most significant Chicago-based art publication of its era (1973-2002).  The panel will move forward from that to assess the current state of art criticism in Chicago, both print- and web-based, and analyze the rapidly changing milieu for arts conversation in Chicago.

The panelists are Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith, editors of the “The Essential New Art Examiner”, Jason Foumberg of Newcity, Abraham Ritchie from ArtSlant: Chicago, Steve Ruiz from visualist, Lori Waxman from the Chicago Tribune, Ann Wiens, former editor of the NAE, and James Yood, moderator of the panel and former editor of the NAE.  (Griffith, Waxman, and Yood are members of the SAIC faculty, and Foumberg, Griffith, Ritchie, Waxman and Wiens are SAIC graduates.) The event is free and open to the public, and is supported with the assistance of Lisa Wainwright, Dean of Faculty, Paul Coffey, SAIC Vice Provost, and Candida Alvarez, Dean of Graduate Studies.

For this week’s look back into the Bad at Sports archives, we’ve pulled a 2008 interview with Meg Cranston, conducted by Duncan MacKenzie and painter Pamela Fraser on the occasion of Cranston’s exhibition at He Said/She Said, Fraser and partner Randall Szott’s now-closed exhibition space in Oak Park, Illinois.

“There’s a work in the show that’s an ass drawn to look like it’s encased in a block of ice. The title is I froze my ass and then I moved to California. It’s a true story – when I was a kid growing up in New York, I froze my ass everyday in the winter. My parents were very thrifty people and they just wouldn’t turn up the heat. My brother and I developed what I called heat lust. And I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that for me as a child heat was like love, and maybe better.” – Meg Cranston interviewed by Bad at Sports.

Click here to listen to Episode 166 with Meg Cranston.

The latest in our “From the Archives” spotlight is dated February 11, 2007: Richard Holland, Duncan MacKenzie and Meg Onli talk to Rodney Graham on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Donald Young Gallery. And hey, coincidentally, Rodney Graham has a new show up at Donald Young right now, through November 23rd, 2011!

Click here to listen to Episode 76 featuring Rodney Graham.

Rodney Graham, on repeatedly recasting himself in his work:

“It was just easier to do that, and it gave me a certain limit, placing limits on what I would do. It was a way of maybe trying to distinguish my work from other Vancouver artists who are really masterful at that like Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas…I thought the performance thing was maybe more my thing. It was a way of doing something that was my own.” – Rodney Graham, interviewed by Bad at Sports.

The Bad at Sports podcast has been going strong for over six years and thus far has produced–wait a sec, are you f*%king kidding me?– 322 *weekly* podcast episodes??!  With a new podcast released every week?! Each featuring an interview with a different artist or maker hailing from parts all across the Western Hemisphere? Uh, that’s pretty extraordinary. Over the last six-plus years of existence, Bad at Sports has talked to hundreds of artists, from local upstarts to living legends. Because B@S is constantly putting out new material, it’s easy to forget that they’ve built up a massive audio archive of material that is virtually unrivaled (William Furlong and his amazing Audio Arts casette tape magazines, of course, is the grandaddy precursor to Bad at Sports’ project).  In honor of B@S’ sixth year of life on this planet, we’re going to start digging through the podcast archives on a weekly basis to highlight key episodes from the past. This, in addition to the new podcasts that the B@S team continues to create and upload for your listening pleasure each and every week.

So, please to enjoy the following selection from Bad at Sports archives, recorded in 2007 and featuring an interview with Jeff Wall that took place just prior to the opening of Wall’s retrospective exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Click here to listen to Bad at Sports Episode 96: Jeff Wall.

“I was … looking at the exhibition and I realized, what I feel about many of my exhibitions…that no matter how well installed they are, no matter how well lit and if the rooms are great, and all that…a lot of the time my pictures just don’t look very good together. No matter how well you hang them they often just don’t really go together. It’s hard to make what I would call a really successful show as an event or as a circumstance, because they’re very singular, each one: and each one has its own structure, its own space, its own colors, its own light, or whatever. And they don’t go in groups. At least, they only go in groups more or less. I don’t see it as a virtue or a negative thing either, it must just be how I see, or how I do things. I really see my pictures as singular. I don’t have any interest in making variations on a theme, or any of those kinds of things that tie pictures together. Each one does come from a real experience. I used to think about it [in terms of] genre, but I don’t think about it like that anymore….Genre means something known. When you think you know something, you create limitations.”  – Jeff Wall, interviewed by Duncan MacKenzie for Bad at Sports

Riding the wave of ridiculously good buzz the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago has been receiving from the local press concerning all the big changes there as of late, the MCA today announced that it has named Dieter Roelstraete as its new Manilow Senior Curator. Roelstraete is currently the Curator of MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst) in Antwerp, Belgium, and will join the MCA in February 2012. The MCA’s press release on the hiring follows:

Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, announced today that Dieter Roelstraete has been appointed the new Manilow Senior Curator at the MCA. Roelstraete is currently the Curator of MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst) in Antwerp, Belgium, where he has organized large-scale group exhibitions and monographic shows. He will assume his new responsibilities at the MCA in February 2012.

“Dieter is a wildly productive and extraordinarily smart curator who has addressed a wide range of art — geographically, generationally, materially — in his writings and exhibitions over the past several years, says Darling. “We felt his range of knowledge and broad curiosity would be perfect for the MCA in our attempt to cast as wide a net as possible in seeking out the most compelling art from around the world. Importantly, I first started hearing about him from artists who found in him a sympathetic and intelligent translator of their projects, and that kind of endorsement is very important to us. He brings with him an international network of colleagues and collaborators which will extend the MCA’s reach far beyond Chicago; but at the end of the day, he is also a really charming person who we are all very much looking forward to working with.”

Originally trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent, Belgian-born Roelstraete has worked at the MuHKA since 2003. His curatorial projects there include Emotion Pictures (2005); Intertidal, a survey show of contemporary art from Vancouver (2005); The Order of Things (2008); Auguste Orts: Correspondence (2010); Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner – A Syntax of Dependency (2011); A Rua: The Spirit of Rio de Janeiro (2011) and the collaborative projects Academy: Learning from Art (2006); The Projection Project (2007); and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2009). He is currently preparing a retrospective of Chantal Akerman, opening at MuHKA in February 2012.

In 2005, Roelstraete co-curated Honoré d’O: The Quest in the Belgian pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. He has also organized solo exhibitions of Roy Arden (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007), Steven Shearer (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2007), and Zin Taylor (Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, 2011), as well as small-scale group shows in galleries and institutions in Belgium and Germany.

Roelstraete is an editor of Afterall and a contributing editor to A Prior Magazine, and has published extensively on contemporary art and philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals including Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse Magazine. He is one of the founders of the journal FR David and a tutor at De Appel in Amsterdam. In 2010, his book Richard Long: A Line Made By Walking was published by Afterall Books/The MIT Press, and a volume of his poetry will be published by ROMA in May 2012. He lives in Berlin with his wife Monika Szewczyk.