It is my sad duty to report the tragic death of one of our community members, local artist Carissa Hinz. She was stuck down after leaving Version Fest where she had been assisting in doing cleanup.

If anyone saw anything or knows anything please contact the authorities. The driver fled the scene and needs to answer for his actions. Our thoughts go out to Carissa’s family and friends.

If anyone is aware of where to send donations please e-mail me at rholland@ponderance.org

Until we get that info please go to Jackalope and leave a huge tip in her honor.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Authorities have released details about the driver of a car that struck and killed a 21-year-old Bridgeport woman and then drove away.

According to an alert issued by Chicago Police Department on Tuesday, the vehicle “a maroon Hyundai Sonata sedan” was driven by a Hispanic male believed to be in his 20s. The car was occupied by two other people.

Police said the car was speeding in the 3200 block of South Morgan Street when it struck Carissa Hinz, an aspiring artist who was helping clean up after Friday night’s kickoff party for Version Fest, the community-focused art and cultural festival she helped organize.

The impact from the crash sent Hinz flying into the rear windshield of a car parked about a 100 feet away, police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Hinz was a well-known artist and barista in the community. Friends at Jackalope Coffee and Tea have said they’ll donate all of their tips at the end of the week to Hinz’s family

You’re not likely to see a better display of the most important architecture and design of the 20th century anywhere else this summer, so the fact that Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America only focuses on what came out of post war MI is even more remarkable. Starting with Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen’s highly influential submissions for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings at MoMA in 1940, and ending with a recreation of a living space in Mies Van der Roe’s Lafayette Park in Detroit, there are few stones left unturned, yet the map and timeline in the North Gallery proves that  so much editing still had to be done. Focusing primarily on the design and architecture, as well as the automotive industry from 1940 – 1970, MI Modern has original and reproductions of some of the most iconic furniture of the period, Herman Miller textiles of Alexander Girard and Ruth Adler – Schnee, advertisements for Steelcase, Herman Miller and others, and newly created and existing models of iconic buildings throughout Michigan. Encompassing most of the state including the U.P., with a symposium (June 13-16) touring iconic buildings in Broomfield Hills, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan Modern is in many ways a summer blockbuster show, mimicking on a small scale the expansiveness of Documenta, but with everything homegrown. While considering all the Saarinen, Van der Roe, Kahn and Breuer contributions to the design and architectural legacy of Michigan, one sees how (again) much of America’s strength lies in immigration, but even more where unique timing, collaboration, forward thinking, talent and serendipity had a profound and lasting impact on the look and feel of modern America. It is our fortune that so many of these Architectural gems like Lafayette Park, the GM Tech Center, and St. Francis de Sales Church are here in Michigan. It is an exhibition that can keep rewarding the viewer all summer long, able to travel from one building to another at the best time of the year to do so. While they have always been sitting in plain site, MI Modern re emphasizes their importance and in doing so, presents them again to us as new.

 

Two complementary shows at Cranbrook Art Museum highlight the lasting influence of Cranbrook at this time in MI History. What to Paint and Why: Modern Painters at Cranbrook, 1936 – 1974, curated by Chad Alligood showcases paintings by alumni and faculty of Cranbrook Academy of Art, offering works that are both in line with and counter the prevailing movements of 20th century art. Likewise, A Driving force: Cranbrook and the Car, curated by Shoshana Resnikoff offers a rare look into Cranbrook’s influence in the auto industry, complete with a stunning and unique Rocket cycle car as well as designs by alum Suzanne Vanderbilt.

 

Michigan Modern: Design that Shaped America is organized by the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office in association with Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Monica Ponce de Leon and Gregory Saldaña. On View at Cranbrook Art Museum until October 13, 2013.

Visit Cranbrook Art Museum’s website for more info:

<<http://www.cranbrookart.edu/museum/>>

 

 

The utter absence of Romanian feminism in the Academy as well as in everyday life has been one of the most surprising takeaways from living in Bucharest for the past year as a Fulbrighter. It seems Patriarchy has won the day through deployment of pressures both brutally institutional and unwaveringly individual. On the street Romanian women associate being called a “Feminist” with admitting weakness and the need for help. With the immovable metaphysical authority of the Orthodox Church backing it, Romanian Patriarchy quietly and efficiently continues its careful management of acceptable language.

What’s the problem? The problem is one of language. The phrase “Trauma Studies” has surreptitiously replaced the word “Feminism” in the Romanian Academy. Gained in this exchange is a vague feeling of victimhood with a need for unending and rigorous archival work, memory studies, and polite acceptance of the cultural conditions at hand. Lost—with the loss of the word “Feminism”—are the activist heritages and more importantly the performative capacities of the word to project group unity in the face of individual oppression. Women and men together—and apart—must learn to negotiate the complexities of how identity thinking and action both erases the individual and is made necessary by historical social injustice.

American Feminism demands that society treat women as the equals of men under the law. The difficulty with positing such a legalistic position remains that law bleeds in and out of other parts of the social architecture.  The best trick Patriarchy ever pulled off was to make women believe they are equal to men since this makes women into gender-bound objects through the performative power of the word “equal”. To categorize women and men according to gender erases the individuality of both equally. Despite the paradox of losing one’s individuality to group identity in order to become freer, the social justice need for the work done by identity politics remains.

European Feminism demands that women look beyond gender expectations to become more themselves, more individual, and less beholden to the male gaze. Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” articulates this point bombastically enough: “Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are.” But of course any such interiority (whether at the end of a penis or vagina or anything in between) pulses stuck in the traffic jam between individual and society. These construction sites of gender make our society function … but at what cost and who pays for it? Can an individual take her own freedom or must a group give her that freedom?

The following call for papers nicely summarizes my experience in the Romanian capital:

“Over the last couple of years, new forces have gathered
to undermine women’s and feminist organizing in Europe
and Eurasia. The Orthodox Church has launched an
“anti-gender” campaign in Russia and Ukraine–with similar
campaigns in Serbia and by the Roman Catholic Church in
Croatia and Poland–misunderstanding gender and linking
feminism to anti-natalist and anti-nationalist projects.
Repression and violence, such as the harsh sentences for
Pussy Riot and violence at Gay Pride events, raise the
stakes. Implicit in austerity policies–cutting services that
more often help women while keeping low the taxes that
men predominantly pay–is a neomasculinism that once
again pushes gender equality off to until “later.””

http://gendertransformationeurope.wordpress.com/

 

Over the past several years Spudnik Press has become a staple for Chicago printmakers and printmaking education. The space and scope of the project continues to grow; the latest expansion occurred about 6 months ago when an adjacent space in the Hubbard Street Lofts building became available. Spudnik director Angee Leonard jumped on this as an opportunity to have a more dedicated exhibition space and also to broaden the focus of the Printshop. This new space, called the Annex, is a center for writing, bookmaking, and self publishing. It houses a growing small press library, as well as a xerox machine, guillotine cutter, selectric typewriter (which I am a big fan of), hot foil stamper, long arm staplers, as well as a supply of bone folders, awls, linen thread, and other book binding materials. Programming includes writing, book making, paper making, and self publishing classes, as well as one day workshops, such as the zine making community workshop taught by Bad At Sports’ own Caroline Picard this past week. I have also been lucky enough to be involved in teaching classes and workshops at the Annex since it opened last fall.

As more of a “clean” space than the printshop next door, the Annex also provides an expanded exhibition space for Spudnik. Curatorial duties rotate between Spudnik coordinators. The most recent show, Charlie Megna’s Lost Tribes of Renni, which opened last night, was organized by Luke Daly – a Spudnik member who has been a driving force in developing the Annex. Luke co-edits and runs the small press arrow as aarow. I also co-teach a class with him at the Annex, which will be running for the third time in the fall. Charlie Megna is the director of the Peanut Gallery and a founding member of the Peanut Collective. His show will be up through early August.

Over the week leading up Charlie’s opening, Luke and I exchanged emails about his involvement with the Annex and the new show, which is the first in a series that creates small-press publications to accompany exhibited works.

Bailey Romaine: Tell me a little bit about how you came to be involved with Spudnik and about your current role there.

Luke Daly: I’ve been involved with Spudnik in one way or another since pretty early on, when it was still running out of Angee’s apartment in Ukranian village. We started doing a reading series there which we then transplanted to the new space when Spudnik moved over to the Hubbard building. Around that time I took a screenprinting class and started printing there. Then last summer I approached Angee with the idea for what would become The Annex, which she and I developed together and worked on translating into reality. Now my title is Book and Writing Projects Coordinator. In this role I work with Angee on classes and programing, I recruit teachers, teach, design classes, and work to include Chicago’s literary community in what we’re doing and vice versa. Very recently a lot of my efforts have been directed towards programming for Printer’s Ball which we’re hosting at the end of July. I also curate our library of small press and artists books and curate three gallery shows per year, which like Charlie’s show will all coincide with the making and publishing of an artist’s book that somehow extends the work being shown in the gallery.

BR: It seems like things really came together in an amazing way with the Annex – it all happened within a really short time frame. There were classes being offered and a show up within a month if I remember correctly. The small press library is really exciting for me. It seems like what you are developing is pretty unique in Chicago, in terms of what is essentially a study collection in a small non-profit space for making.

Can you talk a little bit about this curatorial project you have undertaken – both in terms of the library and the exhibitions? Did you know before seeing Charlie’s work that you wanted to begin publishing books to accompany the gallery shows?

LD: Yeah, the library was an important part of thinking about what the Annex could be from the beginning. Mainly I was interested in having a physical home for small press, mostly very small-run and handmade literary books, since they are such an important part of the history of alternative or experimental writing in the US, and because they are so tactile and really need to be seen and held to be appreciated. Of course Chicago has places where similar things are available, like the Read/Write Library or Quimby’s, but the focus of the collection that I was interested in putting together at the start was slightly different in that it sought to foreground small, specifically literary publishing from around the US.

Since I’ve been putting together the collection, my interests have developed in an organic way, and I’m finding myself interested in the intersection that seems to be going on between comics, zine and literary cultures. It seems like those categories are learning from one another, and people are doing work that very interestingly exist at the intersection of those different conversations. I’m finding myself more and more drawn to work of this nature. And always work that looks beautiful but that is made simply, since in the end we are a space that’s built around making, and it’s great to be able to have this collection here to show students or to consult for ideas when getting started on a project.

As for the Book Arts Series, which is the series of exhibitions that I curate at the Annex, my idea to pair gallery shows with the publication of artists’ books started to come together while I was researching people who I thought would work well to show here. I knew that I was interested in work that was operating at the intersections of language work and visual work, but often the work that I was encountering that extended this as it’s main goal or focus never totally hit home for me, and I started to feel that placing work at a crossroads of visual and literary could very well be a slightly more involved and creative curatorial task than just seeking and finding artists whose work, as is, fit with my own conceptual goals of the Annex.

When I had the idea of doing a show of Charlie’s work, I think that these ideas clicked, and that his work helped me to articulate to myself what I was interested in doing curatorially. Charlie was really excited about creating physical artifacts, tools, symbols, alphabets, and languages for his Renni tribes, and I was really excited about the idea of creating real material things that have been retrieved from an imaginary, non-physical world.

It reminded me of one of my favorite writers Henri Michaux, who wrote factual travel writings of impossible imaginary places, or Borges, who wrote intensely detailed scholarly accounts of imaginary texts, places, histories, people, feuds, conversations, etc. I knew that a book would further the fact of having Charlie’s work existing in multiple planes, and it was exciting for me to locate his work in a place of literary imagination, and have that translation become the intersection that was being investigated or developed. I’m interested in doing books that extend the work that’s being shown somehow, or that translates it across, so that it exists in a different kind of space (physical space to literary/imaginary space perhaps), or in multiple spaces simultaneously. I like the way that the books can live on and grow and complement and play off of one another in a series after the shows are long past.