A graphic, editorial overview of art, artists, and visual art events, found in and around Chicago over the course of the preceding month. All artwork copyright original artists; all photography copyright Paul Germanos.

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On Friday, May 3, 2013, within a 15,000-square-foot tent erected upon Chase Promenade in Millennium Park, The Fashion Design Department presented The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 79th annual fashion show.

And what did it have to do with visual art?

Well, more recently, on June 22, 2013, Cheryl Pope, longtime studio manager for SAIC Fashion’s Nick Cave, enjoyed the public opening of her first solo exhibition, “Just Yell,” at Chicago gallery moniquemeloche. Pope, like Cave, is employed by SAIC’s Fashion Design Department. Meloche served on SAIC’s 2013 Fashion Committee.

A profile of Monique Meloche’s parallel interests in fashion and art was published by Andrea Morris one month ago; Chicago-ish artists Conrad Bakker and Rashid Johnson figured prominently in Morris’ piece. And SAIC Board of Governors member Dr. Daniel S. Berger has been a collector and supporter of Johnson, among other artists, showing with Meloche.

In short: Chicago’s “art world” is in no way distinct from fashion–especially as it’s located within SAIC–but rather it’s intimately connected to it.

What follows is a hint of this year’s production, as experienced on and around the runway at SAIC Fashion 2013. Special thanks to SAIC and Carol Fox and Associates for facilitating Bad at Sports’ access. If you, gentle reader, are able to assist with the identification of any designer or model depicted but not yet named, contact: paulgermanos(at)msn.com

Above: Designer Roy Lee’s garment on the runway.

Above: Cheryl Pope, SAIC Fashion Faculty, at the 2013 show.

Above: Model Marissa Banks/Factor on the runway.

Above: Designer Tosha Sherman’s collection on the runway, model Valerie foreground.

Above: Designer Tosha Sherman at left; model Valerie at right.

Above: SAIC Fashion 2013 pavillion exterior, Chase Promenade North, Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Above: Designer Caroline Hougen’s retro collection, seen front and back, on the runway.

Above: Conrad Hamather, SAIC Fashion Faculty, Graduate Coordinator, producer of the 2013 show, at work.

Above: Model Marissa Banks/Factor on the runway.

Above: Designer Elaine Hoang’s collection on the runway.

Above: SAIC Fashion 2013 volunteer, between shows.

Above: Designer Francisco Gonzalez’ garment on the runway.

SAIC Fashion 2013

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Fashion Design Department

Millennium Park
Chase Promenade North
201 E. Randolph St.
Chicago, IL

http://saicfashion.org/

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On July 29, a fire destroyed one of the country’s largest private collections of African and African-American art–more than 300 sculptures, paintings, photographs and works in other media by Kerry James Marshall, Nick Cave, Jacob Lawrence, Romaire Bearden, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Yinka Shonibare and others.  Prominent activist and art collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz was out of town when a fire consumed her Washington, D.C. home and burned it to the ground.

Over the weekend the New York Times ran a story on the fire that delves into the personal and cultural ramifications of this significant loss.  As far as I could tell, the Times ran no pictures of the art or home that was destroyed, only “after” shots of the ruins. But when it comes to art and art collections, one needs to see what was destroyed in the first place in order to fully appreciate the significance of the loss.  Oprah.com has an extensive slideshow of Ms. Cafritz’s light-filled home, every corner bursting with one beautiful artwork after another (the slideshow is part of a feature on Cafritz that ran prior to the fire).

Courtesy of Oprah, below are two images of Ms. Cafritz’s home: one showing a Soundsuit by Nick Cave (hanging above the stairwell) and another of Kerry James Marshall’s sculpture Power to the People installed in the entry hall. A truly terrible loss.

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Artist, performer, and director of the School of the Art Institute’s graduate fashion program Nick Cave had a big profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. Cave’s Soundsuits–wearable mixed-media sculptures that incorporate every material imaginable to make sounds unique to each garment–are on view in a large-scale exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from March 28th through July 5th; the show will travel to UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2010.

In the Times profile, Cave recalls what he was thinking when he made his first Soundsuit out of fallen twigs gathered from Chicago’s Grant Park.

“It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney King beating,” he said. “I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man — as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.”

One day, sitting on a bench in Grant Park in Chicago, he saw twigs on the ground in a new light: they looked forsaken too. He gathered them by the armful and cut them into three-inch sticks. He drilled holes through the sticks, so he could wire them to an undergarment of his own creation, completely covering the fabric.

As soon as the twig sculpture was finished, he said, he realized that he could wear it as a second skin: “I put it on and jumped around and was just amazed. It made this fabulous rustling sound. And because it was so heavy, I had to stand very erect, and that alone brought the idea of dance back into my head.”

Cave, you’ll remember, had a show at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2006. I really wish I’d been living in this city at the time so I could have seen it–Cave’s stuff is blowing my mind, and I need to know more about it, look at it up close and in person, watch the fur fly, so to speak.

My own lack of familiarity  with Cave’s work makes me wonder, though: Why is Cave’s show traveling to the Fowler Museum, which is a museum of cultural history, and not an art museum that has an equally strong ability to support and exhibit interdisciplinary art of this nature, like, say, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) or even UCLA’s “other” arts institution, the white-hot Hammer Museum*? From the Fowler’s online mission statement:

The Fowler Museum explores art and material culture primarily from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, past and present. The Fowler seeks to enhance understanding and appreciation of the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the world through highly contextualized interpretive exhibitions, publications, and public programming, informed by interdisciplinary approaches and the perspectives of the cultures represented.

Don’t get me wrong: the Fowler is a fantastic institution and will do a superb job with this show. My quibble is with what seems a questionable location of Cave’s work in terms of “material culture” when it really is better understood in terms of contemporary artistic practice–which is, you know, highly interdisciplinary itself nowadays, and which is why institutions like Yerba Buena’s are an ideal context for it.

The NYT piece notes that in his catalogue essay for the Yerba Buena show, Dan Cameron “cites the ‘social sculpture’ of the artist Joseph Beuys, the legacy of the drag queen Leigh Bowery in the London underground performance scene and the ornate costumes of African-American Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans” as associative touchstones for Cage’s fashion/sculpture/performance mash-up. So why emphasize only the last part of that description?

Cave shows his Soundsuits at Jack Shainman alongside Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Michael Snow, Odil Donald Odita, Bob Knox, Tim Bavington–a diverse stable of artists involved in a wide range of practices, some interdisciplinary in nature, some less so. Check out Cage’s bio: He’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and a bunch of other smaller contemporary art venues. That the Los Angeles venue of his biggest exhibition to date will be a cultural history museum rather than a contemporary art center seems a little out of context given where Cage has shown previously.

I’ve sat in the conference rooms where the decisions to greenlight exhibitions are made–the choices are complicated and involve a mutitude of factors, and believe me, I know that outside observers (like myself) often have an overly simplistic view of how it all goes down. Maybe it’s as simple as the show wasn’t offered to anyone but the Fowler. But I’ve also witnessed firsthand how certain exhibition proposals get tossed aside with hardly a second glance because it belongs “somewhere else,” often that conveniently located cultural history museum that’s right down the street, practically next door, maybe we can collaborate with them on something or maybe not…whatever, “it’s not for us.”

This is not about the relative value of cultural history museums. It’s about context, the meaning of “culture,” and museological responsibility. Is the Fowler’s role, and by extension the role of other cultural history museums, to pick up the slack and plug up the holes left by the fine arts institutions in their city? I haven’t lived in L.A. for awhile now, so I can’t do more than broach the question. But the institutional journey that Nick Cave’s Soundsuits have taken and will take in the future would seem to provide a provocative case study in what qualifies as “contemporary art,” what’s deemed “material culture,” and why that distinction even matters.

*(Is this the part where I’m supposed to do the “due diligence/ full disclosure” thing and report that I was once an assistant curator at the Hammer? Well, then, consider it done.)

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photo via Jack Shainman Gallery

Last week I posted a link to Art 21’s blog interview with Jenny Holzer. This week they have a brief interview with Chicago based artist Nick Cave. If you are not reading Art 21’s blog I would highly recommend it. Below is an excerpt from A21 describing Cave’s Soundsuits.

” Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are fabulous creations made of thrift store finds, twigs, plastic bags, discarded thcotchkes, and just about anything else that strikes his fancy. Children loved seeing his work and guessing the materials they were made from, and seeing a video presentation of people inhabiting them. They enjoyed learning about his process, too. Often, Cave’s Soundsuits are assembled by a multigenerational, multicultural group of volunteers in his Chicago neighborhood.”

Check out Nick Cave’s interview here.

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