Our latest post is up over at art:21 blog. This week, we look at a few of the gallery exhibitions that have opened in Chicago over the past month. A brief teaser below:

Traditionally, fall is the time when galleries launch their new slate of exhibitions after a relatively slow-paced couple of summer months. Galleries tend to highlight some of the most prominent artists on their roster around this time, but it’s also common to use the Fall slot to introduce promising new up-and-comers. In Chicago, at least, all the hoopla around the fall openings (many of which took place on a single night several weeks ago) can feel a lot like a high school pep rally: the anticipatory fall preview lists and gallery guides, the minutely detailed gallery crawl maps and the inevitable “best of” Tweets that follow are ways of rousing ourselves from the complacencies of summer in order to get psyched for the upcoming art season.

All hype notwithstanding, fall invariably works its magic on me. I struggle with lazy gallery-going during the summer (and, let’s be honest here, sometimes during springtime too) yet feel a sense of urgency about seeing everything once September rolls around. I’m pleased to report that my efforts have been richly rewarded this season. There are so many interesting shows, and quite a few really excellent ones, taking place in Chicago right now there simply isn’t space to do justice to all of them here. Let’s start with exhibitions by two artists who were recently interviewed on Bad at Sports‘s podcast. Kehinde Wiley, on view through October 23 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, presented the latest iteration of his ongoing project World Stage: a series of portraits of young men of color from various cities around the world.  Here, we find Wiley focusing on anonymous men from New Delhi, Mumbai and Sri Lanka, as opposed to the well-known rappers and athletes that had occasionally peopled his portraits in the past. (Read the post in its entirety here).

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This week on the Amanda Browder show, Amanda and her trusty side kick Tom visit Wendy White’s Brooklyn studio. The discuss Wendy’s paintings as she finishes up a bunch for her current exhibition at Andrew Rafacz gallery in Chicago. Amanda finally finds a painter that she likes in Wendy and Tom learns that Amanda is not a sculptor (as he had believed), but she in fact works in a new genre (to Tom) called “Fibers”.

Wendy White is a New York painter who has shown all over the world, including recent shows in New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and even Omaha! Her work has been discussed and reviewed extensively by the art intelligencia in such publications as ArtForum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post and the Gay City News.