Holy guacamole fun times! This week Kathryn Born interviews Natalie van Straaten. Mark Staff Brandl talks about Jeff Hoke’s kickass book-website-museum Museum of Lost Wonder. Mike Benedetto gives a DOUBLE FEATURE REVIEW. Lastly there is a special bonus treat at the end of this week’s show, it is a surprise.

Natalie van Straaten has been a professional writer on arts subjects for more than 30 years and founded Chicago Gallery News in 1983. A curator, educator, administrator and organizer, she serves on various arts advisory boards and is a frequent juror in art competitions. She served as Executive Director of the Chicago Coalition for Arts in Education (1983-1986), and co-directed an art gallery for fourteen years.

Shamelessly and apologetically lifted from Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Every now and then, a book comes along that’s almost impossible to categorize, like Hoke’s beautifully illustrated gem, a strange marriage of alchemical lore and psychology, science and “wonder.” Hoke, an artist and a senior exhibition designer at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, writes that the eclectic museums and curiosity cabinets of the 1600s inspired him, and that he wants to return us to a time before “science became a belief system unto itself,” a time when artist-alchemist-scientists were able to search for inner truth via mystical experiences and experiments without being ridiculed. Guided by the Greek muses and lured by his lovely color illustrations, readers are beckoned into seven “exhibition halls,” named for the stages of alchemical transformation from base matter to divinely inspired knowledge. Each exhibit also includes a pull-out interactive paper model, such as a “Do-It-Yourself Model of the Universe” in chapter one, where Hoke playfully addresses various creation myths. The chapter on dream states, visions and hypnosis is particularly fascinating. This is a book to linger over; it gradually reveals itself as a sly philosophical meditation on human consciousness, bringing in concepts from Tibetan Buddhism and quantum physics.

Coming soon! Rodney Graham!!!
The Museum of Lost Wonder / Jeff Hoke
Interview with the artist at Written Voices by life enhancement expert Allan Hunkin
Video by Hoke for the publisher
Jan Kaeser
Leonard Bullock
UIUC School of Art
Field Museum of Natural History
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Raoul Deal
Michael Paha
Cameron Zebrun
Jeff Wrona
Staff ‘n’ Eddie
Wunderkammer
Museum of Alchemy
Plato
Aristotle
René Descartes
Abraham Maslow
Sir Issac Newton
James Burke Natalie van Straaten
The Art Dealers Association of Chicago (CADA)
Tom Blackman
Art Chicago
Art at the Mart
River North
West Loop
Pilsen/South
Mich. Ave./Riv. East/S.Loop
North/Bucktown/Wicker Park
Ed Paschke
Museum of Contemporary Art
Richard Gray
Zolla Lieberman
Paul Klein
Kavi Gupta Gallery
Rhona Hoffman
Bronzevile Arts District /Third Fridays Gallery Trolley Tour
Henry Hansen

Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_71_van_Straaten-Hoke.mp3

Christopher Hudgens