Sub-rural #15, Marcia Goldenstein

Sub-rural #15, Marcia Goldenstein

Craft is wide open and bringing to bear new outcomes for vernacular traditions and their relationship to current art and popular culture. Some practices have leapfrogged into the middle of contemporaneity. Embroidery, for one, has livened up painting and mixed media...
Sub-rural #14, Interview with William Conger

Sub-rural #14, Interview with William Conger

Besides being one of Chicago’s most noteworthy and prodigious painters, William Conger is a repository of the city’s history, and a probing aesthetician. His knowledge and implementation of the historic complexity of abstract painting, the particular twists and turns...
Sub-rural #13, Donna Tadelman

Sub-rural #13, Donna Tadelman

  In the early 80’s Donna Tadelman was an emerging representational painter and a friend and enthusiast of the elder Chicago Imagists. While her hushed-toned still lifes were nothing like the tongue-in-cheek psychopathology of the above, they were favored by...
Sub-rural #12, Geographic Mega-parcels

Sub-rural #12, Geographic Mega-parcels

Contemporary art exists under duress in rural America. The artworld still traffics in an obsolete nature vs. culture dichotomy, not through individual works that explore the hybridity of art language or identity, but in nature as synonymous with rural, (what...
Sub-rural #12, Scott Espeseth

Sub-rural #12, Scott Espeseth

  Scott Espeseth’s sedate composition, “Aluminum Storm” embodies the artist’s punning sound-images, ashen palette, and generally understated rendering of his immediate environment. “Storm” depicts the stark metal siding of a neighbor’s unassuming frame house and...