Opening 4/25: “War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”
April 16, 2013
CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum explores the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States with “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which opens April 25.
“It gives visibility to the increasingly mixed generation coming of age by highlighting artworks that map personal biography and the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity against U.S. and transnational histories,” said Laura Kina, exhibit curator. Kina is a Vincent de Paul Professor and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she also is an associate professor of art, media and design in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. April 25 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition runs through June 30.
“Through traditional media as well as video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption,” said Kina. She co-edited a book of the same title with Wei Ming Dariotis, an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-Lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford and Debra Yepa-Pappan.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a number of programs will be held at the museum to encourage a dialogue on the topics. Programs include:
● “The Woman, The Orphan, and the Tiger,” April 29, 6 to 8 p.m. Film screening and discussion with Danish filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen on international transracial Korean adoption.
● Mequitta Ahuja Artist Talk, May 15, 6 to 8 p.m. Ahuja, who is known for her large-scale figurative paintings and drawings, refers to her work and method as “automythography,” a constructive process of identity formation in which nature, culture and self-invention merge.
● Mixed race Asian American art and identity panel discussion, May 29, 6 to 8 p.m. Curator Laura Kina, author Camilla Fojas and artists Chris Naka and Debra Yepa-Pappan.
This is the DePaul Art Museum’s second year in its new home. The museum is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 773-325-7506 or visithttp://museums.depaul.edu.
DPAM celebrates the centennial of the 1913 Armory Show
March 14, 2013
“For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show + 100”
Opening Reception and Lecture: Friday, April 5, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m
CHICAGO — A century after The Armory Show made a sensational splash on the Chicago art scene, the DePaul Art Museum examines the historical moment with an exhibition that opens April 4. Titled “For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show + 100,” the exhibition reunites some of the prints, drawings and paintings from the exhibition that introduced a stunned America to avant-garde European art, said Louise Lincoln, director of the DePaul Art Museum and curator of the exhibition.
An opening reception will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. April 5 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition, which runs through June 16, is made possible in part by funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
“Post-Impressionism, Cubism and abstraction seem unremarkable now, but the intensity — and polarity — of the critical reception had ramifications in the Chicago art world for decades,” Lincoln said. “Although it was in Chicago for only 23 days, it drew 189,000 visitors — more than the attendance in New York or Boston, its final venue. But it was in the Windy City that the most intense reaction to the new art occurred.
Dubbed the Armory Show because it was first held in New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory, the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art was the first large exhibition of modern art in America. The exhibition went on to show at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Copley Society in Boston, where, due to lack of space, all work by American artists was removed.
“Cartoonists had a field day with abstract painting and art students protested against Henri Matisse; shops advertised ‘cubist’ dresses and restaurants offered ‘cubist’ food,” Lincoln said. “For those few winter days in 1913, when throngs crowded into the Art Institute, the challenging art they saw divided them into ‘For and Against.’”
Guest curator Mark Pohlad, associate professor of the history of art and architecture at DePaul, said the exhibition encourages a more nuanced and generous attitude by inviting visitors to respond to direct quotes about specific objects from visitors and critics of the 1913 show.
Images of the human body, both nude and clothed, were a flashpoint of critical and audience response to the Armory Show, and ranged from vague discomfort to joking to outrage. “For and Against” probes the shift in how the (usually female) body was represented, drawing on commentary in the popular press by artists and by local and national critics.
Works in the exhibition, which come from Midwest museums and private collections, will offer various approaches to the human form, starting with the academic tradition: life drawing and modeling. The core of the exhibition will be about 20 images concentrating on figural representation and including the more radical European artists as well as progressive American artists. Among the artists featured in the exhibition are Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
“The 2013 centenary offers the opportunity not only to draw attention to this remarkable episode in Chicago’s history, but also to examine issues about art that are challenging or offensive to some viewers,” Lincoln said.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a number of programs will be held at the museum to encourage a dialogue on the topics. Programs include:
● “The Armory Shows: Modernity as Pathos,” April 5, 6:30 p.m. Lecture by Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania and Vartan Gregorian Professor in the humanities.
● “It’s a Rube Town,” May 1, 6 to 8 p.m. Lecture by Mark Pohlad, associate professor of the history of art and architecture and guest curator of the exhibition.
This is the DePaul Art Museum’s second year in its new home. The museum is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 773-325-7506 or visit http://museums.depaul.edu.
“Climate of Uncertainty” exhibition explores human impact on environment, opens Jan. 10 at DePaul Art Museum
CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum will explore the human impact on the environment with “Climate of Uncertainty,” an interactive exhibition that opens Jan. 10 and runs through March 24.
The museum is free and open to the public every day. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Jan. 10 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton “L” stop.
“Climate of Uncertainty” features 12 artists engaged in long-term projects that address the human role in environmental degradation, said Laura Fatemi, assistant director of the DePaul Art Museum, who organized the exhibition. Seven photographers document issues ranging from the destructive effects of extractive industry to the effect of careless waste disposal on animal populations. Several artists use installations to provide audiences with a participatory and immersive experience around deforestation and the enormous consequences of large-scale damming. Other media included in the project include sculpture, printmaking, and mixed media.
Works in the exhibition reveal ways that individuals, industries and governments have exploited, abused or depleted natural resources and explore alternative approaches to environmental issues by challenging the viewer to imagine a more hopeful future.
“One of the greatest challenges that society will likely face in the coming decades and century is how to strategically plan for and adapt to the uncertain effects of climate change,” Fatemi said. “It’s unusual for an art museum to take on a subject that is so technical, but the premise of this exhibition is that artists, whose tools for communicating are visual, emotional, visceral and intuitive, can help build a public movement and engage audiences using a fresh vocabulary.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, a number of programs featuring leading scholars, environmental activists and artists will be held at the museum to encourage a dialogue on the topics. Programs include:
● Sustainability Conference, Jan. 18, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; curator’s tour, 5 p.m. A conference on sustainable business organized by the Driehaus College of Business’ Finance Department is designed to introduce the concept of sustainability to the value creation process of for-profit firms. Keynoters, panelists and presenters from industry, policy-making organizations, and think tanks will discuss the many avenues through which ideas may be developed for profitable projects that are mindful of the environment and social challenges of our time. The conference will include speakers from Northern Trust, Manulife Insurance, New America Foundation, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Chicago Metropolis 2020, Interface, Haworth, Boeing, Eli Lilly, Biohabitats, and E2.
● The Art and Science of Climate Change, Jan. 30, 6 to 8 p.m. A panel of speakers will discuss climate change through the lenses of several academic disciplines. Mark Potosnak, assistant professor, environmental science and studies at DePaul, will introduce the science of climate change. Barbara Willard, associate professor in the College of Communication, will focus on how the public perceives climate change and outline {propose, suggest] methods for more effective communication. The economic implications of climate change and potential policy responses will be covered by the third speaker, Christie Klimas, a lecturer in environmental science and studies at DePaul. Chicago photographer Terry Evans will discuss her project, A Greenland Glacier: The Scale of Climate Change.
● Technologically Enhanced Nature March 6th 6-8pm
How is our view of nature affected by a technologically imaged world? In an informal conversation Chicago artist Allison Grant will ground the question in multiple visual sources, while DePaul environmental scholar Randy Honold will approach the question through philosophical inquiry.
It is the DePaul Art Museum’s second year in its new $7.8 million home, which opened in September 2011. The museum is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 773-325-7506 or visit http://museums.depaul.edu.
Afterimage opened on September 14th to record crowds and has since garnered great praise, most notably, a Critic’s Pick from ArtForum, which can be read here and found online as well. Additional press links are below.
Rebecca Shore, 09, 2010, oil on canvas, 30 x 45”.
It is a testament to the generative richness of the Chicago Imagists, who coalesced around the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center in the 1960s, that a show about their influence on artists working today is so void of anxiety and full of exuberance. In a small separate gallery at the museum’s entrance, a concise sample of fourteen Imagist prints, drawings, and paintings by James Nutt,Christina Ramberg, and Ed Paschke, among others from the 1960s and ’70s, reminds viewers of the original movement’s loosely associated idiosyncrasies: figural forms, often with a combination of hieratic graphic precision and grotesque distortion, comic juxtaposition and cryptic text, recurrence of motifs and the suggestion of hidden or symbolic meaning, and strong colors not of the Pop art Day-Glo variety but out of comic books, Surrealist painting, and homespun craft.
The title “Afterimage” refers to the persistence of an image on the retina after an initial exposure, and it’s true that some specific Imagist precedents crack across the mind’s eye when one moves through the twenty-five recent works on display. For instance, David Leggett’s squirming black ink lines, which trace incongruities such as a chain of daisies and a floating brain in Summer of Dreams and Magic, 2010, recall James Falconer’s squirrely ink drawings (see Slep Portrait, 1966, on view in the entrance gallery). For others, the persistence of Imagism is not so retinal. In Rebecca Shore’s oil painting 09, 2010, it’s found in the potential of some connective symbolic logic behind the farrago of neat silhouettes that she lays across a teal ground—a wig, a pot, a leg, a lock. One paired relation promises to unlock a story or game, but the whole remains an insoluble spread of surface variation. Because Imagism is both underrecognized outside of Chicago and inherently difficult to define in its recourse to personal meaning and individual style, “Afterimage”’s influence shoots in both directions as a later generation of artists reads and rearticulates Imagism’s import. – Julia Langbein
Panel Discussion: Mixed Race Asian American Art and Identity
5/29/2013
May 29, 6-8 pm. This event is free and open to the public.
Mixed race Asian American art and identity panel discussion with curator Laura Kina, author Camilla Fojas and artists Chris Naka and Debra Yepa-Pappan
LAURA KINA is a Vincent DePaul Associate Professor of ARt, Media and Design and a member of the Global Asian Studies program at DePaul University. She is a studio artist and the coeditor and curator of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.
CAMILLA FOJAS is a Vincent DePaul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and a member of the Global Asian Studies program at DePaul University. She is the author of many books, including “Pop Imperialism: Island Frontiers of the U.S. Imaginary.”
DEBRA YEPA-PAPPAN n is a Jemez Pueblo and Korean artist based in Chicago. Her “digital pop” artwork portrays contemporary Native people and interogates American Indian stereotypes.
Born in 1983 the video artist CHRIS NAKA is a native of Chicago. His father is sansei (third-generation) and was born in the Manzanar Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment camp. His mother is a secular European American Jew. Naka earned his BFA in 2006 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Northwestern University in 2011.
Cosponsored by the Japanese American Service Committee, DePaul’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity President’s Diversity Series, and Latin American and Latino Studies.
