Catalog accompanying retrospective exhibition of Chicago-based social practice artist Jim Duignan.\nStockyard Institute: 25 Years of Art and Radical Pedagogy presents the first comprehensive survey of the pioneering socially engaged practice of Chicago-based artist Jim Duignan and his ongoing Stockyard Institute project. Beginning in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1995, Duignan founded a shape-shifting arts education platform that calls for the active participation of local youth and community members to address the social and civic problems faced by Chicago’s most vulnerable and underserved populations.\nProduced to accompany the retrospective exhibition of Stockyard Institute at DePaul Art Museum in 2021, this fully illustrated catalog provides important documentation and historical context for one of the most significant social practice projects in the world of contemporary art. With an introduction by curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, this publication includes contributions by Jennifer Gray, Rachel L.S. Harper, Jorge Lucero, Allison Peters Quinn, David Maruzzella, and Nato Thompson.

Stockyard Institute: 25 Years of Art and Radical Pedagogy

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

DePaul Art Museum

For over a century the Chicago art community has struggled to define itself in relation to other urban art centers. While prominent American artists past and present have had strong connections to Chicago, many left to make their reputations elsewhere. This book and the exhibition on which it is based reframe Chicago as an artistic center in its own right, with a perspective and community as distinctive as its geography, economy, and politics.Exploring issues of reputation and canon formation past and present, four scholarly essays by Robert Cozzolino, Wendy Greenhouse, Kirsten Jensen and Lynne Warren probe moments of important historical shifts in the city’s artistic identity. The exhibition itself was shaped by asking forty one members of the Chicago arts community—critics, collectors, journalists, and museum specialists—to name a Chicago artist who is famous, ought to be famous, or is no longer famous, and to contribute a brief commentary on the artist and his or her work. Their selections—from the celebrated to the obscure—and multiplicity of viewpoints provide a nuanced view of the city’s artistic heritage and underscore the range of ways in which art is produced, perceived, and understood. A lushly illustrated book, Re: Chicago features a diverse group of artists including: George Healy, a nineteenth-century painter; Margaret Ianelli, a graphic artist; the famously reclusive artist and writer Henry Darger; and fashion designer Nick Cave.

Re: Chicago

1968: Art and Politics in Chicago

History

Americas

The German-born, Chicago-based Latvian artist Peter Karklins creates small, pencil-and-paper drawings that capture the processes and energies just below the surface of all human life. The complexity of his organic forms is matched by the artist’s meticulous recording of the times and circumstances of the creation of each image on its reverse, providing viewers with added insight into these rich images. In this visually compelling collection, brief essays by an eclectic and distinguished group of scholars deploy a wide range of theoretical approaches—phenomenological, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, iconographical, historical, and musicological—to interpret Karklins’s unusual images and artistic practices.Distinctive in its subject matter and execution, this volume shows Karklins’s work to be a fertile topic for discussion and a vibrant example of intuitive art. The essays in this book also tackle larger questions of philosophy, aesthetic theory, and art history, while offering a fully realized portrait of Karklins as an artist.

The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins

Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, Paul D'Amato's photographs made on Chicago's West Side provide a nuanced perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the U.S. Equally committed to his craft and to immersing himself in the community, D'Amato's collaborative approach to portraiture aspires to narrow the divide between his and his sitters' subjective experiences in order to create photographs that are at once genuine and aesthetically engaging. We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato brings together ten years of work and offers insight into the making of the photographs. By pairing variants of a portrait from a single sitting, D'Amato seeks to complicate the images' meaning by defying the authority of a single photograph as a comprehensive statement. Neither feel-good narratives nor stories of despair, D'Amato's photographs convey the complexities of representation and the ambiguities of life in a socially and economically marginalized community. Published by the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago.Includes essays by Gregory J. Harris (Assistant Curator, DePaul Art Museum) and Pastor Cleophus J. Lee (Original Providence Baptist Church, Chicago).  Hardcover, 10 x 8 in., 102-pages, 47 plates, 3 gatefolds.We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato has been funded by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato

Paul D'Amato

Cleophus J. Lee

Gregory J. Harris

Photography & Video

The Works Progress Administration gave federal financial support to a wide range of artistic projects during the Depression, from fiction to fine art. Of all these forms, however, the printmaking supported by the WPA is perhaps the one of most enduring interest: the design of the program itself, the political climate of the time, and the very nature of printmaking came together to produce a distinctive approach to style and subject matter, impressive technical innovations, and a surprising degree of social fluidity among artists around issues of race and gender. Ink, Paper, Politics is a beautifully produced catalog that accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum in celebration of the generous gift to the museum of one hundred WPA-era prints from the collection of Belverd and Marian Needles. In addition to full-color reproductions of the prints in the exhibition, the book also features essays by leading scholars addressing various aspects of American printmaking in the 1930s, as well as a brief essay by the collector. The result is a wonderful reminder of the stunning artwork that was produced in our name at one of our nation’s darkest times.

Ink, Paper, Politics: WPA-Era Printmaking from the Needles Collection

Eco and environmental art can highlight the primal importance of natural resources for human life and the need to be responsible environmental stewards. This catalog for a recent exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum explores one particularly undervalued resource: soil. Bringing together the work of fifteen artists, including that of photographers Sally Mann and Jane Fulton Alt, interdisciplinary artist Claire Pentecost, and Baroque painter Adriaen van Utrecht, Rooted in Soil addresses critical issues of soil degradation and combines scientific approaches with fresh philosophical perspectives. Though we rarely recognize it, soil is an integral part of the natural cycles of life and death. The essays here include scholarly meditations on the importance of decay for soil, which allows for rebirth and regeneration. The works in the Rooted in Soil exhibition collectively highlight the fundamental interconnectedness that we have with the natural world and inspire viewers to become better stewards of the soil and the land.

Rooted In Soil

Heneghan, Liam

Fatemi, Laura

Fatemi, Farrah

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding the photographic medium. Working with the Liminal Camera, a massive, portable camera obscura fashioned from a shipping container, the Optics Division uses experimental technology in an ongoing effort to map and depict the American landscape. From the arid West to New York’s waterways, the camera has captured dramatic scenes of regions in transition. As part of this project, The Liminal Camera presents newly commissioned photographs made in and around Chicago. Though enormous in size, the camera, transported on a semi-trailer truck, was unobtrusive from an outsider’s perspective, allowing the artists to work without drawing attention. Photographs could be developed from within the shipping container, blending the image’s subject with the process of photography itself. The resulting large-scale prints not only highlight the evolving history of photographic imaging, but also locate the city within a complex global network of transportation systems, industry, and commerce.

Liminal Infrastructure: The Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio

Weschler, Lawrence

Bon, Lauren

Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio

Idol Structures accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum of recent photographs and sculptures by Chicago-based artist Matt Siber, whose work explores the systems of corporate and mass-media communication that permeate the urban landscape. Instead of focusing on the information itself, Siber emphasizes the physical infrastructure of these systems. Photographs of the narrow edges of signs, sculptures of billboard ads hanging so loosely that their text is obscured in the folds, and other unique treatments of promotional materials distort and subvert the intended messages. The artist’s deconstruction of such commercial efforts reveals an element of communication meant to remain invisible and subservient to image, text, and graphics. By highlighting the everyday objects used to persuade and influence, Siber’s art undermines these communication systems’ ability to do precisely what they were intended to do.

Matt Siber: Idol Structures

Raskin, David

Siber, Matt

Individual Artists

Dianna Frid’s sculptures, installations, artist’s books, and mixed media work explore the intersection of text and textile, matter and subject matter. Richard Rezac has created thought-provoking abstract object-sculptures since the 1980s. This book, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, brings together works by both of these Chicago-based artists. In doing so, Dianna Frid + Richard Rezac: Split Complementary shines a light on their shared sensibilities—a rigorous yet poetic approach that revels in the nuances of color, surface, and material. Frid’s and Rezac’s works appear here accompanied by rare books from DePaul University’s John T. Richardson Library and a variety of objects from the DePaul Art Museum’s permanent collection. The juxtaposition of objects made by artists, craftspeople, and bookbinders generates affinities that broaden how we see and understand all of the work assembled in these pages. Complementing each other formally, these pieces offer opportunities to find familiar patterns in unfamiliar forms and surprising connections between dissimilar objects.

Dianna Frid + Richard Rezac: Split Complementary

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Books by DePaul Art Museum