On this month’s episode of Fielding Practice, Bad at Sports’ co-founder Richard Holland joins Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn and Ime for our regular roundtable discussion about art, culture, and related happenings in Chicago. Duncan provides a brief report on this year’s  Open Engagement, an annual conference addressing current issues in art and social practice; and [...]

We’re back with our second edition of “Fielding Practice,” a podcast produced exclusively for Art21′s listeners and readers. On today’s episode, Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn, and I are joined by art critic, blogger, and ArtSlant’s Chicago editor Abraham Ritchie to talk about the rise of CSAs (Community Supported Art), which are art subscription programs that [...]

Rachel Mason’s work is not easy to neatly summarize. I’ve been following her projects for several years now, and I still have difficulty explaining what exactly it is that she does. Rachel’s art is fluid — it’s always easing in and out of different forms. She is a songwriter and performer; she’s an actress, of [...]

All of us here at Bad at Sports have loved working on our twice-monthly column for this blog, Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports. It gives us a chance to “slow-blog” a bit, to dig deeper into areas and issues pertaining to Chicago and Midwest-area art that daily blogging doesn’t always [...]

Dan Devening is an artist, educator (he’s on the faculty of the Paintings and Drawings Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and the creative force behind one of my favorite Chicago galleries, devening projects + editions.  At the end of this month, devening projects will open a new exhibition titled Multiplemix [...]

Dan Devening is an artist, educator (he’s on the faculty of the Paintings and Drawings Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and the creative force behind one of my favorite Chicago galleries, devening projects + editions.  At the end of this month, devening projects will open a new exhibition titled Multiplemix [...]

Meg Onli and Claudine Ise’s list of the ten best–or at least most interesting–events in Chicago art in 2010. 1. Best city-wide, sustained, multi-platform discussion of a single topic in contemporary art: Studio Chicago, a yearlong collaborative project focusing on the artist’s studio. Taking the form of exhibitions, talks, publications, tours, and research, Studio Chicago [...]

Lately I have been thinking a lot about sustainability and sustenance. Not the environmental kind of sustainability–the personal and emotional kind.  Chicago’s art community is rich in relationships, but like so many other ‘art worlds’ out there, it can be a bit less bountiful when it comes to monetary compensation, feedback, and consistent forms of [...]

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, [...]

What do artists know? A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon at the Chicago home of Frances Whitehead talking about the philosophical and pragmatic underpinnings of this question. To be sure, the notion that artists have a specialized knowledge ��a quantifiable skill set of processes, methodologies, and approaches that they carry with them into [...]