Note from Chicago: Heartland and Everybody

I got back last night from a few days in Chicago around the opening of the Smart Museum's exhibition Heartland. The Compass Group, a collective of 11 people of which my baby daddy and I are a part, had a new project in the show, and I represented the group on a panel at Thursday's opening. Now no longer a fourth trimester blob of sleep, Baby Genesee made it hard to get to everything I had hoped to see, and I had to skip Michael Rakowitz's talk at the Accidental Publics symposium at Northwestern on Friday. However, I did manage to make it to Every Body! at I space. Here's a quick and dirty review.

Heartland is a big project that unfolded over several years. The curators (Charles Esche, Stephanie Smith and Kristen Niemann) conducted a series of research road trips in an area shaped literally as a heart, centered on the Mississippi and extending from New Orleans to Minneapolis, the Delta to to Detroit. The trips served three functions: first, an attempt to reconceptualize a word that typically refers only to a handful of Midwestern states and their amorphous traditional values; second, an inquiry into cultural production as a regional expression; and third, part a new method of finding emerging artists that relied on local networks and word of mouth, rather than the gallery system. Unfortunately, the Smart Museum's temporary exhibition galleries are so small that this interesting curatorial premise was only apparent from the wall text and a small display of binders and photos from the trips. The show, which has a lot of really interesting work, feels a little like a very compressed survey, with radically different ways of working put in exciting, if somewhat disorienting, proximity. Only about half of the work was really about place or the region, which disappointed me as one of the exhibiting artists whose work deals with those themes and who might have liked a more focused curatorial agenda. But the show presents an engaging mix of work being made in/about the center of the nation and a good combination of emerging and established, regional and international artists. I really enjoyed work by Jeremiah Day, Deb Sokolow, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, and Julika Rudelius. I haven't had a chance to spend much time with the catalog yet, but it looks like it will more than make up for what wasn't possible in the tight space of the show.

The following day, I headed over to I space for "Every Body!" Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009," curated by my friend and collaborator, Bonnie Fortune. In contrast to "Heartland," the show had a very tight agenda and a strongly historical feel, with visual and textual works spanning four decades of activism and education concerning women's health. In light of recent exhibitions that treat the 1960s as style, Every Body! reminds you that there was--and still is--a lot at stake. I particularly enjoyed the trio of works by University of Iowa alumna Faith Wilding, including a minimal and sensitive "central core" drawing from the 70s that is amazingly beautiful and a series of watercolors from the late 1990s based on female circumcision and vaginal reconstruction techniques. When these works are seen in person, the oft-repeated dismissal of these kinds of works as being hopelessly essentialist comes off like a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the complex feelings of attraction and revulsion such images evoke. The show, which includes drawings, performance work, painting, blogs, zines, video, and posters documenting work by artists and non-artists alike, reminded me how much unfinished business remains in achieving physical health and bodily integrity for women around the world. At the very least, it was the most appropriate exhibition for public breastfeeding that I've ever seen.

The other exhibition at I space was "Glue Factory," a project on aging by the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena. This was a nice little show documenting a series of community- and discussion-based projects in which participants shared their thoughts and fears about growing older. Although I wished to see it in a more public place (like a school or a mall), I really enjoyed the textual and visual components. In addition, the two shows played off each other nicely, which doesn't always happen at I space due to the rotating curation the space uses.