chicagotribune.com - Arts & Architecture
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City to mark 100th anniversary of Burnham Plan
The publicity drums already are beating for next year's 100th anniversary celebration of the Burnham Plan, the masterful urban planning document that changed the face of Chicago and established the field of city planning worldwide.
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New Children's Museum plans still don't answer basic questions
Despite design changes to the proposed Chicago Children's Museum, a big question remains: Will kids like it?
As an exercise in legal gamesmanship, the latest design for the Chicago Children's Museum's proposed move to Grant Park is fiendishly clever. As an essay in the art of architecture and city planning, it leaves key questions unanswered and thus fails to address the biggest issue of all: Why here? Will putting the museum on the controversial lakefront site lead to a sunken, dimly lit structure that winds up with the nickname "the Children's Mausoleum"?
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MCA's new director strives to make museum 'necessary'
MCA's new director strives to make museum 'necessary'
This has been an exhilarating month for Madeleine Grynsztejn. The 46-year-old former curator in the department of 20th Century art at the Art Institute of Chicago has returned from San Francisco to become the first female director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the retrospective she organized for celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson—which will come to the MCA next spring—has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Joffrey Ballet's MoMo brings some muscle to State Street
Some day soon, you'll be able to stand at the corner of State and Randolph and see lithe ballet dancers pirouetting in the practice rooms of the new 31-story condo high-rise where the Chicago-based Joffrey Ballet will have its headquarters. But don't forget to check out the building. It has just the right muscle and mix of uses for State Street, even if it's too squat to match the graceful dancers who will perfect their art inside.
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A new medium emerges at resurgent Artropolis
Show's scope invites more than one visit
N ot many times in life can anyone see an artist pioneer a significant new medium. But that is what we see in John Gerrard's "Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas)" and two other pieces at Galerie Ernst Hilger/hilger contemporary, the Viennese showplace exhibiting in this year's revitalized Art Chicago at the Merchandise Mart.
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Understanding Minimalist art
Wrestling with form's 'operating means'
Whenever I attend museum exhibitions in the company of others, inevitably I overhear comments from people frustrated by the work they are there to see. So by now I thought I instantly could point to the area of creation that gives an audience the most trouble. But to be certain, I asked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and was taken aback to learn from comments heard by its education staff and docents that a style more than 40 years old continues to cause greater difficulty than most currents today.
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Alvin Ailey troupe spreads wings in offbeat 'Firebird'
Maurice Bejart's fascinating "Firebird" is a departure for the art of dance and also for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which opened its engagement Wednesday with the offbeat 1970 ballet.
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Masterpieces of printmaking
Exhibit showcases artist collaborations with Italian production studio
The renaissance in printmaking that began in the late 1950s often is discussed as if it were purely an American phenomenon. But any larger view would include the 2RC Stamperia d'Arte atelier founded in 1959 in Rome by two young students, Valter and Eleonora Rossi.
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ABT's 'Sleeping Beauty' wears imperfections well
Kevin McKenzie's production of "The Sleeping Beauty" arrived last summer to some of the meanest notices of his career as artistic director of American Ballet Theatre.
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'Chapel/Chapter' catches troupe, audience in its net
There is nowhere to hide in Bill T. Jones' 2006 multimedia dance reflection, "Chapel/Chapter," running through Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater. His New York troupe, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, sets several audience members in pews on the stage during an intense recounting of two murder cases and a dancer confessing a disturbing incident from his childhood. What may sound maudlin is a gentle cry against passivity. Everyone in the theater is forced to bear witness within a confined space that is both intimate and expansive. The performance becomes a collective ritual of mourning.
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Chicago Tribune