Editor and publisher | Michel Segard |
---|---|
Senior editor | Tom Mullaney |
Assistant editor | Nathan Worcester |
Categories | art magazines |
Frequency | Bimonthly |
Founded | 1973 |
Country | United States |
Based in | Chicago |
Language | English |
Website | www |
ISSN | 0740-6592 |
Founder and Adviser | Derek Guthrie |
---|---|
Publisher | Pendery Weekes |
European Editor | Daniel Nanavati |
Categories | art magazines |
Frequency | Bimonthly |
Founded | 1973 |
Country | United Kingdom and International |
Based in | Cornwall, UK and Washington D.C., USA |
Language | English |
Website | www |
ISSN | 0886-8115 |
The New Art Examiner was an international magazine of critical art thinking founded in Chicago, Illinois, in October 1973 by Derek Guthrie and Jane Addams Allen. [1] Publication ceased in 2002. [1] As of 2023 there are two publications using the name and styling of the New Art Examiner. It officially relaunched in 2015 (Chicago) but there was a dispute/split between editors Derek Guthrie and Michel Segard in 2017. The U.S.-based "New Art Association" trademarked the name "New Art Examiner" in 2019; in 2021, a U.S. court ruled that the U.S. operation (.org) owns the New Art Examiner trademark and logo in the United States; the trademark dispute has not been similarly tested in a United Kingdom court. As of 2023, New Art Examiner (.net) is based in the United Kingdom. An anthology of representative articles and editors from New Art Examiner, Essential New Art Examiner, was published in 2011.
At the time of the New Art Examiner's launch in October 1973, [1] Chicago was "an art backwater" according to Artnet's Victor Cassidy. Artists who wished to be taken seriously left Chicago for New York City, and apart from a few local phenomena, such as the Hairy Who, little attention was given to Chicago art and artists. [2] Time Out Chicago praised New Art Examiner for its Midwestern focus and its "refus[al] to portray that city [New York] as the only place in the U.S. where artists, galleries and museums do anything worthwhile". [3]
Editor Jane Addams Allen, an art historian who studied under Harold Rosenberg at the University of Chicago and a relative of progressive reformer Jane Addams, was influential in developing new writers who later became significant on the New York scene and encouraged a writing style that was lively, personal, and honestly critical. [4]
The critics and artists who wrote for the New Art Examiner included Devonna Pieszak, Fred Camper, Jan Estep, Ann Wiens, Bill Stamets, Michael A. Weinstein, Adam Green, Robert Storr, Carol Diehl, Jerry Saltz, Eleanor Heartney, Betty McCasland, Carol Squiers, Janet Koplos, Vince Carducci, Danielle Probst, and Mark Staff Brandl.
The New Art Examiner ceased publishing in 2002 as a result of a funding shortfall. [5]
In 2011 the NIU Art Museum held an exhibition exploring the significance and history of the magazine. [6]
In November 2011, Northern Illinois University Press published The Essential New Art Examiner, containing 37 pieces from the original run of the magazine which serve as a record of contemporary art and its key figures and institutions (especially in Chicago) during that period. [7] Reviewers from Newcity and Time Out Chicago praised the insight provided by some of the included articles while criticising the overall selection, with Time Out writing of the editors "cramming in bland writing by famous names at the expense of articles that could offer much-needed insight into Chicago". [8]
An attempted relaunch beginning in 2015 was marred by disputes between editors and funders. [9]
Over the decades following the founding of the New Art Examiner, Chicago's art scene flourished, with new museums, more art dealers, and increased art festivals, galleries, and alternative spaces. Art writer Victor M Cassidy claimed that the New Art Examiner "ignored, opposed or belittled" Chicago's artistic developments, that it was overly politicized, overloaded with jargon, and did not serve the Chicago or midwest arts communities. [2]
Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Addams co-founded Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, in Chicago, Illinois, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hull, opened to serve recently arrived European immigrants. By 1911, Hull House had expanded to 13 buildings. In 1912, the Hull House complex was completed with the addition of a summer camp, the Bowen Country Club. With its innovative social, educational, and artistic programs, Hull House became the standard bearer for the movement; by 1920, it grew to approximately 500 settlement houses nationally.
A maquette is a scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture or work of architecture. The term is a loanword from French. An equivalent term is bozzetto, a diminutive of the Italian word for a sketch.
Ellen Gates Starr was an American social reformer and activist. With Jane Addams, she founded Chicago's Hull House, an adult education center, in 1889; the settlement house expanded to 13 buildings in the neighborhood.
The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.
The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary and Leigh B. Block donated funds to Northwestern University for the construction of an art exhibition venue. In recognition of their gift, the university named the changing exhibition space the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. The original conception of the museum was modeled on the German kunsthalle tradition, with no permanent collection, and a series of changing temporary exhibits. However, the Block Museum soon began to acquire a permanent collection as the university transferred many of its art pieces to the museum. In recognition of its growing collection and its expanding programming, the Gallery became the American Alliance of Museums accredited Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 1998. The Block embarked on a major reconstruction project in 1999 and reopened in a new facility in September 2000.
Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.
Irving Kane Pond was an American architect, college athlete, and author. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Pond attended the University of Michigan and received a degree in civil engineering in 1879. He was a member of the first University of Michigan football team and scored the first touchdown in the school's history in May 1879.
Pond and Pond was an American architecture firm established by the Chicago architects Irving Kane Pond and Allen Bartlitt Pond.
Carol Diehl is an American artist, art critic and poet. In addition to her writing, most recently appearing in her blog Art Vent, she is best known for her paintings, which have often documented daily life in a manner described as diaristic, even compulsive, using dense, painterly, often indecipherable words, numbers and symbols in grid or geometric frameworks. Diehl has also been a prolific art critic, having contributed features and reviews to numerous periodicals, including Art in America, ARTnews, and Art + Auction, as well as to books and artist catalogues. In the 1990s, she became active in New York's performance poetry scene. Diehl lives in New York City and southwestern Massachusetts. She has two sons, Matt Diehl and Adam Diehl.
Chicago has long had a gay neighborhood. Beginning in the 1920s there was active homosexual nightlife in Towertown, adjacent to the Water Tower. Increasing rents forced gay-friendly establishments steadily northwards, moving through Old Town and Lincoln Park along Clark Street and on to Boystown.
The Design Museum of Chicago or "DMoC" is a museum of design in Chicago. It was founded by Tanner Woodford in 2012 as a pop-up museum, and hosted exhibitions in different venues around Chicago in 2012 and 2013. Following a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2014, the museum opened a permanent location in the Block 37 building. In late 2018, the museum moved to Expo 72.
Corey Postiglione is an American artist, art critic and educator. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists in New York, and known for precise, often minimalist work that "both spans and explores the collective passage from modernism to postmodernism" in contemporary art practice and theory. New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Allen, writing in 1976, described him as "an important influence on the development of contemporary Chicago abstraction." In 2008, Chicago Tribuneart critic Alan G. Artner wrote "Postiglione has created a strong, consistent body of work that developed in cycles, now edging closer to representation, now moving further away, but remaining rigorous in approach to form as well as seductive in markmaking and color."
Carole Harmel is an American artist and photographer, who gained recognition for her provocative images of nudes in the 1970s and 1980s and still lifes combining photography with short narratives, wordplay and mixed media. Fundamental to Harmel's work is a questioning of reality and photographic conventions, a penchant for surrealism, and humor. The New Art Examiner described her nudes as having a "startling, queasy impact," "rich in ambiguity, discomforting in content." About her still lifes, critic Michael Weinstein wrote, "sophisticated academic criticism is fused with love of color and visual form to create images at once conceptually engaging and perceptually arresting."
John Himmelfarb is an American artist, known for idiosyncratic, yet modernist-based work across many media. Diverse influences ranging from Miró, Matisse and Picasso to Dubuffet, New York school artists like de Kooning, Guston, and Pop artists inform his work, described by critics and curators as chaotically complex and tightly constructed. He often employs energetic, gestural line, dense patterns of accumulated shapes, and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, using strategies of concealment and revelation to create a sense of meaning that is both playful and elusive. His work is also unified by "a circulating library" of motifs and organizing structures, such as geographic and urban mapping, abstracted natural and industrial forms, and language systems. Assessing him at mid-career, New Art Examiner’s Andy Argy wrote "Himmelfarb’s art is original […] His unabashed immersion in graphic art, emphasizing drawing over painting, has earned him an important place among artists who make drawings into major aesthetic statements." Himmelfarb next turned to monumental paintings that critic Christopher Moore called joyful, luminous, and frenetic pyrotechnical displays. In 2006, he began to devote considerable studio time to sculpture that curator Gregg Hertzlieb described as an expression of the "human need for play and (our) enduring fascination with metamorphosis and transformation."
Jan Cicero Gallery was a contemporary art gallery founded and directed by Jan Cicero, which operated from 1974 to 2003, with locations in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois and Telluride, Colorado. The gallery was noted for its early, exclusive focus on Chicago abstract artists at a time when they were largely neglected, its role in introducing Native American artists to mainstream art venues beyond the Southwest, and its showcasing of late-career and young women artists. The gallery focused on painting, and to a lesser degree, works on paper, often running counter to the city's prevailing art currents. It was also notable as a pioneer of two burgeoning Chicago gallery districts, the West Hubbard Street alternative corridor of the 1970s, and the River North district in the 1980s.
Diane Simpson is an artist who lives and works in Wilmette, Illinois.
Frank Piatek is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.
Joan Livingstone is an American contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago. She creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience.
Neil Goodman is an American sculptor and educator, known for bronze works that combine elegant arrangements and forms with hand-wrought, textured surfaces. He has explored a wide range of formats—still-life compositions, wall and floor installations, free-standing works and monumental public art—in a formalist style that has evolved from spare representation to abstraction and minimalism.