This year, the New Art Examiner sent three writers to Expo Chicago. Our writers’ ages spanned more than 60 years. We wanted to see how that would affect their perception of the fair. Indeed, each had a different vision of what the fair was about, but they also shared a couple of conclusions about the fair’s overall content. Below are their three essays.

Expo Chicago 2024: Déjà Vu

By Michel Ségard

        “Safety first” seemed to be the theme of Expo Chicago 2024. There were no extraordinary exhibits, no shockingly avant-garde entries. Everything was so civilized, genteel, and politically correct. And there were a number of notable absences. Richard Gray Gallery and Kavi Gupta Gallery, both from Chicago, were conspicuously absent—as were the LGBTQ+ superstars Kehinde Wiley and Devan Shimoyama. Marc Straus Gallery from New York seemed to be the attention getter with several artists that also caught my eye, notably Anne Samat’s wall hangings, Marie Watt’s neon signage, Jeffrey Gibson’s collages, and. Antonio Santín’s trompe l’oeil paintings of oriental rugs.

        This year, the Special Exhibitions section was, frankly, underwhelming, especially the booth of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose main piece was an installation by Eugene I-Peng Tang. Untitled #3, Renovating Kinship was a collection of photos and found objects stuffed into a corner. The wall tag says it was meant to map “an anthropological approach to researching the balances and imbalances within support systems and non-biological kinships.” It was, actually, a clichéd collection of pieces from an apparent building renovation arranged in an architectonic fashion—not bad formally, but non memorable.

        This year’s international scope of the BLM movement brought a refreshing change of focus. Elias Mung’Ora from Nairobi showed TONY AND PUMA IN THEIR HOUSE, a large acrylic and mixed media painting that reflected the poverty of an artist’s life but soothed by the presence of his cat. Emmie Nume from Uganda, shown by Afriart Gallery, presented two compelling drawings–Glance at Silhouettes 1 and 2. In Glance at Silhouettes 1, a man peeks out somberly from behind a door; in Glance at Silhouettes 2, it is a woman that peers out with an almost angry look on her face. They were shown side-by-side at Expo to dramatic effect, evoking a “see what you’ve done” atmosphere. We are used to a far more aggressive political stance from American Black artists in recent years than what is shown in these two pieces.

        Unusual materials and various forms of assemblage were popular this year. Anne Samat, shown by Marc Straus Gallery, is a Malaysian artist who weaves wall hangings out of a wide variety of objects. Eyes Are Like Angels but Heart Is Cold #2, from 2021, is assembled out of rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, beads, ceramic, metal, and plastic ornaments. This is a work that blurs the boundary between art and craft and creates a dramatic totemic presence representing family members (as described in the Marc Straus Gallery notes about the artist).

        Following this trend, An Undoing by Jackie Milad, shown by Pentimenti Gallery from Philadelphia, is a large mixed-media collage/painting on canvas. Measuring 79 ½ x 76 inches, its mixture of fabric, tassels, paper and strips of painted canvas merge to create a mood similar to Samat’s piece, although the works look nothing alike. There is the sense of family history in her work as there is in Ann Samat’s work. Along the same line at Latchkey Gallery, Luis A. Shahagún uses silicone, charcoal, beads, hemp, wood, and picture frame fragments to create religiously inspired works, some of which are actually self-portraits. Mexican born, Shahagún’s work, such as Maria Bonita Maria Del Alma from 2022, is heavily influenced by Mexican cultural customs and religious traditions.

        There were just a few “technological” pieces in the show. A repeat from last year, Fluidity by Mads Christensen consists of a set of curved columns, each with a LED-filled face that changed color. More interesting, a novel set of six small “paintings” by Peter Sarkisian at Charlotte Jackson Fine Arts shows vehicles on the streets of various cities. Each has a car with a tiny video of a driver at the wheel. Remote Driver (Chicago) from 2024 was particularly nostalgic; the background image, judging from the cars parked on the street, is from the late 1940s or early 1950s and contains a typical three-flat, a two-flat seemingly converted into a church, and a single-family residence. My family had cars in the 1950s that looked like the ones in the background. But the bright red car racing by is a Ferrari 360, first built in 1999—shades of the film Back to the Future and its play with time. The other “tech” piece of note was Manfred Mohr’s P-2210-B. It consisted of an abstract video screened on an IMac that depicts “a diagonal-path created by a hypercube, randomly chosen between eleven and fifteen dimensions,” according to the description on the vimeo.com website. Conceptually, it is a highly mathematical piece—reminiscent of Donna Cox’s 1990s imaging work with the romboy homotopy, a four-dimensional surface projected into three dimensions, thereby creating striking sculptural forms.

        Overall, there were far fewer sculpture pieces this year. Internationally renowned Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt passed away shortly before the fair, yet, sadly, no recognition of him or his work was made by the fair organizers. Fortunately, Bill Hodges Gallery brought several of Hunt’s more modest pieces to the fair. To this viewer, the most notable new sculptural piece was Sanford Biggers’s Apollo. Represented by Monique Meloche Gallery of Chicago, Biggers shows us a green Rameggiato marble bust of Apollo wearing an African mask. The back shows us the typical Greek rendering of the god with a sheath of arrows on his back and a cloak on his shoulders. This surprising juxtaposition makes the piece particularly thought-provoking.

        Brightening things up, there were three superstars of American contemporary art represented in this year’s fair that caught the eye of this viewer. Sam Gilliam’s modest sized three-dimensional wall piece Four Isolate #2 from 2009 was shown by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery; Paul Thiebaud Gallery featured an artist’s proof of Wayne Thiebaud’s lithograph Paint Cans, from 1990; and Yares Art (NYC) brought Frank Stella’s Protractor Series piece Abra I from 1968. Together, these three pieces gave us 40 years of delicious colorist painting.

        Expo Chicago 2024 was a safe, mostly politically correct fair. It had enough noteworthy pieces to make trudging through the 170 booths worthwhile. While it was a nicely nostalgic show, there was nothing in this fair that would truly excite you or keep you up at night wondering about the future of art.

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.

EXPO CHICAGO 2024: Discovering Unconventional Voices

by Andrew Hart Benson

        John Dewey states that “art is the most effective mode of communication that exists.” With 170 galleries at Expo Chicago 2024, the amount of information being communicated is far from diminutive. Visiting every booth is a challenge, but with so many different galleries from all over the world, it is enticing to see as much work as possible. While art acts like one of the biggest communicators, many messages get lost in the sea of people and art that Expo Chicago welcomes. During my time at Expo Chicago, I was able to hear and see two stories of artists that caught my attention. These stories I hope to share in order to bridge the communication barrier that naturally occurs during Expo.

        The works of Preetika Rajgariah were presented by Bill Arning Exhibitions from Kinderhook, NY. According to Arning Exhibitions, Rajgariah is a “queer multidisciplinary artist whose works examine the complicated intersections of cultural + queer identity, nostalgia, and capitalist consumption, while referencing her traditional upbringing as an Indian born, Texas raised American.”¹ She uses acrylic and latex paint on yoga mats to create this unique intersection of her perspectives.

        Rajgariah’s perspectives are full of overlapping identities, viewpoints, and information.      In her piece entitled, the heart sees deeper than the eye, a yoga mat is cut into the shape of two hands. The position the hands are in is called the Kalesvara Mundra, which translates into “God of time”. The position is meant to promote concentration, control over the mind, and activation of the third eye; the subconscious.³

        The eye, Rajgariah references in her title could mean the third eye chakra that Kalesvara Mundra is believed to activate. It begs me to question what the heart could symbolize. Although the third eye is how we unlock our subconscious, our heart is how we empathize with others     —it is social. As much as we can look inward to find peace, we can look towards others with compassion and understanding. With understanding comes acceptance.

        Rajgariah uses her mother’s sari to create her work; nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. The title is a reference to a quote by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. It touches on the idea that everything happens in due time. Patience is key; nature will determine everything in due time. The queen card depicted in the piece could reference the most powerful woman of all: earth. Upon closer inspection the queen has a bindi, a red dot on the forehead, a common religious symbol of an Indian woman. nature does not hurry incorporates a lot of Rajgariah’s identities. The Indian symbols, the Chinese quote, and the Americanized playing cards homogenize into the essence of Preekita Rejgariah. The intersection of all these identities is what the expo is all about.

        Another artist, Sonya Rapoport, brings her own perspective to Expo as well. Her work is presented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco, California. Rapoport is one of the first women to receive a M.A. in Art Practice at the University of California Berkeley. Rapoport has experimented from her original studies by incorporating science, computers, and data collection into her work.⁴ Shoe-Field was one of her projects displayed at Expo. In the mid-to-late 80s, Rapoport was interested in documenting how women thought about their shoes. She recorded what women thought about the shoes they wore on a scale from –2 to  +2. Then, with the help of programmer John Watson, the answers were fed through a program and recorded on an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) dot matrix.⁵

        What is interesting about Shoe-Field is the blend of technology and the human experience. The shoe is a symbol of beauty for women. Shoes are fun; there are hundreds of different styles, colors, and functions. While shoes can be a fun and important necessity, it can also cause anxiety. High heels can be painful after a certain time; shoes can be expensive—and they can break! To take such a personal matter and record it into zeros and ones strips it from any personal meaning. However, recording it into this creative pattern redefines its meaning. I think of data as purely logical. Making this data into a creative pattern invigorates the emotional aspect of it that was lost in the matrix. Even though research is used to collect data and find meaning of it, this creative reimagining of data is a good reminder of why we do research. It mixes the emotional and the logical aspects of research in a meaningful way.

        Both these artists bring their unique perspectives to their art. It’s their stories that give me deeper insight into multifaceted individuals like Rajgarah and female experimentalists like Rapoport. Their stories stood out to me amidst the chaos of Expo Chicago. Being introduced to Rajgariah’s and Rapoport’s stories is what Expo is all about for me. Although I wasn’t able to see all 170+ galleries’ stories, I am grateful to have caught a glimpse of two inspiring women artists and their work.

Andrew Hart Benson (they/them/theirs) is a writer for the New Art Examiner. They have a degree in Communication from SUNY University at Buffalo.

Footnotes:

1. Bill Arning Exhibitions. Preetika Rajgariah. https://art.illinois.edu/about-us/news/alumna-preetika-rajgariah-featured-in-expo-chicagos-exposure-section/

2. Divyansh Sharma, “Kalesvara Mudra: Meaning, Benefits, and How to Do”, Siddhi Yoga, March 31, 2024.
3. Casemore Gallery. Sonya Rapoport. Web. Casemoregallery.com.
4. Sonya Rapoport. Shoe-Field: 1982–1989. Web. Sonyarapoport.org.

Too Many Haystacks, Not Enough Needles
Tracking Down Expo Chicago’s Trend Breakers

by Charles Young

        Oh Expo. You have such a good heart. The lineup of galleries and artists you bring together each year is truly spectacular. You should feel good about that. But year after year, like Sideshow Bob in a field of rakes, you keep making the same mistake.

        Deep in the recesses of Marxist theory, we encounter what Louis Althusser dubbed the ideological state apparatus (ISA): an institution which, while purporting to be neutral, produces and reproduces the ideology of capitalism. Expo isn’t an ISA in the traditional sense, as it has never been particularly reticent about its commercial nature. (The most boldfaced move I saw this year was by Yares Art, whose booth featured blue chip work by Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and Jules Olitski, among others. In a blatant attempt to increase his market value, an abstraction by the lesser-known Thomas Downing was covertly slipped into the mix.) But Expo Chicago does fit the description of an ISA in a way: while purporting to be a neutral forum in which galleries may present the best existing art, it inadvertently renders large fractions of that art almost invisible.

        Take the vast number of stylized figurative paintings present this year. Most of them would be quite beautiful if encountered on their own in a gallery or art museum. But not a soul on earth possesses the bandwidth to reconfigure their way of seeing over and over again for each figure artist showing at Expo. (Ditto with most varieties of geometric abstraction and shiny, material-focused work.) These large swaths of artistic output are dismissed wholesale by virtue of being so omnipresent—asking yourself “Do I like this?” would be like asking a fish to evaluate the quality of water.

        The most memorable art each year tends to buck these wider stylistic trends, eschewing homogenous categories in favor of its own unique modality. Here are my picks for 2024.

        A good number of artists this year operated within the formal constraints of established categories while transcending their bounds through the use of novel media. SECRIST | BEACH presented a series by May Tveit in which the artist uses corrugated cardboard to delineate sublime, cross-like shapes. Tveit’s layered forms create an illusion of infinite pictorial recession, imbuing their quotidian medium with an ethereal aura. Perhaps the most innovative work this year was Diana Al-Hadid’s Even the Mountains Were Surprised, which uses an unconventional canvas of polymer gypsum – a material typically used to make drywall, which, incidentally, made up most of the walls at Expo. The gypsum was allowed to flow before it set, meaning the final surface is patchy and incomplete. Onto it, Al-Hadid has painted a nature scene that puts all previous uses of the word “fleeting” to shame—the thing looks like it’s melting before your eyes, demanding to be savored before it’s gone for good.

        Other artists, less keen on playing by the rules, openly mock Expo’s cloying opulence. In Robert Colescott’s Hot Dawg! An Impression (shown at Michael Rosenfeld’s booth), eighty percent of the canvas is taken up by a limitless slab of hot dogs, every single one the same: limp, topped by a squiggle of mustard on a plain bun. They’re about as appetizing as wastewater sludge, and coincidentally an apt metaphor for the way the innumerable figurative works at Expo are delicious in a single serving but utterly nauseating at scale. Ricky Burrows’s similarly farcical paintings at Harper’s Gallery are an absolute hoot. The subjects of these figurative works are abjectly ridiculous, flinging their spaghetti limbs every which way like 2-D ragdolls. I’m especially taken with an untitled work depicting a one-armed man playing a trumpet against a banana-yellow background. His facial expression is uncertain, as if he’s not sure whether or not making music is a worthy undertaking in the first place. He conveys a sentiment almost totally absent in Expo’s self-seriousness: while art can be approached rationally, it is a fundamentally irrational activity to pursue.

        Only two truly radical works revealed themselves, both achieving expansive ends with terribly limited means. My favorite painting of the fair was hidden in plain sight at Hakgojae Gallery: an innocuous canvas by Lee Dong-Youb called Interspace. The vast majority of it is covered with a smooth, sheeny layer of off-white paint. In its center, Lee’s unshaking hand has applied careful layers of muted gray rectangles, one in front of the next. Its painstaking precision, much needed in an event where every other work dubs itself “gestural” or “expressionist,” took my breath away. The painting seems to be nascent, slowly coming into being before you. Transfixed, you have no choice but to halt your Expo routine of rapid, thoughtless looking and probe its irreverent beauty. A close second was tucked away in the corner of Bernard Jacobson’s booth: a study by Robert Motherwell for his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic. In a year where Expo was bigger than ever, in every sense of the word—170 galleries, more than 35,000 visitors, seldom a canvas less than a few feet wide and tall so as to provide optimal noticeability for potential collectors—Motherwell’s meager scale (only 6 x 8 inches) is dazzling. True lovers of art, Motherwell reminds us, find solace not in grandiose pomp and circumstance, but intimate encounters which produce pleasant surprise.

Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.