I have been invited to run E-Dogz during the opening of an exhibition entitled Afterimage on Sept. 7th, 2012 at the new DePaul Art Museum. My friends Dahlia Tulett and Thea Liberty Nichols are the curators of the show which features a roster of (mostly) young painters (mostly) from the Chicago area that carry on traditions established by the Imagist movement including a bunch of good people like Carl Baratta, Rob Doran, Carmen Price, Ben Seamons, and Edra Soto, among other incredibly talented artists.
A link to the statement for exhibition is here.
As a young painter I was strongly influenced by the Imagist movement, counting Roger Brown and Karl Wirsum as two of my favorite painters. As a student at the School of the Art Institute I was able to study with Phil Hanson and Gladys Nilsson as well as proto-Imagist Ted Halkin and also George Liebert and Jim Lutes, two important Chicago painters sharing concerns with the Imagists.
Fast forward 12 years, long after I had left the studio behind, and here I was being asked to be a part of a show about this legacy. Frankly, I didn’t bat an eyelash- though I have put my brushes down, there are many values that I can thank the Imagists for instilling in my practice. Firstly, the collaborative spirit in which they worked carried through not only in my painting practice, but also in my activities as a curator. Their irreverence towards the traditional white cube model influenced my curatorial practice as well- overhanging works- on top of wallpaper at that! In 2009 when I had a chance to curate a section of the Artist’s Run Chicago show at the Hyde Park Art Center, I directly paid homage to this curatorial approach (perhaps it was Don Baum’s in particular) by hanging garish bright orange plaid wallpaper on which I hung salon style, the works of 8 young Chicagoans.
But there is something deeper about the Imagists that has stuck with me- a celebration of this city- of the gritty funkiness of Chicago that was so integrated in their vision. From the obsessive low brow collecting habits of Roger Brown and Ray Yoshida to the blues references in Karl Wirsum’s work, a deep appreciation of our city’s street culture is evident in not only their works, but in the record of their everyday lives. And this sort of democratic value system of situating the low- pop culture and other expressions from outside of the academic- in the sphere of fine art, is also at the core of my practice.
Anthony Stepter, who is working on the catalog for the Afterimage show asked me for an E-Dogz original recipe and I figured it would make sense to include a recipe for the food I would actually serve at the opening. So what to cook for this? Those familiar with my projects know that I have a deep love of street foods- particularly our own Chicagoan- and the cross-cultural influences that they reflect. Maxwell Street, our city’s shifting, nomadic open air flea market was a site of research for many of the Imagists- where they heard the blues and collected other source material and handmade objects. It is also here that many of our native street food traditions have proliferated, so this seemed to be a point of entry in a commonality between what I do with the Imagist’s concerns.
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