When it comes to cities known for experimental art scenes, Philadelphia might not be the first to come to mind. Yet over the past few years, the city’s tight-knit art community and DIY ethos have been attracting more and more artists to consider relocating.
Ask anyone in Chicago where the best place is to get independent books and zines, and they will surely have just one answer: Quimby’s. Located in Wicker Park, this bookstore carries almost everything independent, artistic, off-kilter, silly, or profound that you can imagine, and it boasts an intelligent and capable staff to help you navigate it all.
Second Bedroom is exactly what you think it is: a tiny spare bedroom in the back of a fourth-floor apartment building at 3216 S. Morgan St. in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. But it’s the installation-art “gallery” inside the spare room that makes the trek up four flights of stairs (and, if you’re like me, a detour through a neighbor’s apartment) totally worth it.
Early last month, the Chicago Public Library opened its competition to use its short URL, www.chipublib.org, in an original Library-inspired design. The contest is in conjunction with the CPL’s “Not What You Think” campaign, which intends to change misconceptions about what it offers.
The winner, selected among 30 finalists, will have his or her design unveiled on June 3 at the Harold Washington Library Center. The chosen piece then will be featured around Chicago as part of the campaign.
Melbourne, Australia’s Sticky Institute knows zines.
“I try to read literally every zine that comes through our doors,” manager Luke Sinclair says. The distro, which opened its doors in April of 2001 after Melbourne artist Simone Ewenson visited a similar shop in Amsterdam, carries a variety of zines, “artist books,” and other independent publications. Through support from the Victorian government and the Australian Council for the Arts, Sticky is able to nurture independent artists at every stage of the process.
When Griff Williams started Gallery 16 in 1993 in San Francisco, a city known for having the most non-profit art organizations per capita, he knew that he had to create a space that would stand out.
“I really wanted to connect myself with the arts community in San Francisco, which has always been really vibrant,” Williams says. “We came upon the idea of kind of creating a new sort of model for art support — one that really didn’t require me to become a non-profit art space, which I thought was a model that was kind of on the way out.”
Representing a random sampling of ambiguous pop-culture references, Tyler Cufley unveils his latest work at NEXT, the Invitational Exhibition of Emerging Art in Chicago.
“The zine has a life of its own, so as the time for it approaches, I start pulling together my own story and the stories of others, and that’s the most rewarding thing — building community, reaching out, making friends.”
That’s how zinester/blogger Tom Moniz describes the uniquely organic process of creating his zines, which cover topics like trans and queer fatherhood and the anarcho-punk lifestyle. His works describe not just the parenting styles of its subjects but their lives and passions.
Netherlands-based artist Mara Piccione explores love, childhood, nightmares, sadness, mental illness, and the “beauty of it all” in her silk-screened, music-centered work.
In addition to her themes of of human/animal hybrids, this blend of features depicts expressions that “make is possible for a character to be sweet, sad, and weird at the same time.”
On April 24, the Scion Installation LA gallery will completely transform into a hodgepodge ranch displaying creatively arranged rooms from eight unique artists.
Founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss, P.S.1 was created as an organization devoted to organizing exhibitions in abandoned spaces across New York City. Now located in Long Island City, P.S.1 became affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000 and now uses its spaces for exhibitions rather than as a collecting institution.
Recent photos by Los Angeles born photographer Richard Misrach are on display through February 20 at the Chelsea gallery, part of PaceWildenstein galleries, in New York. The exhibition features nearly twenty large-scale pigment prints from Misrach’s 2007-2009 series, Untitled.