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As some of y’all know, I spent the better part of a week in Chicago and as per usual had a great time. Most of y’all also know of the massive shadow hanging over the city right now, and I learned after the fact that there had been a ICE teargas attack barely several blocks away from where I’d been staying; I’d been out on a walk in that area that very morning (ironically enough, I’d been on an abortive lunch run to the neighborhood that had been attacked the previous day when everything went down). I’d rather have spent less time on Reddit running down sightings and neighborhood coordination and what to do next, but them’s the breaks, I guess.

Standing beneath the Bean, a good visual summary of my week.

I decided last year that I’d carry on my creative life as normally as possible, and that hasn’t changed, but the atmosphere in town was definitely a little surreal: it’s such a big place (as I hardly have to remind our fellow Chicagocado creatives) that it was almost easy to forget that anything was even going on (apart from the odd suspicious helicopter). I’d hoped to be of some help beyond donations and whatnot, but the chaotic and piecemeal nature of the ongoing assault makes figuring strategy hard enough for natives, let alone tourists. So I checked the news each morning, hit the Art Institute on Thursday, the Intuit Museum (with its uneasily mesmerizing Henry Darger exhibit) Friday, Lincoln Hall on Saturday (Cusp, Tenci, and Pictoria Vark), and so on.

A recreation of Henry Darger’s single room apartment at the Intuit Outsider Art Museum; I couldn’t help but notice that it was only a little smaller than my old place.

At the Art Institute, I got to check out the exhibit on Symbolist painters and printers, as well as a superb retrospective on the work of Elizabeth Catlett. The latter was a pleasant surprise as I thought it was going to end by the time I got there (must have confused it with the Caillebotte show). Both visits stoked the fires to get more into printmaking, and reading the exhibit guide to the early modern European drawing and printing show I missed earlier this year didn’t really help (nor did the exhibit I saw at Northwestern on Helen Frankenthaler and abstract printing). I got a lot of sketching done, too; tried to consciously lean into that this time.

Oh, and there was the Carlos Koyokuitkatl Cortez exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art, featuring some of his original printmaking tools and setup; they had a guy out front running some kind of security and hot damn I can’t blame them.

So while I’m really excited about the possibilities, they flare like rockets against a pretty dark sky. Best wishes to you all, especially those in Chicago.

How’s your work going?