Passed Artwork
“Hi”
Artist: Kay Rosen
Location: Billboard at Milwaukee Leavitt
Drawing on her academic background in linguistics, Kay Rosen uses language as her primary material and subject, creating text-based works that explore the ways that language can be represented visually. Playing with different approaches to typography and layout, Rosen’s work often employs puns, anagrams, and textual puzzles, forcing the viewer to consider new ways of reading and approaching language. Rosen has a BA in Linguistics, Spanish, and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University. She attended graduate school in Linguistics and Spanish at Northwestern University. Rosen teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rosen’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions and projects at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the MIT List Visual Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand. She has also been included in notable group exhibitions such as Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art (2012), Prospect 1 New Orleans curated by Dan Cameron, and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Her work is the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Norton Family Collection.
TransLIT
Artist: Luftwerk
Location: Humboldt Boulevard Viaduct
Luftwerk’s TransLIT illuminates The 606 with dynamic projected video inspired by flora and fauna coupled with original music by Owen Clayton Condon at the Humboldt Boulevard overpass.
Luftwerk is the artistic vision of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Their art practice focuses on the exploration of what makes a space a place and how art plays a vital role within urban and natural environments. With each individual project, Luftwerk discovers and accentuates the unique connections between architecture, environment and the communities which interact within these places, transforming their experiences of space and site through light and sound.
With immersive light art installations at landmarks such as the AT&T Plaza in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Illinois, and Tampa’s Kiley Garden to name a few, Luftwerk installations open new aesthetic conversations within public spaces and landmark structures, encouraging viewers to perceive the environment, histories, and concepts surrounding them with a heightened awareness for meaning and place.
“Pay Attention” “Halo Chart”
Artist: Louis de Marco
Location: Churchill Field Park Dog Friendly Area
Organization: Project Onward
Louis DeMarco (b. 1985, Chicago) is an artist with autism who has developed visual strategies for both describing and coping with the anxieties, obsessions, and distractions that sometimes overwhelm him.
DeMarco painstakingly catalogues the “clouds” (each with its own distinct color) that appear above him when neuroses and fears overtake him. The Cloud Chart is a sort of emotional periodic chart that reflects the artist’s effort to understand his own negative behaviors. DeMarco counters the negativity of the Cloud Chart with the more hopeful Halo Chart, an inventory of positive behaviors that are cloud antidotes. Similarly, Pay Attention is an example of his text-based series Words to Live by, which includes positive reminders and motivational messages carefully rendered in yellow block letters against a background of blue skies and puffy white clouds.
An alumnus of Gallery 37, the City of Chicago’s youth arts program, DeMarco joined Project Onward in 2005. As a Project Onward artist, his work has been featured in exhibitions all over the world, including the Museum of Everything’s Exhibition #4 in London, featuring his text-based drawing “You’re Not Only Human” on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. In 2012 he was commissioned by Chicago musician and educator Matt Baron to create the 16-page album art for Songs for Learning, the debut CD by Baron’s band Future Hits. In addition to being a highly skilled visual artist, Louis DeMarco is also an accomplished bass player and songwriter for the rock-and-roll band DHF Express, fronted by fellow Project Onward artist Adam Hines.
Project Onward is a nonprofit studio and gallery dedicated to supporting the career development of visual artists with mental and developmental disabilities. Located in the Bridgeport Art Center, Project Onward provides workspace, art materials, and opportunities for professional growth to artists who have exceptional abilities but face challenges ranging from autism to mental illness.
Brick House
Artist: Chakaia Booker
Location: Damen Arts Plaza
Since the 1980s Chakaia Booker has been addressing ecological concerns and explorations of racial and economic difference, globalization, and gender. In the 1990s she began recycling discarded tires into complex assemblages and creating the type of objects for which she is most widely known. The worn and patinated finish of the rubber parallels human diversity, while the tire treads suggest images as varied as African scarification and textile designs. The visible wear and tear on the tires evokes the physical marks of human aging. Equally, Booker’s use of discarded tires references industrialization, consumer culture, and environmental concerns. Her work, as yet untitled, will be installed during the opening season and remain up for at least one year, with the possibility of a one-year extension.
Booker has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Rutgers University and a Master of Fine Arts from the City College of New York (CUNY). Booker’s inspirations embrace a wide range of disciplines ranging from African dance, ceramics, weaving, basketry to t’ai chi.
Feeling nostalgic, check out this video installation of Brick House. https://youtu.be/X19J_viPIxw