The Art Center will begin the year with its final show in the Del Prado building: For Real, proposed by Marie Krane Bergman and curated by Bill Brown. The exhibition will highlight the Center’s many roles as a multi-faceted cultural site, at once bringing the administrative background of the Center into the foreground, and pursuing Chicago’s contemporary aesthetic with works by artists connected with Cream Co., a fluid practice/theory collective of artists and others.
Cream Co. (Chicago) will be enlisted to momentarily arrest the Center’s move from the Del Prado. In that pause–between the Center’s long history of success and its new life in a new setting–the administrative offices themselves will be suspended within the historic Ruth Horwich Gallery. The constellation responsible for art and its contemporary appreciation will attain some unforeseen visibility. And within that constellation, the show of active contemporary artwork will ask how art itself can administer–how it can organize, reorganize, and reinstitute–the temporal and spatial registers within which we experience The Real.
The exhibited artists interrogate the relation between the prosaic and poetic. Representing a wide range of media, form, and style, the exhibited artists (individually and collectively) interrogate the relation between the prosaic and poetic, use value and aesthetic value, clock time and natural time, the specific and the universal, epistemological limits and the longing to transcend them. During the exhibition, the public will be invited for a series of events ranging from artist’s talks to patron receptions.
The Art Center has produced a 52 page catalogue including essays by Lawrence Rinder, Dean of Graduate Studies at the California College of the Arts, and Bill Brown, the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor, English Language and Literature, Visual Arts, Committee on the History of Culture (University of Chicago), and the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Please email exhibitions@hydeparkart.org for catalogue purchases.
