History is supposedly written by the victors. Most devotees of early American punk and hardcore could probably rattle off the travails of Henry Rollins’s time in Black Flag or Ian MacKaye’s memories of the 80s D.C. hardcore scene, as the two have told their stories ad nauseam. But how many know the story of the […]
Author Archives: Kerry Cardoza
Posted inCity Life
Best abolition-oriented mutual aid project
Chicago Community Jail Support is one of many vital mutual-aid groups that sprung up following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, as local protests against racism and police brutality resulted in mass arrests of demonstrators. The all-volunteer effort aims to support anyone being released from Cook County Jail, the majority of whom are discharged with […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Best NSFW nihilistic queer punk artist
Chaos reigns in the artwork of Mony Nuñez, aka Mony Kaos. Drawing from the aesthetics of Tom of Finland, anarcho-punk iconography, vintage gay porn, and cutesy cultural figures like Betty Boop, Kaos’s NSFW compositions—which take the form of screenprints, air-brushed banners, fliers, zines, ceramics, T-shirts, hooked rugs, and illustrations—explode with color and attitude. In her […]
Posted inMusic
Kate Fagan cements her place in Chicago punk history with a new reissue
Before she began fronting trailblazing Chicago ska band Heavy Manners in the early 80s, Kate Fagan was a new-wave powerhouse. Her 1980 single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” became the best-selling local release at Wax Trax. Since then, unfortunately, physical copies have been all but impossible to come by. A house fire destroyed its […]
Posted inCity Life
Perfection from the pieces
If you’ve ever dabbled in woodworking, you probably have a sense of just how much scrap material can go to waste. Lumber is sold in predetermined sizes, like the ubiquitous 2×4, so once you have the cuts you need, you’re likely to end up with various odds and ends that are hard to put to […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Artists are all-in for Brandon Johnson
In the 2019 mayoral election, Lori Lightfoot stood out with her platform for supporting the arts in Chicago. Out of a crowded field of 14 candidates, she was the only one to hone in on the arts with a detailed plan. Not so this time around. Instead, candidate Brandon Johnson, who has recently surged in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The next Great Migration
There were 18 extreme weather events with losses in excess of $1 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. There was the heat dome in the southwest in September, which put more than 61 million people under extreme heat advisories and broke heat records in California. There were […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Present absence
“Regarding the Missing Objects,” a group exhibition on view at the Hyde Park Art Center, takes absence as its theme. There is the absence of one of the artists whose work is included in the show, Dana Carter, who died before the exhibition opened. Then there are the missing objects of the show’s title, a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ways of seeing
Stepping into “Exact Dutch Yellow” is like finding a cool spot of shade on a scorching hot day. The light in the darkened fourth-floor galleries mainly comes from the work itself, LED- and neon-lit installations that seem to play tricks before our eyes. The exhibition plumbs the history of color classification, a subject that seems […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The growing pains of AI art
The Wikipedia image for stable diffusion, an AI platform that generates images from text prompts, is a surrealist photo showing an astronaut atop a horse. At first glance, it scans as realistic, the horse in mid-trot, a forest in the background. But a closer inspection reveals that the astronaut seems to have no hands or […]
Posted inArt Feature
New ways of survival
Anna Martine Whitehead’s solo exhibition, “Notes on Territory: Meditation,” at Roman Susan, is an invitation to imagine new ways of survival. The bulk of the gallery is taken up by a seven-by-nine-foot wooden platform strewn with books and throw blankets; a woven canopy hangs above it, forming a compact sanctuary of sorts. The sculpture has […]
Posted inArt Feature
Jessica Labatte finds beauty in the detritus of everyday life
Being a parent requires attentiveness, and when you can muster it, patience. In many ways, parenting small children is not unlike being an artist; both necessitate curiosity, mindfulness, and a certain amount of nimbleness. The works in Jessica Labatte’s solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, “Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” form a web of connections between […]
Posted inArt Feature
Jeanne Dunning looks at what’s left behind
The works in this exhibition radiate death. Roadkill is scattered around on the floor, from the upper level, to the stairs leading down to the exhibition space, to the main gallery. A massive mandala takes up most of that floor, made up of ash sourced from wood effigies the artist made of herself and then […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Venerable tobacco smoke
Any smoker can relate to the feeling of release they get from a cigarette, the satisfying blend of calm relief and buzzy energy. When artist Marcela Torres started smoking cigars about seven years ago, they were struck by the respite it offered. So began a relationship with tobacco, which has stretched to include its historical […]
Posted inArt Feature
Artists continue to run Chicago
If art fairs like EXPO and Frieze are about making a splash with Instagrammable booths and recouping onerous exhibition fees, what are smaller-scale alternative ones for? MdW, an alternative art fair first held in Chicago in 2011 and now back after a decade-long hiatus, proposes a simple yet radical purpose: for the art community to […]