Annette LePique, author at Chicago Reader

A speaker talks at a podium. Behind her is a crowd of supporters holding aloft placards in support of school staff.

Making waves

by Annette LePique October 17, 2023October 17, 2023

“The view that unions are a hostile force within a workplace is fundamentally incorrect. Creating a union is an act of love: love for your work, love for your colleagues, and love for the institution that means a great deal to many people.” This is a view that came to the forefront of my conversation […]

A clothesline on a stand is positioned in front of a large window in the gallery. Green lawn turf is on the floor below. On the line hangs a jacket and squares of material with photos on them.

Arts & Culture

Material as memory

by Annette LePique August 21, 2023August 21, 2023

Working with fabric necessitates a certain type of intimacy. How you move through the world is punctuated by what you were wearing; fabric changes you, it can define your day. Fabric, whether it’s worn or transformed, can thus become a complicated act of memory and storytelling. “A thread through a past life,” up at Middle […]

A banquet table of ceramic pieces is reminiscent of a Renaissance-era still life, featuring a wolf's decapitated head and entrails, a pig's head with an apple in its mouth, various cut fruits and a lobster.

Arts & Culture

Welcome to the underworld

by Annette LePique August 2, 2023July 27, 2023

The ceramicist Roxanne Jackson’s “Candle Holders for the Underworld,” up at Andrew Rafacz, is a bacchanal of color, texture, and form. Massive ceramic sculptures dominate the gallery and tell stories of monsters, lovers, and debauchery. These are rituals and rites where the heat of both sex and violence burn. Animal entrails and ripe fruit glisten […]

On the walls are five paintings on paper, with yellow and black abstract marks, taped to the wall with black tape. On the floor is a stack of artists books on newsprint

Arts & Culture

The waves

by Annette LePique August 1, 2023October 16, 2023

The elements water and air both seem to possess an aloof quality. They lurk until they want their presence known, like a hurricane. Water drips through our synapses and air expands our lungs like bellows. We’re beings of water and air, held aloft by the systems we create to corral waves and tame winds. This […]

A group of people sit in front of a large screen, watching the software poem. The room is filled with yellow and orange light from the screen. The motherboard is mounted on the wall to the left.

Arts & Culture

Inside the currents of life

by Annette LePique July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

On a page in Donald Barthelme’s 1974 book Guilty Pleasures, there is a collage of a collision between two ships. Under the graphite lines of their hulls, the words “not our fault!” ring like a bell. In artist Mark Fingerhut’s software poem “HALCYON.EXE: THE RIDE,” currently up at Sulk Chicago, two cargo freighters, with a […]

On the gallery wall, a red painting shows abstracted figures on the left. On the right hangs a framed color photo of red roses laying on the ground, their petals strewn around.

Arts & Culture

Staying grounded

by Annette LePique July 24, 2023July 21, 2023

In the exhibition notes for “Fondage,” currently up at Purple Window Gallery, an epigraph from the book The Laws of Love compares the work of human relationships to the work of gardening. While that particular metaphor has long made the rounds within the realm of popular psychology, it is useful to keep in mind when […]

The gallery gallery has its overhead lights off and a black light on. On the floor a cross shaped flat sculpture is illuminated by the light, in purple, blue and green tones, as are spots on the floor that look like stars or constellations in the sky.

Arts & Culture

Space race

by Annette LePique June 16, 2023June 27, 2023

The Kepler Mission was NASA’s first attempt at finding planets with the potential to support life in our galaxy. Scientific maps, governmental documents, and business (yes, business) contracts commonly present data from the mission in the form of a cross; this cross is the space we know the best within the Milky Way. Such knowledge […]

a collage of five faces of elder trans people with trans-flag pink and blue circles

News & Politics

Trans elders are revolutionaries

by Taryn Allen, Annette LePique, Kat Sachs, Hannah Edgar and Katie Prout June 15, 2023June 16, 2023

The following five profiles feature trans and genderqueer elders in Chicago as they reflect on identity and joy this Pride Month.

A sculpture sits on a wooden table with a wall outlet behind it. The base is a round black circle, and a golden rod extends up from the base, above which are two layers of acrylic with a gold animal head at the top.

Arts & Culture

The alchemy of everyday happiness

by Annette LePique June 12, 2023June 27, 2023

Do you possess a talisman, a lucky charm? Like the amulets of history and myth, these objects can be the beads you wore, the fragrance you sprayed, the ceramic shard you grasped during moments of triumph and survival: the alchemy of everyday happiness. It’s this shared history that imbues these items with their energy, their […]

Close up photo shows a chain of crystals lined along the wooden baseboard of the gallery.

Arts & Culture

Obfuscation as survival

by Annette LePique May 31, 2023May 31, 2023

As the womxn of Ruschwoman gallery are much smarter than I, I could not tell you what the “game of pearls” entails in the gallery’s current show: “The Game of Pearls, Prune de Madame, and Other Phantasia (As Confided to the Rusch Womxn).” However, for an exhibition as intricately laced as this one—featuring art as […]

On the right of the frame sits a large black soft floor sculpture in the shape on a whale's tail. To its left hangs a soft sculpture in the shape if an eye. On the walls of the gallery are a series of frames collages by James Hosking.

Arts & Culture

Common threads

by Annette LePique May 22, 2023October 16, 2023

Picture a strand of thread, feel it in your hands, make a knot. In Japanese folklore, there is a story that each and every person is born with a red thread around their finger. This thread connects them to another person: a pair destined to make indelible marks on the lives of one another. In […]

On the left side of the photo is an orange paraffin sculpture of an armless torso. To the right, on the wall are two black and white drawings of figures in repose.

Arts & Culture

Seeing double

by Annette LePique May 19, 2023May 22, 2023

Pleasure is unruly, sometimes fickle, and always ungovernable. These are the joys that aren’t beholden to any algorithmic assignation; they’re not necessarily good for you, they don’t materially or superficially “support” you, and neither do they usually make sense. Artist Iris Bernblum intimately understands such frictions, the spaces between what we say we want and […]

Installation photo shows two paintings hanging across from each other in the corner of the gallery. The walls are brown, with vertical dark brown lines and one dark horizontal line. The large paintings are in whites and blues, depicting cold, arctic scenes.

Arts & Culture

Searching for enlightenment

by Annette LePique April 21, 2023April 19, 2023

Artist Theodora Allen’s work has long reminded me of the Major Arcana tarot or a deck of playing cards; her paintings, both intimate and grand, are worlds ripe with hidden meanings. This merge of the physical with the metaphysical produces an uncanny sensation in the viewer. One might reasonably expect The Lovers, The Queen of […]

On the left panel, a person covered head to toe in a pink bodysuit reclines on a chaise longue. They hold a pink balloon and have cucumber slices over their eyes.

Arts & Culture

‘Serenity, NOW’

by Annette LePique April 6, 2023April 5, 2023

“SPACORE,” a group show curated by Serena JV Elston and Rudolf Lingens, is anarchically funny. Currently up at Co-Prosperity, the exhibition’s 45 artists utilize humor to reveal the hollow white supremacist capitalist fantasies that uphold the personal wellness industry. Through the collective’s desire to “situate wellness within the horror genre,” they present a model of […]

Photographs shows a vast wall of books, and a table featuring books in the foreground. On the table is a sign that reads "Abortion is older than the church and police and much more popular."

Best of Chicago

Best bookstore tote bag

by Annette LePique April 5, 2023April 9, 2023

This is not just a tote bag (though their new caterpillar design by the local Bear Wood Editions is adorable and helps support the Atlanta Solidarity Fund). Pilsen Community Books is a neighborhood bookstore that actually serves their neighborhood. Located on 18th Street in Pilsen, PCB offers a variety of bilingual programming (book clubs and […]