Culture of Chicago - Visual Arts

Visual Arts

Main article: Visual arts of Chicago

Chicago is home to a lively fine arts community. The highest concentration of contemporary art galleries can be found in the River North neighborhood, though a great amount of arts activity also centers around the area around Wicker Park. Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo"," and arts pioneers such as Stanislav Szukalski who were tied to the "Chicago Renaissance" helped to fashion the city into a nexus for new trends in art.

Chicago has long had a strong tradition of figurative surrealism, as in the works of Ivan Albright and Ed Paschke. In 1968 and 1969, members of the Chicago Imagists, such as Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Robert Lostutter, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi produced bizarre representational paintings. Today Robert Guinan paints gritty realistic portraits of Chicago people which are popular in Paris, although he is little known in Chicago itself.

These same impulses also appeared in Chicago's lively Street photography scene, gaining notoriety through artists centered around the Institute of Design such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Leon Lewandowski as well as in the work of nanny-savant Vivian Maier. Bob Thall's beautiful, bleak photographs of Chicago-area architecture have also won much acclaim.

Chicago has a Percent for Art program of public artworks, although it is notoriously more opaque and secretive than that of most other cities; arts activist such as Paul Klein and attorney Scott Hodes have long criticised its lack of public accountability.

Chicago is home to a number of large, outdoor works by well known artists. These include the Chicago Picasso, MirĂ³'s Chicago, Flamingo and Flying Dragon by Alexander Calder, Monument with Standing Beast by Jean Dubuffet, Batcolumn by Claes Oldenburg, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor, Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa, and the Four Seasons mosaic by Marc Chagall.

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