Curator

Intersect Chicago | Brief Prologue

Academic

collector

gallerist

Kimathi Mafafo

Audio commentary

This vibrant embroidered panel produced by the emerging South African artist, presents meticulously embroidered flowers that surround a black female character. Many of Mafafo’s artworks are partly autobiographical and tell the story of a woman withdrawing from the urban lifestyle and finding strength in nature and within herself. 

Ebony Curated

Awaiting I

Ray Spillenger

Described as “the most brilliant unknown painter of his generation” Spillenger  studied with de Kooning and Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, and worked prolifically during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting masterfully with Abstraction Expressionism. The extremely private artist, who passed away in 2014, left paintings and drawings in his rent-controlled apartment on New York’s Lower East Side which are now being properly studied and are receiving the attention they deserve.

Hirschl & Adler Modern

Untitled (Zig 1)

Allan McCollum

Since the 70s, Allan McCollum has been developing mass production systems that have enabled him to analyse and critically assess the status of the work of art. This Drawings series was begun by McCollum in 1989 and constitutes around five thousands of drawings of black abstract shapes on a white background. From a collection of templates designed by the artist, assistants produced by hand hundreds of variations and distortions in order to obtain a multitude of drawings that are never repeated. Each drawing in the series is therefore a unique work. Here the mass becomes a collection of unique items, which differ from each other only by minute variations.

Krakow Witkin Gallery

Collection of Sixty Drawings

Natalie Baxter

Using sewing and quilting techniques learned from her Appalachian grandmother, Baxter’s work explores issues of weaponry, violence and gender stereotypes. The artist creates soft sculptures that playfully push controversial political issues. Her Warm Gun series reflect on the United States’ complicated relationship with guns; many of these pieces are modeled after actual weapons used in recent US mass shootings.

Elijah Wheat Showroom

Mandy

Bosco Sodi

Sodi is known for his craggy, volcanic paintings – made with saturated pigments and natural fibers like sawdust and coconut. The Mexican artist has admited to being more interested in the process of making his artworks than the outcome, in Sodi's own words “I love to research and test, much more like a laboratory. My work deals with the temporality of life, the connection to nature, and passing of time. The works are not controlled by me. There are similarities between my paintings to what happens in nature." 

Galería Hilario Galguera

Untitled  

Joaquim Tenreiro

Designed by the Brazilian master designer Joaquim Tenreiro, this chair presents traight lines in the frame and back, and was made of straw and tropical hardwood to suit the  hot climate of Brazil. Tenreiro championed furniture that was “formally light”, and designed furniture for modern architects like Oscar Niemeyer. 

Nilufar Gallery

Cadeira baixa para quarto

Frank Jones

Jones descended from a long line of Southern slaves who resettled in Texas to make a living picking cotton, he spent the majority of his adult life in and out of prison, and is nowadays acclaimed for his remarkable drawings in colored pencil on paper which are well known amongst informed collectors and specialists in the outsider-art field.

Carl Hammer Gallery

Devil n House

Alia Ali

Ali addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. 

Galerie SINIYA28

Chevron Indigo Series

František Vizner

Vízner trained at the Specialized School of Glassmaking in Železný Brod, and then he studied at the renowned Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. He is known for his glassworks, and specialized in innovative hot-sculpting and blowing processes. 

Habatat Estates

Green Bowl XVI 143-16

Yanira Collado

Collado is interested in the reconfiguration of objects that speak metaphorically of time. Her use of construction materials summons the perception of a displaced personal and public history.

Emerson Dorsch

Untitled

Villanueva, an art historian and independent curator, selected 10 fine and decorative artworks exhibited at Intersect Chicago 2020. Amongst the pieces selected is a drawing by a Texan outsider artist born in 1900, a Brazilian modernist chair , a painting by an underrecognized abstract expressionist of the New York school, and an embroidery by a South African contemporary artist amongst other relevant works.

Intersect Chicago | Brief Prologue

Curated by Isabela Villanueva