The fact that Paul Klee (1879-1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered – un...

"A Lived Practice" examines the reciprocal relationship of art and life: Artist-practitioners are shaped by their experiences, and they in turn create and enhance the experience of others. Based on a symposium held at the School of the Art Institute...

Socially engaged art, though its transformative practice, shapes the institutions that surround it. And in a city famous for both its physical and political structures, few creative communities are as deeply intertwined with a city's framework than t...

"Afterall", a journal of contemporary art, provides a forum for analysis of art's context and seeks to inspire artists to see art as an agency for change. Each issue contains in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists, along with ess...

This collection offers a new look at American artist John La Farge (1835-1910) and his lifelong efforts to visualize the sacred. Most clearly reflected in his ecclesiastical paintings and stained glass windows, the latter of which appear in churches...

On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement.  "The Freedom Principle", which accompanies an exhibition on t...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! What is it about human beings that makes us creative, able to imagine and enact new possibilities for life and new solutions to problems in a way that no other animal can? The authors incl...

The Western discovery of Japanese paintings at nineteenth-century world's fairs and export shops catapulted Japanese art to new levels of international popularity. With that popularity, however, came criticism, as Western writers began to lament a pe...

Chicago-based artist Helen Mirra creates works that explore the relationship between the natural world and the everyday lives and activities of the people who live in it. Aesthetically minimalist, her works deploy repetition and a large range of refe...

Though largely out of the public eye for more than a century, Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) has come to be recognized as one of the most dynamic and original artists of the impressionist movement in Paris. His paintings are favorites of museum-goer...