PRESS: Artforum on Black Is, Black Ain't

Black Is, Black Ain't was chosen as a Critics' Pick on Artforum.com. Britany Salsbury writes:

"Black Is, Black Ain't," illuminates both the complexity of racial discourse and its continued necessity.

Read the full article on Artforum's website.

The Wrens Study Break

Events at The Renaissance Society

View details for each event on our events calendar

LECTURE: Race: Effects and Intent
Tuesday, May 6, 6:00 pm
Jeffrey Grogger

STUDENT MIXER
Thursday, May 15, 6:30 pm
hosted by The Wrens

PANEL DISCUSSION: Roots Revival
Friday, May 16, 6:00 pm
Saidiya Hartman
Rick Kittles

POETRY READING
Sunday, May 18, 2:00 pm
Tyehimba Jess

LECTURE: The Black Eclectic...Revisited
Wednesday, May 21, 6:00 pm
Travis Jackson

STAGED READING: Orenthal by Maarten van Hinte
Thursday, May 29, 8:00 pm
Directed by Ron Parson

PANEL: Post-Black: There and Back Again
Sunday, June 1, 2:00 pm
Darby English, Kerry James Marshall, Kym Pinder, and Greg Foster Rice

LECTURE: Erasing Race: Transforming public housing in Chicago
Thursday, June 5, 6:00 pm
Janet Smith

LECTURE: From the Moynihan Report to Obama's Candidacy
Sunday, June 8, 2:00 pm
Camille Charles and Lawrence Bobo

LINKS: Black Is, Black Ain't

Terry Adkins
The Black Factory
Hank Willis Thomas
The Ballad of Emmet Till at Goodman Theatre
Hyde Park Art Center

Black Is, Black Ain't

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this exhibition will explore a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. The exhibition will bring together works by over 20 black and non-black artists whose work together examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called “blackness” is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant.

Artists Include: Terry Adkins, Edgar Arceneaux, Elizabeth Axtman, Jonathan Calm, Paul D'Amato, Deborah Grant, Todd Gray, Shannon Jackson, Thomas Johnson, Jason Lazarus, David Levinthal, Glenn Ligon, David McKenzie, Rodney McMillian, Jerome Mosley, Virginia Nimarkoh, Demetrius Oliver, Sze Lin Pang, Carl Pope, William Pope.L, Robert A. Pruitt, Randy Regier, Daniel Roth, Joanna Rytel, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas.

Please join us for the opening reception Sunday April 20, 2008, 4 to 7 pm, with a discussion with the artists from 5 to 6 pm.

PRESS: Artforum on Katerina Seda

Read James Yood's review of Katerina Seda's exhibition "It Doesn't Matter" at The Renaissance Society in the April Issue of Artfroum.

The exhibition...was presented as the work of Katerina Seda, not her grandmother, and begged to be interpreted less a the discovery of some visionary portraitist of the mid-twentieth-century hardware than as a representation of an artist generating work through social activity.

PRESS: Trisha Donnelly

Check out the latest review of Trisha Donnelly's exhibit in Time Out Chicago. Read it online now.

THE RADIO: Jack Quartet

Jack Quartet
98.7 WFMT

Listen to Andrew Patner's excellent commentary on the JACK Quartet's performance at The Renaissance Society.

Listen online now

PRESS: Trisha Donnelly

The Chicago Tribune reviews Trisha Donnelly at The Renaissance Society:

Everybody ends up being mystified to some degree, which, of course, is fine for the artist as long as everybody continues to believe in the mystery.

Read the full article here.

VIRTUAL TOUR: Trisha Donnelly

UPCOMING EVENTS

March 4: Reading, Carla Harryman, 5:30 pm
March 7: Staged Reading, Memory Play by Carla Harryman, 8:00 pm
March 13: Concert, JACK String Quartet, 8:00 pm
March 15: Concert, Ensemble Dal Niente, 8:00 pm
March 16: Concert, Millenium Chamber Players, 7:00 pm
March 18: Concert, Ossatura with Ensemble Noamnesia, 8:00 pm
March 30: Reading, Helen Mirra , 2:00 pm

Go to the calendar for more information about each event.

NEW: Google Events Calendar

Keep up to date with our new Google Events Calendar. Select "Add to my Calendar" to add particular events of interest to your own calendar.

NEXT UP: Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly
February 24 - April 6, 2008

Tell me why the ivy twines? As if it needs a reason. Trisha Donnelly’s work does not defy reason, but like the rhetorical response to that question, it doesn’t need it. Accountable to nothing or no one, her work is refreshingly free to roam, whether it is driven by slight whim, vague urge, or calculated thought. Likewise, it can assume any form-installation, video, sound, photographs, drawing, language, and or performance. All possibilities are open for the production of a poetry that however slight or obscure remains poetry nonetheless. Always specific, Donnelly’s work attenuates thought toward the precipitation of meaning as it resides ever so subtly around us.

Opening reception Sunday February 24, 2008, 4 to 7 pm, with a discussion with the artist from 5 to 6 pm.

ON TV: Kateřina Šedá

Gallery Walkthrough on CAN-TV, Channel 21
Sunday, January 20th @ 3:00pm

Watch a gallery walkthrough with the artist Katerina Seda and curator Hamza Walker this Sunday at 3 pm on CAN-TV21. Seda will speak about her project It Doesn't Matter on display at The Renaissance Society until February 10th.

Find schedule updates and a full list of showtimes here.

Watch the gallery walkthrough online now here.

PRESS: Kateřina Šedá

Alan Artner in the Chicago Tribune: It Doesn't Matter an "enthralling exhibition organized by The Renaissance Society," read the full article here

Also read the reviews in TimeOut and New City

THE RADIO: Kateřina Šedá

International Three to See
Chicago Public Radio
Friday, January 11 @ 8pm
WBEZ 91.5 FM

This week on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight, Matt Cunningham and Hamza Walker will discuss Katerina Seda's exhibition at The Renaissance Society as part of the 32C segment.

Listen now online at CPR's website.

INSTALLATION: Kateřina Šedá

This week we've been hanging hundreds of drawings for our new exhibit Kateřina Šedá, It Doesn't Matter, play the slideshow below to check out images of the installation. The show opens this Sunday, January 6th, from 4 to 7 pm, Šedá will be giving a presentation on her past projects from 5:00 - 6:30 pm in Cobb 307.

LINKS: Kateřina Šedá

Frieze

Arratia, Beer

OPENING: Kateřina Šedá, It Doesn't Matter

Opening reception Sunday January 6, 2008, 4 to 7 pm, with a discussion with the artist from 5 to 6:30 pm.

Czech artist Kateřina Šedá’s primary media are her friends, family, and community of her native town Líšeň. Šedá uses performance, staged activities, and public interventions to reactivate social concourse as it is the basis for a sense of self predicated on group identification. The Society will present It Doesn’t Matter, a series of over 600 drawings executed by Šedá’s 77-year-old grandmother, cataloging in size and type the various tools and supplies sold through the Brno hardware shop her grandmother managed for over thirty years under communism. While therapeutic in intent, the result is a profound reflection on memory and subjectivity as expressed through, rather than in spite of, alienation.