ISSUE 17 // 6.3.2024

Installation shot of “System and Dialectics of Art,” open through June 14th at Madron Gallery

WHAT’S NEW?

What Is the Art of the Future?

It’s the very last question—#129—that John D. Graham poses in his 1937 System and Dialectics of Art. “It may be an art unthinkable to us now,” he writes, “perhaps a collective art, perhaps highly individual.” Either way, he imagines it will be both “pungent and relevant.” While we don’t have a Magic 8 Ball to say for certain where art is headed in the coming years (and we’re not necessarily sure we want that “pungent” aspect to be a big component), we do like to think that each of the 15 artists featured in our “System and Dialectics of Art” show holds a piece of the answer to Graham’s final question. If you haven’t made it in yet to see the exhibition, mark it in your calendar now as some art in YOUR future to look forward to. You’ve got just two more weeks before the show closes on June 14th.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Chick-ago

We’ve been holding this one close to the vest for a little while, but we are so excited to announce our upcoming fall show, a twofer featuring the work of Bernece Berkman-Hunter and Ethel Spears. A pair of female artists whose time in Chicago overlapped for a brief period in the 1930s and 40s, Berkman-Hunter and Spears possessed visions and understandings of the city that were specific, personal, and wildly different from one another. Berkman-Hunter’s fragmented and monumental depictions of social strife run in deep contrast to Spears’s humorous and hyper-detailed scenes of city parks, streets, and domestic interiors. An unlikely duo at first glance, the juxtaposition of extremes brings out a heightened effect in each artist’s work. Opening September 3, 2024 and running through late November.

WHAT’S THIS?

To Summer-ize

Your trusty newsletter writer will be taking off for the next few months. But worry not—Madron is very excited to be welcoming a summer intern who will be putting her own spin on the “The Fine Art of [ ]” essays in the interim. For now, I’ll leave you with a little summery offering from Harriet Randall Lumis, an image of a row of lobster shacks she created just a few years after beginning her studies under Hugh Breckenridge at his school in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. The wooden shacks are in varying degrees of disrepair, chewed up by wind and salt and time. A pale coastal light leans its way into early afternoon, a blue that’s cold enough to lend the scene an air of loneliness. It’s likely enough the lobstermen haven’t returned for the day—the 1920s saw the advent of gas engines being used in fishing vessels, allowing them to set traps further out to sea, making for longer days. So we wait on, watching as the grass and the purple shadows grow.