Review: ‘City in a Garden' spans decades of local LGBTQ art and activism at the MCA

Chicago Tribune

4 days ago

This summer in Chicago, three of the city's most prominent art spaces are presenting major exhibitions with LGBTQ themes. One is scholarly: 'The First Homosexuals,' featuring hundreds of artworks that explore the creation of homosexuality as an identity between the years 1869 and 1939, at Wrightwood 659. One is historical: 'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men,' a blockbuster touring retrospective on the Impressionist master, disappointingly retitled by the Art Institute as 'Painting His World.' One brings it all up to date and back home: the MCA's 'City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago,' a messy, exuberant gathering of painting, sculpture, photography, film and ephemera stretching from the 1980s to the present day.
Art exhibitions do not happen overnight. They take years of planning, especially when they involve deep research and international loans. A confluence of such shows on a related subject is a rare occurrence, worth paying attention to as evidence of profound cultural shifts. In Chicago right now, the evidence points to the importance and durability of LGBTQ rights and realities, despite aggressive conservative political agendas.
Much of what makes 'City in a Garden' so contemporary is the wide embrace of the word 'queer' taken by curator Jack Schneider, who organized the exhibit with Korina Hernandez. Once an insult applied to gays and lesbians, the term was reclaimed starting in the '80s and has since expanded beyond same-sex sexuality to include any sexual orientation or gender identity not corresponding to heterosexual norms — but also, more broadly, to a general refusal of categorization and mainstreaming. So 'City in a Garden' is only partly a survey of art made by artists who identify as gay, lesbian or transgender; it is also, more experimentally, a consideration of artworks that are themselves queer in one way or another.
Sometimes the relevance is clear, like a quartet of photos taken by Doug Ischar in 1985 of men tanning and embracing on the Belmont Rocks, a gay beach scene the artist documented as much as belonged to. Diana Solis, Patric McCoy and Luis Medina also photographed their own communities and spaces. But sometimes the criteria for inclusion are murkier, as in Catherine Opie's opalescent views of Lake Michigan, one for each season, hung with their horizons in line. Opie rose to prominence for her formal studio portraits of California's queer communities, but she is also a serious landscape photographer, and the curators ask interesting questions by putting that work here. Does Opie reveal something radical about the lake through the way she frames it, as an ever-changing entity of constant fluidity? Could Lake Michigan be queer?
Throughout the show, tension recurs between fabulousness and death. It probably could not be otherwise, given that the show's timeline begins amid the AIDS crisis; too many of the artists, and those they pictured, did not survive that era, or they did but died years later from complications related to living with HIV/AIDS. Roger Brown's 1983 disco painting of a skeleton in a naughty leather cap embodies both extremes. Chiffon Thomas' silicone cast of a torso — blackened with charcoal dust, pounded with nails and braced with rebar — exists somewhere painful but consensual between S&M culture and transition surgery. Even Nick Cave's gorgeous 'Soundsuit' from 2008, a sculpture that outfits its wearer in a head-to-toe bodysuit of crochet doilies, includes an upper-body cage abloom in tin flowers. That might not be death, but it's a whole lot of difficulty and claustrophobia masked by beauty.
Likewise Guanyu Xu's takeover of his parents' Beijing dining room from the 2018 photography series 'Temporary Censored Home': though living in Chicago as a gay man, Xu had not come out to his parents and could only fully inhabit their apartment when they were out and he fleetingly filled a room with images of his foreign life and work.
Some of the most exciting artworks here are strange, hybrid things. Faysal Altunbozar's bird feeders-cum-dildos offer hilarious tribute to one of Chicago's most scenic cruising spots, the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary. Mary Stoppert's puzzling sculpture of a spiked hand emerging from a white calla lily, all expertly carved from a single block of wood, teases delightfully. It is unclear what exactly Jeanne Dunning has photographed in 'The Pink,' a 6-foot-tall photograph of a glistening, oozy red substance that nauseates with its subcutaneous fleshiness but might be just grapefruit segments. William J. O'Brien clutters a table with his own weight in mementoes and his unabashedly bright, ugly ceramics in a speculative self-portrait arguably more accurate than a typical likeness.
At the heart of the exhibition are local collectives. Some used artsy tactics for political action, others political tools for art making. From 1993-95, the group Haha maintained a storefront in Rogers Park that grew hydroponic greens and herbs for HIV/AIDS patients, providing free biweekly meals and events. In 2004, the Pilot TV collective came together in a Bridgeport three-flat over four intense days to temporarily create a cooperative 'transfeminist' television studio, producing 35 talk shows, cooking classes, dramas and more.
Most crucial of all was ACT/UP Chicago, part of a national grassroots network whose members worked tirelessly, creatively and at great risk to bring attention to the AIDS crisis as it was being fatally ignored by the U.S. government. A sprawling, glam newspaper collage by Hunter Reynolds commemorates the chapter's work, as does a display case full of ephemera, the highlight of which is a T-shirt showing a woman with her face buried in another woman's crotch under the words 'Power Breakfast.' Designed by Mary Patten and Jeanne Kracher, it was a fundraising bestseller.
Imaging the future of trans healthcare — and plastering it across the MCA'City in a Garden' ends on a dreamy but utterly knowing note. How could it not, given the extraordinary advances in queer rights and protections achieved since the Reagan era and the enormous threats currently posed by the Trump administration? Four cheery architectural renderings from Edie Fake's 'Memory Palace' series fictionalize bold storefronts for real organizations from Chicago's LGBTQ past that, like the abortion counseling service Jane, necessarily existed mostly underground. In many places in the U.S. today, they have to all over again. The final artwork is Paul Heyer's shimmery painting of a cowboy, larger than life, gently crouching to scoop water from the ground. It would be simply romantic except for five huge white circles that sit atop the image and threaten to obliterate it. That must never happen, and with shows like 'City in a Garden' to help remember and envision, it surely won't.