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Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Letters: Why the Art Institute's handling of Gustave Caillebotte's sexuality is disappointing
We read with interest Hannah Elgar's feature 'How light a touch is too light?' (Aug. 3) about the handling of Gustave Caillebotte's sexuality by the Art Institute and the renaming of the exhibition 'Painting His World.' We were especially struck by the comments from Jonathan Katz because of our experience visiting the Caillebotte exhibit and 'The First Homosexuals' at Wrightwood 659, curated by Katz. I am a scholar of anti-discrimination law (and a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago School of Law), and my husband, David, is a teacher and student of art history. While we enjoyed the Caillebotte exhibit very much, we were disappointed at its elliptical (at best) treatment of Caillebotte's sexuality, for two reasons. It seemed insensitive to the realities of class, which in large part enabled Caillebotte to paint what he wished without worrying about sales or a disapproving public. But worse, one of our closest friends, Mark Brosmer, is a gay artist in Los Angeles — and an exhibit curated this way all but denies the artistic legacy of gay artists and gay life throughout history. In many of Caillebotte's paintings, we recognized a loving depiction of the sociability of gay men together in the past, something we have observed and enjoyed in the present day. 'The First Homosexuals,' by contrast, enthusiastically explores that legacy, helping the viewer to understand which artists felt freer to express their same-sex orientation in their art, and why; what those risks were and who was willing to take those risks. We immediately thought, 'Caillebotte belongs here!' — in an exhibit where the sensual, erotic and homosocial dimensions of his work and life could be foregrounded and celebrated. We hope many Chicagoans felt the her review of the Gustave Caillebotte show now on view at the Art Institute, Hannah Edgar questions the museum's decision to change the title of the exhibit from 'Caillebotte: Painting Men,' used by the Getty and Musee d'Orsay, to 'Caillebotte: Painting His World.' Her article explores whether this title change is based on an Art Institute decision to downplay the homoerotic aspects of some of the paintings. This change of title and emphasis strike me as minor considering that all three museums have displayed the same paintings and offered the same biographical information. There is a lack of evidence that Caillebotte was gay. Which makes the assertion of an art historian Edgar consults — that this is an example of queer erasure and is consistent with the Art Institute's pathological 1950s mindset — completely over the top and in fact a time when Catholics in Chicago are visibly proud of their religion, it is shameful than one organization has chosen to focus on the worst parts of their history. On May 8, Robert Prevost was elected as Pope Leo XIV, and the Chicago papers claimed him as 'Chicago's pope.' Everyone, no matter what their religion, was proud that Chicago could produce a man who was elevated to the papacy. Then in June, Chicago recognized the good work of another Catholic, Sister Rosemary Connelly. For over 50 years, Connelly was a dynamic force building Misericordia into a healthy home for children and adults with physical and developmental challenges. Politicians and church leaders were effusive in their praise of her work, and Chicago papers gave extensive coverage as a real testament to her years of service to the church. Recently, the church was once again recognized as a beacon of hope when the news focused on the works two valiant nuns, Sister Patricia Murphy and Sister JoAnn Persch, after Murphy passed away. Both women were recognized for spending more than 40 years championing the rights of the poor and the immigrants. They spent long hours with immigrants in detention and found ways to house the asylum-seekers sent to Chicago by Texas Gov. Abbott. These three wonderful church champions have made all Catholics feel good about their church and have encouraged many to emulate their actions. That is why it is so disconcerting that the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, has chosen to grab the headlines by bringing up decades-old sexual abuse allegations. SNAP should continue to investigate these allegations, as it has been doing for the last many years, but it should do it quietly and stop grabbing the headlines and erasing the euphoric feelings of the Catholics in the Chicago Cubs will host the 2027 All-Star Game. It's about time the sport focuses its promotional energy on the upcoming event, rather than on special attraction games at a motor speedway park or a cornfield. I imagine a return to Hawaii or a game at an amusement park site is next. Wrigley Field is a showcase because it's a classic. Fans aren't clamoring for more bells and whistles. I hope Major League Baseball doesn't take it for granted.I won't be at Wrigley Field in 2027 for the All-Star Game, an ostentatious display of no consequence other than to line the pockets of sponsors and appease the egos of overpaid, uninterested athletes. But I agree with Jack Lavin's Aug. 5 op-ed ('MLB All-Star Game in 2027? Let's fly the 'W' for Chicago's economy') that it's good for the city and a chance to showcase the most iconic stadium in MLB. Sorry, Fenway Park, your Green Monster can't compete with Wrigley Field's ivy-covered walls. I hope the visitors enjoy the city and try a Chicago hot dog — with mustard, of course.
Chicago Tribune
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘City in a Garden' spans decades of local LGBTQ art and activism at the MCA
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.
Washington Post
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month
The dazzling variety of current and upcoming books on LGBTQ themes is a reassuring reminder of how far we've come. This year, fans of queer romance can read books set in the worlds of Formula 1 ('Crash Test'), clandestine Victorian clubs ('To Sketch a Scandal') and Italian restaurants ('Pasta Girls'). In July, Phaidon is publishing a lavish survey of global queer art as a companion piece to Jonathan D. Katz's Chicago exhibition 'The First Homosexuals,' while the queer Korean vampire murder mystery 'The Midnight Shift,' by Cheon Seon-Ran, will draw first blood in August. Joe Westmoreland's autofiction classic 'Tramps Like Us,' a sort of gay(er) 'On the Road' first published in 2001, is being reissued. Alison Bechdel is back. There are two new studies, one by Daniel Brook and another by Brandy Schillace, of the groundbreaking LGBTQ advocate and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose books were burned by the Nazis. Phil Melanson's entertaining historical fiction debut, 'Florenzer,' imagines the early life and same-sex longings of Leonardo da Vinci against the backdrop of a conflict between the Medici family and the Vatican. The novel, which owes a debt to Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' trilogy in the detail and immediacy of its telling, feels freshly contemporary in its papal intrigue and plutocratic power battles. These books — and those I discuss at greater length below — are variously warm, comic, sad, jubilant, curious, violent and erotic. Each has insights of its own to offer, but they're united by their awareness of the continuing vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people. 'Gaysians,' which is 'Flamer' author Mike Curato's first graphic novel for adults, doesn't shy away from violence, racism and transphobia, outside the community or within it. The colors of the trans flag give the book its dominant palette, working especially well for its many nightclub scenes. The story, about a group of young Asian Americans living in Seattle in 2003, is most powerful when Curato unleashes his more expressionistic side to capture different characters' traumatic flashbacks and glimpses of historical tragedy. But this darkness is offset by the story's cozy, reassuring focus on friendship and found family. Some may find Curato leaning too heavily on sentimentality — his 'gaysians' give themselves the cutesy name 'The Boy Luck Club,' riffing on Amy Tan's novel 'The Joy Luck Club,' and speak mostly in catty clichés, as if auditioning for 'Drag Race.' For me, this mawkish tendency stunted the book's emotional range. One of the most curious books of the season comes from 'the emerging field of queer ecology.' In 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature,' Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian makes a powerful case for trying to understand nature without the artificial binaries and hierarchies of human societies. Though she is, by training, a mycologist — a fungi specialist — she embraces all life forms, a disposition derived from her understanding of diversity being nature's 'very premise.' Sometimes this embrace borders on the erotic; one might well blush reading how, 'turgid with spring rains, mushrooms carefully arrange themselves into fruiting bodies, poking up through the soil to disperse their spores.' True to its nonbinary ethos, the book is really many things: an account of growing up in New York's Hudson Valley surrounded by snakes and slugs; a survivor's memoir about the path to healing following a childhood sexual assault; a story about growing to love one's own 'ambiguous,' 'amorphous,' 'amphibious' nature. It can sometimes feel a bit more like a manifesto than a work of science — 'How we treat swamps is an indicator of our societal health' is a typical assertion — but the radical-green politics are all part of the book's charm. And while Kaishian's inclination to romanticism occasionally threatens to undermine her mission as a scientist, as it does when she claims she'd prefer the mysteries of eel reproduction to remain outside human knowledge, it's nevertheless a fascinating book that celebrates difference in unexpected ways. I certainly know more about snail sexuality than I did before I opened it. One of the summer's most hotly anticipated titles is 'Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told.' Jeremy Atherton Lin's follow-up to 'Gay Bar,' for which he won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is a strong cocktail of memoir, legal history and sociology. He proceeds along parallel tracks to tell the romantic (and very horny) story of his relationship with a British man he met in 1996 and the jagged path taken by American and British legislatures and courts to eventually grant basic rights to people in same-sex relationships. 'We were aliens in each other's countries,' he writes, 'because in our own we remained second-class citizens.' Lin beautifully captures the Bay Area at the turn of the millennium: the creeping gentrification, the tech bros, the video shops, the aging hippies. He's also not shy in his descriptions of sex of many kinds and configurations, with all the attendant sensations. (At times you can almost smell it.) The liberated familiarity of these scenes in our less-prudish age makes it a little jarring when Lin reminds us of the difference a couple of decades make. 'By the year 2000,' he writes, 'when we rented our first weird, damp apartment, eighteen states still had sodomy laws on the books.' He and his boyfriend — who overstayed his visa by years to remain with Lin in California — dreaded immigration authorities so much that they became 'convinced you couldn't go to a hospital without being deported.' The metaphysical impact on Lin's boyfriend, who is addressed throughout in the second person, was drastic: 'I think after years without legal status, you sometimes considered yourself to be insubstantial.' Reading Lori Ostlund's excellent new short-story collection, 'Are You Happy?,' I found myself reflecting indignantly on the subtitle Lin chose for 'Deep House.' Surely laying claim to being the gayest love story ever told — or the gayest anything, however flippantly — risks devaluing that which isn't quite so … overt? Promiscuous? Coastal? Male? Though Ostlund's stories dwell less on heady sex and front-line politics, other hallmarks of the LGBTQ experience are everywhere present. Her protagonists have parents who never accepted them and colleagues they never told about their significant others. They sleep with their partners in the basement on separate couches when visiting home. Ostlund's stories may be less graphic than Lin's memoir, but there's nothing less gay about them. Besides, the lesbian couple that runs a furniture store named after Jane Bowles's 'Two Serious Ladies' could hardly be gayer — that's a pretty sapphic bit of branding. Don't let 'Are You Happy?' pass you by: There's not a word out of place in these brilliant Midwestern sketches. They're lonesome, for sure: Family members greet each other from a distance, 'like two people on opposite banks of a fast-flowing river.' But they're also hilarious. 'How is it possible,' one character wonders, 'for a family to have two stories about eating glass?' Also set a little further from the madding crowd is Seán Hewitt's first novel, 'Open, Heaven,' which takes place largely in a 'foggy northern village' in England. It's all a bit reminiscent of the film 'God's Own Country' — in rural Thornmere, to be gay is to be lonely and furtive — though with more longing and less flesh. As in Lin's 'Deep House,' we're reminded of how recently the culture has shifted toward tolerance. When James, our sensitive, stammering hero, comes out in 2002, Britain is still a year away from repealing Section 28, a sliver of legislation that effectively quashed discussion of sexuality in England's schools, and he is left feeling like a stranger in the only home he's ever known. While delivering milk bottles one morning before school, he meets Luke, a boy lodging with his aunt and uncle while his dad is in prison. Before long the strong-jawed Luke is all James can think about — but does Luke feel the same way? The book's appeal may depend on its readers' willingness to take adolescent romantic longing as seriously as we do when we're young. It succeeds because Hewitt knows when to stop — he casts a spell, like first love, that he knows can't last forever. Or can it? Throughout this short book, Hewitt muses on the passage of time, the way 'the years spin like this all of a sudden,' and considers how easy it might be for time to fold in on itself and the world to revert to an earlier state, taking us with it. The consequences of such a regression for our narrator, and for us all, are potentially dire. We have plenty of regressions to worry about outside of fiction, not least from the Supreme Court, which hinted only last year that it may be willing to revisit marriage equality. Progress in immigration reform also appears vulnerable: Lin, who finished 'Deep House' before January, has observed of the crackdown under Trump that 'our paranoia has become the reality.' Yet there is some consolation to be found, amid all this, in the humor, hope and humanity in the stories still being told. Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Afternoon Briefing: Illinois lawmakers pass Prisoner Review Board reforms
Good afternoon, Chicago. Illinois lawmakers advanced a bill that would emphasize domestic violence awareness training for members of the state's Prisoner Review Board, which came under criticism after releasing a man from state custody who then allegedly attacked a former girlfriend and fatally stabbed her young son. The bill's passage came 14 months after authorities say Crosetti Brand broke into his ex-girlfriend's apartment on Chicago's North Side and attacked her before fatally stabbing her son, 11-year-old Jayden Perkins, when the boy tried to come to her rescue. The 39-year-old Brand is on trial for the attack and Jayden's family has filed a lawsuit against the review board alleging negligence in the case. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into war-torn Gaza, decrying the violence and suffering in the Middle East during his first general audience as pope today in St. Peter's Square. Read more here. More top news stories: Judge acquits suburban men of aggravated battery, robbery in Mount Greenwood bar brawl AmeriCorps cuts leave Chicago programs serving kids facing diminished summer Country Club Hills District 160 Board spent $25K on conferences last year; parents raise concerns over school conditions Burton Odelson, the village attorney, told Elite Street that Dolton's recently sworn-in mayor, Jason House, made the decision to proceed with the acquisition with the consent of the Dolton Village Board. Read more here. More top business stories: Target sales drop in 1st quarter and retailer warns they will slip for all of 2025 Environmental advocates worry about Cleveland-Cliffs delayed maintenance Jameson Taillon (3-3) scattered one run and four hits over seven innings. The right-hander walked three and struck out two to snap a two-start losing streak. Read more here. More top sports stories: NFL teams can keep using the tush push after owners vote down proposed ban Man is charged with providing alcohol to 20-year-old Pittsburgh fan who fell from PNC Park outfield wall Some artworks bring the suppressed queerness of their makers or their subjects to the fore. 'The Man in Black' is a 1913 portrait of Art Institute benefactor Robert Henry Allerton by Glyn Philpot, an acclaimed British painter whose work appears throughout 'The First Homosexuals.' Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: 'Couples Therapy' review: The best unscripted show about working through conflict — while the cameras watch — returns for a new season Review: Tom Cruise holds the key to 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' With President Donald Trump's multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package at risk of stalling, House Speaker Mike Johnson and conservative Republican holdouts headed to the White House for the last-ditch talks to salvage the 'big, beautiful bill.' Read more here. More top stories from around the world: Iran insists it will never stop enriching uranium as US says it must if a new deal is to be reached Rapper Kid Cudi to testify at Sean 'Diddy' Combs trial this week
Chicago Tribune
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Afternoon Briefing: Illinois lawmakers pass Prisoner Review Board reforms
Good afternoon, Chicago. Illinois lawmakers advanced a bill that would emphasize domestic violence awareness training for members of the state's Prisoner Review Board, which came under criticism after releasing a man from state custody who then allegedly attacked a former girlfriend and fatally stabbed her young son. The bill's passage came 14 months after authorities say Crosetti Brand broke into his ex-girlfriend's apartment on Chicago's North Side and attacked her before fatally stabbing her son, 11-year-old Jayden Perkins, when the boy tried to come to her rescue. The 39-year-old Brand is on trial for the attack and Jayden's family has filed a lawsuit against the review board alleging negligence in the case. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into war-torn Gaza, decrying the violence and suffering in the Middle East during his first general audience as pope today in St. Peter's Square. Read more here. More top news stories: Burton Odelson, the village attorney, told Elite Street that Dolton's recently sworn-in mayor, Jason House, made the decision to proceed with the acquisition with the consent of the Dolton Village Board. Read more here. More top business stories: Jameson Taillon (3-3) scattered one run and four hits over seven innings. The right-hander walked three and struck out two to snap a two-start losing streak. Read more here. More top sports stories: Some artworks bring the suppressed queerness of their makers or their subjects to the fore. 'The Man in Black' is a 1913 portrait of Art Institute benefactor Robert Henry Allerton by Glyn Philpot, an acclaimed British painter whose work appears throughout 'The First Homosexuals.' Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: With President Donald Trump's multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package at risk of stalling, House Speaker Mike Johnson and conservative Republican holdouts headed to the White House for the last-ditch talks to salvage the 'big, beautiful bill.' Read more here. More top stories from around the world:
