Kirjahaku

Some Kind of Duty features all new handmade weavings by Chicago-based artist Karolina Gnatowski, known as kg. In monumental and small-scale tapestries, kg, anAmerican artist who was born in Poland incorporates references ranging from Polish immigration, badminton, Jim Morrison, and feminist fiber artists to addiction, mourning, and their pet. The artist’s keen attention to the details of life’s coincidences and moments of intersection finds a fitting form in their reverence for the history of tapestry weaving, and the evidence of everyday life incorporated into the artist’s work makes their weavings an offering to those both living and dead. This catalog accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, and it features full-color plates of the works on view, an interview between the artist and DPAM Director and Chief Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, an essay by K. L. H. Wells, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and poems written by the artist to accompany each work.

An experimental “expanded catalog” chronicling the recent work and 2018 solo exhibition of artist Beverly Fresh, Really Somethin Else not only documents and contextualizes the work in the exhibition, but also includes research, sketches, production stills, inspirations, and other works not on view in the exhibition. In these works, artist, musician, and back-road drifter Beverly Fresh takes on the incongruities, social rituals, and archetypes of the rural Midwest. Drawing from age-old performance traditions, juvenile graffiti, backyard debauchery, adult social clubs, amateur living room theater, and pig wrestling, the exhibition is a keyed-up regurgitation of rural Midwestern symbols, behaviors, and vernacular. Plentiful color images are accompanied by essays from Julie Rodrigues Widholm, H. Peter Steeves, and Greg Scott. The catalog, designed by Beverly Fresh himself, carries the distinct personality and aesthetic sensibility of the exhibition.

Chicago-based artist Barbara Jones-Hogu (1938–2017) was a central figure of the Black Arts Movement and a founding member of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA). Throughout her career she worked in painting, printmaking, film, education, and contributed to major projects including Chicago’s Wall of Respect mural. The Barbara Jones-Hogu: Resist, Relate, Unite catalog is the first monograph of Barbara Jones-Hogu’s work. The book includes a foreword by DPAM Director and Chief Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, essays by Tate Modern curator Zoé Whitley and Chicago artist Faheem Majeed, an interview with the artist by art historian Rebecca Zorach, and 22 illustrated plates, a selected bibliography, exhibition history, and checklist. The limited edition catalog was designed by Matt Austin of Candor Arts and features a hand silk screened cover.

Dianna Frid's sculptures, installations, artist's books, and mixed media work explore the intersection of text and textile, matter and subject matter. Richard Rezac has created thought-provoking abstract object-sculptures since the 1980s. This book, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, brings together works by both of these Chicago-based artists. In doing so, Dianna Frid + Richard Rezac: Split Complementary shines a light on their shared sensibilities a rigorous yet poetic approach that revels in the nuances of color, surface, and material. Frid's and Rezac's works appear here accompanied by rare books from DePaul University's John T. Richardson Library and a variety of objects from the DePaul Art Museum's permanent collection. The juxtaposition of objects made by artists, craftspeople, and bookbinders generates affinities that broaden how we see and understand all of the work assembled in these pages. Complementing each other formally, these pieces offer opportunities to find familiar patterns in unfamiliar forms and surprising connections between dissimilar objects.