Art

Photographs of the public art project of Chicago's painted cows.

From the back cover:"The Studio Reader pulls back the curtain to reveal the activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their entire lives? This forward-thinking anthology brings together artists, curators, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually at the center of an art world that increasingly crosses institutions, markets, and disciplines."

Jun Fujita (1888-1863) was a poet and photographer born outside of Hiroshima, Japan. As a teenager, he emigrated to Canada where he worked as a laborer and train porter in British Columbia. By 1909 he had made his way to Chicago, where he found employment briefly as an actor, and the more enduringly as a photographer for the Chicago Evening Post. In the twenties, Fujita's poems began appearing in Poetry, and in 1923 he published his only book, Tanka: Poems in Exile. Although Fujita is remembered for taking some of the most indelible and horrifying images of the early twentieth century, in his poems and private photography his central fascination was with the natural world. Writing about his relationship to wild flowers, Fujita notes: "I feel that moods are beyond the reach of the camera. But I feel words are too crude for the delicate moods of wild flowers. Whether I have succeeded in portraying the moods of these wild flowers I am not sure. I am trying."

Interviews with visitors who attend a court session at 2600 S. California Ave, then eat a meal with the author at El Milagro.

Overview of meal-based residency program held at Joong Boo Market. Author chooses artists, then they meet and discuss art over a meal.

From dust cover: " Every day, young Charles White's mother takes him to the Chicago Public Library where the librarians look after him until she picks him up again after work, at six o' clock. At the library, Charles looks carefully at the picture books the librarians give him and also at the people around him, later drawing what he sees on scraps of paper at home...Ultimately, Charles becomes a great artist whose works now hang in museums throughout the United States."

Exhibit catalogue of Nick Cave's work exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2006

Documentation of art installed at every CTA station, published by CTA

"Our project Refuse, Refuse, doesn't sit all that comfortably with...ideas...that insist that the mechanisms that created global warming and other ecological disasters are the ones to solve them. We think that our engineering practices have brought us to our current environmental and cultural situation and that there is no better way to deal with the constant stream of waste running out of our factories than to stop, to refuse refuse. We are both attracted and repelled to the idea of creating a solution out of the problem. Being able to create a new home out of recycled materials, or to inject the atmosphere with tiny reflectors to redirect heat away from the planet are both beautiful and Sisyphean. In this book, you will find experiments with trash in Chicago and Aberdeen." (abstract is taken from the first page of the zine.)

"Library Excavations #9 goes digging into the Chicago Artist Files at Harold Washington Library. A slightly more fancy edition than usual. In addition to a five page essay there are 20 full color pages representing obscure printed ephemera by as unusual and diverse an array of Chicago artists as you should expect from Public Collectors." (abstract taken from https://halfletterpress.com/library-excavations-9-chicagos-filed-artists/)