Böcker utgivna av Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago

The collected exhibition essays of Hamza Walker, former director of education at the Renaissance Society. Hamza Walker was director of education at the Renaissance Society for twenty-one years, between 1994 and 2015. During that time, he wrote essays about almost every single exhibition, both those he curated and many others curated by Suzanne Ghez. These texts were published first in the Renaissance Society's newsletters and then eventually on the exhibition posters, which were distributed far more widely.  In the course of this workman-like writing in the service of the institution, Walker developed not only his distinctive personal writing style and a keen eye but also a theory of what museum education could be and do. In his writing, Walker draws on his art's historical knowledge but looks equally to current events (both minutely local and international), insisting on the mutual relevance and related nature of the two. In Walker's own words, "If we're going to live up to the idea that art is for everybody, it needs a set of wider reference points," an emphasis that has arguably shaped the identity of the institution in turn. This book collects those essays together into a volume that celebrates Walker's brilliant, joyful, and generous writing. It also serves as a lively record of two decades of the Renaissance Society's exhibition programming and reflects the prevalent theories, issues, and fashions of the art world during that time, not to mention the events occurring in the wider world.

A companion to Aria Dean's Abattoir, U.S.A.! Aria Dean's moving image work Abattoir, U.S.A.!, presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Renaissance Society between February and April 2023, surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse was built and animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool for creating virtual environments. The viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture--a seamless combination of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces. Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings -whether as a metaphor or paradigm--as crucial to the construction of civil society. Abattoir, U.S.A.! also builds on Dean's own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture and the ways they reveal modernism's intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels. This book documents the exhibition as well as selected material from Dean's process and research. It includes essays by film scholar Erika Balsom, who writes on the history of abattoirs and their relation to modernism, Afropessimist theory, and the dehumanizing rationality of capitalism. Architect and writer Keller Easterling contributes a quasi-fictional text from her ongoing series of Draft Teenage Essays, which are part of her collection of experimental writings titled No One Thing. This volume also includes transcripts of two conversations: one between Dean and film historian Bruce Jenkins in which they discuss Dean's work in relation to historical avant-garde films; and another with Dean and co-director of Rhizome Michael Connor, media artist Filip Kostik, and composer Evan Zierk, who created the soundtrack for Abattoir, U.S.A.! Together they discuss the technical process of using Unreal Engine and the nature of virtuality.

A catalog of an exhibition by contemporary artist Max Guy that uses The Wizard of Oz as a way to ask questions about society and culture. This book accompanies Max Guy's exhibition "But tell Me, is it a civilized country?," an installation of new works centered on The Wizard of Oz. The title is drawn from a conversation between the Witch of the North and Dorothy in which the Witch defines "civilized" as not including magic. Anchored in Chicago-where L. Frank Baum's novel was written and first published, and home to enduring monuments to Oz fandom-the exhibition and book bridge the parallel universes of the Emerald City and its birthplace, drawing out the traces each carries of the other. A number of latent currents course underneath the work: critical perspectives on modernist urbanism, the peculiar products of fan culture, and the transformative power of storytelling and other acts of world-making. This catalog features essays by artist and writer Brit Barton and the exhibition's curator, Michael Harrison, as well as a transcription of a conversation between Guy and artist and writer Irena Haiduk. The book will also include a new artist project made specifically for the book in the form of an annotated bibliography created by Guy of writings and images that relate to and inspire his practice.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois, May 12-July 7, 1989 and the Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles, California, July 18-Aug. 20, 1989.

An exhibition catalog centering on a film by artist Diane Severin Nguyen.   This catalog, published on the occasion of the exhibition If Revolution is a Sickness, presents the first monographic book on work by artist Diane Severin Nguyen, which considers how songs and shared histories are woven together across different times and places. The book centers on a new film by Nguyen that is set in Warsaw, Poland, and it loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to join a South Korean pop-inspired dance group. Popular within a subculture of Polish youth, the genre of K-pop is used by Nguyen as a vernacular structure as she traces a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia that has roots in Cold War allegiances.   In addition to extensive imagery from the film and behind-the-scenes footage, the book also features essays by Cat Zhang on K-pop's online communities and by Nathanäel on music, history, and geography; a pair of reflections on the film by curators Myriam Ben Salah and Sohrab Mohebbi; and a conversation between the artist and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. Also included with the book is a flexi-disc record featuring a song with music and lyrics co-written by Nguyen. If Revolution is a Sickness, was commissioned by SculptureCenter in New York and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

A catalog for an exhibition of the latest chapter in Miriem Bennani‿s CAPS film project. Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in New York. Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani‿s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film. Enacting a variety of cunning shifts, Life on the CAPS moves fluidly from the imaginary to the geopolitical and ranges from the microscopic scale of DNA to the global eye of surveillance. At the same time, it engages with the power of individual experience as well as the power of collectivity while building on an emotive, formal experimentation that refutes boundaries. This volume includes transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and Omar Berrada, Fatima Al Quadiri and Bidoun, Amal Benzekri, and Aziz Bouyabrine. Â

Catalog for an exhibition of Matthew Metzger‿s paintings at the Renaissance Society.   Published on the occasion of Matthew Metzger‿s exhibition Heirloom at the Renaissance Society, this is the first book dedicated to the artist‿s paintings, which echo and explore various kinds of abstraction. Anchored by the new paintings Metzger made for this exhibition‿a set of works conceived as an installation for the Renaissance Society‿s space that also serve as the subject of an essay by curator Karsten Lund‿the book also features four other series of paintings by the artist, each of which further charts his evolving aesthetic and conceptual strategies.   For this publication, Metzger has also invited six writers‿including Kris Cohen, Fumi Okiji, Hamza Walker, Jan Verwoert, and Anna Zett‿to reflect on how abstraction functions more broadly, whether as a psychological tendency, a social phenomenon, or a technological side effect, among many other possibilities. Â

Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium‿s possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp‿s exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops. Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig ÿvstebÿ and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies. Â