Winter of discontent

On October 29, I saw an artwork I hated. When the Art Loop Open winners were announced at a ceremony at Block 37, Renee McGinnis’s oil painting Park 60654 received the $5,000 Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Representational Art. Park 60654 depicts the Merchandise Mart removed from its River North site and surrounded by a vast array of circular hedges. A cloud looms over the building. Native and exotic plants fill the foreground of this surreal landscape, flanked by two putti. While McGinnis renders the Mart with impressive detail, Park 60654 has technical flaws: The artist seems to have based the nude, rainbow-feathered putti on poorly lit Facebook baby photos—yet they’re less distressing than the piece’s irony-free worship of a corporate entity.

McGinnis’s piece had one advantage over much of the art I saw this year, though: It made me feel something other than boredom. Though Chicago’s art world hosted fine exhibitions and experienced important milestones in 2010, it seemed shadowed by a malaise. TOC awarded five stars to only two exhibitions: “Dan Gunn: Multistable Picture Fable” at Lloyd Dobler Gallery and “Felipe Dulzaides: Utopía Posible” at the Graham Foundation.

Gunn’s among a few local artists who had strong solo shows. The best included the Renaissance Society’s survey of young photographer Anna Shteynshleyger’s recent work; Loyola University Museum of Art’s “Moholy: An Education of the Senses,” about Institute of Design founder László Moholy-Nagy; Hairy Who pioneer Gladys Nilsson’s retrospective at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art; and the Hyde Park Art Center’s “Roger Brown: Calif U.S.A.,” an innovative look at the Imagist’s art and collections.

The city’s most hyped exhibitions went to outsiders, however: The Art Institute of Chicago highlighted Henri Matisse, William Eggleston (pictured) and Henri Cartier-Bresson; the Museum of Contemporary Art touted Alexander Calder and Luc Tuymans. The slant might be a fluke: The MCA opens a Jim Nutt exhibition January 29, and its UBS 12x12 program highlights its 100th local artist, Jessica Labatte, this month.

But the disparity revives a question that’s become a cliché: Does Chicago have the resources and opportunities to sustain artists’ careers? Though we aren’t hemorrhaging galleries as quickly as we did in 2008 and 2009, Vespine shut down earlier this year, the last exhibit at David Weinberg Gallery ends in February, and the Green Lantern closes next month. Even the city’s progressive galleries seemed to show the same group of SAIC graduates over and over. Threewalls’ collaboration with Kansas City’s Charlotte Street Foundation and the Exhibition Agency’s partnership with St. Louis–based Los Caminos make me hope other regional exchanges invigorate a scene that coddles emerging artists in an insular world.

One bright spot is the Propeller Fund, an initiative overseen by West Loop nonprofit threewalls and UIC’s Gallery 400 that could become a new lifeline for local artists whose work has a public component. In October, the fund announced it would give $50,000, provided by the Warhol Foundation, to 15 projects involving InCUBATE, Ben Russell, Anne Elizabeth Moore and other worthy Chicagoans. Artists remain desperate, though: Just ask those who lined up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in September to audition for Work of Art’s second season, undeterred by the absurdities of the Bravo reality show’s summer debut. Or those who entered their work in Art Loop Open, despite the competition’s long odds and $65 entry fee.

Still, it would be great if ALO sends local artists home with $60,000 again next year—and if projects like Work of Art and ALO keep riling up the art world. At least angry’s better than complacent.

• More Art & Design articles