Giving It Away for Free
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CC&C says this is all part of its effort to give back to the community, so maybe it has nothing to do with things dragging a bit in the exhibitor department: at press time, according to the CC&C Web site, 60 were lined up for Navy Pier (though a spokesman insisted there’ll be 100), while Thomas Blackman’s Art Chicago, which is running concurrently, listed about 70, many Chicago names among them. Art Chicago, displaced by CC&C, will set up in a tent in Butler Field, across from Millennium Park, a sweet location for a street fair. Blackman, who observed that galleries have been slow to commit this year, says that Art Chicago will eventually have more than 90 exhibitors, including about 10 galleries from the former Stray Show. He adds that he has no plans to match the CC&C ticket giveaway.
And Pier Walk, the annual sculpture show, which opens April 27, is turning into the anti-Navy Pier show. New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, back for a second season as curator, says that putting art on the carnival-like pier is like “throwing a kitten into a mosh pit. Last year I couldn’t decide which sculpture I disliked enough to put there.” Instead, Schjeldahl dropped most of it into Gateway Park, that glorified traffic circle at the pier’s entrance, which is where all or nearly all of it will wind up once more. This year’s submissions were disappointing, Schjeldahl says; as a result he had to extend invitations and is still finalizing the show, which he expects to include 12 to 20 artists, among them Franz West, Ruckriem Ulrich, and the Art Institute’s Kay Rosen.
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