Was It Something He Painted?;
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A talented painter with muralist roots, Portillo has developed a cartoonish body of work that is merciless in its critique of America, which he portrays as greedy, soulless, and perverse. Chicago art dealer Aldo Castillo says the deportation made him suspicious; he’d included Portillo’s painting America-War–which shows an American soldier tonguing an Iraqi prisoner while Lynndie England looks on–in an exhibit at his gallery last year, and worried that “something like that might compromise his welcome.” But Portillo doesn’t think that’s the case; what you’ve got here, he says, is an instance of arrogance and bureaucratic folly.
Portillo insists he is not attempting to become a resident and was never given the chance to leave voluntarily. He says since 2001, when he first came here to teach art to Chicago schoolchildren through a program sponsored by the Mexican government, he’s developed a following that led to exhibitions and purchases by American museums. He says he’s now been told he needs a different kind of visa, but notes that his tourist visa was never an issue when he paid American taxes on those sales. “This is where the contradictions become evident,” he says. “Why did I not have any difficulty gaining a taxpayer identification number?
Shearer suffered a fatal stroke in November. The Morrison-Shearer Foundation, which she endowed after Morrison’s death in 1984, will maintain the Jens Jensen-landscaped Northbrook property and its buildings as an artists’ retreat and archive, and this spring will publish the first installment of Shearer’s three-volume autobiography–much of it drawn from handwritten copies she kept of nearly every letter she ever sent. What’s left in addition to that is the criticism she wrote in her later years and Morrison’s work, including a collection of films in which Shearer performs her own dances in front of a stationary camera in the little Northbrook studio. They help explain why this idiosyncratic loner–whose career largely consisted of sporadic performances in midwest college auditoriums, who never really got the hang of choreographing for others (or dancing with anyone else), and who had no identifiable dance vocabulary that could be passed on to succeeding generations–is considered a giant in her field. Some of the films will be shown at a tribute this Sunday at the Art Institute, where Shearer performed one last time for her amazed public a year ago.
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