Michael Workman

In "Schematic Patterns," a new collection of paintings with drawing elements, Julia Henderson tackles the visual representation of Chicago's historically segregated racial populations. It's a good fit with Linda Warren Gallery, which relocated here a few years back from Los Angeles, a city with its own catalytic mix of racial diversity. "Chicago: The Extended Remix" clearly shows the influence of Chris Johanson's hand-drawn, sloppily painted Venn diagram works, and Henderson's plainly comfortable working in a borrowed mode; even so, it's hard not to like them. Henderson works as the "lead artist" of the painting program at Gallery 37, where she works with kids from lots of different backgrounds and the "slop art" approach certainly lends itself to her work. She's also had time to survey her colleagues: these acrylics have taken a page or two from the likes of Chicago artist Michael X. Ryan (certainly worthy of precursor status--more people should see his work), though Henderson abstracts their concerns with systems and process rather than framing them squarely in the foreground. Whereas Ryan would track his exact pathway through the streets of Manhattan, for instance, superimpose his route over a map of the city streets and then remove the map, Henderson gives us the city streets without the superimposed route. Matter of fact, it's less the streets she's concerned with than the neighborhoods, rendering them in huge blocky chunks of color with their names scrawled in thick graphite letters over the dried paint. Drips extend down over the surface at several points to emphasize the haphazard way they were made.

But that's not to imply lack of intention, necessarily. While any Chicagoan looking at this will wonder why the Gold Coast appears on Henderson's map next to Garfield Park, or how Lincoln Park managed a migration down near the Loop, there's a method here. Henderson has reorganized the city map into a roughly alphabetical order in a play on the city's racial distribution. Her colors are actually code for population broken down into percentages of "Hispanic," "Non-Hispanic White," "Non-Hispanic African-American," and "Non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific." At first glance, major sections of the map look as if they correlate to bright orange (90-100 percent) for "Non-Hispanic African-American," though past this bossy color there's a fairly equal balance. If a single recasting of the city's not enough, Henderson has ventured several different versions of the map, including one with cursive lettering and darker color scheme and a version of the city "at night" (in white on black, of course).

Her maps are a rehashed delight, but Henderson strives for a a softening effect with other work in her collection that recalls, at least stylistically, another Chicago artist--Leslie Baum, whose free-floating geographic elements are replaced in Henderson's acrylic and ink "Toile: Domestic Balance III" with signs depicting two iconographic children on a seesaw. Her gridded sign pattern has them in rows, each a different ochre or umber color, against a row of flat-bough trees. Henderson's most successful works are her applications of social schema to her sports stadiums (which are, notably, without legend)--go see this show just for the stadiums. Yet, far and away her most ambitious if not entirely successful works are the "Next Migration" series, a title that alludes to the "Great Migration" northward of slaves from a newly freed South, many of whom ended their journey in Chicago. Why stumble into this? Hasn't Kerry James Marshall covered this territory enough? And better? They're clearly honest in their sympathy, even if they read as basic still-life studies. But look at her depiction of the buildings awhile, these images of the Robert Taylor homes with their facades crumbling and shorn away, and context drives the slowly rising impression of a map. Of what? To where? It's a map, perhaps, of simple destruction and sadness, images that linger in a space of indecision as to the work's ultimate meaning.

Missing Link Found
It's a useful thing when an exhibit opens the door to history and that's doubly true when it does so for a local audience. This coming weekend, the Hyde Park Art Center will do that for painter Robert Amft, whose significance, according to a statement by curators John Corbett and Annie Morse, was his ability to presage notable Chicago art movements. This survey of his work from 1935-2005, "Paintings for Particular People," includes his airbrush and stencil work from the sixties and seventies, as well as oils that juxtapose with absurdist flair familiar sights from the Midwest. His "Trolley and Hawk" from 1946, for instance, depicts exactly that, with hawk in full wingspan over a tall, narrow trolley raised on impossibly tall, thin wheels. Situated in perspective nearly atop one another, the hawk appears ready to whisk away the train-car and its passengers. Amft also undertook to repaint famous canvases from figures such as Chicago faves Picasso and Seurat, sure to please the crowd.

Paula Henderson shows at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 West Fulton Market, (312)432-9500. Through April 2. Robert Amft shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5307 South Hyde Park, (773)324-5520. Through April 16.

(2005-03-01)

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