The Society

Peter Schjeldahl: "The Critic as Artist" in 2011

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came to The New Yorker from The Village Voice, where he was the art critic from 1980 to 1998. Previously, he had written for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Schjeldahl has received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association, for excellence in art criticism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been featured in many catalogs and has been collected in The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings (1991) and Let’s See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker (2008)....

Please join us for the Society for Contemporary Art’s annual Sponsor Luncheon, which recognizes the special commitment and generosity of Sponsor, Patron, and Angel members and provides an opportunity for our Board to thank you for your extraordinary support during the past season. This year Zoë Ryan, the Chair and John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, will give a gallery tour of Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design, which presents more than 30 proposals and ideas from an international group of architects and designers.

Paul McCarthy uses provocative and often satirically violent imagery to parody archetypal subjects in irreverent performance-based multimedia work. He explains, “My work seems to be about tearing down and opening up conventions.” During the 1970s, McCarthy videotaped himself performing strenuous physical tasks and graphic sex acts that transgressed normal codes of behavior to say the least. Later, he added elements of Hollywood, particularly Disney, through a cast of characters, masks, props, and the sets of former TV sitcoms.

Paul McCarthy (American, born 1945) is one of the most challenging and influential American artists working today. His recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2010), De Uithof, Utrecht (2009), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Stedelijk Museum, Ghent (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2004); Tate Modern, London (2003), among others. From 2000-01, a retrospective of his work traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Villa Arson, Nice; and Tate Liverpool. McCarthy achieved international recognition in the 1990s, at which point he participated in numerous group shows including Performance Anxiety at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Body – A Videotape Program at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. He has participated in countless international events, including the Gwangju Biennial (2009), the Berlin Biennial (2006); SITE Sante Fe (2004); Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 1999, 2001)....

The Acquisition Committee of the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce the acquisition finalists for 2011.

The Society for Contemporary Art members will select two artworks for purchase at this year’s vote. Members will choose from five paintings, one by Nicole Eisenman (American, b. France 1965), one by Joanne Greenbaum (American, b. 1953) and three by R.H. Quaytman (American, b. 1961); a drawing by Nancy Grossman (American, b. 1940); and a sculptural installation by Danh Vo (Danish, b. Vietnam 1975).

Nicole Eisenman has made narrative drawings, paintings, and installations with an irreverent sense of humor since the early 1990s. She was originally dubbed a “bad-girl” painter for her emotionally charged content, which often included feminist inspired takes on female subjects. She combines historical elements of painting—from Renaissance to modern art—with appeals to popular culture, including pornography, horror films, and punk music. Her complex narratives always involve the human figure, whether alone or in a crowd, to evoke feelings of anxiety, fear, and isolation....

Since the 1980s, Joanne Greenbaum has cultivated an approach to abstract painting characterized by humorous, expressive, and increasingly complex compositions. Her work hints at various painterly influences—from the Russian avant-garde to Cubist abstraction—but Greenbaum has developed her own unique visual language of geometric and organic forms. Her tangled marks on white backgrounds hang in the balance between order and chaos....

Nancy Grossman has made emotionally compelling drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculpture for more than 50 years. Her characteristic depictions of bound human figures, equal parts startling and seductively beautiful, are counterintuitive responses to larger political circumstances—specifically the various liberation movements of the 1960s. In some ways, her work depicts a struggle between freedom and confinement. More specifically, her drawings are evocative, while not directly illustrative, of a subculture in which forms of self-expression are tied to empowerment and pleasure. Grossman turns her attention to the figure, elaborately bound, to portray controlled aggression....

R. H. Quaytman (American, born 1961) currently lives and works in New York. Three of her paintings were included in the 2011 Society for Contemporary Art Acquisition Exhibition. She will have a solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society, Chicago in January 2013. Quaytman has had solo exhibitions at museums and institutions including: Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Quaytman’s work has been included in group exhibitions at: CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; and MoMA PS1, NY. Quaytman was included in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Whitney Biennial in 2010. Her work has recently been published in Spine, a 400-page volume that includes her work from the past decade....

Danh Vo explained, “All of my projects tend to deal with issues that are taking place right around me—my private sphere, my love life, my desires, other people’s projections on me and my identities.” When he was a child, Vo’s family left Vietnam in a boat built by his father. By chance, they were picked up by a Danish freighter and brought to Denmark, where they became citizens. Through performance-based works inspired by his life experiences and historically rich readymade objects, Vo reveals the construction of inherited cultural values, conflicts, and displacement....

Despite affinities with Chicago Imagist and Northwest Coast abstraction traditions, Jim Lutes’s enigmatic work resists classification within any one school or group.

Jim Lutes (American, born 1955) is the Frederick Latimer Wells Professor of Painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (2010, 1987); Documenta (1992); and The Corcoran Biennial (1985). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (1993); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1985); and other venues around the world. Lutes has shown extensively in Chicago including a retrospective at The Renaissance Society (2009), a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (1994), and numerous group exhibitions. He has received numerous accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award (1993), and The Illinois Art Council Grant (1999, 1985)....