These Young Chicago Artists Will Soon Be Household Names

These young artists are proof that the art scene in Chicago is on the come-up.

Jun 08, 2015
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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Sometimes it’s a good thing to be outside of the U.S.’s usual art-world circuit of New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles. Over the past decade, Chicago has emerged as a vital voice in our national artistic landscape, due in part to its long incubation of artists and curators through institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, which recently moved into a new, modern wing designed by Renzo Piano, and the museum’s attendant university, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The city has given rise to artists with original, groundbreaking practices, like the post-surrealist sculptors Sterling Ruby and Theaster Gates, whose works move between making objects and renovating urban neighborhoods.

Then there’s Chicago’s vibrant street life, where the art spills out into the city. Anonymous artists like Bored, Don’t Fret, and Penny Pinch build on Chicago’s already rich body of public art—after all, it is the city of Anish Kapoor’s reflective “Cloud Gate” sculpture, more commonly known as “The Bean.” With that, here are 10 young Chicago artists that will soon be household names.

Luke Armitstead

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Website: lukearmitstead.com

A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Luke Armistead is a trained ceramicist, but his work isn’t limited to functional pieces or even the medium of sculpture itself. Armistead puts together textured ligatures of clay into works that hang on the wall, stand on pedestals, or drape over pre-existing forms. Sometimes, the results are monstrous, but in a good way—the artist’s charming assemblages often resemble the kind of creatures that inhabit a post-Pop art children’s book.

Don’t Fret

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Website: dontfretart.com

The artist Don’t Fret describes him/herself as “a vaguely anonymous human from Chicago” on a mysterious Facebook page. While the human is anonymous, the art has already made a name for itself. Working most often on public streets, Don’t Fret has developed a unique visual language of scratchy lines and bright, saturated colors to depict daily life in the city on its walls, from a couple making out in the back of a taxi to ice cream vendors, shivering commuters and harried chefs. Like the Brazilian duo Os Gêmeos or the muralist Blu, Don’t Fret enlivens urban space by adding a touch of humanity, not to mention humor.

Nazafarin Lotfi

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Website: nazafarinlotfi.com

Nazafarin Lotfi, an Iranian-born artist, makes quietly ethereal sculptures that often seem to be floating by themselves up into the air of a gallery space. Using a broken stool or thin wooden dowels as pedestals, the sculptural forms, which resemble crumpled milk cartons or hollow vessels, have a weightless quality. Alongside the sculptural practice, Lotfi makes drawings on paper in which fields of dots ebb and flow, suggesting celestial volumes.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

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Website: mollyzuckermanhartung.com

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s “95 Theses on Painting” have quickly become iconic. Part manifesto and part personal statement, the theses stake a place for painting in art history and the larger scope of civilization as a whole. “I decided to become a painter. No one asked me to do this,” number two explains. “At times painting is passionately committed to its history, and sometimes, nostalgically resigned to its pastness, but always, painting looks backward,” number 48 reads. At the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Zuckerman-Hartung showed vivid pieces that border on abstraction without tipping fully into it, like “Notley,” which is filled with an emphatic “NO” in black-and-white letters.

Kasia Houlihan

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Website: cargocollective.com/kasiahoulihan

“I’m interested in the moment we slip into step with a stranger on the street or align our breath with the person lying next to us,” writes of her artistic practice. “I want to push myself to take risks that make me wriggle in my own skin. I want to wriggle with you.” This empathetic approach plays out in photography, video, and works on paper as Houlihan investigates what intimacy means. From her portraits of single figures isolated in man-made landscapes to a series of hand-drawn chapter lists from imaginary books, Houlihan’s art is all deeply felt, a comfort in isolating times.

Laurie Jo Reynolds

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Website: artandarthistory.uic.edu

Laurie Jo Reynolds works in the burgeoning medium of art called public practice. She calls her work “legislative art” since it works within public systems, like governments and prisons, to create change. The artist has spent a decade working with the Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison that became infamous for its inhumane practices of solitary confinement. Thanks in part to Reynolds’s work, Tamms was closed in 2013. “Hers is a politics of doing,” curator Anne Pasternak wrote.

Jason Lazarus

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Website: jasonlazarus.com

Jason Lazarus, a student and more recently a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was trained as a photographer, but his work functions as much on appropriation and sculpture as it does in image making. Running on a wry sense of humor as well as a critical knowledge of visual history, Lazarus has nailed the attitude of postmodernism.

Carol Jackson

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Website: jacksoncarol.com

With recent solo exhibitions around Chicago, Carol Jackson has long been part of the city’s artistic fabric. Jackson’s installations riff on the idea of the “total work of art.” Her aesthetic of loopy swirls and mechanical detritus moves across media from room-filling installations to sculpture and painting on photography.

Academy Records

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Website: academyrecords.org

Though it sounds like a music label or record store, Academy Records is a “platform for live performance, recorded events, and printed ephemera” run by artist Stephen Lacy. The collective works across media, putting on exhibitions as well as producing record albums, live radio plays, and DIY films. Academy Records’ work is all the better for being indefinable—it lives in the real world as much as in galleries and museums.

Tony Lewis

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Website: shanecampbellgallery.com

Born in 1986, Tony Lewis was the youngest artist to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Engaging in the political moment, Lewis’ work deals both obliquely and directly with race. Lewis appropriates texts about race relations in the U.S. and breaks them down into scattered letters and words, referencing the work of Jenny Holzer and Chris Wool. Lewis’ images break through the noise of our already image-heavy culture.

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