The East Middle West Tour is here for one weekend only.

Call for Participation: Over The Influence: The Art of Beer

Mash Tun Journal and Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar are are teaming up with Chef Won Kim of Brew Ha Ha to bring you another visual and brewery arts exhibition and happening. This edition, called Over The Influence: The Art of Beer, takes place May 18, 2013 at the Co-Prosperity Sphere ( 3219 S Morgan Street).

We are seeking work from artists and designers inspired by the aesthetics of craft beer and how it intersects with food, culture, and society. We are looking for work in any media. Please email edmarlumpen(at)gmail.com if you would like to submit to the show. Please send a  description of the of the work and enclose 1-3 jpegs of previous work. Deadline is 4/20/13 for proposals.

Words and photos about the previous show:

Under The Influence: The Art of Beer

Good Beer Hunting

Girls Like Beer Too

The Co-Prosperity School is an Artist-Run School for and about the advancement and understanding of contemporary Chicago Art. Through guest speakers and class member presentations we will shine a light on the contemporary art scene of Chicago.

One of our goals is to break down the panel discussion dialogue of Chicago’s art and bring it to a more informal group discussion format in which shapers of Chicago’s Art World themselves tell of the contemporary scene.   Members can discuss their own work, or the work of others.

Spring 2013 session begins March 3, 2013 at 630pm. $150 is the cost for the Spring session.

Past guests have included Daniel Tucker, Juan Angel Chavez, Hamza Walker, Paul Klein, Duncan MacKenzie, Stanley Tigerman, Abigail Satinsky, Shannon Stratton, Bill Ayers, Jason Lazarus, Mary Jane Jacobs, Eric Brown and Catie Olson, Mindy Rose Schwartz  Cody Hudson, Carolne Picard, Carrie Gundersdorf, Tom Torluemke, Tom Burtonwood, Aron Packer, James Duignan, Nandipha Mntambo, and Barbara Koenen.

Tuition is $150 for 8 classes. email This email is hidden - JavaScript is required for viewing. if you are interested in joining us.

Join us for a potluck edition of Proximity Magazine Number 11, wherein we investigate the intersections of art, food, politics and social practice. We are following our noses and inhaling the increasing preoccupation of food being used in contemporary art. Our engagement with projects that have inspired us in recent editions of Proximity, Version Festivals and MDW fairs, and romps throughout our city’s art ecology has lead us to this inevitable feast. And of course the increasing collaboration between chefs and brewers with community groups and social causes has given us a pause to further consider this blossoming movement of culinary social art practice.

Please  prepare a course, a dish or an aperitif and send us your thoughts in a one paragraph pitch. We are seeking short and long form essays, briefs on historical artworks (we hope someone will create a directory of historical works), visual imagery, and your investigations into how the boundaries of art and food have been blurred, smoothed out and ingested.

Reservations at  edmarlumpen at gmail dot com. Our pitch deadline is March 15, 2013. Completed texts and works are due by April 15, 2013. We will  release the issue at a new endeavor  to be unveiled this Spring at Version Festival 13.

( Photo of Stefan Gross Sculpture  at Re: Rotterdam 2013 )

Our bud, Edie is having his first solo show this January 4 – February 16, 2013. with the Opening Reception onFriday January 4, 6-8PM.

See you there. From the announcement:

Thomas Robertello Gallery is pleased to present Memory Palaces; an exhibition of new drawings by Chicago-based artist Edie Fake. Comprised of fifteen drawings, Fake’s first solo show in Chicago is a city built from two places or directions: a series of gateways for departed friends and vividly patterned architectural spaces re-imagining Chicago’s queer history.

In his ecstatic gateways, Fake pays tribute, mourns the loss of, and meditates on the lives of departed friends. The ballpoint pen and gouache drawings take the form of thresholds, passageways, and transitional spaces using visually striking patterns and fantasy architecture. Fake’s pictorial spaces expand and collapse, memorializing lives and building a community of celebratory facades in honor of his friends.

Taken from fragments of Chicago’s buildings and history, Fake recreates and reincarnates the spaces once associated with LGBTI newspapers, feminist clinics, dance clubs, social spaces, punk venues, theaters, and other imagined spaces. Among the historic spaces from Chicago’s past depicted here are the Newberry Theatre – a gay xxx movie theater in the 1970s, Nightgowns – a queer artist space on the south side in the early 2000s, JANE – a radical undercover abortion service established in Chicago from 1969-1973, Killer Dyke – 1971 newspaper from Northeastern IL University, Blazing Star – newspaper and group based in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) mid-1970s, La Mere Vipere – a gay bar on Halsted that became a pivotal venue in Chicago’s early punk scene (burned down in 1978), The Snake Pit – former Chicago gay bar (1970s), and Club LaRay – gay dance club and hub for dance music and voguing in the 80s.

Since moving back to Chicago in 2009, Fake’s artistic practice has centered around synthesizing the city’s gay history with a visionary landscape for the queer present. The buildings in his drawings are not about nostalgia for a lost time, instead, they are about re-awakening the impulse to create physical space for queer voices, lives and politics. They are decidedly shaped by real buildings in Chicago. Like the city itself, the buildings drawn are visually striking: ornate and formal details merged with the eclectic aesthetics of hand-painted signs, weathered awnings and makeshift repairs. The drawings engage the viewer with the history of a community in a way that inspires both investigation and response. These pieces act as visual bridges between former incarnations of local queer initiatives and blueprints for new and necessary resources.