Hours:
Tues-Sat 11am-5pm
Thurs 11am-7:30pm
Admission: $5
Intuit Members and
children under 12: Free
|
|
|
|
Life Lines
The Drawings of Charles Steffen
June 4, 2010 - August 28, 2010
Curated by Eugenie Johnson
This retrospective features 30 pieces of Charles Steffen's work, covering a variety of imagery he knew in his limited sphere: neighbors, his mother, flowers and plants from the yard, a woman he once loved, and scenes from the Elgin State Hospital. More fantastical drawings show his experimentation in creating human forms merged with plants and distorting or combining male and female features. |
Born into a family of eight children, Charles Steffen (1927-1995) studied art at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the late 1940s. While still in school, he suffered a mental breakdown and spent the next 15 years at the Elgin State Hospital where he began to make art. Upon his release, Steffen lived with his sister and spent most of his time creating, usually producing two or more drawings a day.
Shortly before his death, Steffen went to live in a small room in a men's retirement home on the north side of the city. Instead of throwing away the remainder of his drawings and photographs, Steffen decided instead to place them with his nephew, Christopher Preissing. Preissing had shown an interest in his uncle's work and received over two thousand works. Intuit is proud to present Life Lines: The Drawings of Charles Steffen, a collection that could possibly have been lost forever.
|
Almost There
A Portrait of Peter Anton
July 9, 2010 - December 30, 2010
Free Opening Reception:
Friday, July 9, 5-8pm
Co-Curated by Daniel Rybicky
and
Aaron Wickenden
Peter Anton, a 78 year-old resident of East Chicago, Indiana, creates paintings that illuminate moments of significance from his personal history. Many of them are based on photographs he has obsessively compiled into a massive autobiography titled "Almost There." |
|
|
Charles Steffen
A Study in Life Drawing
1991
Colored pencil on paper
Collection of Barbara and Russell Bowman |
Peter Anton
Special Scrapbooks of Peter Anton and His Life
1931 – Present |
|
Through the whole of twelve scrapbooks, Peter details his "life on a rollercoaster" - from his near death experience in 1934 at the age of three to his happy "movie star years" in the 1950's organizing and performing in hundreds of talent shows, all the way through his ruminations on mortality in 2005 after losing his beloved cats and being taken from his severely deteriorating home by a social service agency. Despite his declining health, Peter perseveres. This exhibit - the first retrospective of his work - is testament to how art and the impetus to create it still thrives in even more dire circumstances.
Co-curators Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden have spent the past four years documenting Peter's environment and day-to-day life of creating art under brutal conditions. Inspired by the story of perhaps the most famous outsider artist, Henry Darger - whose artwork was discovered posthumously and only after three dumpsters of waste were removed from his apartment - the curators of Almost There will present an unvarnished view of an artist before his process has been altered or sanitized. Their photographs and videos will be exhibited alongside Peter's paintings, scrapbooks and ephemera as a way to further contextualize his work. Visitors will have the added pleasure of experiencing this exhibit alongside the Henry Darger Room Collection, Intuit's innovative permanent installation that evokes the obsessive artist's original environment.
Poised at the intersection of biography and autobiography, Almost There: A Portrait of Peter Anton explores the curatorial complexities surrounding the discovery and stewardship of one man's work, as well as the definitions of so-called "high art" and "outsider art." By showing the decaying textures of Peter's house, paintings and scrapbooks - of Peter himself - this exhibit asks audiences to contextualize his art and ultimately, their own aesthetic concepts of and emotional responses to memory, aging and pain.
|
|
|
|
|
