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chicago

The AFC Guide to Inauguration Resistance Actions

by Michael Anthony Farley on January 17, 2017
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I think I have more Facebook invitations to different demonstrations in Washington D.C. and New York this Friday than I have friends. If you live within a hundred miles of either city, it’s likely you already have inauguration protest plans. For those of us not presently near the respective political and media capitals, it can feel like we’re left out of the party. But don’t fret: we’ve reached out to artists in seven cities where we have a large number of readers—Baltimore, the Bay Area, Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Philadelphia—and got the scoop on where you can go while joining us in the #J20 art strike. It’s incredibly inspiring to see hundreds of thousands of RSVPs across the country and beyond. And after the demonstrations, we’ve found some fun nighttime activities to raise funds and solidarity for the long fight ahead.

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Matthew Metzger’s Sweet Peace

by RM Vaughan on November 28, 2016
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We live in terrible times. I need not explain that assertion. And while I do not subscribe to the reading of art as always and/or necessarily “therapeutic”, it would be silly of me to not acknowledge that art can be therapeutic, even healing. To wit, Matthew Metzger’s exhibition The Shade of a Line is the Xanax in my tea.

Metzger is a Chicago-based painter whose work tilts back and forth between neo-Minimalism and neo-Color Field. I normally have nothing good to say about Minimalist work, as I find such works have nothing to say (and, yes, that is reductive, but so is the style). However, in Metzger’s case, the paintings vibrate with buried colors and dreamy pools of semi-occluded light. They teem with an interior life that reminds me of staring into precious stones, of the first hues of the morning, of being less than lucid. Put plainly, Metzger’s paintings are pretty. Let us give thanks for prettiness in an ugly world.

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