Hours:
Tues-Sat 11am-5pm
Thurs 11am-7:30pm
Admission: $5
Intuit Members and
children under 12: Free
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Forget Me NOT
September 10, 2010 - December 30, 2010
Free Closing Reception:
Thursday, December 30, 5:30-7:30pm
Curated by Jan Petry
To “capture” in paint, film, wood or stone the human image has challenged artists, both trained and untrained since man began making marks. The portrait remains universal artistic subject matter.
Wealthy 19th century New Englanders engaged itinerant painters, many self-taught, to paint the likenesses of themselves and their families. Beyond documentation, displaying one’s portrait implied status. Popular tastes evolved to displaying portraits of others- statesmen, generals, beauties- until today when any amount of celebrity might make ones’ portrait desirable. |
Stephen Anderson
George Washington
Tempra on canvas board
10” x 7 1/2”
Roger Brown Study Collection,
TheSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago |
Forget Me NOT will focus on our continued fascination with our own image. From the self-taught itinerant 19th century painter to the street artist today. The meticulous detail of Ammi Phillips and Drossos Skyllas, the gestural swash of William Hawkins, the boldness of Sam Doyle, the simplicity of Paul Duhem–- kings, movie stars, presidents, bad boys, good girls- all reflecting who we are and how others see us. And how we see ourselves. |
Peter Anton
Special Scrapbooks of Peter Anton and His Life
1931 – Present |
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Almost There
A Portrait of Peter Anton
July 9, 2010 - December 30, 2010
Free Closing Reception:
Thursday, December 30, 5:30-7:30pm
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." |
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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.
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