Merce Cunningham famously said, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” This ephemerali| Bridge
TREATMENTS: ANTHOLOGY OF WORK BY MAT RAPPAPORT WITH AN ESSAY BY MICHAEL WORKMAN, AND POETRY BY RACHEL JAMISON WEBSTER AND JOSH HONN. For the closing reception on May 14 of Treatments 2019 / 2023 at Material, Bridge Books published an anthology of the same name with the complete "| Bridge
Surviving the Long Wars offers a groundbreaking exploration into the complex histories of US warfare and militarism, illuminating the pivotal role of art in cultivating justice, healing, and abolition. Inspired by Indigenous responses to the “American Indian Wars” and artists from the Greater Middl| Bridge
AFFLUVIA: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” by Johanna Drucker, Nonfiction from Bridge Books| Bridge
To be in transit is to be human. No one does well staying still too long. This past year has shown us more than ever that nothing is ever permanent. In this journal we explore the different ways that people, museums, and institutions can be considered in transit. We are addressing questions of trad| Bridge
Guide To { ... } is for anyone engaging with museums today, whether at the very beginning of your career, years into it, or peering in from the margins. It is meant to be revisited. A guide does not expire when we memorize the route; it waits patiently, until the landscape shifts and we re| Bridge
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As part of Intuit Art Museum’s recent reopening, Chicago-based artist and designer Bob Faust unveiled a striking new architectural intervention that reimagines the museum’s façade as both signal and symbol. Wrapping the building in bold, layered imagery drawn from works in Intuit’s permanent collect| Bridge
When the MCA postponed the career-spanning show Indulge Me by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal for a whole year, some hearsay from my gossip network suggested that it was due to the postponement of a rocket launch. The work in question is Canto III (2015), a response the artist made to a rumorhe heard:| Bridge
Global contemporary fashion does not have an obvious home in Chicago's museums. The Art Institute has not collected tailored garments as earnestly as they have collected textiles; the MCA’s flirtations with fashion are sporadic; the Chicago History Museum has a mandate to only acquire clothing with| Bridge
April 17, 1975 lives on in infamy as the date of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia’s capitol city, Phnom Penh. This watershed event ushered in the Communist rule of Cambodia which lasted for three grueling years, eight months, and twenty days. During this condensed period, as estimated two to four million people died of starvation, disease or disappearance. Urban centers in Cambodia were emptied and all organized educational, religious, and cultural institutions were abolished. Cambo...| Bridge
In Mexican history, the charro—a skilled horseman and master of cattle work—emerged as a national icon during the colonial period and solidified his status in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Dressed in elaborately adorned suits and wide-brimmed sombreros, the charro became a symbol of rural pride, tradition, and patriotic masculinity. His image would come to define la charreada, Mexico’s official national sport, and spread into popular culture as a paragon of honor, discipline, and ...| Bridge
One thing that sets EXPO Chicago apart from many other major art fairs is its deep connection with Chicago’s art community as a whole. While the on-site fair at Navy Pier has come to an end, remember: there are still plenty of things to do at this year’s off-site partners. If you weren’t able to make it to this year’s EXPO Chicago due to travel limitations or scheduling conflicts, you still have some time left to visit the off-site events and exhibitions hosted by EXPO ART WEEK partners.| Bridge
Rhythms beyond conventional time are what govern nature: cycles of tumult and rest, fertility and decay. Seasons become one way of measuring this change and invoking these rhythms. And seasons are the most salient reminders that we, of the human world, are intimately bound to nature’s rhythms––but only if we can listen and see and feel them. In Fallow Season , a wide-ranging exhibition of works exploring the affective force of the natural world, Detroit-based artist and environmentalist...| Bridge
Photography has long been thought of as a definitive source for truth and documentation. Lucy Wood Baird’s solo exhibition of mixed media works, entitled What do I call you? challenges this notion by considering photography’s fickle and slippery nature. The show’s title catalyzes questions like: How should Baird’s multi-dimensional and multi-temporal mixed media works be understood and engaged with? Are Baird’s sculptures actual stone or just images of stone? Where did the photograp...| Bridge
I shuffle, quietly so no one will know I’m awake. I deal ten hands, five cards each. One by one I turn up the hands to see the families. Two remaining cards lie on the pillow. The rule is you can add them later to fix a family if you need to, make it perfect. Tonight, even with extra cards, there are no perfect families. Usually there aren’t. Now I sort them, first by suit, then in order of age, and put them away in their box. I say each one’s name as I pick it up from the blanket, be...| Bridge
It wasn't the record-breaking season on Broadway that drew me out for George Clooney's outing in the stage adaptation of his 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck. I didn’t intend to write about, but felt gravitationally moved to do so. I should state up-front that it’s based on a preview performance I attended on Saturday, March 29, ahead of the show’s official slated opening night on April 3. So, as is standard with previews, some tiny production polishes are still evolving, though the core ...| Bridge
Welcome to baby-land, the best spot in town for having kids. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had one. Here cried the future of Glenwood, Ohio, where children never had to dream about tidy sidewalks and friendly cul-de-sacs and a nice new house with a puppy in the yard. They already had it, and their own babies would have it too. Just look at the one across the street. A baby boy on his grandfather’s lap. His tiny hands steering the wheel of a Mustang convertible. In the driveway, his...| Bridge
It’s 32 degrees at the University of Chicago after a busy week of cultural events and programming across the city hosted by the Chicago Panafrica Constellation. A reception is in full swing at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery celebrating Betye Saar’s exhibit, Let’s Get it On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar. The artist is present, and the room is full of enthusiastic admirers. A young woman dressed in a dandelion yellow puffer jacket eagerly approaches the crowd circling the artist, matchi...| Bridge
On view until July 13, 2025, Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland is an exhibition curated through the voices of four artists—Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, Nora Moore Lloyd, and Jason Wesaw. The exhibition serves as both a recognition and a reclamation of Indigenous art histories often sidelined in the dominant narratives of the art scene in the Illinois region (& also beyond). The exhibition experience begins outside, where three striking pieces adorn the glass exterior, immediatel...| Bridge
Though the reputation of Frederick Kiesler has to some degree been resuscitated over the last few decades, he is still perceived as an elusive figure and his career a fly-over realm between (or across) previous and current disciplines. As an architect Kiesler’s only projects that are generally still discussed are the Art of This Century Gallery for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942 and his continuously evolving Endless House. He is still portrayed as the “greatest non-building architect of our tim...| Bridge
The idea of an objective image is a premise that never had a solid foundation within the history of photography. While the fidelity of a photographic capture of the scene before the lens proffers a factual image, the meaning remains contingent. Indeed, some of photography’s earliest practitioners and theorists readily understood that the constructed space of the photograph and the visual culture in which it circulated were contentious terrains. The current photography exhibition at the Milw...| Bridge
Brutal Companion, Ruben Quesada’s latest collection (Barrow Street Press), delves into mortality, myth, and queerness with striking intimacy. A former Angeleno and founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, Quesada explores themes of cultural displacement, intimacy, and life’s fragility in a way that reaches out to readers like a whispered confession. Anchored in his past work across Revelations (2018) and Next Extinct Mammal (2011), this newest collection often returns to explore themes of cu...| Bridge
For nearly 75 years since its initial unveiling at the eponymous exhibition dedicated to him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1947, Mies van der Rohe’s “Fox River House” (as it was originally referred to) captured the attention of the world of architecture and the national press. Mired in mystery, metaphysics and controversy, Farnsworth House has been variously depicted as the pinnacle of the modern architect’s spiritual quest to capture the immaterial within the materi...| Bridge
My Eyes, Your Gaze, a book by my friend Darya Foroohar, begins with an intense discomfort with the body. “I always feel weird looking in the mirror,” Foroohar writes, the illustrated version of her leaning towards a mirror that glares back, both suspicious of the other. “My body has changed so much that no version of me looks right anymore.” It’s a sentiment that I think many readers can relate to—I certainly do. The cognitive dissonance of looking at yourself and seeing something...| Bridge
I moved to Chicago because I wanted to make art with my friends. I wanted to find them. My friends. We had always thought the world was ending, and especially then we believed it was ending because of ignorance. A dangerous position, teetering on narcissism, but not an unhealthy one for kids looking for work. I believed art could change worlds—yours, if you were alone, which means if you didn’t belong to the dominant world, and ours. On a fundamental but not always practical level, I cons...| Bridge
YOUNG ADULT BOOKS SERIES Written by Dick Farkas with drawings by M.A. Papanek-Miller and designed by Jessica Larva, Making Way: Sailing Into The Revolutionary Storm is an adventure story that takes place on the waterways of colonial America, on a schooner (sailing ship) named Commerce. The sto| Bridge
FWD: Museums Journal - Redacted, Alternate Rabia Tayyabi Cover A notable absence, a muting, making invisible. Redaction extends beyond the simple black squares as incomplete redactions – stamps marked with ‘deleted’ covering the text– white squares, and handmade notations. Each black s| Bridge
MUSEOLOGY / MUSEUM STUDIES Museums, like all other social institutions, reflect the tensions and contradictions of their times. The Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago proposes that these museum problems are deeply seeded in the field and| Bridge
CONTEMPORARY ART / LITERARY STUDIES / PHILOSOPHY / DANCE Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries is a philosophical study of equality as binding principle by art-makers across disciplines, and how they view their work situated across unrestricted spectrums of social| Bridge
FWD: MUSEUMS: “Power/Potential” Power: Having control or authority to dictate or influence people and organizations’ behavior and actions. Potential: Having the capacity to build or develop a positive outcome in the future. Power and the potential for power shape the r| Bridge
MUSEOLOGY / MUSEUM STUDIES Museums Are Dead. They fell victim to torch-bearing mobs, looters, and the vociferous contempt of political and religious groups. But perhaps also through insular pedagogies, inequitable practices, and a lack of representation or transparency, museums contributed to th| Bridge
DEATH & DYING / END OF LIFE CARE / MEMOIR Camille Grafer describes the journey she and her mother took after Mama Rose was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Recalling the life of her mother — a widow raising her only child in Chicago in the 1950s — Camille tells the story of her own transitions| Bridge
CONTEMPORARY ART / VETERAN ART / SOCIAL RESEARCH / RECIPES Tea is something that we all share. —Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo torture survivor Invitation to Tea compiles 48 tea recipes, stories, and traditions, one for each of the countries that have had citizens extralegally held at the U| Bridge
MUSEOLOGY / MUSEUM STUDIES How do museums respond to the urgency of the moment? In what ways can they be critically transformed to foster social justice work? Fwd: Museums, an inclusive, cross-disciplinary journal, shares interventions, experiments, and community dialogues within and out| Bridge
HOW DO MUSEUMS RESPOND TO THE URGENCY OF THE MOMENT? In what ways can museums be critically transformed to foster social justice work? Fwd: Museums, an inclusive, cross disciplinary publication, shares interventions, experiments, and community dialogues within and outside of museums. Our contributo| Bridge
FWD: MUSEUMS: “Power/Potential” Power: Having control or authority to dictate or influence people and organizations’ behavior and actions. Potential: Having the capacity to build or develop a positive outcome in the future. Power and the potential for power shape the r| Bridge
MUSEOLOGY / MUSEUM STUDIES Strangers in strange lands. Heroes sent to right what is wrong. Workers separated from the fruits of their labor. Scapegoats in times of fear and change. Aliens and alienation are ever present tropes in our cultures, our politics, and our lives. This issue of Fwd: Muse| Bridge
A notable absence, a muting, making invisible. Redaction extends beyond the simple black squares as incomplete redactions – stamps marked with ‘deleted’ covering the text– white squares, and handmade notations. Each black square signifies absence. It serves as a reminder for enforced forg| Bridge
