Are you “talented, educated, imaginative, emotional, disrespectful, offbeat, humorous, unconventional, under-employed and poor?”
If so, according to artist Mike Elko’s print – advertising his School of Not-So-Fine Art – can offer training that will put you “on your way to a new and relatively successful life.”
This offer, as well as a list of the “popular crapola” you will learn to produce from Mike’s School of Art, can be found on a 3-D silkscreen print of a giant matchbox. The matchbox, by printmaker Elko, is one of 43 prints by 31 different artists on display at the New Prints 2005/Autumn exhibit at Columbia College’s A+D Gallery, 619 S. Wabash Ave.
The exhibit traveled from the International Print Center New York, which displays four new print shows a year, one for each season. According to Michelle Levy, program manager at IPCNY, this is the first time the center has traveled one of its print shows. “Traveling the new print show is a big deal for us,” Levy says.
Leonard Lehrer, the dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College, is on the Board of Trustees at IPCNY.
“(Lehrer) is a longtime printmaker himself and has always been enthusiastic about the program and has wanted to bring (the show) to Chicago,” Levy says.
The exhibit, which runs through Feb. 18, consists of a group of prints with no central theme among them. A selection committee chose the artists from a pool of more than 1,200 works. The selection committee consisted of individuals in the art world, including a curator, a master printmaker and a gallery director. According to Levy, there was an open call for submissions and IPCNY received work from a range of artists, from those just out of school to professional artists.
Friedhard Kiekeben, a visitor to A+D gallery, says he enjoys the mixture of big names and lesser-known artists in the exhibit.
“It is nice and fresh to see a show like this coming from New York to Chicago,” says Kiekeben, a professor of printmaking in the United Kingdom.
Kiekeben fixates on a lithograph titled “Entropia: Construction” by Julie Mehretu. What looks to the artistically na
