CHGO DSGN: Chicago Cultural Center
“Wandering, thus asquint, through the exhibition gallery, you are startled by the uncanny familiarity of it all. Here’s the bullseye of Target’s corporate identity, designed by legendary agency Unimark International. Here’s Holly Hunt’s Odense chair, recognizable to anyone who’s ever paged through a glossy interior design magazine. Here’s a long row of books whose covers were affectionately designed by Isaac Tobin, working in-house at the University of Chicago Press. Here’s the ubiquitous “You Are Beautiful” mantra, created on a lark by Matthew Hoffman. Here’s a pair of sweet kicks, Converse’s collaboration with restaurateur and artist Cody Hudson. Here’s an experimental microscopic camera by Leviathan. Here’s a shelf of Goose Island’s 312 Urban Wheat Ale bottles, their packaging developed by VSA Partners. (Void of content, display bottles taunt the thirsty.) Here’s a Divvy bike. Illustrations for Newsweek. Logo variations for IBM. Posters for plays and festivals. A box of chocolates. Tote bags. Booze. Postcards, some addressed and some not. Stuff. Such is design’s central paradox: at its most successful, designed objects are anonymous and almost entirely imperceptible—part of the texture of everyday life. They are the objects you encounter without remark. But at CHGO DSGN, when plucked from context and installed in a gallery, the everyday object becomes special: as hopeful, as significant, and as erotic as a fetish.”
My review of an encyclopedic exhibition on the history of Chicago design was published in The Seen, a journal that surveys the state of contemporary art.
Taking up all of the galleries in the Chicago Cultural Center, the exhibition CHGO DSGN offered a sweeping survey of the breadth of the city’s design scene, from its history as a typographic capital to its recent innovations in industrial production. The show was curated by AIGA medalist and self-styled Docent of Design Rick Valicenti and brought together a head-spinning variety of periods, pedigrees and styles — in an atmosphere that approached the carnivalesque.
My review, published in The Seen journal of international contemporary art, didn’t dare catalog the vast exhibition. Instead, it identified the stakes of the project by speaking with the curator, city officials, and participants whose work was on display. The review also gave Valicenti a platform to explicitly articulate the ideas that undergirded the exhibition. Valicenti later told me that he wished my review had been used as an introduction in the exhibit catalog; alas, too late.