Two Clubs at The Arts Club of Chicago
17 September – 14 December 2013
McElheny’s The Club for Modern Fashions —a transparent room constructed in glass and furnished in mid-twentieth-century style—echoes The Arts Club’s history, as well as that of its modernist form. Like Vizcaya and its fictionalized “Light Club,” The Arts Club was founded in 1916 to provide a space for the appreciation of the new. Former Arts Club President Rue Winterbotham Shaw retained the services of legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the Club’s rooms at 109 East Ontario Street, and Mies delivered an elegant yet advanced interior in 1951. The spirit of that space, demolished in the 1990s, has been retained by Mies’s student John Vinci in the Arts Club’s current building, which preserves Mies’ “floating” staircase at its heart. Nodding both to The Arts Club’s history and to Mies’s historic pavilion architecture, McElheny’s temporary glass room will become both a home and a frame for a renewed display of modernist style.
Winner of the 2006 MacArthur prize, McElheny has had solo exhibitions at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has been the subject and author of numerous publications, including Bill Horrigan, ed. Josiah McElheny: Towards a Light Club (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013); Helen Molesworth, ed. Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012); Josiah McElheny: A Prism (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2010); The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart’s The Light Club of Batavia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Lynne Cook and Josiah McElheny, eds. A Space for Island Universe (Madrid: MNCARS & Turner, 2009). McElheny lives and works in New York
The Arts Club of Chicago is located at 201 East Ontario Street, on the southeast corner of St. Clair and Ontario. Exhibitions are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm, and Saturday, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm.
For press and general inquiries, please contact Rachel Levin at 312.787.3997 or information@artsclubchicago.org. For questions regarding the performances taking place as a part of The Club for Modern Fashions, please contact Molly Feingold at 312.787.3997 or mfeingold@artsclubchicago.org.
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