SIXTY INCHES FROM CENTER
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APPARITIONS AND UNRAVELED ECOSYSTEMS: A REVIEW OF A TALE OF TODAY: MATERIALITIES AT THE DRIEHAUS MUSEUM
BY KRISTIE KAHNS
CHICAGO — On the night of October 8, 1871, the constellation Orion hung low in the sky to the east, hovering over Lake Michigan. To the southwest, strong winds blew toward downtown Chicago, and Saturn, along with the stars of Sagittarius, would have been visible before sinking below the horizon later that night. Today, a map of this night sky perforates a luminous copper globe, a reimagined hod filled with copper-gilded coal nestled into the fireplace in the Library at the Nickerson Mansion, a lavish epitome of Gilded Age architecture and design, now the site of the Driehaus Museum. This copper and coal piece, Mercury’s Hearth: Coal, Electricity, Fire and Industry, is the contribution of Chicago-based artist Rebecca Beachy to the exhibition A Tale of Today: Materialities, currently on view at the Driehaus Museum. The exhibition is the fifth iteration of A Tale of Today, an initiative that activates and reconsiders the histories of the Gilded Age by bringing contemporary artists into the Museum’s historic space…
-April 17, 2025
Given that the vast majority of the world’s lands have by now been modified by humans, urban gardens might be the best we can hope for.
BY LORI WAXMAN
CHICAGO — When Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it adopted the motto “Urbs in Horto,” meaning “City in a Garden,” and inscribed it on the official seal. The slogan is widely considered prophetic of the city’s vast swaths of public parkland, including miles of Lake Michigan shorelineand parks designed by such luminaries as Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. The reality is rather dirtier. And flowerier, too. The group exhibition Myth of the Organic City explores this topic at 6018North, an ambitious art space run out of a dilapidated mansion in the Edgewater neighborhood…
-January 13, 2025
SIXTY INCHES FROM CENTER —
OPAL POOLS OF MILK AND THE LUZHIN DEFENCE: REVIEW OF THIS TOO SHALL PASS
BY ANNETTE LEPIQUE
“This Too Shall Pass, curated by Joshi Radin at the Ralph Arnold Gallery, is a poem, a quartet between curator and three featured artists: N. Masani Landfair, Rebecca Beachy, and Nancy D. Valladares. Taking cues from the exhibition’s title—the phrase’s origins in medieval Sufism and the kinship to curator Helen Molesworth’s 2012 exhibition on the sociocultural shifts of the 1980s under capitalist realism, This Will Have Been—the artists’ works speak to the entanglements, the knotty impossibilities of living and dying in a world marked by capital, a world that clings to the false hope of stasis as a necessity for consumption. Think “business as usual” or “getting America back to work” during a pandemic that laid bare the vulnerabilities and material inequities upon which modern life is built. Landfair, Beachy, and Valladares’ work not only complicates but challenges such discontinuity; all three engage time and cycles of materiality and immateriality to ask, “do you not see yourself in these assemblages, these remnants, these memories, these moments of the natural world? You should, as these are your actions, the chain of reactions, echoing out from their point of origin…”
-April 14, 2022
ANTENNAE MAGAZINE —
TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Interviewer: Giovanni Aloi
Interviewee: Rebecca Beachy
“Rebecca Beachy is one of the most interesting and original up and coming contemporary artists in Chicago. Her practice invites a heightened level of attention for the subtleties involved in our relationship with the materialities of the natural world. An expert taxidermist, Beachy has cultivated a keen interest for the natural world and its ability to enhance a sense of existential presence as well as its ability to slow us down in order to better grasp the reality we live in.”
-Issue 46, Winter 2018
WHITE HOT MAGAZINE —
CAROLINE PICARD IN CONVERSATION
Coming of Age
An Exhibition Curated by Caroline Picard
Sep 09-Nov 19, 2017
Sector 2337
2337 N Milwaukee Ave., Chicago IL 60647
Featuring Rebecca Beachy, Rhonda Holberton, Essi Kausalainen, Takahiro Iwasaki, Aki Inomata, Ebony G. Patterson, and Tsherin Sherpa
By Giovanni Aloi
-November 2017
HYPERALLERGIC : ANIMAL BONES AS AN ARTISTIC MEDIUM —
THE NOMADIC BODY: REBECCA BEACHY AT NEW CAPITAL
By Caroline Picard
-January 2017
By Liz McCarthy
Winter 2016
ART SLANT —
TASTE WITH THE BODY AND WITHOUT
By Zachary Cahill
-The Taste Issue, June 2016
NEWCITY ART CHICAGO —
BREAKOUT ARTISTS 2014 : CHICAGO'S NEXT GENERATION OF IMAGE MAKERS
By Jason Foumberg
-May 2014