CALL FOR AWARENESS: Alberto Aguilar Solo Exhibition for Trunk Show
Trunk Show | Saturday, June 18th, 2016 | 2-5pm
5234 South Mayfield Avenue | Chicago, IL

How much of art is adornment and how much is what Adorno meant? He noted that exclamation points are “like silent cymbal clashes,” nevermind that they themselves are also salient symbol crashes.

If it feels like summer is finally here, you can thank last month’s artist, Alexandria Eregbu. Alongside the unveiling and affixing of her sticker, BRILLIANCE! OPULENCE! GLOOM!, Eregbu performed an audio-visual mixtape-cum-dance party in the backyard of our favorite sector, Sector 2337. We ate homemade sweet potatoes and cornbread and delectable fried chicken from mainstay Harold’s. An approximation of her under- and over-lapping mixtape is available here and her sticker is available here. It was a delight and for those who say “don’t complain about the weather, change it,” we’re happy to say you can do so without the all too popular method of destroying the climate.

We’re ecstatic to host another point of exclamation this month. Alberto Aguilar is never not making art. His is one of the most inspiring and exciting and encompassing practices we know. He and his family and his friends are continually and continuously collaborating: temporary sculptures, paintings, drawings, sign-makings, curating, performance and taking every life situation as a potential site for art- and meaning-making. We are also drawn by the endless public-ness of his practice. A recent show at Antena spilled into the neighborhood with signs adorning local businesses, art spaces and community spaces. His brilliant and contentious recent residency at the Art Institute of Chicago’s instagram — as part of a larger residency at the museum itself — reconciled the role of the contemporary artist and citizen within an institution of the AIC’s scale.

For this exhibition, Aguilar is pulling out a hundred stops: we’ll have pizza from some of the pizzerias he and his family visited on their 2012 Pizza Parade, he will perform a related slide show, his daughter will sing songs she made on their unplanned, seven week-long family road trip last summer and their house will do double duty as the site of HOME VIEWING: A TOURING SHOW FOR TEMPORARY COLLECTORS featuring works by Julie Weber and Hui-min Tsen. We’ll be stationed near Cicero, a town Aguilar grew up in, which was named after the Roman orator also known to have noted that “the causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.” Of course, another known Ciceroan, Al Capone said, “you can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” We’ll square these alongside former Cicero Town President Betty Loren Maltese’s musing: “but, you know, sometimes things get etched and it can never be removed.”

Upcoming Trunk Show artists include Every house has a door.

ABOUT ALBERTO AGUILAR
Alberto Aguilar is a Chicago-based artist. He is coordinator of Pedestrian Project, a program dedicated to making art more accessible and available to all. Currently he is artist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. Aguilar’s creative practice often incorporates whatever materials are at hand as well as exchanges with his family, other artists, and people he encounters. His work bridges media from painting and sculpture to video, installation, performance, and sound, and has been exhibited at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queens Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He holds a BFA and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at Harold Washington College.

ABOUT TRUNK SHOW
TRUNK SHOW is a mobile exhibition space usually located in Chicago. It features monthly solo shows for which artists are commissioned to design a limited edition bumper sticker. The sticker lives, rides along with and helps propel a medium beat-up 1999 forest green Ford Taurus owned by Raven Falquez Munsell and Jesse Malmed. In addition to the month-long exhibitions, the bumper stickers are sold à la carte and by annual subscription. Openings follow a nomadic, symbiotic logic and include a public affixing, conceptual catering and playlists. TRUNK SHOW has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Hyperallergic, Newcity (who also named it The Best New Gallery on a Car Bumper) and the Chicago Tribune, which deemed these missives among the Best of Visual Art in Chicago.

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Tags: Alberto Aguilar, bumper stickers, Chicago, Cicero, Garfield Ridge, Jesse Malmed, raven munsell, trunk show