As host of Bingo/Tango night at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Jason Pickleman didn’t call out numbers—instead, he used shapes drawn from artworks in the museum’s collection. Between rounds, guests vacated their seats to learn the tango from professional instructors. Unusual, exhilarating, smart on multiple levels, and a bit zany—the beloved event speaks volumes about Pickleman, a creative force of nature whose impact on his chosen city is hard to overstate.
Recently described as a “dancefloor mainstay of Chicago,” Pickleman’s hats have been many: artist, designer, collector, gallerist. Amassing art since he was a teenager, Pickleman studied English literature at Boston University; there he met Leslie Bodenstein, who would become his partner in life and at JNL Graphic Design, the studio the pair founded in 1992. Working from a decommissioned post office in Chicago's River North area, Pickleman and Bodenstein merged their art and design sensibilities with tremendous success. “To live in Chicago is to encounter Jason Pickleman’s work,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and local clients have included Millennium Park, Avec, Blackbird, Time Out Chicago, Chicago Transit Authority, Poetry Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, EXPO Chicago, and the Field Museum. Beyond the Windy City limits, JNL has worked with clients including the Prada Foundation and Skinny Pop Popcorn, for whom they designed Warhol-inspired packaging.
The space between commercial and contemporary art has been of the utmost importance to Pickleman, who has defined himself by his ability to move effortlessly through these worlds as both an artist and collector. As an artist, Pickleman’s works reflect his passions for text and graphic design, frequently invoking the history of these disciplines while managing to evade dryness or didacticism—in other words, giving them life. As Michelle Grabner, professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has put it, “Jason thinks about everything from the formal qualities and what the formal qualities of a painting can convey, from color to design to composition—but then [gets] to kind of the deep, full heart behind it.”
“I started making art with serious intent in the mid-80s,” Pickleman reflects on his own practice. “By 1987 I was well into making text-based paintings, collages, and Polaroid photographs. Chicago at the time was a hot-bed of contemporary art. Galleries like Feature that showed early support to artists such as Charles Ray, and Jeff Koons [were] also exhibiting a strong cadre of Chicago-based conceptual artists like Tony Tasset and Jeanne Dunning. My early art making inspiration was influenced by their example.” Pickleman was among the creators featured in the 2007 exhibition Young Chicago at the Art Institute of Chicago, where his art now resides in the institution's permanent collection, and his works have been shown at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Chicago Design Museum, Ken Saunders Gallery, and the Neon and Light Museum, among others.
In 2015, Pickleman opened his collection gallery Lawrence & Clark, a living testament to his unorthodox and open-hearted ethos, named for the Chicago intersection where it stood. Here, Pickleman curated and installed works from his own collection, throwing open the doors to the public to be seen again (and again) by anybody who wanted to drop in. “I know collectors whose answer to an over-growing collection is to buy another property to display their art, or to put things in storage,” says Pickleman. “My response has always been to hang everything salon-style. I’d rather see things jammed together than to see nothing at all.” As an ardent supporter of rising local talent, Pickleman tirelessly made his own circuit between galleries, thesis exhibitions, and less formalized art spaces. “I’m most interested in ambiguity and pieces that seem strange or awkward,” Pickleman says, “living with them fuels my creativity.”
“Much of the work in EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT would have been on exhibit at Lawrence & Clark,” Pickleman says. From early works by rising Chicago artists to icons of design to unexpected oddities, each component of this auction represents Pickleman’s boundless curiosity and his passion not only for art and design, but for the communities, writ large, that gravitate in their orbit. Indeed, Pickleman has come to exude a gravitational pull of his own, as a force of creativity, generosity, and connection for which so many in Chicago and far beyond are truly grateful.
Cindy Sherman b. 1954
A seminal figure of the Pictures Generation, Cindy Sherman blends photography and performance to question the construction of identity, gender, and modern cultural tropes. Born in New Jersey and raised on Long Island, Sherman enrolled to study art at Buffalo State College in 1972. Before landing on photography as her primary medium, Sherman created original paper dolls to enact various scenes and even made an animation with herself as a paper doll coming to life. While living at Hallwalls, a Buffalo art space started with fellow artists Robert Longo and Charlie Clough, Sherman would use artist gatherings as occasion to assume elaborately constructed characters using makeup and thrift store clothing, which she sometimes documented on camera.
Sherman moved to New York in the summer of 1977, where she took a part-time position as a receptionist for Artists Space. That fall she began what would become her breakthrough series, the 70 photographs comprising the Untitled Film Stills. Dedicated to a certain level of ambiguity, Sherman fashioned herself after actresses of the 1950s and 60s, inhabiting familiar scenes from movies that did not exist – but might have. Sherman developed the photographs in her apartment darkroom, deliberately processing the photos to be reticulated and grainy: “the photographs were supposed to look like they cost fifty cents,” Sherman said. In 1980, The Kitchen hosted Sherman’s first New York solo show and, that same year, her works were exhibited as the debut show of the new Metro Pictures Gallery.
Rocketing into the widespread recognition, Sherman has continued to adapt and occupy various forms of imagery, from the centerfold and soft-core pornography to the historical portrait. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, the year that the Museum of Modern Art acquired Untitled Film Stills in its entirety. More recently, Sherman has used large color photography to restage classic European portraits and continues to be recognized for her ongoing deconstruction of female representation throughout history.
Auction Results Cindy Sherman
