Debra Riley Parr

Debra Riley Parr is Associate Professor of Art & Design History at Columbia College Chicago. She is currently writing a book on contemporary olfactory art.

This exhibition is about the unlikely friendship of two marvelous women, Frida Kahlo and Mary Reynolds, one now very famous and the other deserving more recognition. People attending Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds might be perturbed that there are only a few of Kahlo’s paintings on view, surrounded as they are with the art and ephemera of the avant garde who hung out at Mary Reynold’s place in Paris.

Frida Kahlo, The Frame (El Marco), 1938. Oil on aluminum in artisanal frame with painted glass, 11 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches. © 2025 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / ADAGP, Paris. Digital Image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

For this exhibition Kim Gordon created eight-minute-long bursts of sounds to accompany German-born artist Albert Oehlen’s three massive twelve-foot-tall metal constructions. Flat cutouts attached to the walls of the stark, over-lit, white gallery space, they are shaped like huge omega forms. Their curved elements are softened into organic almost phallic silhouettes, perfect for Gordon’s pas de deux of low grumbling and dissonant feedback.

Albert Oehlen, Untitled, 2024. Oil on canvas, 74 x 43 inches. Courtesy the artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
With this exhibition, the Art Institute builds on its institutional commitments to collecting, exhibiting, and contributing to the research on Surrealist work. It also reaffirms the museum’s commitments to recent vital collaborations with Mexican art institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
Remedios Varo, Cazadora de astros (Star Catcher), 1956. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, by exchange, 2021.35. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid. Photo by Rafael Doniz, courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
This heart-rending issue follows seventy printings of Quaranzine, a daily one-page zine that Public Collectors has published on a Risograph printer in Marc Fischer’s basement here in Chicago during the worldwide pandemic. It’s a substantial labor of love and commitment to community.
Quaranzine #71. Courtesy Public Collectors.
Curated by Zoë Ryan, the exhibition In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair draws together six artists working in Mexico between 1940 and 1970: Anni Albers, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, Clara Porset, and Cynthia Sargent. It is the first exhibition to make an argument for the impact of post-revolutionary Mexico on these artists, deeply connected yet never shown together before.
Cynthia Sargent, Bartok, designed 1955/60, produced c.1967. Ardis Berghoff Collection, in memory of Georgia Beros Berghoff, SAIC '52. Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago.

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