Weinberg/Newton Gallery

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1 MEDIA ALERT Weinberg/Newton Gallery EXHIBITION Weight of a World EXHIBITION DATES July 13 - September 15 OPENING RECEPTION Friday, July PM LOCATION Weinberg/Newton Gallery 300 W Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL HOURS Mon Sat 10 AM 5 PM VISIT US ONLINE weinbergnewtongallery.com ALL MEDIA REQUESTS Please contact Claire Arctander claire@d-weinberg.com High-resolution images of artwork are available upon request. OVERVIEW Conceived of as a tool, Weight of a World presents artworks that elicit lessons to be learned and to be taught from global conflict, local lore, and cultural identity. Presented in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves, Weight of a World comprises sculptures, paintings, film, and supplementary programming that pivot upon two vast, inextricable categories: history and identity. The pieces on view attempt to conceptualize the roles of individuals within the long arc of history: how we are formed by our contexts, and how we may impact what comes next. ARTISTS Alison Ruttan, Deborah Stratman, and Orkideh Torabi with a program by Rebecca Keller PARTNER Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational organization that reaches millions of students worldwide every year. Using the lessons of history and history in the making Facing History equips teachers to provide students with the skills to think critically and wrestle with difficult issues. Teachers work closely with students to make personal connections between the past and their present. Our rigorous curriculum sparks their desire to look beyond themselves and participate in the broader world. We are creating future generations of engaged, informed, and responsible decision makers who when faced with injustice, misinformation, and bigotry, will stand up for justice, truth, and equality. Facing History transforms required lessons in history into inspired lessons in humanity to empower youth who will change the world for the better. ABOUT WEINBERG/NEWTON GALLERY Weinberg/Newton Gallery is an exhibition space with a mission to educate and inform the public on social justice issues. Through artwork and programming, the gallery provides an engaging environment for discourse on critical contemporary issues facing our communities. Connecting artists with social justice organizations, the gallery works to drive change and cultivate a culture of consciousness.

2 PRESS RELEASE 2 Weinberg/Newton Gallery EXHIBITION Weight of a World EXHIBITION DATES July 13 - September 15 OPENING RECEPTION Friday, July PM LOCATION Weinberg/Newton Gallery 300 W Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL CONTACT The gallery may be reached at or info@weinberg newtongallery.com HOURS Mon Sat 10 AM 5 PM VISIT US ONLINE weinbergnewtongallery.com ALL MEDIA REQUESTS Please contact Claire Arctander claire@d-weinberg.com High-resolution images of artwork are available upon request. As we are all enmeshed in the flow of time, we are all implicated in the making of history. Our connections to current conflicts occuring in distant corners of the world or even of our own city can feel just as remote as acts of mass violence in previous centuries yet the logic and consequences of such situations reverberate through the power dynamics we experience on a daily basis. The artists featured in Weight of a World Alison Ruttan, Deborah Stratman, and Orkideh Torabi experiment within the boundaries of sculpture, film, and painting respectively in order to elucidate the tacit connections between ourselves and faraway others, between ourselves and the land we live upon, between ourselves and the power structures that propel our ways of being. In doing so, they subtly yet firmly suggest the possibility of destabilizing seemingly inevitable orders to reconfigure our world into an incrementally more just, more compassionate, more sustainable place. Alison Ruttan's current works in ceramics function as aestheticized scale models of contemporary ruins caused by the destruction of war. Her sculptures of bombed out urban dwellings underscore the violence that civilians endure throughout the course of war. Her works look to recent devastation of Syrian cities in order to call into question the distance at which we as Americans survey international warfare isn't it terrible, we can think, when seeing images through the bulletproof glass windows of our newsfeeds. Ruttan's sculptures concretize violence but keep it at a manageable scale to both emphasize and call into question the privileges of distance. Deborah Stratman's experimental documentary film The Illinois Parables remains grounded in our home state while traveling through the centuries. These vignettes link the stories of diverse subjects, from indigenous peoples to natural disaster survivors. The common landscape connects these seemingly disparate stories of upheaval, violence, and struggle in order to illuminate the common threads of human endurance in the face of unimaginable difficulties. Even if they cannot readily be seen at first glance, our histories are etched into the land on which they unfold. Orkideh Torabi's paintings, made using a unique transfer process of fabric dye on cotton, depict oafish men in garish, sickly colors. These caricatures incorporate lush patterns and imagery from traditional Persian miniatures in order to emphasize the connections between power dynamics of the past and the present. She renders her male subjects as goofy and goggle eyed in order to rattle the patriarchal

3 PRESS RELEASE 3 precedent of her home country Iran, and of contemporary society at large. In concert with Weight of a World, artist and teacher Rebecca Keller will lead a group of creative thinkers in a generative project that adds to her ongoing endeavor Excavating History, a curriculum and collaborative practice that she has honed over the years. Excavating History has previously taken the forms of classes, exhibitions, and a book that question the ways that histories are inscribed and encourage participants to probe the metaphoric heft of objects. Keller's new iteration of the project will see three meetings take place in the gallery during Weight of a World. These sessions, Keller's artistic contribution to the exhibition, will yield responsive work from the group of participants. Weight of a World is inspired by and presented in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves, an international nonprofit educational organization which engages students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. Through online and in person professional development and their free library of classroom resources, Facing History and Ourselves encourages students and teachers to confront the development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide in order to make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

4 CALENDAR OF EVENTS 4 LOCATION Unless noted, all events are free and open to the public, and will take place at Weinberg/Newton Gallery. 300 W Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL Handicap accessible entrance is located at 730 N. Franklin Street, call the gallery upon arrival. The gallery may be reached at or info@weinberg newtongallery.com Weight of a World OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, JULY 13, 5 9 PM FACING HISTORY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: CURRENT AND CONTROVERSIAL THURSDAY, JULY 19 PRIVATE EVENT FACING HISTORY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: RACE AND MEMBERSHIP JULY PRIVATE EVENT FACING HISTORY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LGBTQ MATTERS THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 PRIVATE EVENT FACING TODAY: HOW LGBTQ HISTORY CAN INFORM AND EMPOWER YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 6 8 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FACING HISTORY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: NEWS LITERACY TUESDAY, AUGUST 14 PRIVATE EVENT YOUTH VOICES IN CINEMA THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 6 8 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FACING HISTORY ALLIANCE SCHOOL COLLOQUIUM THURSDAY, AUGUST 23 PRIVATE EVENT FACING HISTORY AND THE FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRACIES ACROSS THE GLOBE THURSDAY, AUGUST 23, 6 8 PM FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC SEE WEINBERGNEWTONGALLERY.COM FOR EVENT DETAILS

5 ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 5 ALISON RUTTAN is an artist who primarily works within topically focused projects. Each project comes out of Ruttan's attempts to understand perceived contradictions in the world around her. For the past ten years she has been engaged with various questions surrounding the nature of violence as a part of the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Elmhurst Art Museum, Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Galerie Wit in Wageningen, Rocket Gallery in London, and the Drawing Center in New York City. Ruttan's work has been written about in Art in America, Flash Art, the Chicago Tribune, Art Papers, Chicago Magazine, and New Art Examiner. Her awards include The Illinois Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, Wexner Center for the Arts, and AIR Niederosterreich Artist Residency in Krems, Austria. IMAGE: ALISON RUTTAN, TITLE TK INSTALLATION DETAIL, 2018

6 ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 6 DEBORAH STRATMAN is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, raptors, comets, and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/ DOX, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame, Rotterdam and Berlinale. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins fellowships, a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert Award. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois. IMAGE: DEBORAH STRATMAN, THE ILLINOIS PARABLES, FILM STILL, 2016

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 7 ORKIDEH TORABI imagines herself as a director who, through painting, resituates the power dynamics of patriarchal society in her native Iran.

7 ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 7 ORKIDEH TORABI imagines herself as a director who, through painting, resituates the power dynamics of patriarchal society in her native Iran. She juxtaposes her cartoonish images of contemporary men against vivid patterns that are influenced by Persian miniatures, small yet highly detailed illustrations that have been an integral part of Iranian culture since the 13th century. In doing so, Torabi makes explicit that the past and present become interwoven. Torabi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and she received her MA and BA from The University of Art in Tehran. Torabi s solo and two person shows include Yes, Please & Thank You in Los Angeles, Western Exhibitions in Chicago, and Horton Gallery in New York City. Group shows include Andrew Rafacz Gallery and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. She was selected for the 2017 Midwest issue of New American Paintings and has work in the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, WA. Torabi lives and works in Chicago. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Horton Gallery in Dallas. IMAGE: ORKIDEH TORABI, WHERE ARE ALL THE HOURIES, FABRIC DYE ON STRETCHED COTTON, 2018

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHY 8 Artist, teacher, and writer REBECCA KELLER focuses on the intersection between art, audience, and the wider culture, negotiating the terrain between private meaning making and

8 CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHY 8 Artist, teacher, and writer REBECCA KELLER focuses on the intersection between art, audience, and the wider culture, negotiating the terrain between private meaning making and public symbolism. Much of her recent work falls under the umbrella project Excavating History: wide ranging, research driven, frequently collaborative projects that investigate the idea of history as a category and engine for artmaking. far flung locations. She teaches in the departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. IMAGE: REBECCA KELLER, PRESENT TENSE: EXCAVATING BRADDOCK PARTICIPANTS IN HISTORY WALK AND WORKSHOP, 2016 Keller's recent work includes projects done in sites ranging from 17th century anatomical theaters to white cube art museums, and engage topics from medicine to domestic labor, from steelmaking to teaching. Her projects have recently appeared at the Roger Brown Home and Residency, the International Museum of Surgical Science, and the Jane Addams Hull House Museum among other

FROM OUR PARTNER 9 Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational organization that reaches millions of students worldwide every year.

Teachers work closely with students to make personal connections between the past and their present.

9 FROM OUR PARTNER 9 Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational organization that reaches millions of students worldwide every year. Using the lessons of history and history in the making Facing History equips teachers to provide students with the skills to think critically and wrestle with difficult issues. Teachers work closely with students to make personal connections between the past and their present. Our rigorous curriculum sparks their desire to look beyond themselves and participate in the broader world. We are creating future generations of engaged, informed, and responsible decision makers who when faced with injustice, misinformation, and bigotry, will stand up for justice, truth, and equality. Facing History transforms required lessons in history into inspired lessons in humanity to empower youth who will change the world for the better. From the failure of democracy in Germany and the events leading to the Holocaust, to struggles for civil rights from the United States to South Africa Facing History s approach encourages students and teachers to start their journey of discovery with fundamental questions of identity and group membership, which then sparks the desire to look beyond oneself and participate in their communities and beyond. We are grateful for this unique opportunity to collaborate with Weinberg/Newton Gallery on Weight of a World. Visual art conveys the richness and complexities of human behavior in surprising and challenging ways it can help us explore our own and other identities and the legacies of choices made in the past, which can inform the choices that confront us today. We hope that visitors will leave with a deeper understanding of how history continues to influence our world, and how we can all choose to participate in bringing about a more humane, just, and compassionate world.

10 ABOUT WEINBERG/NEWTON GALLERY 10 Weinberg/Newton Gallery aims to create space for dialogue about the many social justice issues that concern our local Chicago community and beyond. In collaboration with artists and non-profit organizations, we work to cultivate a culture of consciousness and inspire change by way of exhibitions, panel discussions, film screenings, artist talks, and more. Weinberg/Newton Gallery 300 W Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL info@weinbergnewtongallery.com Monday Saturday 10 AM 5 PM

Weinberg/Newton Gallery

MEDIA ALERT Weinberg/Newton Gallery EXHIBITION In Acts EXHIBITION DATES April 7 June 10, 2017 OPENING RECEPTION Friday, April 7, 2017, 5 8 PM LOCATION Weinberg/Newton Gallery 300 W Superior Street, Suite