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Writing on Art                                                                                                                             

IMPORTANT: As a freelance writer, I am the copyright owner of all my articles, and they may not be reproduced without my permission.

I have an article offering advice for artists from the point of view of an art critic.
        The Chicago Reader has made its articles from more than the last decade available on-line. You can find hundreds of my art and photography reviews, plus many profiles of artists by me, by clicking on "Search our articles archive" on the main page and entering Fred Camper art or "Fred Camper" plus the name of the artist you're interested in. A very few of those are linked to below.
Writing on Art and Architecture

General commentary:

Is art defaming 9/11 deaths?, a commentary on a recent art ruckus that also applies to some earlier culture wars, Newsday, July 10, 2005. (This will only be available for free briefly.)

Listed alphabetically by artist:

Fish, Julia: On the Brink of Abstraction, Reader, February 4, 1994.
Gross, Rainer: Rainer Gross, catalogue essay on the "Twins," 1998. Also available in German translation.
Helen Levitt: A Vision of Freedom, Chicago Reader, April 2, 1993.
Monet, Claude: An Ecological Vision: Monet in the 90s, Chicago Reader, July 27, 1990.
Niemeyer, Oscar: An Art Museum in Brasilia, The C.A.C.A. Review, October 2003.
Pascual, Vicente: review Chicago Reader, August 21, 1998.
Peltz, Lorraine: Review of her 2002 show, originally written for the New Art Examiner.
Gerhard Richter: All Over the Place, Chicago Reader, August 2, 2002.
Richter, Gerhard: Some notes on Richter in the form of a response to Jed Perl's trashing of him, and replies from others.
Schlaud, Angela: Angela Schlaud, catalogue essay, 1998.

Artists and galleries who have placed my reviews of their work on their own Web sites (with my permission):
Dan Addington
Mark Arctander
Katherine Drake Chial
Elizabeth Coyne
Robert Erickson
Paul Hertz
Tim Lowly
Ben Mahmoud
Kate McQuillen
David Dufault Peterson
Amy Youngs
Scott Roberts and José Lerma, a review of exhibits by both artists at Seven Three Split gallery.

My writing on art, available for purchase on-line (most are $1.95) on the Reader Archive site:
There are a vast number of art reviews and other articles on artists and art world figures here. I will gradually try to index at least some of them, but for now you can search for my name and get a complete list by year, or my name and an artist's name to see if I've written on that artist. Look at the short text excerpt to see if it's a full review or just a mention.
Among these articles are the following Reader cover stories ($3.95 each), listed alphabetically by subject:

Walter Andersons: Original Spin: Why does the most exciting young painter in town paint from photocopies of other people's work? (Chicago Reader, March 10, 2000). I also wrote two reviews of exhibits of Andersons's work, in 1995 and 1997.
On New York art dealer (and former Chicagoan and Chicago dealer) Richard Feigen: "Get Yourself Some Dynamite!". The title was taken from Feigen's comment on Josef Paul Kleihues's horrible building for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, but he talks about many other things, including the history of anti-Semitism in Chicago and its negative impact on the local art scene; he even makes a case that were it not due to anti-Semitism, Louis Sullivan's great Chicago Stock Exchange Building might have been saved from demolition.
Yasuhiro Ishimoto (and Marvin Newman): Men on the Street: The everyday art of two extraordinary photographers: Marvin Newman and Yasuhiro Ishimoto (Chicago Reader, June 11, 1999). (I won a Peter Lisagor award for this story.)
Tim Lowly: Temma Lowly and the Meaning of Life: Her parents didn't know what hit them. Then they started to figure things out (Chicago Reader, November 22, 2002). I also wrote two reviews of exhibits of Lowly's work, in 1997 and 2000.
Kerry James Marshall: Open Houses: Painter Kerry James Marshall rediscovers the civil rights era in the living rooms of the black middle class (Chicago Reader, May 8, 1998.
Marvin Newman: see under Ishimoto above.
Zhou Brothers: Too Hot to Be Cool: European collectors love the Zhou brothers. Why can't they get any respect here at home? (Chicago Reader, December 14, 2001).

Selected other art writing, not on-line but currently in print and available for ordering:
Wes Mills: Missoula Drawings, an exhibition catalogue for a February 2000 exhibit at Joseph Hellman Gallery. The catalogue is available for $15.00 in the gallery, and $18.00 by mail including shipping.


The Chicago Reader Web site has no art reviews available free, but they do put all their current film writing there. They also sell back issues from approximately the last year, for 25 cents a copy if you come into the Reader office, or for $3.25 an issue by mail; photocopies of articles from back issues can also be ordered.

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