Barb Staples, center, overseeing a fitting of Matt Leuck in his King Randor costume at limebarb in Chicago. The company is North America’s largest independent maker of costumes for cosplay. Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

Barb Staples makes geek dreams come true.

At limebarb, Ms. Staples’s company and North America’s largest independent manufacturer of costumes for cosplay — derived from “costume” and “play”— the words “geek,” “nerd” and “dork” are not terms of derision. Customers, who dress up as their favorite characters from popular Web and video games, often refer to themselves that way.
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Katie King, a senior at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, working on her garments for Fashion Design Tuesday. She does not plan to stay in Chicago after graduation.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

It is widely agreed that Chicago is a great place to learn fashion design.

Big enough and diverse enough to inspire young designers, Chicago is also affordable and accessible, two things that fashion powerhouses New York and Los Angeles (and Paris and Milan and London) are not. Throw in a top-notch design school — the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — and you’ve got an enormously appealing training ground for the next generation of Marc Jacobses and Phoebe Philos.
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Michael Darling
Jennifer Richard

When Madeleine Grynsztejn became director at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, the then-40-year-old institution was in the throes of what she called “a healthy midlife crisis”: slightly adrift, re-examining its place and purpose in an art landscape dominated by the Art Institute and its coming Modern Wing.

Ms. Grynsztejn vowed to make the M.C.A. more relevant and accessible to a broader audience, to build on its history while attracting a new range of emerging and underground artists. She pledged to make the museum more essential to the city’s overall social fabric while maintaining its ties to Chicago’s core art community.

Gauging her success, of course, will take time. But one critical marker is incontestable: attendance at the museum is at record levels.

Ms. Grynsztejn has made the museum a more youthful place, not only in its programming, which has skewed younger since her arrival, but also in staffing. That movement came into sharp relief Thursday when she announced that she had chosen Michael Darling, 42, to become the museum’s chief curator, replacing Elizabeth Smith, 51, who resigned last year. Mr. Darling takes over in July.

Mr. Darling, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum, has a record that suggests he can embrace high and low culture with equal gusto. He has the requisite degrees: a bachelor of arts from Stanford and a master of arts and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. But he is also clued into popular culture.

A case in point: his final exhibition in Seattle is a look at Kurt Cobain’s profound impact on a generation. In hopes of expanding the program’s appeal beyond aging Gen-Xers, the museum will pair “Kurt” with an exploration of Andy Warhol’s depictions of fame, death, gender and loss.

“This got me so excited,” Ms. Grynsztejn said of the Cobain-Warhol juxtaposition. “Michael has a really intelligent way of looking at aspects of art history, like Andy Warhol, that we may feel have been studied to death. He’s addressing it from left field, reviving Warhol and pointing to modern culture and the most important issues of our time.”

Ms. Grynsztejn chose Mr. Darling, someone with established tastes and opinions, because she wanted someone who would challenge her in decisions involving the museum’s collections and exhibitions. “I was not looking for a mini-me,” she said.

Mr. Darling’s appointment reverses his last professional transition, which took him out of a thriving contemporary art environment — the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — to Seattle, where he became only the second curator of that museum’s modern and contemporary collection.

“I’ve tried, in Seattle, to insert a very active contemporary art collection into an existing museum,” he said.

At Seattle, the emphasis was broader and more general. At the Chicago museum, he said, “I’m looking forward to being all contemporary, all the time.”

The popular Untouchable Tours take people to the city's “old gangster hot spots and hit spots.”
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

Chicago, as any proud city official will tell you, is known for many things: its stunning architecture, its extensive green spaces, its hapless yet beloved sports teams. It likes to sell itself as America’s 21st-century city, defined not by its often sordid past, but by its relatively glamorous present and future.
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Paul Saenger, curator of the Newberry Library in Chicago, perusing a 14th-century codex from southern France with writings by Peter John Olivi, a Roman Catholic dissident.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Denounced by the Vatican as heretical some seven centuries ago, the writings of an influential Franciscan dissident have found their way to the fourth floor of the Newberry Library.

The handwritten texts of Peter John Olivi, bought last month jointly with the University of Notre Dame, could shed light on theological disputes during the early Inquisition. Scholars have hailed them as a remarkable legacy of the order of Spiritual Franciscans, who dared to criticize the Roman Catholic Church for amassing vast wealth.
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The South Shore Drill Team and Performing Arts Ensemble participates in competitions across the United States.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

As the city was reeling from dozens of shootings last week, a group of teenage boys gathered on a basketball court in a tough South Side neighborhood called the Pocket. Their leader, a stocky 32-year-old wearing baggy sweat pants and a baseball cap, told them to settle down and listen up. They didn’t have much time.

Then he barked out a chilling command: “Go get the rifles.”
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Art by snacki, an elusive graffiti artist, has been popping up all over North Side neighborhoods.
Image courtesy of snacki

It came to me in one of those terrifying flashes of clarity that drive some people to drink and and others to gorge on pie: My life had become a cut-rate Samuel Beckett play.

I’d been waiting for snacki — an elusive graffiti artist who has developed an appreciative following in Chicago — for nearly four months. And on a recent Friday evening, I should have been triumphant: After endless negotiations and delays, the person whose work had begun populating my dreams finally had agreed to call me. Now I just had to be patient. And rearrange my schedule. And wait.
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Alderman Sandi Jackson's portrait by Lunchbreath.

The paint is dry, the photographs are framed and the Legos have been arranged in an uncanny likeness of Alderman Ariel E. Reboyras. It is time to unveil the much-anticipated Chicago Aldermen Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists.

The show, which opens its two-week run at 7 p.m. Friday at the Johalla Projects gallery, at 1561 North Milwaukee Avenue, features portraits of Chicago’s 50 aldermen (including two who recently left their seats), created by 50 Chicago artists.
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Ceramic figures by Clara Hoag are on display in unoccupied retail space in Evanston, part of the Art Under Glass program.
David Klobucar/Chicago News Cooperative

As the recession takes its toll on retailing, empty storefront windows throughout the Chicago area are turning into “pop-up” art galleries, the result of an opportune alignment of interests among artists, landlords and chambers of commerce.
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Alderman Scott Waguespack sat for a portrait recently at Jim Newberry's Bucktown studio.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

If you’re not doing anything the evening of March 19, you might consider a visit to the Johalla Projects Gallery in Wicker Park for the opening of the “Aldermen Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists” show.
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