Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Venue Partner)
756 N Milwaukee Ave
312.243.9088
This event has passed.
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Peter Anton, Special Scrapbooks of Peter Anton and His Life, 1931 - Present
- When
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Opens Friday July 9, 2010 (5–8pm)
July 9, 2010 – Dec 30, 2010
Tuesdays–Wednesdays (11am–5pm)
Thursdays (11am–7:30pm)
Fridays–Saturdays (11am–5pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$5
- Links
“Intuit's new Peter Anton show provides a productive and evocative foil for the museum's overlapping show of drawings by Charles Steffen, another Chicago-area outsider artist who created works based on personal history that act as meditations on memory and loss. Anton's epic autobiographical photography project Almost There is exhibited alongside the artist's other works, including scrapbooks and memorabilia, to contextualize the inarguably brutal conditions of his life — and in so doing, they create a new investigation of outsider art's rich production and mythology.”
Monica Westin, Flavorpill
Peter Anton, a 78 year-old resident of East Chicago, Indiana, creates paintings that illuminate moments of significance from his personal history. Many of them are based on photographs he has obsessively compiled into a massive autobiography titled Almost There. Through the whole of twelve scrapbooks, Peter details his "life on a rollercoaster" — from his near death experience in 1934 at the age of three to his happy "movie star years" in the 1950s organizing and performing in hundreds of talent shows, all the way through his ruminations on mortality in 2005 after losing his beloved cats and being taken from his severely deteriorating home by a social service agency. Despite his declining health, Peter perseveres. This exhibit — the first retrospective of his work — is testament to how art and the impetus to create it still thrives in even more dire circumstances.
