Artists I Know: Theodore Boggs and Garrett Munski

Theodore Boggs with An Ode To Don Cornelius, Summer 2008

Last Saturday night, August 9, 2008, I attended the second of two interesting art openings that weekend. It was Open Studio at 212 N Sangamon, 2 blocks west of the intersection of Lake and Halsted in Chicago. Garrett Munski and Theodore Boggs--I call him Teddy Ballgame--have had this regal loft space for their studio this summer, so they set aside eight hours that night to show first the patrons and then the party people what they are working on.

Teddy is sitting in front of the piece with my favorite detail of the night, An Ode To Don Cornelius. Those trucks are Mexican Junk Trucks, as I call them, the pickups with built-up sides that are used by independent men and women who zoom up and down the alleys of Chicago as far north as Evanston, picking up any valuable trash that doesn't belong in the garbage.

Garrett Munski made this framed photograph, which I would call a collage for greater specificity. If I were a collector, I would be very excited to plan and paint a room in my house around it. My walls are Sweden Grey, and even as I type this I can see how great it would look above my flat TV and Robert The Rubber Tree in his silver reliquary. I see the cornrows playing off the stripes and the joinery and I think about everything African American culture has to teach the American aesthete about decoration, embellishment, general graphical neatening of one's person and surroundings.

Casta Indomitable by Theodore Boggs, Summer 2008

Undoubtedly from later in the night, this is a picture of another cartoon by Theodore Boggs, Casta Indomitable. Ted, I'm calling it a cartoon because that's where I think it fits in the tradition of drawing, painting, printing and collage. It is a cartoon in the sense of Michaelangelo's cartoons--a rather large-scale work on paper that uses drawing and coloring techniques in various media to rehearse ideas for even larger works.

Casta Indomitable is the second of Ted's recent works to picture the entire globe. I just paid a visit to Ted's amazing blog, SYNTHESIZER, to look for a photograph of the other one to show you, but I think I will wait and use it lead off my upcoming in-depth interview with the man called Theodore Boggs. On second thought, here it is; I can't deprive you of at least a taste of my favorite memory of Summer 2008, which was seeing Okonkwo Poiccard by Theodore Boggs at Art Partly 3 in July:

Okonkwo Poiccard by Theodore Boggs, Summer 2008

P.S. Big up Panthrow Nobody, pictured at the lower left of Casta Indomitable, one half of the talented production duo Best Day Ever!, www.myspace.com/yourbestdayever.