Janine Mileaf is executive director of the Arts Club of Chicago. She is the author of Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade.
Working independently with ties to the Chicago art community, painters Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning, John Wilde, Julia Thecla, Harold Noecker, and Julio de Diego explored the tenets of Surrealism. Each artist employed a distinct approach, but all frequently treated American domestic interiors as sites of fantasy. Focusing on paintings produced between the 1930s and '50s, art historians Adam Jolles, Joanna Pawlik, and others identify Chicago as a prime city for the collection and display of European Surrealism, while also highlighting local artists' contributions. -- Art in America