Recombinant Stare: a Stare Magazine Retrospective–Opening Reception

Recombinant Stare is an exhibition that pulls together strands from Kevin Riordan’s Stare Press, particularly Stare Magazine, a publication focusing on irreverent and arresting graphic art and writing that ran from1976-1991. The show consists of issues of the magazine as well as books, posters, press sheets, photostats, and photographs. It also brings together recent and selected publications and works by some of the many Stare contributors, including Wayne Bertola, Mike Brehm, Elroy Christy, Peter Hannan, Bradley Lastname, Jean Riordan and the late Fritz Wolfmeyer. The show will be accompanied by the publication of a printed book that is part catalog and part transgression against the encrypted order of cataloguing. Stare steps on toes and gets up your nose by throwing its flyweight around without leaving the ground.

Kevin Riordan is a lifelong Chicagoan and long time staff and faculty member of Columbia College Chicago. A former art museum security guard, sock salesman and comic book production slave, he attended 6 post secondary schools including vocational training at the Boys Club, 1975, in printing, which he used to subvert American culture throughout the next few decades, through the publication of Stare magazine and other seditious editions and exhibitions.