New Icon was the Contemporary Arts Council annual show for 2010, located this year in the very nice and spacious Loyola University Museum of Art. The show was curated by Britton Bertran (well known for directing Gallery 40,000 and for many other projects since its closing) and included seven artists: Zachary Buchner, Pamela Fraser, Carrie Gundersdorf, Dan Gunn, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Brennan McGaffey, William J. O’Brien, Sze Lin Pang and Kevin Wolff.

While the show presented a pretty thorough look at everyone involved, from Pamela Fraser’s color-theory-ish blooms to Carrie Gundersdorf’s rumored photo collages (later on display at MCA), New Icon’s most significant aspect – that it was the first CCA show to exclusively include Chicago artists – also meant that a lot of work on display had been shown before or many times before around the city. Still, that primary significance shouldn’t be downplayed. New Icon felt like a declaration of mass, and a demonstration that the current mid-career generation of Chicago lifers can be skimmed at the top and still fill a large space with excellent work. Considering ours is a city where art institutions often define headline credibility by curating in from the coasts, I think Bertran should be commended for making the statement that our art can hang together at any level.

The second reason for New Icon‘s significance, at least to me and to my summer, and the reason I made a return trip only a few days after my first, was the superb Dan Gunn room at the back of the show. The work was an apparent leap forward for the artist and probably the best art I’ve seen so far this year. Gunn’s style and visual logic was expressed through a confident consistency, with celebratory colors and patterns and reflection combining in ways at once familiar and new, gestures and forms making movement by repetition at every scale, and all to make a highly convincing, approachable, and thoroughly enjoyable visual experience. With luck New Icon might also be remembered as the second launch for Dan Gunn, as I hope (and expect) to see a lot more of his work soon – it’s really that good.

For the sake of numbers, I give it all an:

8.8

New Icon opened June 5th, 2010 and closed August 1st, 2010 @ Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N Michigan Ave.