Kevin C Maginnis

Kevin Maginnis was born 1955 in Menominee, Michigan. In 1977 he graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay with a degree in painting and printmaking. After graduation Maginnis moved to Chicago. In 1986 Maginnis received his first solo exhibition at the New York Academy of Sciences, Order & Chaos (catalog) In 1987 he produced and curated what would become a series of independent shows starting with a counter-exhibition, The Non-Spiritual In Art: Abstract Painting 1985 – ????, (catalog) followed in 1989 by Strange Attractors, the Spectacle of Chaos (catalog) In 1990 the artist had his first solo show in Chicago at Rezac Gallery (catalog).

2013 Maginnis was included in a group show Midwestern Appropriation (catalog) at Hyde Park Arts Center in Chicago curated by Michelle Grabner, followed in 2014 by a one person show/installation, Untitled, at Grabner's The Suburban Gallery. In 2016 Maginnis created and curated one of his more ambitious independent exhibitions, Spun, (catalog) featuring 20 different artists “platformed” upside down inside an exact replica of a commercial gallery space built upside and rotated 30 degrees off center about 30 cm away from the actual interior gallery walls.

https://www.facebook.com/spun180degreestwisted30degrees/?view_public_for=1719937734922977

2017 marked a change in the practice toward relational protest art with stand-alone installations and paintings. Footpath (2017-18), an installation consisting of over 50,000 hand-sculpted and painted faux cigarette butts sprinkled around a sandstone footpath leading to a Prairie School style stone bench, was the first.

In Black (2019) Maginnis took an abandoned lot next to a gallery and transformed it into a mini-park with a trimmed apple tree at its center and freshly laid sod all around. A 274.32 cm x 274.32 cm square of Canadian oil tar sands was then spread out over freshly laid sod, forming a Constructivist-like black square floating in a green color-field and set at a 45 degree angle to the park’s perimeter.

Black #2 (2020) is a relational art installation with paintings that through abstraction approximately delineate the most polluted and healthcare deprived neighborhoods in Chicago. These neighborhoods are home to mostly Black and Latinx families "herded" by the forces of Late Capitalism into places where rent is cheap and access to low paying, (often COVID-19 risky), jobs are available. Black #2 is a protest against this environmental racism.

Currently Maginnis has been exploring the transformational opportunities presented though close examination of ordinary personal objects he has been isolated with during the pandemic.