John Preus
John Preus (rhymes with choice – b. 1971) spent his early years running barefoot under a cathedral of trees in Makumira, Tanzania, then grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and northern Wisconsin. Preus, currently works as an artist, builder, fabricator, amateur writer, musician, and collaborator.
After receiving his bachelors in art, Preus studied hand-tool furniture-making with master, John Nesset. He fabricated for Nesset, and later for many other artists and designers including, Dan Peterman, Theaster Gates, Omer Arbel, and Norman Teague. Preus co-founded SHoP, a community art space in Hyde Park Chicago with Laura Shaeffer (2011), and Material Exchange with Sara Black (2005). and collaborated with Theaster Gates on the Dorchester Projects, and was project lead for 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, at Documenta 13, the culmination of a 6 year collaboration with Gates.
Preus was recently a Kaplan resident at Northwestern University, a 2016 nominee for the US Artist Fellowship, and was included in New City’s Chicago Art 50 in 2016. He was the 2013-2014 Jackman-Goldwasser resident at the Hyde Park Art Center, a 2015 Propeller Fund recipient, a 2014 Efroymson Fellow in sculpture and installation, 2014’s first place winner of the Maker grant and a 2013 finalist. He was a finalist for the 2015 Artadia Award and the 2014 Creative Capital grant, and a 2014 DCASE artist grant recipient.
Selected solo exhibitions include, The Beast: Herd Mentality at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, John Preus: New Work at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, The Relative Appetite of Hungry Ghosts at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, John Preus On Drawing at the Heilbronn Kunstverein in Germany, The Beast at The Hyde Park Art Center, Slow Sound at the Experimental Sound Studio. Group shows include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Threewalls Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, The Iceberg Gallery in Portland, OR. Miami/Basel, the New York Armory Show, ADAA, EXPO Chicago, The Elmhurst Biennial, The Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, The Devos Art Museum in Michigan.
Portrait by Suzette Bross
Stories from John Preus
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier & John Preus
Project Overview
Getting in the Way: Making Sense of COVID-19, Racial Injustice and Humanity in Chicago and New York City: The late Congressman John Lewis cautioned us to understand that “in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine.” But at this point in our American history, what has been called a reckoning on race has sparked a global conversation on inequality, highlighting its significance in health disparities, educational and economic oppression, the school to prison pipeline and police brutality. Central to this reckoning is the question of humanity. With the frustration brought on by the isolation of quarantine and the threat of infection on one hand, and the videotaped reality of racial injustice in the form of police brutality on the other, making sense of our troubled world is a difficult task, but not impossible to achieve. By using the Four C’s of 21st Century Skills Learning (critical thinking, creativity,
collaboration and communication) as a backdrop, participating youth will gain crucial aptitudes for future academic and professional endeavors. Fostering dialogue between youth from two of the different cities hardest hit by these issues will provide much-needed perspective on the difficulties we share as well as their possible solutions. And by taking the time to learn and think more deeply about what makes us human in and through such dialogue, students will participate in creating the strong foundation necessary to create the compassionate world we seek for the future, learning to build together across the divides of disease and health, wealth and poverty, equality and inequality, justice and injustice,
violence and non-violence.
John Preus & Sullivan High School
Project Overview
I have been working with broken and damaged furniture from the large scale school closings of 2013, both as a contractor and an artist. For me this is both a critique of our educational system, and an attempt to imagine and explore what seems to me a tragic failure of primary education in the US. For my project with Sullivan high school in Rogers Park, I worked with a handful of advanced students who took small cutoff pieces of the wood and plastic furniture that I brought in, and they fashioned a variety of objects including masks and totems, using these little scraps of wood and plastic. Because Sullivan does not have a shop, and has very few woodworking tools, the students would draw onto the wood or plastic, the shapes that they wanted and I would take them back to my shop, and my daughter who recently graduated from high school and was an apprentice in my studio for the past year, cut them out and I brought them back to the students. They made a series of objects with the materials – masks, totems, and garments.
I consider it a tragic state of affairs because of our culture of liability, and how our legal system works, and through no fault of the public schools themselves, there are very few schools that offer hands on education in the trades for fear of injuries and lawsuits. This is a deeply flawed aspect of our legal system that has drastic repercussions on our education system. Not everyone can, nor should want to go to college. It is honorable to work in the trades and my project with Sullivan was a modest attempt to offer them some experience working safely with sharp and dangerous cutting tools. We cannot put nerf corners on the whole world for our young people, and trying to do so does them an unforgivable disservice.
