I am writing in hopes that our city starts to appreciate a balance rather than a conflict between sumptuously decadently beautiful and/or repulsive commodity-fetish art (which may never sell) and research-focused project-based community art (which may not really help that many people), both of which we have in spades and should be grateful for all the time. I apologize in advance to anyone who objects to the undoubtedly undue prominence given in my picks to people I know and have worked with (the last three are all people and shows I had some collaborative contact with in 2009).  Is it possible that there were more than ten stellar things that happened in Chicago this year that I didn't have anything to do with?  In a word, yes-- I just wasn't persistent and lucky enough to see dozens of stunning shows, and I chose to work with many of the people I was most impressed by. Vega Estates This summer-only residential project space in Pilsen, a garage and a basement rented and curated by Roxane Hopper and Julie Rudder, exposed me to some of the finest artwork I've seen in the last couple years, and is closing down.  The final show was just spectacular-- the garage was a collection of hard-edged "copied" wall art by Conrad Bakker, Amy Adler, and  Vince Leo, as well as a video by Sharon Lockhart of a working-class British miner attempting to read aloud from Marx's Capital.  Earlier this summer the gallery featured a spare but memorable team-up between Chelsea Culp and Ben Foch, who blocked off entry to the garage with a blank white wall running around its interior, and created a vitrine of creepy artifacts in the basement.  I will totally miss this space. Every Body!:Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009, at I-Space Bonnie Fortune organized this fabulous collection of art and artifacts of women over the last forty years relating to and coming to understand their own bodies, individually and collectively, both within and outside the context of repressive traditional medical apparatuses.  Suzann Gage’s unforgettable illustrations for women’s health publications of women literally exploring their bodies together (pedagogically, not erotically) are confident, warm, and inspiring.  Feminist art pioneer Faith Wilding, in collaboration with Hyla Willis, created a giant plush vulva for a performance on the opening night, and polymath transgender artist Dewayne Slightweight showed his touching, delicately rendered, and decidedly erotic watercolors of lesbian love, evolving from young adulthood into old age.  The show also boasted a wealth of prints and publications from collective womens’ health projects from the birth of radical feminist activism up to the present day. , Golden Age Established in 2007 by Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms, Golden Age is a specialty "concept shop" in Pilsen that is the place-- physically or online-- to acquire beautiful, often handcrafted, books, magazines, clothes, and music, along with moderately-priced multiples and DVDs; an example of the latter is "Tough Stuff From the Buff," a retrospective on experimental and activist media culture in Buffalo from the 1970s to today.  And the store is a destination for frequent shows and performances by local and traveling artists, including a collaborative drawing party last year with Lucky Dragons. / Sister Corita at Loyola Another community of women struggling to reconcile progressive politics with a patriarchal institutional framework found expression in the work of a prolific artist who was, for at least the formative and productive early part of her career, a Catholic nun.  Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, created bold prints in the 1960s that combined handwritten text with lettering and imagery taken from popular media, in order to speak out against war and racism with beatific eloquence and strident vigor.  In the 1970s she converted to Buddhism, and her work became more abstract, both in appearance and subject matter, but there remained a distinct sense of unease with the inhumane, fractured world she saw around her.  As with the I-Space show, this represented a landmark final show for a university art space falling prey to a decimated academic budget. Christa Donner, Jesse McLean, CamLab, InCUBATE at ThreeWalls-- Christa Donner, who has taken on feminism and science in her zine, drawing, collage, and video work for several years now, was a prominent figure in the Every Body! show, and also had an amazing show at ThreeWalls, who have done a great job programming artists whose work makes use of social subject matter, both in content and approach.  From the striking anatomical graphics of Christa Donner, they moved to Jesse McLean’s subtly surreal digitally-manipulated video reportage from the Iraq war.  In the summer the two-woman performance team CamLab were in residence, creating a large outdoor interactive piece and a hands-on workshop for CPS teachers, and in October ThreeWalls gave space and scheduling to the grassroots arts-administration collective InCUBATE, who conducted a trivia contest, and invited in numerous other people to lead lectures, tours, and workshops. / The electric fish show at Gallery 400 David More bought an African river fish that perceives its environment through emitting electric current, an animal whose anatomy, and whose inability to breed in captivity, is better understood than the murky route by which it gets from Africa to Chicago.  More amplifies his fish’s current as audio, and he has been making recordings in which he plays sound along with the fish, whom he has named Alex.  The recordings and peripheral marketing items, like T-shirts, are sold to raise money for an African environmental organization, and Gallery 400 hosted Alex and David’s performances, workshops, and merch table. . The Italics show @ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago This simply the best group show that I have ever seen come through the MCA. Francesco Bonami’s curatorial creation, this is intended as a retrospective of overlooked Italian avant-garde artists, from (again) the last forty years. This show coheres around a morbidly sensuous and anarchically absurd sensibility that could only come across when Luciano Fabro’s marble cylinder-stamp figure printed in relief on a bed of flour, Roberto Cuoghi’s rotting maggot-ridden head of a wealthy collector, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s giant trumpets, Letizia Battaglia’s photos of Mafia assassinations, Gianfranco Baruchello’s strange library diorama, Gianno Colombo’s installation of glowing kinetic cords, Giuseppe Penone’s handmade replica of a boulder, and Maurizio Cattelan’s marble shrouded cadavers are all seen in one place. / Paul Nudd's shows at Western Exhibitions and Spudnik and Antena A full-time teacher and a father of two, no big-time Chicago gallery artist works harder than Paul Nudd.  His work was not exclusively individual--he and I curated a small exhibit at this year’s Version Festival about poop, money, and love; he created and packaged two mini-documentaries on two of his favorite local artists; and he put together a magazine of drawings by several artists he knows.  Then he collaborated with Jeremy Onsmith on some incredible small prints which showed at Spudnik Press, he had an unforgettable two-person sculpture and drawing show at Antena Gallery with Nick Black, and his jaw-dropping September mixed-media painting show at Western Exhibitions would have represented a massive effort from an artist who had had nothing else going on all year.  On top of all that, he also worked on a children’s art book on expressing one’s “inner slug,” and he did a wonderful diorama at Home Gallery about trolls who live under an outhouse and make art out of all the poop, as well as the trolls that live beneath the outhouse belonging to those first trolls.  And I’m sure I forgot at least three things. / Mike Bancroft''s space In a year where he created graffiti using homemade sausage and set afloat giant inflatable turds in Paris’ Seine River, and worked on a giant Rube Goldberg machine, solar-power lighted underground dioramas, public projections, and newspaper-box pirate radios with young people, just to scratch the surface, Mike Bancroft may have seemed to have his hands full.  There’s also the interventions he did with me: one at the end of 2008, known as Pinata Factory, in which a huge number of piñatas, created by his students and mine, were stuffed with safety blankets for the homeless, and dumped over anti-homeless fences under overpasses on the Kennedy, and one this past month, Altarventions, in which we took our students’ black and white sculpture altars, memorializing victims of ghetto violence, to select locations in the northern suburbs.  But Mike’s biggest undertaking may have been Garage Spaces, an astounding overhaul of his rented two-car garage into a wood-paneled office with drop ceilings and one-way glass.  The short-lived nook had three group show incarnations.  The first was Pawn Shop, focusing on stolen and found artwork, the second was Den, a claustrophobic faux- domestic installation, and the last was Funeral, a somber performance focusing on the still body of artist Evan Plummer. / Salad Church EXERCISE This show was at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and, what’s more, I curated it.  But I had very little (no really, I swear) to do with the astounding work that artists turned in for a show that centered on three peculiar activities that some people, including myself, use as an individual and collective form of cathartic discipline and self-betterment: eating salad, exercising, and attending church.  From Chris Santiago’s mountain of monitors documenting the moves of local teen dance crews, to Rachel Pollak’s quilted-tile dance floor, to Gina Grafos’ tip-touching ten-foot steeples, to Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick’s human-powered air-hockey table, to Jaime Henderson’s giant bizarre Sharpie renderings of Bible scenes, to Dayton Castleman’s half-scale cardboard F-16 and full-scale cardboard goose, this was the most fun and the most monumental show I’ve ever been involved with.