<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2fQFrs_19Q8okX300" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2fQFrs_19Q8okX300" width="1763" height="1175" ><figcaption>Ann Toebbe poses in front of her painting at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., on Feb. 27, 2026. Marc C. Monaghan</figcaption></figure>Ann Toebbe has been swimming in Lake Michigan for years and, over time, has felt firsthand the ways the water’s currents ebb and flow against Promontory Point. One thing she noticed was how different the water could be from north to south: on one side it could be rough and tumble, while on the other it remained placid.Anchoring her new exhibition, “Cooler by the Lake,” on view in the Hyde Park Art Center’s upper gallery through June 14, is her painting “Northside Southside” (2021), which depicts those stark geographical divides while also offering a window into her painting practice.Toebbe has lived in Hyde Park for nearly two decades, and while her work has long been shown on the East Coast, this is her first solo exhibition in Chicago in years. She told the Herald in an interview that the series was her “love letter to Hyde Park,” and its subject matter reads like a map of neighborhood life when mom-and-pop shops still predominated along its commercial strips. Depicted in her paintings are Valois, the cafeteria-style diner on 53rd Street beloved by everyone from graduate students to former President Barack Obama; Wesley’s Shoe Corral, the family-run shop with a popcorn machine and stand-alone mannequin legs showing off women’s shoes; and Bonjour Bakery, which depicts the French patisserie that has since closed, only to be replaced by the local chain La Boulangerie.But the paintings are not photorealistic records of these places. Instead, they are densely layered, multi-point-of-view constructions that resist linear perspective. Toebbe stacks spaces: floor plans opened like unfolded boxes, views from above alongside views straight-on, interiors that open simultaneously onto exteriors. She traces her approach to pre-Renaissance Christian painting, Indian miniature painting and Chinese landscape scrolls. “Things that are larger can sometimes feel more emotional, more about storytelling,” Toebbe said.Her choice of medium is also unconventional. Rather than working entirely in oils, Toebbe paints primarily in acrylic wash, a matte, chalky acrylic-gouache hybrid that gives her precise control over flat shapes and color. She builds each painting layer by layer from a stencil-like underdrawing, filling in shapes before building up intricate surface patterns: hash marks for grass, dense geometric forms for wallpaper, fabrics and tile. Some paintings incorporate collage, with furniture, objects and architectural elements cut from painted paper and adhered to the surface, creating a subtle physical relief that plays against the flatness of everything around it. “People often say, your work is so detailed, so patterned,” Toebbe said. “I’m really interested in the way pattern activates the surface.”Toebbe’s process is meticulous; she is unwilling to declare a piece finished until it coheres just so. Smaller paintings, like the ones in the show, take her at least a month to finish, with larger ones taking up to three, she said. Toebbe works roughly 40 hours a week at her studio, a garden apartment a few blocks from her home, while still making time to teach two courses a semester at Columbia College Chicago. <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=45Bb1f_19Q8okX300" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=45Bb1f_19Q8okX300" width="1763" height="1175" ><figcaption>Ann Toebbe installs her painting at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., on Feb. 27, 2026. Marc C. Monaghan</figcaption></figure>While the paintings in the exhibition depict many places instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in Hyde Park for more than a few months, there are also ones portraying more intimate settings.“Backyard Garden” (2021), a phantasmagoria of raccoons, bunnies, possums, birds and neighborhood cats rendered against lush Henri Rousseau-esque foliage, is Toebbe’s own backyard. The Rousseau reference is conjectural — in the spring of 2016, Toebbe and a class of second graders at Ray Elementary painted a Rousseau-inspired jungle mural on the second floor of the school. And “Jeanne Dielman” (2024) takes its name from Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film about a Brussels housewife who rubs up against the strictures of her staid domestic routine.“I really relate to that,” Toebbe said of the movie. “I wake up before 8 a.m. and I’ve already done sixteen things — put in a load of laundry, helped with lunches, swept up the cat litter.” The painting portrays her own dining room, the table set for Friday dinner, with the titular Dielman peeling potatoes on a television screen in the background. What still surprises Toebbe, who grew up in Cincinnati, studied sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art and lived in Brooklyn during the late nineties and early aughts, is that she ended up back in the Midwest, let alone Hyde Park.Living in a loft in Williamsburg when rents were cheap, Toebbe was thoroughly enamored with New York’s art milieu. After getting an MFA at Yale in 2004 and a DAAD scholarship to Berlin the following year, Toebbe had expected to return to Brooklyn, but then love intervened. Her now-husband, a Hyde Park-based academic turned divorce lawyer, was rooted here, and eventually Toebbe made the “very calculated decision” to move. She was not initially impressed by the Second City’s art scene.Toebbe recalled breaking down crying upon visiting the West Loop, “where the supposed ‘Chelsea of Chicago’ was,” for the first time.“‘What am I doing here? Where is the art world?’” she remembered saying to herself.But over time, whether through marriage or through having children, the city and the neighborhood slowly grew on her, until Toebbe eventually realized the place had become dear to her. “I don’t want to leave now,” she said. “It really flipped.”The decision to make these paintings came around 2021, when Toebbe’s two daughters were old enough for her to realize that these Hyde Park locales were “going to be their core memories,” and ones they might feel nostalgic about later in life. “When they’re my age, if one of them were a painter and they were going to paint where they grew up, it would be here,” she said.In December 2021, Toebbe exhibited these paintings at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, where many sold, mostly to collectors with no connection to Hyde Park who, she said, were drawn by “the formal qualities” of the work. Three of the paintings currently on display were loaned back from collectors, and some are revised versions of the original pieces.Returning the paintings to the neighborhood that inspired them, Toebbe said, amounted to a recognition that Hyde Park may be the place where she spends much of the rest of her life — that it has become her home.“It’s a homecoming doing a show about this neighborhood that took me so long to love,” she said. “I would be very sad if we left.”</div></body>

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Ann Toebbe has been swimming in Lake Michigan for years and, over time, has felt firsthand the ways the water’s currents ebb and flow against Promontory Point. One thing she noticed was how different the water could be from north to south: on one side it could be rough and tumble, while on the other it remained placid.

A painter’s ode to Hyde Park returns home

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Hyde Park Herald

Ann Toebbe has been swimming in Lake Michigan for years and, over time, has felt firsthand the ways the water’s currents ebb and flow against Promontory Po

A painter’s ode to Hyde Park returns home

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