Hyperallergic – The Sidney R. Yates gallery in the Chicago Cultural Center is a large space on the top floor of a neoclassical-style building on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Its opulent interior, with pilasters of black and wine-red marble rising up the walls to intersect with a coffered ceiling, is no accident of interior design: it was modeled on a hall in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Completed in 1897, the Chicago room is part of a building that was originally the city’s main public library — an engine of learning, employing machines known as books, supplying a history that provides a way into the strange things that artist Paul Catanese has done to this room during a two-month residency in the gallery. read more