Jeff Huebner

Jeff Huebner is a multiple award-winning Chicago art writer, journalist, and critic, as well as the author or co-author of six books on Chicago-area public art, park landscapes, and community murals and muralists, including titles with Northwestern University Press and University of Illinois Press. He has published hundreds of articles, mostly on public art, visual art, and culture topics, in dozens of local, national, and international publications.

Huebner was a longtime writer for the weekly Chicago Reader, where he specialized in long-form journalism—he wrote 38 cover/feature stories from 1992 to 2020—and won several local and national awards for best arts reporting, from the Society of Professional Journalists/Chicago Headline Club and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

He has written for many art magazines (ARTnews, New Art Examiner, Art Papers, Sculpture, Landscape Architecture, etc.), and was a longtime contributor and Chicago correspondent to the former quarterly Public Art Review. He has also written for Chicago magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Sun-Times, and has written numerous essays on artists for exhibit catalogs, booklets, and brochures. His writings on Finland art, nature, and culture have appeared in the Finnish American Reporter, the (defunct) New World Finn, and other publications.

 In 2017, Huebner was an inaugural recipient of the prestigious Rabkin Foundation Visual Arts Journalism Award, and in 2011 he received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other grants and awards. He was also the proud recipient of the Nelson Algren Committee Community Service Award, in 2005, for his articles (in various publications) on the gentrification of Chicago’s Wicker Park in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Huebner’s books:

•  Tom Torluemke: Live! On Paper, 1987-2024, with Dan Cameron (Skira Arte, forthcoming April 2025)
• Walls of Prophecy and Protest: William Walker and the Roots of a Revolutionary Public Art Movement (Northwestern University Press, 2019)
• Bob Emser: American Sculptor (Aardvark Global Publishing, 2008)
• Marcos Raya: Fetishizing the Imaginary (Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 2004)
• Chicago Parks Rediscovered, with Frank Dina (Jannes Art Press/Northwestern University Press, 2001)
• The Great Walls of Joliet (University of Illinois Press, 2001)
• Urban Art Chicago: A Guide to Community Murals, Mosaics, and Sculptures, with Olivia Gude (Ivan R. Dee, 2000)