DAWOUD BEY

Bey’s series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, is comprised of ten large-scale portraits that chronicle the viewpoint of an enslaved person fleeing bondage. Conjuring powerful imagery of the history of Black migration, the present photograph depicts an obscured, seemingly innocuous front porch under the veil of foreboding night. By placing the viewer in the perspective of the figure as it navigates this treacherous path, Bey demonstrates how black space is informed by the black body.

THEASTER GATES

Gates’s black seam on city infrastructure, (2022) deploys decommissioned Chicago Transit Association steel from an abandoned train station formerly at the crossroads between the black and white neighborhoods in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Gates has reconstituted the beam into a Doric column from two welded ends of a steel leg of the train trestle.

RASHID JOHNSON

In Black & Blue, Rashid Johnson considers the spaces and pastimes that have been gatekept from Black and brown communities. Here Johnson depicts the Hamptons—an exclusive Long Island vacation destination—and uses his family as the protagonists of the film, tessellating domestic scenes of affluence commonly associated with whiteness onto non-white figures. Sounds of soothing and contemplative jazz feature intermittently throughout the film to accompany the leisurely ambiance Johnson creates.

TONY LEWIS

...A Kind Of Racial Narcissism... responds to the transcript and video documentation of the 1965 debate between the writer and activist James Baldwin and one of the godfathers of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. This highly publicized event took place at the Cambridge Union in the United Kingdom. Using graphite, Lewis places a large X over Buckley’s face, demonstrating the repulsion and anger he registered when analyzing Buckley's language, thesis, and rhetorical strategies.

Coon is a recent addition to a series of works that date back to 2011. To create it, Lewis took a socio-politically charged sentence and isolated fragments of phrases before placing them on large paper sheets. Working in the tradition of contemporary visual art that observes language and its effects, Lewis’s stray letters and dismantled words also function on a graphic level.

The Encyclopedia of Invisibility is both a sculpture and a functional 2,416-page book. Bound in navy blue leather with gilt pages and an official-looking insignia on the cover, it bears a winking resemblance to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but its fifteen thousand entries cover a range of subjects rarely found in traditional reference libraries.

JAN TICHY 

In this series of projected images, Jan Tichy documents the elaborate murals on the walls of Cabrini-Green, a former Chicago Housing Authority complex. The buildings comprising the housing project were demolished in 2011, but this suite of photographs endures as a record, revealing that the final function of one of the country’s most well-known public-housing projects was a surface for art making.

VAL GRAY WARD

Since 1972 Val Gray Ward has memorialized the Black arts and cultural movements into an impressive but familiar artifact full of presence and present-ness, composing a collage of fabric designs and even photos, with names sewn throughout. She interviews cultural history with her ownpersonal history. Through the medium of her quilt, Ward has been commemorating Chicago’s Black cultural scene for decades. The piece reveals the generative potential that comes from constructing an everyday, or habitual, relation to a notable historical event.

In her Kitchen Table series, Weems has placed herself within the narrative as the recurring subject of staged photographs with a rotating cast of family members and scenes of a single table illuminated by an overhead light. Her own image and relationships turn into a method for exploring the tension within family dynamics and social realms beyond.

AMANDA WILLIAMS

Semper Augustus Chicagous expands artist's site-specific installation An Imposing Number of Times at Smith College where the artist and students planted tulip bulbs along "desire paths," that result from people walking and taking shortcuts off of paved pathways. By marking the paths with tulips, Williams aimed to inspire discussion about designated and undesignated uses of public space. In the present Semper Augustus Chicagous, the gold-leaf-encased cast tulip bulbs are placed as an allusion counterparts to be planted in areas on the South Side of Chicago affected by racist redlining and other sinister social practices which have led to the hyper-segregation and marginalization of Chicago's residents by race and class.

DAWOUD BEY

Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) explores a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs. Celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits, Bey came to attention with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979) a visual journey through the iconic neighborhood that, in 1979, also comprised his first solo exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, Bey’s photographic and social practice has been defined by the empathy he brings to his subjects and the complexity with which he depicts them.

NICK CAVE

Nick Cave (b. 1959) is an artist, educator and foremost a messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represents both brutality and empowerment.

THEASTER GATES

Theaster Gates (b.1973) currently lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art world capital, Gates’s practice focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.

TONY LEWIS

Tony Lewis (b. 1986) harnesses the medium of graphite powder to confront such social and political topics as race, power, communication, and labor. The material provides a literal and conceptual foundation for the artist's work, as it is stretched, smudged, rubbed, spliced, and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. Graphite powder is an inherently unruly medium, a substance that threatens to wander. Lewis nurtures this dispersal, allowing for the powder to build into a ubiquitous state that settles upon and indiscriminately marks paper surfaces; the graphite-slick studio floor becomes a "tool the same way a pencil is a tool."

JAN TICHY

Jan Tichy (b. 1974) is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Using video projection as a time-based source of light, Tichy creates physical and psychic spaces in which he explores themes of concealment, obscurity, and the seen and unseen. Tichy’s use of photography in his work, tempered by his strictly formal and minimalist visual language, results in installations in which the narrative is open to interpretation.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS

Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953)  is widely renowned as one of the most influential contemporary American artists living today. Over the course of nearly four decades, Weems has developed a complex body of work employing text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video, but she is most celebrated as a photographer. Activism is central to Weems’ practice, which investigates race, family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Over the last 30 years of her prolific career, Weems has been consistently ahead of her time and an ongoing presence in contemporary culture.

THE STAPLES JR. SINGERS

The Staples Jr. Singers were part of a vanguard of soul gospel artists in the 1970s that broke from tradition in their music. They grew up playing on the banks of the Tombigbee River, writing songs about what they saw: the backlash to desegregation, poverty, Civil Rights. Like many gospel acts of the time, they were a family band: Annie, A.R.C., and Edward Brown from Aberdeen, Mississippi. They were just teenagers when they started, building a reputation playing school talent shows and front yards in tow.

AMUS MOR

Amus Mor was a master language artist who’s contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s inspired and influenced a network of artists and militants. A staple of the Chicago Black Arts
Movement, Mor also known as “Moose” was unofficially deemed the area’s Poet Laureate affirming the power of music, poetry, prose and the intellectual power of the Black nationalist tradition. Few
of Mor’s works were published during his lifetime. His influence, however, to the movement remains and contemporary scholars and art artists have worked to re-introduce his poetry and much
deserved acclaim.