Since 1975, Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey has developed a body of work distinguished for its commitment to portraiture as means for understanding contemporary social circumstances. Ranging from chance street encounters to studio portraits, Bey has investigated a range of methods to find increased engagement with his subjects, and the resulting candor and expression such images convey. The Renaissance Society is pleased to present a career survey of Bey’s work, including a new chapter of Strangers/Community featuring portraits of individuals from Hyde Park, Chicago, home to both the University of Chicago and the artist. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue including new scholarly essays, and is being slated to travel.

Galler Walk-Thourgh
Saturday, May 26th at 12:00pm

Darby English
Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: FREE

English is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and cultural studies since 2003. He is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Visual Arts; the Center for Gender Studies; and, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. English is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007) and co-editor of Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (MIT Press, 2003; republished Rizzoli, 2007). He has received grants and awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Creative Capital Foundation, the College Art Association, the Getty Research Institute, the National Humanities Center, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. This event will take place in the gallery.

For more information visit The Rennisance Society’s website.

Terri Griffith: What was your catalyst for starting Black Visual Archive? What kind of scope did you have in mind?

Meg Onli: I had been working at Bad at Sports for four or five years when I decided to start my own project. I wanted to hone my writing skills and use the new blog as a way to funnel my research. Racial politics and the performance of race had been subjects I had been exploring in my art and I wanted to run a website that had a very specific focus, so it felt like a natural transition to write about art created by African American artists since they were the artists I was always looking back to. There are a lot of amazing art blogs that cover contemporary art in every major city but there were not many that covered work created by black artists so I saw an untapped niche and decided to just jump in.

In 1979 African American photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) held his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, showing a suite of 25 photographs titled Harlem, U.S.A. Bey had been in residence at that museum for one year, and he had made the surrounding neighborhood a subject of study since 1975. Though raised in Queens, Bey and his family had roots in Harlem, and it was a youthful visit to the exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, that had given Bey his determination to become an artist.

Harlem, U.S.A., which has never been shown complete since the Studio Museum exhibition, appears fresh today partly in its manifest difference from much of Bey’s later work. The prints are not large, not in color, and do not come in multiple parts; the subjects are not all adolescents, and they do not “sit” for the artist but were found by him on the street. And yet all these photographs are sensitively composed and radiate an emphasis on the calm and dignity that would become hallmarks of Bey’s approach. Like August Sander, Bey wanted to show the “types” of Harlem’s residents: the barber, the patrician, the church ladies, the hip youth. He was searching for a way to combine the specificity of photography, which only knows how to record details, with the diversity of Harlem, a neighborhood as varied as any in the country. And he wanted to do this without courting stereotypes.

Thanks to the efforts of more than 20 patrons, led by Leadership Advisory Committee members Anita Blanchard and Les Coney, the complete vintage set of Harlem, U.S.A. has been acquired by the Art Institute. A further five photographs from that time, never before printed or exhibited, will be donated by Bey to the museum this fall. Complementing this exhibition are a selection of permanent collection works in Gallery 10 curated by Bey as well as a career survey of Bey’s work presented at theRenaissance Society at the University of Chicago from May 13 through June 24.

Dawoud Bey is a professor of art and was named Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. Bey studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and holds an MFA in photography from Yale University. His work has been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Center (1995) and a four-year traveling exhibition, called Class Pictures, mounted by Aperture and first shown in 2007 at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Catalogue: A catalogue accompanies the exhibition with images of the entire photographic series and essays by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography, and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author of the monograph Harlem Is Nowhere.

Sponsor: Funding for this exhibition and catalogue is provided by the Leadership Advisory Committee of the Art Institute of Chicago
Events:

5/2 @6pm Dawoud Bey: Harlem, U.S.A.
7/9 @ 9:30am Exploring Photography—Dawoud Bey’s Harlem, U.S.A.Series

For more information please visit The Art Institute of Chicago’s website.

 Malick Sidibé’s exuberant photographs offer a unique look at a time of political transition and cultural liberation. As Mali gained independence from France in 1960, the youth culture of music, dancing and fashion exploded in this once-conservative West African nation and Sidibé’s ubiquitous lens chronicled it all. Through the use of props, posing, and a deft attention to personality, he developed a distinct style, fulfilling his clients’ aspirational self-presentation and achieving international recognition for these beautiful and nuanced studies of human character.

Studio Malick is organized by the DePaul Art Museum in conjunction with diChroma Photography, Spain.

For more information please visit the DePaul Art Museum’s website. 

This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, the first major solo exhibition for Johnson, who is a preeminent artist in the post-media generation. A former Chicagoan and alumni of the MCA’s UBS 12 x 12 exhibition series, Johnson explores the complexities and contradictions of black identity, rooted in his individual experience, through photographs, sculptures, videos, installations, and paintings. On view April 14 to August 5, 2012, this exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, MCA Pamela Alper Associate Curator, and includes thirteen years of Johnson’s work with an emphasis on major works from the last five years.

Throughout his work, Johnson evokes shared cultural memories by referencing creative and intellectual black figures whose impact has transcended black communities. The exhibition fosters a dialogue by inviting viewers’ free associations with familiar figures — such as W.E.B. DuBois, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, and Public Enemy — and everyday objects that appear in the work, including plants, mirrors, rugs, record albums, CB radios, shea butter, and books. The title of the exhibition is based on a 1969 album by the avant-garde group Art Ensemble of Chicago, who performed with a variety of found percussive objects and spanned musical styles to radically redefine the rules of jazz.

The conceptually loaded and visually compelling works also allude to alchemy and transformation through different media that hold their own significance and symbolism. He prefers to create a sense of wonder in the unknown rather than present a concrete understanding of his art. The exhibition also presents examples from ongoing bodies of Johnson’s work such as Cosmic Slops, abstract paintings made with melted black soap and wax; The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, portraits of members of a fictional black bourgeois secret society; recent “shelf sculptures” featuring found objects, such as The Shuttle (2010) and Triple Consciousness (2009); and early photographs of homeless men made using the nineteenth-century Vandyke brown printing process.

Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977 and currently lives in New York. He has a BFA in photography from Columbia College and attended graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in the collections of the MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work has been featured in major group exhibitions including 30 Americans: The Rubell Collection (2008); Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self at the International Center of Photography (2003); and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); and in 2011 was featured in the International Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale. He is one of the nominees for the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2012.

Rashid Johnson in Conversation with Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10:30 am, Free with suggested museum admission

Artist Rashid Johnson and Julie Rodrigues Widholm have a conversation in the gallery about Rashid’s work and ideas.

Curator Tour

Tuesday, April 24, 2012, noon

Tour of the exhibition led by Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

For more information please visit the MCA Chicago’s website.

Pearl Fryar is a sculptor who uses live plant material to create original, elegantly abstract forms of topiary. Self-taught, he takes risks which are outside the normal bounds of horticulture, and has been said to “tame trees” through the development of his unique techniques. Much of the plants in his garden were cast-offs, nurtured by Fryar into incredibly expressive topiary sculptures. He looks for the potential in each plant and encourages the growth and creativity within, reflecting his desire to inspire people, particularly youth, to find their own potential. Born in 1939 in rural North Carolina, Fryar came of age in the racially segregated South. After college, military duty, and working for 36 years at a soda can factory, his garden has brought him the most satisfaction. It is a Preservation Project of the Garden Conservancy, a national not-for-profit that preserves exceptional American gardens. Supported in part by SAIC’s Roger Brown Study Collection and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

For more information please visit SAIC’s Visiting Artist Program.

Inaugurated during the American Bicentennial in 1976, Black History Month (BHM) has been a source of contention for many. Falling during February, the shortest month of the year, detractors have often critiqued this celebration of black achievements as a consolation prize for the decades that African-Americans have been erased from American history books. Narratives of blacks’ long enduring fight for equality are neatly packaged and presented for consumption on the History Channel and as limited-edition Nike products designed by Serena Williams and LeBron James. Although easy to source why BHM occurs in February — both Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were born during this month — one must ask why the observance has continued to present black history with majorly limited and superficial readings?

The latest installment of moniquemeloche’s “on the wall” series, Kerry James Marshall’s installation, Black Night Falling: Black holes 
and constellations, utilizes a visually simplistic approach to BHM while introducing a new
 cast of icons to the public’s lexicon. Located in the twenty-five-foot-long window space of the gallery facing Division Street, Black Night consists of several large iridescent cellophane bows that have the names and photographic images of activists who challenged contemporary racial injustices. These single-colored reproductions resemble photocopies from an encyclopedia and include slave rebellion leader Denmark Vesey, civil rights activist Cleopatra Jones, Black Panther member Wayne Pharr, and activist Joan Little, all displayed on top of a black nationalist flag made of sparkling glitter.

Kerry James Marshall, Black Night Falling: Black holes and constellations (2012)

Department stores, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys New York, have used complex window displays to provide their merchandise with seductive backdrops. Window installations, also known as window dressings, have roots with America’s most prominent artists; James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns were all employed as window dressers early in their careers. Marshall’s installation is not selling a product though, instead it is providing a space to contemplate the complexities and politics concerning how history is documented and subsequently edited.

Marshall, who received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, is primarily known for large-scale paintings often depicting middle class blacks, although he has created numerous sculptural works that reference the civil rights movement as well. Constellations and banners have appeared in his monumental Souvenir paintings, in which obscure martyrs from the movement have been screen printed at the top of the tapestries causing the images to appear floating above the domestic spaces of 60s and 70s households. These often unrecognizable visages are constant reminders of those who have fallen into the abyss of our history books. Both remorseful and powerful in the Souvenir paintings, the printed faces in Black Night have almost a campy appeal when placed on the gaudy cellophane bows.

Marshall, fully aware of his materials — glitter and cellophane, the art supplies of school children — exploits them to disarm the viewer in order to present a metaphor that rings true: black history is not something that can or should be easily parceled and consumed. Yet, if this is the way our history is going to be presented to mainstream American audiences, Marshall might as well add a few new bows to the cultural package.1

Founded against the backdrop of rising neo-fascism, police brutality, and extreme racial unrest of 1980s Britain, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) produced some of the period’s most poetic and provocative works before disbanding in the 1990s. BAFC’s acclaimed essay film, Handsworth Songs, examines the 1985 race riots in Handsworth and London. Interweaving archival photographs, newsreel clips, and home movie footage, the film is both an exploration of documentary aesthetics and a broad meditation social and cultural oppression through Britain’s intertwined narratives of racism and economic decline. 1986, John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, UK, 16mm, 60 minutes + discussion.

THE BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE (1982–98, UK) included John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison. The group produced films, videos, slide-tape pieces, installations, posters, exhibitions, and performances, including Handsworth Songs (1986), which garnered seven international awards, Testiamint, which premiered at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes International Film Festival in 1988. These and subsequent works such as Twilight City (1989) and The Last Angel of History (1995) staked a claim for a new kind of moving image work that was resolutely experimental and confidently internationalist. Throughout their career, the BAFC worked within and between the media of art, film, and television, participating in British survey exhibitions such as From Two Worlds (Whitechapel Gallery, 1986), The British Art Show (Hayward Gallery, 1990) as well as international exhibitions such as Documenta X (1997) and Documenta XI (2002). BAFC is the subject of the recent retrospective and catalog, titled Ghost of Songs: The Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (2007, Liverpool University Press).

For more information please visit Conversations at the Edge.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present tête-à-tête, a group exhibition of photographic work by Derrick Adams, Jayson Keeling, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Clifford Owens, Mahlot Sansosa, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas.

In January of 2012 the Friends of Education of the Museum of Modern Art, New York invited Derrick Adams, Clifford Owens, Mickalene Thomas, and Xaviera Simmons to participate in “Conversation: Among Friends.” This discussion inspired Thomas to question ideas surrounding collaborative work, and to consider the performative process in which a conversation is transformed into a visual expression.

Zanele Muholi, Tinky II (2010)

tête-à-tête includes photography by both African and African-American artists, and asks us to consider the conceptual idea of the black body and what that means in today’s society. Mickalene Thomas is interested in the performative way in which male artists use their physical presence and body in relation to the viewer, and the way many female artists view themselves through the gaze of another (often male). Clifford Owens inverts the art historical male gaze and creates a “black male on male gaze.” Derrick Adams responds to these ideas more abstractly in “Communicating with Shadows,” a collection of performances in which he created enlarged, projected silhouette impressions of artists such as Joseph Beuys, David Hammons, and Adrian Piper as a means of developing a personal conversation.

In the “Faces and Phases” series, Zanele Muholi photographed black lesbians she met through the South African townships as a commemoration and a celebration of their lives. She established relationships with her subjects based on a mutual understanding of what it means to be female, lesbian and black in South Africa today. Deana Lawson, much like Muholi, creates photographs that serve as visual testimonies of familial relationships, sexuality, and life cycles. Lawson is also interested in establishing a dialogue around the way in which these images create a cultural narrative. Often pictured within her own photographs, Xaviera Simmons simultaneously captures both truth and fiction in bright, colorful compositions. Performance artist Adam Pendleton describes her work as “using the suggestion of performance to capture the explicit and contradictory nature of individuality. Her subject becomes herself, and also a dismembered characterization of what we’re accustomed to looking at.”

Exhibited in the lower gallery are works from Mickalene Thomas’ “Polaroid Series,” compositions of archival digital Polaroid prints which provide insight into her artistic process. As if looking through a keyhole, the images expose Thomas’ subjects (many of whom are also portrayed in her prints, photographs, and paintings) as she herself would have seen them. The groupings, notes, and various arrangements not only articulate the intimate conversations between artist and subject, but also reveal the selection process by which Thomas creates her narratives.

Mickalene Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002, and participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2002-2003. She has exhibited extensively and was included in the recent and critically acclaimed exhibitions 30 Americans at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, FL; Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, IL; and Greater New York 2005 at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, NY. Her work may also be seen in prestigious public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago among others. A solo exhibition of her work, “Origin of the Universe,” will open at the Santa Monica Museum of Art on April 14, 2012.

Featuring the works of:

Derrick Adams
Jayson Keeling
Deana Lawson
Zanele Muholi
Clifford Owens
Mahlot Sansosa
Malick Sidibé
Xaviera Simmons
Mickalene Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas

For more information please visit Rhona Hoffman.