Works in the Exhibition

The following text accompanied these photographs when they were on view in the 2018 exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980.
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Photography and the Black Arts Movement in Chicago

Widely considered the political and economic capital of Black America, Chicago also has a long history as its cultural hub. The Black Arts Movement gained momentum in the mid-1960s, promoting exploration of African heritage and celebration of Black identity, aesthetics, and beauty. Photography was key to the movement in Chicago, where an informal collective of documentary street photographers explored these ideas through their images of the city’s South and West Sides.2

Influenced by predecessors such as Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Gordon Parks, these photographers emphasized their own social experiences, making images that offered positive or complex representations of their community that countered the negative and simplistic stereotypes in mainstream depictions while at the same time conveying the universality of their experience. With few outlets for the dissemination of their work, these artists relied on their own local institutions and publications—the South Side Community Art Center, the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, and magazines published by the Johnson Publishing Company—and frequently helped to establish or advance such forums. These photographers also contributed to the New York–based Black Photographers Annual, which celebrated the work of African American photographers nationally. In her foreword to the first volume of this publication, issued in 1973, writer Toni Morrison wrote that the photographers succeeded in “telling us what we had forgotten we knew, showing us new things about ancient lives, and old truths in new phenomena.”3

The South Side and the Civil Rights Movement

Chicago, with its promise of industrial employment, became a major destination for African Americans fleeing the rural South during the Great Migration (1915–70). By the 1930s, however, the newly established Federal Housing Administration’s adoption of a loan rating scale based on neighborhoods’ perceived social stability led to redlining—denial of loans and other services to African Americans—and other forms of systemic discrimination. As a result, Chicago became one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The devastating effects of these policies, combined with mass-media representations of the South Side as exclusively poor and crime ridden, made the area a nerve center for the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements.4

Many of the photographers working on the South Side were photojournalists, and they aimed to counter stereotypes in the press itself. Their images most often appeared in periodicals published by and for African Americans: the Chicago Defender; Johnson Publishing Company magazines such as Ebony and Jet; and Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam.
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OBAC and The Wall of Respect

In 1967 a group of artists and writers working on Chicago’s South Side established the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC; the acronym was designed to include the word oba, Yoruba for “royal” or “leader”). The goals listed in the group’s earliest statement of purpose include: “To provide the Black Community with a positive image of itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibilities for creativity. To reflect the richness and depth and variety of Black History and Culture. To work toward the ultimate goal of bringing to the Black Community indigenous art forms which reflect and clarify the Black Experience in America.”6

That same year, OBAC’s Visual Arts Workshop conceived its first collaborative public artwork, The Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural located at Forty-Third Street and Langley Avenue in the Bronzeville neighborhood. It featured Black heroes and heroines grouped into seven sections. The mural was assembled by fourteen artists, four of them photographers: Billy Abernathy, Darryl Cowherd, Roy Lewis, and Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke. Actual photographs were thus integrated into the design of The Wall, which was an innovative approach for an outdoor mural. Other photographs exhibited in this gallery record the mural’s creation as well as the gatherings, performances, and political events that regularly took place in front of it until its destruction in 1971. The Wall, as OBAC cofounder Abdul Alkalimat put it, was “jazz”—a collective product of multiple art forms inspired by history, guided by politics, and deeply connected to its community.
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The Garage

After three years in Mexico apprenticing with photographer Ted Williams, Mikki Ferrill returned to Chicago, her hometown. While working as a freelance photojournalist, she began documenting The Garage, an improvised music venue that popped up every Sunday in a car garage located at 610 East Fiftieth Street. The owner, Arthur “Pops” Simpson, would transform the space and host jazz DJ battles in the afternoon, followed by live or recorded music jams that lasted until eight p.m. and often spilled into the adjacent alley. Ferrill photographed these events regularly for ten years, creating images that demonstrate her relaxed relationship with her subjects—members of a close-knit community who saw The Garage as a space for the uninhibited personal expression of Black identity.8

“On Sunday mornings, the cars were parked on the street and in came the tables, folding chairs, speakers, and turntables. At 1:00 pm the battle starts. One DJ plays a jam, all vinyl—a scratch was considered a disqualification—then the opposing DJ plays his jam. Their peers judged them. Most of the selections were very high tempo—Duke Ellington, Count Basie with Ella Fitzgerald, Jazz at the Philharmonic. Most people could not keep the pace. The battle continued until 6:00 pm. Then came on current R&B music—Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown. At times, there were live jazz musicians. At 8:00 pm the premises were cleared and the cleanup began. The event was a word-of-mouth happening. The people, the music, and just the atmosphere became my spiritual inspiration. They called me “The Picture-Taking Lady.” I covered the walls of The Garage with pictures of [the people] themselves.”—Mikki Ferrill, 2013
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Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church

Gordon Parks relocated from Minnesota to Chicago’s South Side in 1940, immersing himself in the local art community while operating a portrait studio out of the South Side Community Art Center. In 1941 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for a portfolio of photographs he created on the South Side; the award gave him the means to move east to Washington, DC. By 1948 Life magazine had hired him as its first African American staff photographer.10

In 1953 Life sent Parks to Chicago to do a story on the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, located at 2151 West Washington Boulevard on the city’s Near West Side. A white reporter accompanied Parks, but he made the mistake of keeping his hat on as he entered the church; the deacons viewed this gesture, in Parks’s words, as “another case of the white man’s disrespect” and asked Parks to continue alone. Life ultimately did not run the feature, but Parks was on record as both the photographer and the writer for the story. In the unpublished manuscript, Parks described the church as “a temple of hope to thousands of Negro people caught in the backyard of this vast city. It is a haven in a world of unending trouble.”11

“The church’s value in this situation is hard to measure, but to thousands of Black voices that cry out within its porcelain-bricked walls it’s the “great home in the wilderness”….In about 720 emotional minutes the church must repair the damage inflicted on its congregation during the preceding 156 hours. It must stoke-in enough of the goodness and patience to endure the coming week. It must quench the hot thirst for dignity and belonging, kill the urges to sin and make up for the pleasures that are denied.”—Gordon Parks, unpublished manuscript for Life magazine, 1953
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Black Muslims

In 1963 Parks again returned to Chicago on assignment for Life to report on the Nation of Islam, newly headquartered in the city. Parks gained unprecedented access to this radical civil rights movement through his friendship with Malcolm X, who arranged a meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the group’s leader, so that Parks could obtain permission to proceed with the story. Parks spent weeks with the Black Muslim community, documenting a range of its activities—from self-defense training to religious services led by Malcolm X. 13

Parks’s photographs ran in the May 31, 1963, issue of Life, along with an essay by Parks that reflected on his dual status as both insider and outsider. It begins with his return to Chicago after nearly a decade and his memories of “the hopelessness that seeped into the Black souls of that jungle.” Parks then described his current position: “I was a Black Man in White Man’s clothing, sent by the very ‘devils’ [Elijah Muhammad] criticized so much…. I wondered whether or not my achievements in the white world had cost me a certain objectivity.” He concluded, “I sympathize with much of what they say, but I also disagree with much of what they say…. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the circumstance of common struggle has willed us brothers.”
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Film and Video in Chicago

When the motion picture industry emerged in the early twentieth century, Chicago was comparatively isolated from the major centers of film production on the coasts. Nonetheless, the city became a center of innovation in the field. Decades later its film industry was relegated to producing and distributing educational and industrial films. Yet its experimental legacy was taken up beginning in the 1950s by a generation of filmmakers—professionals and amateurs, many of them also photographers—who embraced avant-garde and cinema verité filmmaking as means to explore and critique Chicago’s dynamic sociopolitical landscape.15

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, various collectives and other grassroots organizations formed to support and promote the work of Chicago film and video makers. Founded in 1968, the Center Cinema Co-op—which included among its members several artists featured in this exhibition—was established to aid in the distribution of its members’ films. “This is the new cinema of the real America,” their 1969 catalogue proclaimed. In 1977 pioneering video artists formed the Chicago Videomakers Coalition (later superseded by the Center for New Television), which promoted collaboration and provided technical support. Varied in style and influence, these artists’ films are nonetheless unified by their sustained engagement with their immediate surroundings.
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Sun Ra

Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount) was a musician, composer, bandleader, artist, and mystic whose experimental work shaped the history of jazz and helped form the foundation for Afrofuturism. Sun Ra’s persona and philosophy took shape on Chicago’s South Side, where he lived between 1946 and 1961. He became a regular presence in and around Washington Park, disseminating and preaching revolutionary ideas rooted in history but pointing toward a space-age future. In 1955 Sun Ra created the Arkestra, a big band–style collective that became an evolving performance laboratory for him and his many collaborators. Through the Arkestra and his own artistic production, Sun Ra developed what he called an intergalactic philosophy, a spiritual, political, and aesthetic vision that combined ancient Egyptian and futuristic iconography. Presented here are photographs by Alton Abraham and Ayé Aton, two of Sun Ra’s collaborators, that offer a glimpse into the legacy he left in Chicago.
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Graffiti

Born in Cuba, Luis Medina immigrated to Miami after a multiyear tour of Europe in his teens and relocated to Chicago in 1967 to study first sculpture, then photography, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a boy in Havana, Medina had, as he put it, “explored the brightest and darkest corners of that city…in search of ineffable essences, contradictions, and tragedies contained in anything human.” This interest in his immediate surroundings continued in Chicago, where he turned to the territorial gang graffiti he found in his own neighborhood northwest of Wrigley Field. Medina approached these images as an archivist and as someone familiar with power struggles, photographing walls after gang members had swung cans of white paint at them to efface a rival gang’s graffiti. He eventually gained the trust of members of several Latino gangs, who allowed him to take their portraits in front of their graffiti, in a further gesture of power and defiance.
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Uptown

In the summer of 1965, having graduated two years earlier from the University of Chicago, Danny Lyon traveled on his Triumph motorcycle from his home in Hyde Park to Chicago’s tough Uptown neighborhood. The area had acquired the nickname Hillbilly Heaven for its large number of immigrants from Central Appalachia. Over a period of several months, Lyon photographed residents living on Uptown’s Clifton Avenue using a Rolleiflex camera borrowed from his close friend and mentor Hugh Edwards, then a photography curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lyon gained the trust of several families, resulting in images that depict struggles but also immense community pride: “paradise inside a square,” as Lyon said, a reference to the camera’s square format. In 1966 Lyon wrote about the project, “The pictures are not made to disturb people’s consciences but rather to disturb their consciousness. The pictures do not ask you to ‘help’ these people, but something much more difficult; to be briefly and intensely aware of their existence, an existence as real and significant as your own.”
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The Garrick Theater and the Stock Exchange Building

While studying photography at Chicago’s Institute of Design, Richard Nickel joined the Sullivan Project, a photographic survey led by photographer Aaron Siskind that documented buildings by architect Louis Sullivan. The project was completed in 1954, but Nickel continued photographing Sullivan’s work on his own, finding his calling in the identification, documentation, and preservation of these endangered works of art. Sullivan was revered as the father of the skyscraper and known for his use of architectural ornament. But by the 1950s urban renewal projects prompted the demolition of his most celebrated structures, including Chicago’s Garrick Theater and Stock Exchange Building.20

For nearly two decades Nickel campaigned to save Sullivan’s works. When those efforts failed, he worked to rescue their ornament—the elaborate, nature-inspired decoration that adorned both the interiors and exteriors of the buildings. Nickel mourned the disappearance of a city he admired, warning that Chicago could move toward anonymity or, worse, become “a city of contrasts: the superficial glitter of the new mixed with the slum of the old.” Nickel’s photographs let the architecture take center stage, even if his documentation was later partly overshadowed by his efforts to rescue surviving structures and fragments. One such attempt, in the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, cost him his life in 1972. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote: “Richard Nickel has become a true martyr to the cause of architectural preservation. He is irreplaceable, and Chicago architecture has lost its truest champion.” 
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