We've Always Been Here
6 artworks from 6 artists across 4 galleries
The tour is ordered to begin from the Michigan Avenue entrance. If you are starting in the Modern Wing, simply do your tour in reverse order.
Taking inspiration from the words of Alisha B. Wormsley, "There are Black People in the Future," this tour is inspired by Afrofuturist themes that express the enduring spirit of Black people.
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Mama Wata
Radcliffe Bailey
Gallery 1, lower level, Photography and Media Galleries
Mami Wata is a general name for numerous mermaid goddesses popularized by Black peoples around the Atlantic Ocean in the 19th century. Bailey took on the figure of Mami Wata as part of a long-lived fascination with water and its powers of transformation. His technique of collaging old photographs, cryptic letters, and allusive decorations, often with backgrounds of indigo or green, here suggests shape-shifting as a human and aesthetic ideal."Bailey has said, "I've always felt like the only way I can heal myself . . . is to go back through my memory, learn from memory." His Mami Wata highlights how African-American traditions can be reshaped into contemporary stories and artworks."
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Storage Jar
David Drake
Gallery 161, first level, Arts of the Americas Galleries
This boldly inscribed storage jar was made by David Drake, who was born enslaved around 1800 and learned the art of hand-coiling, throwing, and glazing pottery in Edgefield, South Carolina. Drake was not the only artisan active in Edgefield, and his audacious works represent the artistry, skill, and resilience at a time when enslaved people faced criminalization and violence for reading, writing, or even signing one’s name.""Drake signed his name, demanding acknowledgment for his labor and making sure his artistic contributions cannot be erased. He often included poetry as well. One jar reads, “I, made this Jar, all of cross / If, you don't repent, you will be lost.”"
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Starry Night and the Astronauts
Alma Thomas
Regenstein Hall, second level, Regenstein Hall
Alma Thomas was enthralled by astronauts and outer space. This painting, made when she was 81, showcases that fascination through her signature style of short, rhythmic strokes of paint. “Color is life, and light is the mother of color,” she once proclaimed. In 1972, she became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York."Thomas marveled at how the future she was living in was radically different than her recent past: "One of the things we couldn't do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there. My, times have changed. Just look at me now.""
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Afrophoenix No. 1
Melvin Edwards
Regenstein Hall, second level, Regenstein Hall
In 1960 Melvin Edwards shifted his artistic practice from abstract painting to sculpture. Afrophoenix No. 1 is one of the earliest objects in his series of Lynch Fragments, made in response to the tumultiouse climate of the Civil Rights movement. Afrophoenix No. 1 exemplifies how Edwards transformed found objects into poetically suggestive, tension-filled compositions."This work asks viewers to consider what aspects of Black history are hidden in plain sight. As Edwards noted, "making sculpture with chain or with barbed wire . . . will remind my human compatriots in the world that we got lots of work to do.""
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The Science of the Dogon, from Human_3.0 Reading List
Cauleen Smith
Regenstein Hall, second level, Regenstein Hall
From 2015 and 2016, Chicago-based artist Cauleen Smith produced a series of 57 drawings, each representing a specific book that she had read. Together, these drawings propose a reading list, a new canon of humanistic literacy. The personal impact of reading is conveyed through Smith’s choice of media; the time and effort to create drawings by hand reflects the special power of holding and reading a physical book."Smith shared, "Black geeks have been collecting, cataloging, and just plain dialoging with science-fiction tropes in hi and lo art for as long as I can remember." This book connects Dogon myths from central Mali with atomic, quantum, and string theory."
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Untitled
Ed Clark
Gallery 291, second level, Contemporary Galleries
A native of New Orleans, Ed Clark grew up in Chicago and spent the early 1950s in Paris, where he took up abstraction: “It struck me that if I paint a person—no matter how I do it—it is a lie. The truth is in the physical brushstroke and the subject of the painting is the paint itself.” After moving to New York years later, he began to show paintings on irregularly shaped canvases, often acknowledged as the first “shaped” paintings."Clark's work literally defies the boundaries of painting, pushing beyond the traditional rectangular canvas. "Our eyes are oval shaped," he pointed out. "Why do we do rectangles?” His innovative approach had a lasting impact on abstract expressionism."
