I’ll be exhibiting two drawings from The Collector project at the new home of ARC Gallery in Chicago’s history-filled West Town neighborhood from October 31st to November 24th, with the opening reception on Friday, November 2, from 6 to 9pm. I will be there and I would love to see you there as well. As usual, free booze, my friends.
ARC Gallery has been women owned and operated for 45 years, and it is my pleasure to have work in their new exhibition space.
The podcast of my CHIRP Radio performance is now live on CHIRP’s site. Give it a listen. It won’t be the most unpleasant 15 minutes of your life, I can nearly promise you that. Gratitude to Julie Mueller for bringing me into the First Time Series.
Also, not terrible to be on the bill with Steve Frisbie and the rest of the gents from The First Time Four band. Read more about the show on the Randomness page.
A look at the third iteration of my Cyntoia Brown portrait, she holds the booking placard that would normally state the name and date of arrest for the official mug shot. I exchanged that information for what felt more appropriate, the Talking Heads lyric “how did I get here,” primarily in an orange resembling the color of jumpsuits worn by the incarcerated.
Part of the tragedy of Cyntoia’s story is that she was tried for murder as an adult, despite the fact that she was only 16 years old, and sentenced to life in prison. I see this as a massive failure of systems – of jurisprudence, of civil rights advocacy, of criminal law – and while it doesn’t necessarily surprise me considering the track record of the courts and the federal government in general, it still sickens me. And it reeks of racism.
Raise your hand if you think it’s bullshit, too.
Another version of this portrait will be coming soon. This is part of my new body of work, Facing the Music.
I was pleased to create the poster for the next PechaKucha night here in Chicago. When I participated in this event back in March, I had a fairly enjoyable time, and I wanted to express my appreciation by making something for the good people at PK. If you’re in Chicago on June 5th, stop by Martyrs’ for an evening of visual storytelling, beer drinking, and hopefully some good belly laughs.
In 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was severely and repeatedly beaten, then shot in the head, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River by two Mississippi men. Three days passed before Emmett’s body was found. This atrocity was committed because a woman claimed that Till had either whistled or spoken rudely to her, claims that years later she admitted were false. The two men who murdered the child were acquitted of the crime by a jury of their peers (white males) in an hour and five minutes.
In reading the Studs Terkel book Race, something that struck me most about the aftermath of Till’s murder was how forgiving Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, was toward the murderers. Ultimately feeling that there was nothing greater she could do to the men than the judgement god would pass on them, Mamie refused to be broken by grief; she became a school teacher and dedicated her life to Chicago’s educational system. Her decision to have an open casket funeral for her son was a turning point in the Civil Rights movement.
I have never been religious, but the strength Mamie Till found in her faith allowed her to contribute to real and lasting positive social change in the world, which I deeply admire.
This portrait was based on a photograph that Mamie took of her son on Christmas day of 1954, about eight months before Emmett was murdered. Above his head flies a tattered American flag built of the Talking Heads lyric “same as it ever was.”
And why “same as it ever was?” Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald, and Stephon Clark, to name a few reasons, though the nature of these murders are different; they were committed by police officers. This is the beginning of a new body of work entitled Facing the Music. Cyntoia Brown is next.
Friends, join me tonight at Martyrs’ in Chicago for Volume 45 of PechaKucha. Along with 11 other presenters from various walks of life, I’ll be sharing 20 images in 400 seconds and talking about art, music, scribbles, and lentils. It’ll be a fun show.
UPDATE 4/2:
Read more and see photos from the show here.
I am very pleased to announce my participation in The Telephone Show at the Association for Visual Arts – “a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting visual arts and community in personal and experiential ways because we believe that art makes people and communities better” – in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I share those sentiments entirely.
Susan Fox, who runs ShapeShifter – a roving gallery in Chattanooga focussing on one-night exhibitions of new art – curated the show. Like the telephone game some of you might remember playing as kids, this project began with a single piece of art that served as the origin – the first statement made in the game – and that image was passed to the next artist, who created work inspired by the origin piece, and so on. Fun concept for a show, right? Above is my contribution.
If you’re in Chattanooga, the show runs from March 2nd through the end of the month.
UPDATE 3/21:
Word from Chattanooga is that The Telephone Show exhibition was the best attended opening that the Association for Visual Arts has ever had. My thanks to Sue Fox for including me. Here’s some press from the show:
A new portrait of Emmett Till, the first in a series of three drawings of this civil rights icon, is paired with the Talking Heads lyric “same as it ever was.” For what I think are obvious reasons. The brilliant Jabari Asim wrote in his indispensable book The N Word, that “far more durable is the majority culture’s invocation of ‘timeless American values’ such as individual rights, religious freedom, and equal justice, and its simultaneous ignorance of other traditional American values such as greed, duplicity, and intolerance.” Till is as relevant today as he was in the 1950’s when he was lynched by two white men who were then acquitted of the crime. Such atrocities still happen. In my Chicago, there is still needless violence visited upon young black men and women. Same as it ever was.
See my 2nd version of the Emmett Till portrait, a work in progress, in the WIP gallery.
In preparation for an upcoming show, I am making four new drawings, including this, which is based on the mug shot of a Finnish immigrant coming through Ellis Island in the 1920’s. The text is a lyric from the Living Colour song Type: “Everything is possible but nothing is real.” Sort of sums up my feelings about the idea of the American dream.
I’ve also made a portrait of another American dreamer, Spalding Gray, which, along with other new works, you can see in the COLOR gallery. Because why not?
D A M I E N J A M E S 