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Highlights

Black Artists

The Fine art Institute acquired its first work by a black artist—Henry Ossawa Tanner'sThe Two Disciples at the Tomb—in 1906, the same year it was made.

Since then, the museum has supported black artists, purchasing many works for the collection including those by graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), ane of the few art academies that allowed blackness students to enroll at the plough of the 20th century, such equally Archibald John Motley Jr., Walter Ellison, Eldzier Cortor, and Richard Hunt.

Today we go along to expand the collection with the singled-out voices and perspectives of blackness artists across departments and media—compages, design, installation art, painting, printmaking, photography, painting, sculpture, and textiles. This tour features a rotating selection of these works.

Please note that while many of these works are on view, and are noted as such, some may be currently off view due to the museum'due south installation schedule. Click through to the artwork pages for more information.

Walter T. Bailey

The kickoff black architect licensed in Illinois, Walter T. Bailey studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and spent his early career as a professor at Tuskegee University—a historically black university in Alabama. In 1922 he was commissioned by the Knights of Pythias, a black fraternal order (there was also a predominantly white Knights of Pythias order at the time), to design their national headquarters in Chicago'south thriving Bronzeville neighborhood. When it was completed in 1928, the building was the largest and nearly significant in the country to be designed, congenital, and financed by African Americans. This terracotta fragment was recovered from the temple'southward Egyptian Revival facade—a mode which likely held great significance for the blackness Knights of Pythias at a moment when many African American intellectuals looked to the history of Egypt every bit a source of cultural pride. Although the structure was demolished in 1980, the Pythian Temple remains an important part of the rich history of Bronzeville and Chicago'due south Due south Side.

Richmond Barthé

After studying painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mississippi native Richmond Barthé moved to New York where he achieved success every bit a sculptor. His works—frequently elongated, graceful nudes—were exhibited widely by the Harmon Foundation, an organization that promoted African American artists and writers, and earned the praise of Harlem Renaissance critic Alain Locke. The Boxer was inspired by a prizefight the artist had seen years earlier featuring the Cuban lightweight Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo, known as Kid Chocolate, and features the agility, elegance, and sensuality seen in many of Barthé's figures.

Leslie Garland Bolling

"Freeing art from wood" is how cocky-taught artist Leslie Garland Bolling described his practice of carving figures out of soft poplar woods. Though he considered his creative practice a hobby, earning his living as a porter, letter carrier, and utility tradesman, his work drew the attending of fine art world critics and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. Sis Tuesday is one of seven figures from Bolling's most well-known "Days of the Week" series, which depicts black men and women engaged in everyday activities. Sister Tuesday, a sensitive rendition of a adult female ironing, is finished in gold paint to suggest the metallic surface of bronze. Bolling exhibited throughout the 1930s and in 1938 helped found the Craig House Art Middle, a Works Progress Administration community arrangement in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, which was the only one in the segregated South open up to African Americans.

Sam Gilliam

With an artistic career spanning more than than six decades, abstract painter Sam Gilliam has continually pushed the boundaries of color and form. While living in Washington, DC, Gilliam became associated with the Washington Colour School motion, and in the early 1960s he began staining unprimed and unstretched canvases with diluted acrylic paint rather than using traditional brushstroke techniques. By the stop of the 1960s, he started experimenting with crumpling, folding, and draping these canvases before arranging them in site-specific spaces or wrapping them around variably shaped framed stretchers to dispense a more sculptural approach. The malleability of these canvases echoes the fluidity of the pigment and vice versa. A quintessential work,"A" and the Carpenter I is a painting on a k calibration, and yet, similar a stained drop textile slung across ii sawhorses, it evokes a snapshot of the artist's studio.

This work is on view in Gallery 289.

Charles Harrison

1 of the most prominent African American designers in modern history—and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—Charles Harrison designed over 750 objects during his 32-year career at the Chicago-based retailer Sears, Roebuck, and Co., including sewing machines, pilus dryers, kitchen appliances, lawn mowers, and many other goods. 1 transformative early project was his acclaimed 1959 redesign for the popular toy View-Master, a stereoscope device originally introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair and used by the military in WWII. Harrison'south updated—and now iconic—model replaced the nighttime brown, blocky unit with lightweight, brightly colored, injection-molded plastic, making the device less costly and easier to apply, especially for children.

Suzanne Jackson

Suzanne Jackson began exhibiting in the vibrant creative and activist context of 1960s and '70s Los Angeles. Over the class of her six-decade career, Jackson has developed an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, gallerist, dancer, educator, and stage designer and an equally expansive arroyo to process and medium. oldblueshanging, while she waits, made in 2017, epitomizes Jackson's recent artistic developments. In this work, a big assemblage of layered material—including recycled acrylic, leaves, and Sumi paper from her previous painting newblueshanging (2014)—is suspended in articulate acrylic paint and collaged newspaper, and held together past repurposed stretcher bars. The hanging structure dramatically projects off the wall and into the gallery space. Jackson's title references her deep connection to musical traditions of spirituals and the blues, a cultural history that she re-engaged subsequently returning to the S in 1996.

This work is on view in Gallery 289.

Joshua Johnson

The outset known African American painter to gain professional person recognition in the United States, Joshua Johnson had trained every bit a blacksmith before existence freed past his enslaver (and father) around 1782. Johnson worked throughout the Baltimore expanse as a portraitist, advertising himself as "self-taught" in the metropolis's newspapers. Amid the more than 80 paintings attributed to Johnson is this i of Elizabeth Beatty and her daughter, both fashionably dressed. The kid holds a brightly colored strawberry, a delicacy frequently featured in Johnson'south portraits.

This work is on view in Gallery 169.

Sargent Claude Johnson

These teacups are rare examples of functional objects made past artist Sargent Claude Johnson. Best known for carved figural works from the 1920s and '30s that describe the beauty and dignity of African American people, Johnson experimented with a wide range of media over the course of his career, including painting, printmaking, frame making, and ceramics. Here, he focused on geometric forms to shape and decorate his vessels, using contrasting semicircles and rectangles for the handles of his cups and abstruse patterns, silhouetted figures, and musical instruments in the glazed imagery.

Hughie Lee-Smith

Starting art classes at historic period ten and graduating from the Cleveland School of Art (at present the Cleveland Institute of Fine art), Hughie Lee-Smith became a painter of uncategorizable images—scenes of alone enigmatic figures in bleak landscapes that are realist yet surreal, romantic and mystical. The creative person linked the starkness of his imagery to his experience as an African American man, later recalling, "Unconsciously it has a lot to exercise with a sense of alienation … and in all blacks in that location is an awareness of their isolation from the mainstream of society." In Desert Forms, equally in many of Lee-Smith's works, the isolation can too be interpreted as a universal statement nearly the loneliness that tin can exist experienced by all of humanity.

Norman Lewis

New York painter Norman Lewis began his career working in the social realist mode. Effectually 1946, still, he started exploring a gestural arroyo to abstraction and became the only African American among the first generation of Abstruse Expressionist artists. Although his piece of work avoided overt representation, he still sought to address social concerns. The title of this painting alludes to the U.s.' struggles and potential afterward Globe War Ii. With reference to lines from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" (showtime published in 1855), Lewis commented on his own time and the productive complications his socially engaged abstraction brought to American painting at this moment: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)."

Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Since the tardily 1960s, Mary Lovelace O'Neal has expanded the field of abstract painting through her experiments with color, figuration, and materiality, often speaking to the sociopolitical dimensions of race. Running with Black Panthers and White Doves was inspired past O'Neal'south travels in Morocco, particularly, as she notes, past "the biblical presence of North Africa, and a palace in Asilah, Morocco—the mosaics and moonlight that smeared the ocean." The work derives its title from the dialogue of the black king in Gian Carlo Menotti'southward opera Amahl and the Night Visitors: "I live in a black marble palace with black panthers and white doves." While the championship also conjures the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s, in which O'Neal was an agile participant, the painting is anchored in the artist's personal experience. O'Neal performed in Amahl and the Nighttime Visitors, which her father, a music director at the University of Arkansas and Tougaloo College, staged each year. Merging the personal, lyrical, and political, Running with Blackness Panthers and White Doves transfigures O'Neal's political views and aspirations into allegorical form, as the North African courtyard becomes the interior where, as the opera suggests, a black panther resides in perpetual motility.

This work is on view in Gallery 289.

Norman Teague

Norman Teague is a Chicago-based designer and educator whose do focuses on the complexity of urbanism and uses design as a machinery to empower black and dark-brown communities. His projects range from a collaboration with Theaster Gates and John Preus for dOCUMENTA (thirteen) in Kassel, Germany, to a 2017 contribution to the Chicago Cultural Center exhibition Wall of Respect: Vestiges, Shards, and Legacy of Blackness Power exploring the legacy of a seminal 1967 mural developed by blackness artists in Chicago's S Side communities. Teague'due south Sinmi stool takes its title from the word "relax" in the African language of Yoruba. This sleek seating in plywood and safety was inspired past the American rocking chair equally well as the relaxed positions—straddling, sitting, or perching—commonly causeless when lounging and socializing on urban center streets.

Gearldine Westbrook

Gearldine Westbrook became a member of the Gee's Bend artistic community in Alabama when she moved there after her spousal relationship (Westbrook and her husband, Miree, both worked in nearby cotton fiber fields). She had been quilting since childhood, learning from the many quilters who surrounded her, including her mother and grandmother. In describing her work, Westbrook noted, "I've been making quilts for a long time … I don't follow no pattern." Strips exemplifies her experimental, nevertheless ordered, practice. Westbrook used bodily strips of fabric to build wider and longer rectangles, which she then continued to class a single large strip. Continuing this play between slice and whole, the gently undulating edges of the quilt mirror the irregularities of the individual fabric elements, possibly offcuts from local factories.

D'Angelo Lovell Williams

D'Angelo Lovell Williams's photographs investigate Black queer subjectivities and complicate stereotypes of Black masculinity past depicting cocky-love and commonage embrace. In Beloved Railroad train, Williams depicts himself alongside two artists who are also close friends and collaborators—painter Jarvis Boyland and sculptor Cameron Clayborn. The three stand atop a makeshift phase, and their synchronized hand gestures, mimicking a locomotive, allude to the choreography of legendary male R&B trio the O'Jays, whose hit unmarried provides the piece of work'southward title. Wearing shimmering black tops and nylon stockings, they stand in contrast with the conventional gendered wardrobe of their historical counterparts.

John Wilson

Afterward studying in his native Boston and in Paris, John Wilson worked in United mexican states from 1950 to 1956, drawn, like many progressive African American artists, to the expressive power and political engagement of Mexican modern art. In that location Wilson institute the freedom, too as the distance, to explore and face the oppression and trauma of the black experience in the US. Mother and Child references The Incident, a mural he painted in 1952. Now destroyed, the mural portrayed a gruesome lynching of a blackness person at the hands of the Klu Klux Klan, witnessed by a immature African American family unit. In this print, Wilson retained the awe-inspiring scale and sculptural forms of the mural but translated the specific fear of lynching into a more general simply equally affecting image of sorrow and protective anxiety.