What does blackness look like? A triumvirate of artworks currently on view in three separate Chicago museums takes on this question, if not in deliberate concert then at least in a zeitgeisty cacophony. Sometimes the most crucial exhibition exists unintentionally between institutions.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Arthur Jafa’s 2016 viral video “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death” might be the single powerful work of art on view in Chicago right now. (It is the centerpiece of “Prisoner of Love,” a collections show.) Sitting through its 7-minute entirety is composure destroying and ought to be obligatory viewing for any adult alive in America today. Freedom marchers, police brutality, star athletes, political icons, more police brutality, fervid dancing, raging fires, musical geniuses and yet more police brutality — the video choreographs hundreds of quick cuts of highlights and lowlights of 20th- and 21st-century black life in America into one inextricably devastating, rhythmic whole. Blink and you miss Obama singing “Amazing Grace.” Watch it again and you find a black teenage girl in a bikini being wrestled to the ground by a white cop. Don’t even bother to look for balance, for a middle ground: there’s none to be seen here, and where it tries to squeak by it gets wrenchingly abused, like the bewildered mother forced out of her car on the side of a dark highway by the police, who answer none of her pleading questions and terrify her young children, one of whom exits the car with his hands up, because he thinks he has to. Transcendence will not come — not via the soundtrack of Kanye West’s glorious “Ultralight Beam” nor mesmerizing outer-space footage of a molten star. There is no release, only amplification of emotional, psychological and intellectual reaction until complete meltdown is achieved.
The middle is out there, though. Most people live it, as do their neighbors. That’s why it’s called the middle. At the Cultural Center, Cecil McDonald, Jr. has made it his purpose to counteract the invisibility of that middle by showing what it looks like in an ever-expanding series of photographs of friends and family, posed in their homes and on picnics, and just otherwise going about their lives as people of color. Indeed, the few unusual (read: artsy) compositions of “In the Company of Black” feel extraneous; the more effortlessly quotidian, the better. That’s a misrepresentation, of course, as everydayness takes great care to achieve: a young boy on a BMX out front a modest red brick house must be posed just right, so the sidewalk forms a cross right behind him, the older couple touching, the girl flitting out the frame, the house centered, its roof a beacon in the bright sun. Together they form a dynamically stable and believably natural whole. Likewise, references to black cultural figures don’t appear simply by chance: Richard Pryor on a living room tv screen, a Billie Holiday album cover propped on a chair, a Kerry James Marshall catalogue on a bedroom floor, a book about Malcolm X on a coffee table.
Though they exude an air of casualness, this array has been deliberately assembled and displayed as a pantheon. Finally, there is tone. The prints themselves are dark, sometimes so dark that information disappears: in “Pod,” McDonald’s young daughter sits at their dining room table plugged into a music player, slipping into the pool of blackness that drenches the bottom third of the image. Unknown what she’s listening to, but given the show’s context, chances are it’s not Taylor Swift that has her mesmerized. The show is filled with such images, portraits of black children and adults that convey blackness as person, as culture and also as color. White barely registers, except as a clean t-shirt or a crisp bedsheet, a minor element against which to contrast the richness of black.
In Dawoud Bey’s exhibition at the Art Institute, white is not really even there, just a lighter shade of jet. The 16 photographs of “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” the famed portraitist’s series about the last stops on the Underground Railroad, are some of the blackest I have ever seen, for the synchrony of what they depict and how they depict it. Indeed, Bey’s images look at first like large black monochromes rather than illustrations of the landscape around Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, territory once criss-crossed by thousands seeking freedom from slavery. But, as on a moonlit walk, eyes adjust: farmhouses and picket fences, overgrown thickets, a mirrored marsh and the mottled expanse of Lake Erie become slightly brighter and sharper, at least enough to be made out, while the rest remains indistinct, sensed more than seen. Bey’s pictures don’t document those journeys, not exactly, but convey instead the feeling of moving silently at night, under cover of darkness, through thick forest, along secret routes to safe houses, edging ever closer to liberty.
Like Arthur Jafa, with his opus composed almost entirely of found footage; like Cecil McDonald, Jr., with his thoughtfully arranged pantheon; Bey too eschews the tired notion of stand-alone creator, choosing instead to make clear his influences. None of us works alone. Bey borrowed his series title from the last line of a poem by Langston Hughes, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, and directly outside the exhibition gallery he hung a dense selection of 19th- and 20th-century collection photographs that spans the African-American experience. Ranging from a lynching to family photographs, from Ruth-Marion Baruch’s documents of a civil rights rally to Roy DeCarava’s study of inky water, they are all shades of black.
“Prisoner of Love,” through Oct. 27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 312-280-2660 or mcachicago.org; “Cecil McDonald, Jr.: In the Company of Black,” through April 14 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., 312-742-1168 or cityofchicago.org/dcase; “Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” through April 14 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600 or www.artic.edu.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
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