Among the recently opened exhibitions here in Chicago, it has been a particular pleasure to see the new exhibitions of work by Ben Gest and Cecil McDonald Jr. I've known both of them for some time, and it's been gratifying to see them continue to take their work to even more interesting and engaging levels of conceptual and formal production. I first met Ben Gest when I was still teaching at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts from 1995-98. He was an undergraduate student there, and while not an art or photo major was taking photography classes. The photography area at Mason Gross was then dominated largely by the heavily theory based teaching of my other two colleagues Martha Rosler and Diane Neumaier. Documentary work was roundly discouraged.

Having encountered a number of students in the program who were engaged in more conventional or expressive forms of  practice that did not proceed from a place of postmodern critical theory who had been chastised for engaging in this kind of supposedly "exploitative" practice, I wasn't surprised when Gest sought me out to show me a project in which he had begun photographing in a largely African American populated public housing project in New Brunswick. Heart felt and empathetic images, these black and white photographs spoke of someone trying to reach out beyond their immediate set of experiences to use the camera to bridge a set of presumed differences and make photographs that spoke of a common humanity. Impressed with the work, I suggested that after graduation he might consider going to grad school. 

Tired of the conceptual myopia of the program regarding photography (and tired too of the commute from New Haven, CT to New Brunswick, NJ), I was preparing to take a position at Columbia College Chicago. I suggested to Gest that he might want to consider Columbia as a place to do his graduate work. It was a pleasure to watch his work grow in sophistication over the three years in the Columbia College Chicago MFA photography program. His shift from a documentary practice to a highly sophisticated and nuanced use of digital technology has been amazing to witness. Acquisitions of his work by museums, representation by Stephen Daiter Gallery, and his upcoming publication from the Renaissance Society (in conjunction with earlier show there) are ample testimony to his growing stature.











My friend Barry Mayo, Columbia College trustee, photographer, and radio broadcast industry mogul, introduced me to Cecil McDonald Jr. about ten years ago. The three of us met up one morning at the Pancake House in Hyde Park one Saturday morning, and I got to know this Chicago photographer. At the time Cecil was working firmly within the documentary tradition. My cohorts back in New York would call it the black photographic tradition, a tradition that extends from the seminal work of Roy DeCarava, wherein the camera was used a decidedly expressive tool to make photographs (in black & white, please!) that portrayed some aspect of "the black experience." In New York this tradition was carried forth by the Kamoinge Workshop, which for awhile was chaired by DeCarava. Here in Chicago Bobby Sengstack and Mickey Ferrill were two earlier practitioners whose work was known to us black photographers in New York, mostly by way of The Black Photographers Annual, a fine printed book that was published annually for about four years in the mid-late 1970s. 

Cecil had then been working on a series of black and white photographs of the Chicago stepping tradition, a form of black social and expressive dancing I hadn't encountered in New York. Years later he signed on for the MFA photography program at Columbia, and began to considerably expand the range of his own photographic practice, finally breaking with the constraints of the small camera black and white work he had been making for so long. It had become apparent to McDonald that here in Chicago the tradition of photography as practiced as an expressive form by most black photographers was caught in a kind of time warp, operating seemingly unawares of the vast conceptual and material shifts that had been taking place in the medium over the last two decades. He wanted out of that straightjacketed thinking, and he has definitely more than worked himself out of it in fine fashion as his latest work at Catherine Edelman Gallery demonstrates. 

McDonald's show calls to mind two other exhibitions currently on view  here in Chicago, "Black Is/Black Ain't" at the Renaissance Society and "Disinhibition: Black Art and Blue Humor" at the Hyde Park Art Center. Both shows--in their own variously flawed ways--continue the discursive dialogue around race and art/cultural production. I'll talk about them further in my next post.

By the way, I mistakenly placed Greg Stimac (subject of numerous shows and much critical attention) as coming out of the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He did, in fact, do his BFA at Columbia. I mistakenly thought he'd gone on to grad school at SAIC. I knew he couldn't have picked up those fine picture making skills at SAIC. Sorry Greg.

Photograph, top: Ben Gest, Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery
Photograph, bottom: Cecil McDonald Jr., Courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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