A Beautifully Poetic Show
I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks, but not for want of things to write about. I recently attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition that prompted this entry.  I have known Jin Lee's photographs for some time, having seen one of her "Heads" in an exhibition in the photography galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago long before I lived here, and long before I ever met Jin, who I have now come to count among my friends. The silhouetted portrait caught my attention because, in spite of its minimal visual information about the subject--an outline of the face and hair--my mind consistently filled in the details, and I thought I would recognize this young woman if I ever met her in reality. The pictures were both suggestive and minimal at the same time. Happily one of these pieces (#1, 1999) has now been in my collection for a few years, and I am able to contemplate it anew each day. It still holds my attention and engages my imagination.

Lee has moved on since that earlier work, and her recent works find her engaged in describing the natural world in all of its subtle shifting permutations. Her current exhibition at Devening Projects (http://www.deveningprojects.com), Floating World, consists of photographs from three projects, "Small Mountains," "Lake Effect," and "Winter Trees." It is a poetic tour de force. The "Small Mountain" photographs depict various salt mountains in and around Chicago, but they might as well be photographs from an extraterrestrial exploration, made on the surface of some unknown planet. They also seem to reference the 19th century expedition landscape photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan, William Bell, and Carlton Watkins among others; they have all of the appearances of previously unnavigable terrain. They mine, too, an ambiguous sense of scale that only further deepens their inherent interest.















The "Lake Effect" pictures contain an even more pronounced sense of sustained quietude and heightened observation (not to mention a quick and responsive hand on the camera's shutter). A cursory description of these pictures of Lake Michigan would note that each contains simply sky and water. But it is in the richly evocative nuances that the pictures take on a deeper life. Describing the shifting waters, and momentary changes in its surface, Lee has composed a series of elegant images that show a small wave cresting, and other occurrences on the waters surface that last but a second or so at the most. By fixing them on film she allows for a sustained and almost meditative experience as we are now able to fix our own prolonged gazes on these ephemeral aquatic variations. When I lived in New York, I used to sometimes go to MoMA just look again at Ansel Adam's Surf Sequence pictures from 1940. MoMA had on view a triptych of these small photographs, in which the ever moving surf meets land, that Adams had made from an elevated vantage point. They were sheer visual poetry in their multiformity, and were unlike the more well known Yosemite landscapes that Adams made his reputation with. Their power never diminished for me no matter how many times I went to look at them. Jin Lee's "Lake Effect" have that same recurring effect of newly seen experience.
                                 
"Winter Trees" is a group of three pictures of bare tree branches, each spare but richly descriptive of the surface of these bare branches. One must get close to the pictures to be rewarded with the slow revelation of small but significant detail. These pictures--along with the others in the show--allow us to see the world anew through the photographer's eyes. That's one of the things one hopes for through an engagement with art after all. Devening Projects  is, admittedly, a little off the beaten path. This show, however, is certainly well worth the trip. The world will appear a little different to you when you head back out the door.

Photographs: (top) Salt Mountain #6, 2008; (middle) Wave #2, 2007; Winter Tree #2, 2007. All Copyright © by Jin Lee

Check Devening Projects website for hours and address.

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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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