Tag: Art

Searching for Jehanne

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I was born in the village of Domremy, Susan Aurinko. On exhibit at LUMA (Loyola University Museum of Art) in Chicago.

 

In 2013, Chicago artist Susan Aurinko visited a 12th century chateau in France’s Loire Valley that was once the temporary home of Joan of Arc. Aurinko returned again and again to photograph the actual places where Joan of Arc once lived or visited, using these layered images to explore Joan’s passion, from her inspired childhood to her military victories, brief political triumph, capture, suffering, and martyrdom. The photographic exhibit of Aurinko’s work at the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago, “Searching for Jehanne: The Joan of Arc Project,” suggests the ways Joan lives on as a cultural and religious icon, preserved in sculpture, film, and popular memory. Many of the photographs in the exhibit are images of statues of Joan praying or striding triumphantly with her banner, superimposed on dark, churchlike interiors. Other photographs show wistful little girls with faraway eyes standing in the woods or next to rural outbuildings. Some images show teenaged young women in chainmail looking devout and vulnerable. These images float towards viewers with varying levels of immediacy, yet because all are housed in thick, dark, ornate frames, we are reminded of Joan’s distance and separation from us by time and constructed memory. Joan’s words, taken from her trial transcripts, accompany each photograph as a kind of narration or inner monologue.

These various photographic images of Joan—some as hard and remote as a marble statue, some as immediate and moving as a little child peering out through her own windblown hair—remind us that Joan is made and remade for us by religion, the state, and the media, but that we also make Joan what we need her to be. Here Joan is emotional, vulnerable, naïve, and devout, swept up inexorably by forces beyond her control that she cannot fully understand. Joan is also unswerving, courageous, and inspired, a person of frankness, conviction, and great integrity who survived not only the medieval battlefield but months of imprisonment, including physical hardship and deprivation, psychological torture, and probable sexual assault at the hands of military captors and religious tormentors.

Looking at these images inspired by Joan, their subject suspended so near, yet fixed at a distance by dark frames of culture and history, I am reminded of Vita Sackville-West’s Saint Joan of Arc, a biography written in the 1930s by one of England’s most prominent women writers, an admirer and self-confessed nonbeliever who eventually admits to new-found respect for miracles and the supernatural as a result of her research into Joan’s life. Like Aurinko’s photographs bringing us close to Joan yet insisting on our inability to really know her, Sackville-West’s biography alternates between feminizing Joan and marveling at the alien nature of her saintly masculinity. Sackville-West attributes Joan’s shrewdness to “feminine intuition,” and downplays the physical vigor that allowed Joan to spend nearly a week in armor without taking it off even to sleep. She dwells on Joan’s frequent tears: “She was, in fact, emotional, and wept copiously at every possible opportunity—as queer a mixture of feminine and masculine attributes as ever relentlessly assaulted the enemy and then must cry on seeing him hurt.”[1] She notes that witnesses described Joan’s impatience as that of “a woman great with child,”[2] and in her biography she sometimes calls Joan “a girl dressed up.”[3] Such strategies are perhaps designed to bring Joan nearer to people who want their saints to be more “normal,” more intelligible as properly-gendered, tender-hearted beings.

At the same time, Sackville-West acknowledges the things about Joan that distance her from the ways many people still think young girls should feel and act. She finds it to be incontrovertible that Joan possessed the gift of prophecy; she also marvels, with nearly religious wonder, that Joan leapt 60 or 70 feet from a tower trying to escape her captors, yet emerged unharmed. She guesses that the Dauphin Charles must have found Joan an “alarming savior,”[4] and imagines that because Joan “was not really a soldier at all; she was not even a man,”[5] she must have had an “astonishing effect”[6] on the troops.

Sackville-West is most impressed by Joan’s courage in leaving her childhood and her village to move beyond the familiar, and seems pleased that unlike many saints, Joan never used expressions like “my heavenly Spouse,” or “my Betrothed.” Sackville-West writes:

She is the least sentimental of saints, and the most practical . . . She is too heroic and bracing to appeal intimately to the average mind. She makes the mistake of being always something over life-size; something which, however much she may command admiration and respect, can never be loved in quite the same personal way as the more human saints.[7]

I laughed when I first read this passage, in part because it is funny, but also because this sentiment about Joan is a common one. Joan remains a strange saint for many people. Despite the extraordinary record we possess of her actual words at her trial, she can seem oddly unknowable. Is this because she leaves her girlhood behind? Is her tender girlhood the thing we cling to as familiar and knowable, because her warrior’s ruthlessness seems too harsh? Sackville-West’s characterization of Joan’s heroically virtuous nature as a “mistake” is a humorous jab at conventional notions that it is more important for a woman to be loved than it is for her to do great things. As these words suggest, it is this ability to be loved that is so reassuring; a woman who does great things without being especially lovable is terrifying. When Sackville-West finally allows herself to imagine Joan as a warrior, she calls her “The Maid,” the title given her by the common people signifying Joan’s status as the figure of myth destined to deliver France from English occupation: “no soft saintly girl, but a stern and angry young captain with very definite ideas of her own,”[8] and “that inexplicable character, the girl-boy captain—La Pucelle.”[9]

Contemplating Joan’s martyrdom allows tenderness and pity to soften Sackville-West’s sense of Joan’s strangeness. Deeply moved by Joan’s death, Sackville-West notes that “many wept,” and notes the care for others Joan demonstrated in warning the priest holding a crucifix for her to get down off her burning pyre. As her biography nears its close, Sackville-West recounts the miracles surrounding Joan’s death without a trace of skepticism—the name of Jesus writ large in the flames, the English soldier who saw a white dove fly out of the fire and wing its way towards France, the executioner traumatically frightened by the refusal of Joan’s heart to burn.

Similarly, Susan Aurinko’s pictures at LUMA also suggest a figure we never quite know, yet who fascinates and moves us. The mystery of Joan’s nature, of virtuous courage at the intersection of human and divine, is the essence of Joan’s appeal, and this sense of mystery pervades these photographs and this installation.

 

The show runs through October 21, 2017 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 North Michigan Avenue. Admission is free through November 11, 2017.

On October 17 from 6:00 to 7:30, LUMA will host a panel with University of Chicago Professor Françoise Meltzer, author of For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity; Loyola University Chicago professor Bren Ortega Murphy; and artist Susan Aurinko on “Joan of Arc in Contemporary Culture,” a conversation about the lasting legacy and cultural significance of this venerated saint. For more information go to: https://www.luc.edu/luma/education_outreach/publicprogramsandevents/paneldiscussionjoanofarcincontemporaryculture.shtml

 

[1] Vita Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 11.

[2] Saint Joan of Arc, 89.

[3] Saint Joan of Arc, 149.

[4] Saint Joan of Arc, 112.

[5] Saint Joan of Arc, 149.

[6] Saint Joan of Arc, 149.

[7] Saint Joan of Arc, 335.

[8] Saint Joan of Arc, 154.

[9] Saint Joan of Arc, 162.

Jaime Hovey is Associate Program Director for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

Moral Art

This post was written after a visit to ArtAIDSAmerica Chicago, at the Alphawood Gallery, 2014 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The show runs through April 2, 2017.

 

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“AIDS—JUDGMENT HAS COME, Slidell, Louisiana,” 1989, Inkjet print, Ann P. Meredith. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

It is hard to enter the space of the ArtAIDSAmerica Chicago exhibit without experiencing outrage. The massive human tragedy caused by years of governmental and mainstream social indifference toward a disease that wiped out an entire generation of young men here and abroad, as well as women and children, and that still rages on today, draws comparison to the callous use of soldiers as machine gun fodder by the decrepit British generals of the First World War, or the stubborn insistence by the Johnson and Nixon administrations that teenaged boys by the truckload be shipped off to die in Vietnam. In 1980, 31 people had died of what would later come to be known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Ten years later, the death toll in the U.S. alone was 18,447, and continued to rise throughout the 1990s. People living with and dying of AIDS included all sorts of people–gay men, male and female IV needle users, straight and gay women, hemophiliacs, and children born to HIV-positive mothers. Still, the disease was perceived as particular to gay men, and as a result of the stigma associated with them, the U.S. government failed to respond quickly to the crisis.

 

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“Every 12 Minutes,” Nayland Black, 1991. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Artists responded to the crisis by making overtly activist and political art. Many works in this show foreground issues of exclusion, stigma, and injustice. Entering the exhibit, one is immediately confronted by Nayland Black’s 1991 “Every 12 Minutes,” a clock on the wall with STOP IT! written in the middle, its face divided into 5 equal sections by the words “ONE AIDS DEATH.” The clock exhorts us to stop these deaths, but it also commands us to stop all the other behaviors contributing to the crisis, from spreading misinformation to having unsafe sex to stigmatizing people with the disease.

 

Turning from the clock, visitors can see a shimmering bluish beaded curtain by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Water), 1995, that stretches across a wide entryway, separating the entryway from the room beyond. Yet through the clear and bluish beads this next room is also gauzily visible, glowing and beckoning from beyond a veil.

 

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“Untitled” (Water), 1995. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

In a small, adjacent room Native American symbols speak to both stigma and loss. David Wojnarowicz’s gelatin silver print “Untitled” (Buffalo), 1988-89 is a photograph of a diorama of the Native American hunting practice of herding buffalo off a cliff, suggesting the intentional killing of people with AIDS not only through indifference, but through active hostility and homophobia. Ronald Lockett’s “Facing Extinction,” 1994, made of chalk, metal, and wood, shows a ghostly buffalo, a recurring symbol for Lockett of hunted creatures. It stands on a too-solid three-dimensional cliff, gazing into our space as its body begins to disappear into the background. “More Time Expected,” 2002, by Sicangu Lakota artist Thomas Haukaas, shows figures riding singly and in pairs surrounding a riderless horse, symbolizing those felled by the disease.

 

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“More Time Expected,” 2002. Thomas Haukaas. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Part Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded glass curtain and enter a large open space with soaring ceilings. On one wall, a recreation of ACT-UP NY/Gran Fury’s 1987 video and neon installation “Let the Record Show” shines like a dark window, dominating the room. At the top a neon pink triangle glows steadily over white letters spelling out the famous ACT-UP logo, “Silence = Death.” The projection of an arched crescent and decorative columns around the outside of the logo gives it an architectural quality, like a temple or a church nave, beneath which long panels stretch down like stained-glass. Here photographs of six people from the Reagan era are superimposed on an old photograph of the Nuremburg Trials depicting Nazi war criminals seated in a courtroom guarded by Allied soldiers. An electronic panel with running titles in red shows AIDS statistics and epidemic facts. The superimposed photographs light up and go dark, alternately revealing the faces of Senator Jessie Helms, columnist William F. Buckley Jr., Cory Servaas of the Presidential AIDS Commission, an anonymous surgeon, and President Ronald Reagan. These are the war criminals of the AIDS crisis. Underneath each face is an offensive quote made by each one about disease victims, such as Buckley’s infamous assertion that people with AIDS should be “tattooed on the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals,” or the surgeon’s quip that AIDS provided a better reason to “hate faggots.” To underscore the work’s declaration that silence equals death, there is no quote from Reagan, who famously said nothing even as the worst health epidemic in centuries raged around him.

 

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“Let the Record Show”, 1987. ACT-UP NY/Gran Fury. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Other mixed-media and video works include a bank of screens with headphones and seating for projects such as T. Kim Trang Tran’s “kore,” 1994, which swoops in and away from grainy black and white moving images of Asian men relaxing at the beach or walking through cities, zooming out every so often to show these figures, distanced from us by time, being watched by other men and boys on hand-held screens and scrolls. The gaze created here suggests that cruising after AIDS cannot be dispassionate; the look of curiosity, appreciation, and desire for Asian men created in and by these images is now tinged with melancholy, memory, and loss.

 

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Still from “kore,” 1994. T. Kim Trang Tran. Photo by Jaime Hovey

 

In what is thought to be the first AIDS painting, Izhar Patkin creates in his “Unveiling of a Modern Chastity” a surface of erupting skin lesions fashioned out of rubber paste, latex, and ink. Moved by the symptoms he saw in patients at his dermatology office, he documented their wounds a year before there was any public announcement about the disease or its victims. Here the sores break open the skin of the painting to ooze and glisten in the light, pushing through from underneath as if something monstrous is housed inside. The painting is shocking, but it also forces the viewer to confront the disease at the level of skin, pain, and the body.

 

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“Unveiling of a Modern Chastity,” 1981, Izhar Patkin. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

The cumulative effect of these works is to move viewers from outrage at homophobic and indifferent responses to the epidemic to admiration at the courage and resilience of AIDS artists, activists, allies, and survivors. In these works we see creative, political, and deeply moral reactions to the absence of justice, to the withholding of compassion, and to the celebration of love in America at a time when huge numbers of people were suffering and dying.

 

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“Eleven, October 2015”, Kia LaBeija. Originally posted on Refinery 29 here.

 

Religious imagery shapes many of the works, speaking to the gulf between the moral response of the queer community–which involved projects such as public safe sex education and meals on wheels for the homebound–and the judgmental condemnation and indifference of government officials and mainstream religious groups, which shuttered bathhouses and gay clubs in a misguided effort to stop gay sex from happening. In “AIDS—JUDGMENT HAS COME, Slidell, Louisiana,” Ann P. Meredith documents a set of billboards she saw in Louisiana as she traveled to photograph women living with AIDS. Her print shows the harsh messages of the billboards as undercut by a graffiti tagger who writes “Love” and “Peace,” and slyly quotes from Romans 3:10, “There is none righteous, no, not one,” a verse that when it appears in the Bible is followed by the words, “There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.”

 

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“Altar Piece,” 1990, Keith Haring. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Keith Haring’s gleaming silver “Altar Piece,” the last work he completed before he died, shows a weeping Mary with a shining heart and multiple arms holding the infant Jesus under a cross in the center panel of a triptych. Here the Trinity is reimagined to include her, and below her crowds raise their hands in anger and supplication as angels fly and fall.

 

Echoing the theme of Icarian angels, Daniel Goldstein’s “Icarian I Incline,” fashions a Shroud of Turin from the leather cover of a weight bench that once belonged to the Castro gym Muscle System, nicknamed Muscle Sisters by patrons. Stained with the sweat of a thousand gay men, many of whom have since died, the cover bears the ghostly image of their bodies, framed here as a relic memorializing the exuberant communities that flew too close to the sun, flourished before AIDS, and came together to support each other during and after the crisis.

 

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“Icarian I Incline,” 1993, Daniel Goldstein. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Martin Wong’s 1988 “I.C.U.” shows an eye in a triangle floating over a brick building. Echoing the pink triangle in the nearby “Let the Record Show,” the eye above the building here resembles the eye on a dollar bill, but appears amidst constellations, like the eye of God. A pun on “I see you,” the letters are also the common abbreviation for Intensive Care Unit, the place in hospitals where so many gay men lay dying during the epidemic. In this work, most of the brick building is dark, and only the wing with fire escapes is lit and accessible. The eye of providence seems not to know or care about what is inside; in any case, here God is only potentially available upon exit.

 

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“I.C.U.,” 1988, Martin Wong. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

This is not to suggest that the show is tragic; indeed, the entire exhibit is a triumph of creativity, defiance, and love. Artists pay tribute to the fallen in painting, video, textiles, and sculpture, remember those who were there, and call out those who refused to be present. Charles LeDrey’s teddy bear in a box from 1991 suggests both mourning and the end of innocence. In Rosalind Solomon’s gelatin silver print “Silence Equals Death, Washington, DC,” 1987-90, a young man covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions confronts the camera wearing full protest regalia, including ACT-UP buttons, a straw hat, and a paper Star of David. Frank Moore’s “Patient,” 1997-1998, shows an empty hospital bed painted with leaves and snowflakes, where environmental devastation and AIDS are emergencies that require equally urgent care.

 

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“Patient,” 1997-1998, Frank Moore. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Kia LaBeija’s glossy technicolor photographs, such as “Eleven, October 2015,” and “Kia and Mommy” (below) document her dignity living with hospitals and doctor visits, and celebrate fashion and makeup as creative gestures that make everyday life beautiful.

 

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“Kia and Mommy,” 2014, Kia LaBejia. Photo Kia LaBejia – Visual AIDS here.

 

The pieces gathered here span three-and-a-half decades and include work by people still living, as well as cataloging the talent of too many who died too soon. Their project is a deeply moral one: to remind viewers that sick people are human, that no one deserves to suffer, that death comes for all of us, and that the proper response to tragedy is always—must be—art, compassion, and action.

 

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Detail from “By Punchinello’s Bed”, 1992, Patrick Webb. Photo by Jaime Hovey.

 

Jaime Hovey is Associate Program Director for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.

ArtAIDSAmerica Chicago runs through April 2.

Kerry James Marshall’s School of Beauty

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“Bang”. Kerry James Marshall, 1994. Image from Artsy.

Can looking at art make us better people? Can art teach us to recognize in others and ourselves a humanity all too often constrained by narrow cultural definitions of beauty and social worth?

 

Painter Kerry James Marshall has long believed that art has an important social function, and that as a black artist, he should focus on black representation rather than abstraction. In his current retrospective exhibition MASTRY, here in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art through September 25, his decision to engage with European “Old Masters” provokes in viewers recognition that the absence of black figures from Western art history is a moral loss as well as an aesthetic one. By insisting upon black representation and putting figures in dialogue with the great works of European art that exclude them, he also challenges viewers—as the best artists do—to see art, and each other, differently.

 

In his paintings, black figures challenge viewers to see them. In stark contrast to the Old Masters, who rarely use black in their palettes, Marshall paints his figures with pure black paint, mostly unmixed with other colors except for some highlights where light softly contours foreheads, noses, and lips. Eyes and teeth are sometimes rendered in dazzling whites, or muted greys. Marshall’s engagement with seeing and being seen was sparked, he says in a video accompanying his show at MCA Chicago, by his reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Indeed, the painting that begins the exhibit is the aptly-named Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), where white eyes and jack-o-lantern teeth gleam in the black field of an indiscernible face.

 

Marshall’s project of revising what we think we see or know reminds viewers who experience America from outside mainstream culture what it feels like to read symbols of beauty and freedom from the vantage point of struggle and invisibility, and schools viewers used to seeing only from one vantage point what it might be like to see differently. Viewers are forced to acknowledge the subjects of the paintings, and such acknowledgment requires a regard for another that intrudes on the closed world of the individual viewer, in an event not unlike the substitution in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, where “In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone, and it is through substitution that I am not ‘another,’ but me.” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being). Marshall asks viewers to enter a scene and reflect on the people there. His perspective, while flattened, opens out to viewers, who feel as if they are standing at the edge of the room or the side of the yard. Viewers must look closely to make out the details of his figures, often set against dark or dimly-lit backgrounds. It is necessary to stop, look, and engage with these subjects, many of whom look back, confronting viewers with a direct gaze. This confrontation demands a response, and in this proximity there is the possibility of ethics. “We see you,” the figures seem to say. “Can you see us?”

 

Marshall likes to complicate our collective sense of what we know by taking familiar holidays such as the Fourth of July and opening up a different way of looking at them by referencing art history. In Bang (1994), a picture that seems particularly timely now, as athletes supporting Black Lives Matter refrain from saluting the flag, and force many to consider the function of public displays of patriotism, a black girl stands in a backyard with her hand placed reverently across her chest, holding up an American flag in front of two boys who also salute with their hands on their hearts. Pink clouds in the foreground are strung together by a banner carrying words from the Great Seal of the United States, “We Are One.” The words on the clouds form the phrase “Happy July 4th Bang,” and overhead another banner carried by doves forcefully declares, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to god.” Here the promise of American prosperity suggested by these slogans seems realized in the gentle suburban landscape, one where black children safely play amid neat houses and trimmed lawns while their holiday dinner cooks on the grill.

 

But the painting also references medieval and renaissance religious paintings, lending the patriotic tableau both a holy and an ominous cast. The gentle curve of the girl’s neck as she holds out the flag—the symbol of her faith— is achingly vulnerable. Behind her, a patch of yellow on a garage door makes a halo over her head, and beams of light issue from her brow. She is a martyred saint, or the Virgin Mary, her head at the center of the painting, as it would be in a religious icon. The word “Bang” on the pink cloud just as easily suggests the sound of guns as it does fireworks. The boys look away in different directions, their faces innocent, as the barbeque grill issues a coil of smoke and a garden hose circles the girl like a snake. In the background large sunbeams echo the rays in the girl’s halo, but the sun appears to be setting, and the children are standing on a patch of darkness the shape of a grave. In the foreground, shadows enter the frame and angle towards them.

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“School of Beauty, School of Culture”, Kerry James Marshall, 2012. Image from Birmingham Museum of Art.

 

In another work, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), Marshall “schools” viewers to see and understand how the beauty of black women is often haunted and constrained by mainstream culture’s white beauty standards. The scene seems to be a bustling celebration of black women’s beauty, where heart-shaped mirrors on the walls of a thriving black hair salon reflect the words “School of Beauty School of Culture” in backwards letters, and the words “Dark” and “Lovely” are repeated on posters dotting the walls. “It’s Your Hair!” emphasizes one, an encouragement to patrons to claim their style and resist acquiescing to dominant notions about how black hair should be worn. Black women with many different hairstyles move through the space; one looks directly out at us and strikes a classic pinup pose, as if to say, “I am beautiful.” A signed copy of the 1998 landmark album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with its cover image of a black woman with snaky hair, hangs over a doorway in the center of the painting, echoing the painting’s emphasis on black women’s beauty, lives and experiences, as well as the theme of education.

 

But something floats in the space between two young children in the foreground: an anamorphic image attenuated to resemble the similarly floating image in the foreground of Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). In Holbein, two richly dressed men stand amidst their musical instruments, maps, books, and globes, symbols of their worldly accomplishments, while an anamorphic skull, stretched to the point of being nearly

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“The Ambassadors.” 1533, Hans Holbein the Younger. Image from the National Gallery.

unrecognizable, floats between them in the foreground. The skull foreshortens if the viewer moves to the far right of the painting and looks sideways at it, revealing the classic vanitas theme: death waits for all men, regardless of wealth, stature, or skill. In Marshall’s School of Beauty, the image that haunts the scene is Sleeping Beauty, and she also takes shape if the viewer moves to one side of the painting—the left side, in this case, in a mirror-like reversal of Holbein, hinted at by the reversed letters in the mirrors above the salon. Although the adult women in the picture seem unaware of Sleeping Beauty, the child at the center of the picture sees her clearly, and actually stoops to see past her to the little girl on the other side. Unlike Holbein’s skull, Sleeping Beauty casts a shadow in the picture, and her blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin shadow this scene celebrating black women’s beauty. School of Beauty, School of Culture teaches viewers to make the effort to look differently at the painting, much as Holbein teaches his viewers to move to one side, making the effort to look differently at his painting. In Marshall’s case, he is asking us to reverse the look we have learned from “Old Master,” to recognize that Sleeping Beauty haunts this scene, but to make the effort to see her, and look past her white beauty ideal, as the little child does, and see all the beautiful black women searching for their own reflections.

 

Kerry James Marshall asks viewers to recognize the ways in which Anglo-European culture has limited artistic representation and ideals of beauty to the images and experiences of white subjects. As a remedy to this, he offers ways of seeing that expand the notion of which bodies get to be represented as beautiful and inspiring. By insisting that black subjects belong in museums, galleries, and high art, he enlarges cultural assumptions of what constitutes the beautiful, the human, and the divine, and this is a supremely wonderful thing.

 

This video accompanies the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Kerry James Marshall: Mastry is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, April 23–September 25, 2016, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017, and at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017.

 

Jaime Hovey is Associate Program Director for Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life.