Just off the main hall of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, a bold reimagining of the past has resulted in a beautiful collection of photographs that keep you trying to unlock their secrets. Created by Dawoud Bey, a highly-regarded Chicago artist and now a recent MacArthur genius grant awardee, the artist takes a detour from his signature portraitures to take on history and ask a question. “What must it have looked like to escape enslavement and make a run for freedom?” Bey chose the last leg of such a journey to highlight.
In American history, the Underground Railroad symbolizes this country’s second experience in exodus when members of an enslaved people fled bondage. A series of clandestine routes streaming from south to north, secret pathways leaving states like Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas led to places like Michigan or Buffalo, NY that possessed close proximity to the Canadian border. Many runaways also made their way to Ohio and Lake Erie where Canada beaconed from the other side. The artist’s photographs were taken in this geography.
Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black; 18 large scale photographs, lets viewers silently slip into new identities by allowing them to inhabit a radically different world and a vastly different time. Most Americans don’t know the psychological costs of fleeing oppression or have never felt the true weight of life jeopardizing danger. Bey lets us understand and even grasp their intensity through the use of darkness.
Every image is lit as if the photograph was taken in late twilight, just before complete darkness erases vision. Even in the gallery where the exhibition is mounted, your eyes have to adjust. At first the images appear too dark to even detect a subject. Slowly, objects and scenes come into view until you recognize them for what they are; an open field in one or a rolling expanse of water that is Lake Erie in another. And with them comes a feeling of apprehension; a lack of surety, a vague notion of possibility. All made palpable by the absence of clear light.
Is the sleeping house sitting behind the white picket fence the right house, a safe haven? How long will it take to cross that immense lake where freedom will be waiting on the other shore?
Word is out that the exhibit will be ending soon, April 14th. Thursday night saw the gallery full of people losing themselves in the photographs and talking quietly to one another about their strength. A wall leading into the exhibit displays a swarm of period and more contemporary photographs of post-Civil War black America that link Bey’s homage to courage to today’s realities. As well as being visually captivating, both exhibits exude cautionary hope.
Dawoud Bey – Night Coming Tenderly, Black
Closes April 14, 2019
The Art Institute of Chicago
Modern Wing
Nichols Bridgeway (Monroe & Michigan)
Chicago, IL 60603
www.artic.edu
