Two solo shows at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) showcase the vision of a pair of artists who pay tribute to community in very different ways. By honoring the impact and importance of a cultural institution, Faheem Majeed brings renewed attention to a tradition that’s proven relentless in its fostering of growth and greatness in Black art. Slightly more expansive, The Metamorphosis of Gabriel Villa includes work in two mediums, painting and clay sculpture to interpret Mr. Villa’s take on society and explore the nuances of his own psyche through art.
A Minnesota transplant, Majeed became affiliated with the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) shortly after arriving in Chicago in 2003. The brainchild of Dr. Margaret Taylor Burroughs, SSCAC has had a long and celebrated history since its creation in 1940. A year later, Eleanor Roosevelt would lend her support to the art center by dedicating its now legendary Bronzeville location. The center’s legacy as well as its ongoing drive to advance and promote Black art and artists so captivated the young Minnesotan that he eventually became SSCAC’s Executive Director in 2007. Although Majeed has gone on to spearhead numerous innovative artistic ventures throughout the city since then, what’s key is that the center remains his principal muse; his enduring source of inspiration. The Hyde Park show, Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds by Faheem Majeed, uses physical elements of the SSCAC building to create a symbolic and touching tribute to an esteemed cultural institution.
Composed of four parts, each aspect of the exhibition combine to provide a more complete understanding of SSCAC’s depth of impact for the past eight decades. The exhibition’s centerpiece consists of two flowing sheets of muslin Majeed used to create a hand rubbed charcoal impression of SSCAC’s façade. By creating a representation of the building’s “face”, the artist offers a physical connection to a source of artistic empowerment. To re-enforce the psychological influence of the physical structure, Majeed uses wooden planks from SSCAC galleries as the hanging’s foundation and platform. The same platform will be used to stage a performance by the Seldoms, a Chicago dance centered multi-media collaborative. Walls flanking the exhibit’s focal point are lined with more rubbings and drawings; also on cloth, framed, and referencing different aspects of SSCAC’s cultural and artistic relevance.
Confronting the viewer with a barrage of ideas, emotions and color; Gabriel Villa’s paintings along the walls of Gallery 2 embrace the bold. Confessing that it took him some time to find himself as an artist, Villa is now comfortable declaring that he wants his art to be “provocative and beautiful”. Full of cultural references and coded messages that reflect keen socio-political observation, the vibrant intensity of many of the works on display in the exhibition belies their complexity and gravity. Through his art, he makes his admiration for immigrants and the immigrant experience palpable. By transforming the marginalized into heroes and champions, he redefines their identity and places it on a large canvas to lend it greater gravitas. In other paintings, his brush captures the inner lives and shared joys of friends using fantastic combinations of shapes, symbols and colors that read like a sparkling explosion. Villa’s paintings all but demand your undivided attention. The dual messages in Strive, part portrait parody, part indictment, are nothing less than searing.
Villa’s 2018 residency with the Hyde Park Art Center allowed him to change focus and medium simultaneously. Working in clay sculpture freed Villa to move away from the conscious intensity of his paintings and explore what he could create traveling down unchartered trails. Beginning with a concept, he found his pieces develop like characters in a novel; eventually having a say in how they would eventually be realized. Some mildly echo the social consciousness of his paintings, others merge aspects of antiquity and abstract realism to forge Villa’s own artistic signature.
Both Majeed’s inspired tribute to the South Side Community Arts Center and Villa’s spirited paintings and sculptures further our appreciation for the rich complexity of modern life as expressed in art.
The Metamorphosis of Gabriel Villa – Through July 17
Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds by Faheem Majeed – Through July 17
Hyde Park Art Center
https:/hydeparkart.org
5020 S. Cornell Ave.
Chicago, IL
