Clemenstien Love, Roomscape Interior Composition, 2024. Photo courtesy of Artist, CL.
Join The GREYSTONE Collective for the opening of Indelible ORIGINS | Place + People: The BLACK Domestic Living & Dining Roomscapes. Featuring two roomscapes, a living room and a dining room, the installation explores Black domestic interior spaces worthy of deep investigation and discovery. The exhibition focuses on the home as lived and imagined by Black Americans and centers its history as a site of collecting and archiving.
In Black domestic spheres, living rooms have historically been sites of community building where activist coalition meetings, church services, and holiday celebrations are held. For Black Americans, the living room is a new space, a space that became alive after slavery and one that is still not experienced or afforded to all Black Americans. The BLACK Domestic | Living Roomscape speaks to Black familial lineages, the current political sphere, and hopes and dreams for Black futurities. It is Co-Curated by Saida Blair and Jordan Barrant, founders of the Coalition of Black Restorative Artists (C.O.B.RA), a collaboration with Black School of the Art Institute (SAIC) graduate students.
Featuring the work of Chicago artist Shonna Pryor, The BLACK Domestic | Dining Roomscape presents tablecloths as nostalgic objects that have absorbed and transmitted Black oral histories, memories, and experiences, as much as latent foodstuff. Residual food markings on Black family tablecloths record open-invitation Sunday dinnertime banter superimposing a closed rite of passage called ‘The Talk,’ a timeless fortification stretching back to ancestral dinner tables of the Antebellum South. This installation is curated by The GREYSTONE Collective founder Clemenstien Love.
The GREYSTONE Collective is an established home and studio for Black Queer + Trans Makers located in the heart of Bronzeville, Chicago’s landmark Black Metropolis. Indelible ORIGINS | Place + People is a four-part public engagement series that celebrates the identity and creative narratives of The GREYSTONE Collective’s artists, makers, and guest collaborators while establishing ancestral ties to the neighborhood’s historical Black makers—Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Burroughs.
Indelible ORIGINS | Place + People is supported by Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund as part of Art Design Chicago.
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An initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art in partnership with artists and organizations across the city, Art Design Chicago is a series of events and exhibitions that highlight the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
