Chicago, like Johannesburg, is an intemperate metropolis whose vertical centre marks the transition between its affluent northern suburbs and a southern sprawl characterised by hardship. It is at Chicago’s congested midpoint, on a pier jutting into Lake Michigan, that the city has, since 2012, hosted an art fair. In the absence of a biennial, Expo Chicago has – like the Cape Town Art Fair – become a galvanising event for Chicago’s art scene. Its substantial offsite programme encompasses the impressive downtown art museums, contemporary art galleries in West Town and cultural projects on the South Side.
Theaster Gates in Kenwood Gardens on Chicago’s South Side, April 2023.
Established in 1939, the Hyde Park Art Center is the oldest alternative exhibition space in Chicago. In 2007, it hosted a solo exhibition of 50 plank-shaped clay plates by little-known potter and religious studies graduate of the University of Cape Town, Theaster Gates. In 2015, having transitioned to a more multi-form conceptual practice, Gates opened the Stony Island Arts Bank in a former bank near Jackson Park. This art centre, exhibition venue and archive forms part of a patchwork of reclamation projects on the South Side spearheaded by the artist’s Rebuild Foundation. They now include remodelled homes, a public garden and a work-in-progress arts incubator inside a former Catholic school, due to open next year.
In a city famed for always building bigger and taller buildings, it is in nearby Jackson Park that the South Side’s reputation will soon receive a substantial boost. In 2025, the Barack Obama Presidential Center – a major civic initiative featuring a museum, library and public gathering spaces – will open in a landscaped park created by Chicago’s patrician white citizenry in 1893 to celebrate the country’s discovery and colonial settlement. The South Side resonates with Obama. Before he became the first African-American president of the United States in 2009, he was a community organiser on the South Side. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, which, like Wits University in Johannesburg, unofficially demarcates black and white Chicago.
Zanele Muholi with Hebru Brantley at the Obama Foundation Futures Series presentation at Expo Chicago, April 2023. Photo by Sean O’Toole.
On a Friday morning this past April, at Expo Chicago, artist Zanele Muholi gave a private talk to a group of South Side students from Hyde Park Academy High School. The Obama Foundation bussed up the art-interested students, who asked no-nonsense questions of Muholi and Hebru Brantley, a former South Side resident who graduated from muralist to artist. Brantley was asked who his most famous collector was. Answer: rapper Jay-Z. The questions posed to Muholi ranged from their influences (writer Sindiwe Magona) to their choice of black and white.
“I like your energy, keep it up,” said Muholi to a student who asked how their activism and photography converged. “My photography is of LGBTQI+ people, black lesbians, and speaks of issues of blackness, the politics of blackness. It allows people to occupy a space where previously people weren’t given a platform. There are many people on the African continent and also here who are deprived the chance to exist and express same-gender love. It is through this work that I connect to this activism, where people should have rights, and be respected and acknowledged as persons.”
A question about Muholi’s South African heritage and how apartheid had affected their art generated the lengthiest response.
Zanele Muholi, Muholi III, 2023. Photo Sean O’Toole.
“The question goes back to you or any other young person here,” responded Muholi after a false start. “I won’t run away from apartheid, but the question gets back to you. What work is being produced during a period of gun violence and racist spaces in America? What does it mean to live in Chicago and Braddock in Pittsburgh in this minute, where a lot of young people are displaced?”
Muholi’s insights into racism in the United States draw on personal insight. A seasoned traveller to the country, in 2013 they presented an installation of 48 portraits from their Faces & Phases series (2006–ongoing) at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Their work has also appeared in museum and dealer shows in Chicago.
“Do you get what I am saying?” Muholi asked, as they continued to respond to the question about apartheid. “This is just to challenge you as a young person to look at where you stand and ask yourself: Where am I? What song can I produce out of this experience and the experiences of those around me? What sort of experience can I come up with knowing that not everybody is written into American history? Why do we have Black art in America when there is no problem? Why do we have Black Lives Matter and Me Too? These are the questions that young people need to respond to when teachers bring up apartheid.”
Muholi’s answer was far longer than is quoted and drew vigorous applause. “I thought it was a very gentle answer handled with care that the students appreciated,” said Erica S. Hubbard, who directs Chicago programmes at the Obama Foundation. “We are talking about students who have not had much exposure to international artists. I am not sure any of these students have met anyone from South Africa.”
In a flattened history of cultural exchange between South Africa and the United States, Los Angeles and New York tend to dominate. The Windy City, as Chicago is nicknamed, has however proven remarkably hospitable to South African artists. William Kentridge’s first North American survey exhibition was jointly organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2002. In 2017, the Art Institute of Chicago, the country’s second largest art museum, gave Kemang Wa Lehulere his first US museum exhibition. Igshaan Adams, James Webb and Medu Art Ensemble have all since been spotlighted by the same museum.
Chicago’s art dealers are in on the South African scene too. Kavi Gupta, one of the city’s premier galleries, has represented sculptor Mary Sibande since 2018. “There is a sophisticated collector base that is interested in engaging with her work,” David Mitchell, a director at Kavi Gupta, told me last year. “The institutional attention is very strong.” Somali-French art dealer Mariane Ibrahim, who recently moved her US operations from Seattle to Chicago and sits on the board of the American Friends of Zeitz MOCAA, represents Ayana V. Jackson. Currently the subject of major solo exhibition at the National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C., Jackson’s lens-based practice was decisively transformed by her time in Johannesburg in the early 2000s. The New Jersey-born artist still maintains a studio in Johannesburg.
Mohau Modisakeng, Phahamong III, 2023. Courtesy of Martin Projects.
Four South African galleries participated in this year’s edition of Expo Chicago. Whatiftheworld Gallery returned to the fair with a solo booth of new work by Athi-Patra Ruga. His colour-infused tapestries, stained-glass wall pieces and drawings included depictions of historical and contemporary figures, notably musician Desire Marea and Senegalese dancer François “Féral” Benga. Cape Town dealer Igsaan Martin also presented a solo booth comprising five new portrait paintings by Mohau Modisakeng. Like Cinga Samson, Modisakeng – a newcomer to painting – favours a darker palette (mostly greens, mixed with magenta) and posing his subjects in verdant settings. His brushwork is most concentrated around the facial area. Phahamong III (2023), a flatly painted portrait of a young woman seen in three-quarter pose, received the 2023 Northern Trust Purchase Prize and went to Seattle Art Museum.
Photography, a medium that garnered Modisakeng early attention, was noticeably absent from the fair. Only two galleries out of the 170 on show brought dedicated presentations. None of the six participating African galleries braved this medium. Daudi Karungi, founder of Afriart Gallery in Kampala, showed figurative paintings by Sungi Mlengeya (Tanzania) and Charlene Komuntale (Uganda). Mlengeya’s striking portrayals of black dancers in motion, their white uniforms merging with the white of the unfinished canvas, garnered considerable attention. Southern Guild, which has struck up an association with Muholi since their departure from Stevenson earlier this year, showed a large bronze self-portrait – but no photos by the artist.
Ebony Curated brought paintings by Hugh Byrne and Anico Mostert, textiles by Kimathi Mafafo and glazed porcelain pieces by John Newdigate. Mostert’s sinuous depictions of haunted sleepers drew favourable comparison among locals to painter Gertrude Abercrombie, a bohemian resident of the South Side who was a friend of jazzman Dizzy Gillespie. The story of jazz and Chicago are inextricable. Among the city’s jazz luminaries are trumpeter Lester Bowie, founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Herman Blount, better known as bandleader and Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.
Claudia Segura, a curator at Barcelona’s contemporary art museum MACBA, distributed three poems by Sun Ra across the fair as part of In/Situ, her curated intervention within Expo Chicago. Segura also installed a large reproduction of a serigraph depicting a sunflower-like sun created by South Side painter Claude Dangerfield for the cover of When Sun Comes Out, Sun Ra’s 1963 album with the Myth Science Arkestra. It sat comfortably next to Jeanne Gaigher’s Dimensions of a Dialogue II (2022), a large painting brought to Chicago by Southern Guild. I say comfortably because, over the last few years, Gaigher’s enigmatic paintings have aspired to achieve what Sun Ra spoke of in his 1980 poem The Image Reach: “To /the state beyond image-reach/ the magic life of myth/ and fantasy/ I speak.”
Jeanne Gaigher, Dimensions of a Dialogue II, 2022. Courtesy of Southern Guild.
Gaigher’s Dimensions of a Dialogue II embraces magic, myth and fantasy. The painting is composed of an irregular patchwork of stitched canvas and mull overlaid with marks, patterns and ciphers rendered in ink, acrylic and watercolour. At its midpoint is a stooping female figure. The central image traces its origins back to a bout of doomscrolling in 2022, when Gaigher was repeatedly fed news of natural disasters on social media. The artist paused on the image of a man standing on the top of a car, removing branches that blocked its passage.
“Before I heard of the story about the man, I always thought of this figure as having been created from the earth,” admitted Segura in a private walkabout. She likened the central protagonist to the resolute figures of Galician mythology birthed in the northwestern corner of Spain. “I was more interested in the mythological image that the work projects than the man with the branches.” So is Gaigher, albeit reservedly to judge from a quote by the artist placed near the work: “The body as we understand it today, especially in our current political landscape, seems to always be on the precipice of transformation. But the question remains what exactly that transformation is or should look like.”
Andile Dyalvane is at a moment of career transformation. Best known for his glazed ceramics – a 2019 example, Umwonyo, now forms part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – Dyalvane’s ambitions exceed pigeonholing. Like Theaster Gates, he is more than a potter. In contrast to Gates, a sartorial champion of fashion designer Virgil Abloh, Dyalvane, who grew up in the Eastern Cape village of Ngobozana, looks and behaves like a seer. His arms are tattooed with runic symbols. These glyphs form part of a series of nearly 200 symbols that Dyalvane created to denote important words in Xhosa life.
Andile Dyalvane doing a live painting during South X South at Blanc Gallery, April 2023. Photo by Sean O’Toole.
On the penultimate evening of Expo Chicago, Dyalvane – dressed in white, his face painted and knotted hair tied up – reproduced some of these symbols in black paint on a large white sheet of paper. The paper extended from a wall across the floor of Blanc, a South Side gallery. Dyalvane effortlessly and convincingly transitioned from softly spoken shaman to energised, Gutai-style performative painter. His action was prefaced by a discussion with Detroit curator Ashara Ekundayo and screening of a short documentary film. The film describes how, in 2019, Dyalvane took 24 earthernware sculptures based on Xhosa stools, chairs and benches to Ngobozana as a prelude to their exhibition in Cape Town and New York. The act was both one of thanks and “restorative healing,” as Dyalvane put it in 2021.
In an interview at Expo Chicago, where he had two ceramic sculptures for sale in Southern Guild’s jam-packed booth (highlights included two of Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s scratchy calligraphic paintings on hessian backing, both sold), Dyalvane spoke of the enduring pride he feels in taking his work home. “When I realised that my village was now recognised, when I realised that people are calling me with my family name, son of Dyalvane, being a beacon that is shining a light on the community, that was very important for me – and still is important. Being in the Met, or any museum, doesn’t necessarily matter as much for me in terms of excitement.”
Andile Dyalvane showing a photo of him taken by Zanele Muholi in the waters of Lake Michigan, Chicago. Photo by Sean O’Toole.
Dyalvane, who is represented by Friedman Benda in New York, has travelled to the US on a number of occasions. Similar to Zanele Muholi, who told their audience of high school students that, in their youth, they never imagined travelling to the US, Dyalvane recalled the rapture of his first trip abroad. He retains a sense of respect for new places. Shortly after arriving in Chicago for his first visit to the city, Dyalvane and a small group of confidantes made their way to the shores of Lake Michigan. He wanted to orientate himself, to know where the sun rises, but principally he wanted to introduce himself.
“Bodies of water connect everywhere,” said Dyalvane, who played an isitolotolo (harp) and made an offering on the shoreline. “That is very important, to connect to the spirit of the water, the spirit of the land, the sprit of the first nation. We acknowledge the surroundings. It is very important to ground ourselves and announce ourselves, so that whatever spirit we walk amongst knows we are here now.” The small gesture, which went unnoticed by drivers on nearby Lake Shore Drive and pedestrians bound for Navy Pier, was also a positive augury given all that followed. We are here now, it proclaimed, in Chicago. See us.
