I've got a love/hate relationship with art.

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with art.

Scratch that-DID have a love/hate relationship with art.

As a kid, I drew… sketched… often-I never painted, refused sculpting.  I mainly drew cartoons, wide varieties of buildings, flowers, and plants, though there were a few exceptions depending on my mood.  My mom being the utmost support of my life, would take it upon herself to suspend these drawings all over her office, giving me supreme confidence in my artistic ability.

That was how I began loving it.

As I began high school, I was certain an art class would suit me well… It didn’t.  I ended up with a teacher that truly suppressed my artistic spirit.  He was close-minded and rude, critiquing each piece of mine in a downright negative outlook rather than furnishing constructive criticism.  He had favorites, and regardless of long hours invested in a single project, my work would continue being neglected as inferior.

That was how I began hating it.

Luckily, I declined quitting.  While my first freshman college art class was sadly somewhat similar to high school, I paid no mind to my misfortune and proceeded to declare an Interactive Media Studies (IMS) minor as a sophomore.

My frequent attempt to describing the study of IMS is the art of the media.  Common courses for this field denote adroitness with graphic design, professional writing on digital platforms, image processing, digital photography, and more. 

And since my luck with art unfolded the way it did, I met art halfway.  I declared being an IMS… convergent track… minor, which aims for a more journalistic approach towards employing artsy techniques of utilizing technology for communication purposes.

My first IMS course lead me to the reason for this blog-to explore my rekindled love of art via Chicago’s art galleries. 

Students were to visit one on a list of art galleries downtown-I chose the Chicago Cultural Center. 

And THIS… this is how I began loving it once more.

Archibald Motley’s “Between Acts” piece

depicting naked women in seductive poses in order to

create the typical Chicago scene.  It represents the U.S. burlesque circuit and its

notoriety in having local  strip-teasers perform with Jazz bands.

The exhibit currently holds two memorial stations in celebrating two illustrious artists and their impact on art history: Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891-1981) and Charles C. Dawson (1889-1983).  Motley was a Jazz Age Modernist in which his work remarkably depicts both the chronicles of African-American history and the Jazz Age’s urban culture within the 1920s-30s.  Dawson was a commercial artist who happened to be the first African-American to establish a studio allocated to graphic design; his work resembles advertising, illustrating a pop-art feel towards reflecting cultural history.

I found both to be exceptionally fascinating, though I was strangely reeled in and trapped for longer than anticipated by the art work of Motley.

The spectators’ journey to the gallery chamber of Motley begins prior to the actual viewing and experiencing of the art.  The exhibit holds, before walking in the room, a long hall of quotes said from Motley himself, in which it provides for the audience a clear and intriguing understanding of his intentions and inspirations behind his creations.

It is within these quotes that provoke boundless appreciation for Chicago, Chicago art and its influence on the city’s history. 

One quote reads, “Give the artist of the Race a chance to express himself in his own individual ay… and we shall have a great variety of art, a great art…”  I find this as revealing Chicago as a city of diversity in more than just an artistic sense.  The many elucidations behind the meaning of art is complex but can be made simple when defining it in your own terms. 

I define art as anything that can be interpreted… Too broad?  Maybe so-but it compliments my impression of the quote well.  While I interpret conveying race through art as merely encouragement for artists alone, I perceive the words “a great variety of art,” “a great art” as portraying the bigger picture at hand; I perceive the words as concrete representation of the city of Chicago existing as… this “great art.” 

Through Chicago’s insistence of integrating the value of opposing races and alternative cultures into its art, the city stands as a piece of artwork in itself.  Chicago represents a city encompassing African-American, Caucasian, Asian, Native-American, Hispanic, and further ethnic citizens, in which it is not solely the their ethnic appearance but the way in which they express that ethnicity that should paint the perfect picture of Chicago. 

With that being said, it is through both Motley and Dawson that they expose Chicago history via not only their work rendered to depict African-American past, but purely their previous status as an artist itself. 

Although, allegedly, the cease of slavery occurred in the year 1865, discriminatory affiliations were still rampant throughout the artists’ lifespans; however, both were African-American, and both were provided the chance to share their unique, untraditional work through the opportunities and resources Chicago offered.  

Whereas outside American areas were enforcing race segregation, artists such as Motley were free to paint people a larger array of colors, implying cultural differences-in particular, paint the “American Negro” honestly and exempt from poor stereotypical features; and Dawson, first African-American owner of a graphic design studio, established allowance of constructing the pieces that included products as intended for mixed-race individuals. 

Art gave races a voice… a voice that received utter negation spoken anywhere else.

Motley once said, “I can’t find anyplace like Chicago.  You know, I love this place…”

Go discover why his love for Chicago was so vehement.  You may not be artistic; you may not have much care for art.  You may, however, be an advocate for history, and you certainly are a neighbor of Chicago; and in that case, it’s never displeasing to witness both a passion for the home you reside and a recap of how your own passion for Chicago was sculpted to what it stands today.