SKIN + MASKS |||, Curated by Vic Mensa & Chanelle Lacy: Magnificent Mile, Chicago, IL

Pugs Atomz is a multimedia artist whose practice is dedicated to bearing witness to, and documenting, the rich brilliance, creative spirit and joy that thrives within Black communities. Atomz believes artists are the storytellers of their communities. His earliest creative influencers were the muralists and graffiti artists he saw on the Green Line trains while growing up in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Among his most illustrative projects is the experiential installation “Mookie on the Southside,” a multi-faceted aesthetic exploration of places, people, and stories that shaped his understanding of the community he calls home. Atomz is as interested in so-called official history as personal memories and the myths that arise in the gaps between these various forms of recollection. In addition to being a visual artist, Atomz is an accomplished musician, DJ, designer, entrepreneur, community organizer, and activist.

Andrea Coleman is a Chicago based visual artist who makes digital paintings based on family folklore, that explore the layered nature of memory. 

Coleman’s process begins and ends with storytelling. She listens to the stories members of her family tell her about the past, and then seeks out the other people who were part of the same story and asks them to tell her their version of events. Using a 360 camera, she photographs the locations where these stories took place, empty now, but still reverberation from the aura of past events. She mixes her photographs with family photos that relate to the story being told. She then layers brush marks and splotches of color, and then erases or whites out sections of the image. The details in the image shift and evolve as much as the details in the different versions of the past that people tell her. The process of adding layers to the image honors the fuzzy nature of shared memories; the abstract marks Coleman adds to the image convey a sense of energy and mood—part of the lasting aura of the memory; the act of erasure makes spaces in the image for lost information to reappear, and for hidden trauma be memorialized. 

Erol Scott Harris is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist who mobilizes autobiographical folklore to instigate material manifestations of spirit. For Harris, art is an arena in which to uncover how he can work with the body.

Motivated variously by his connection to the narratives of his past and his desire to break free from them, he constructs situations in his studio that contain both structure and potentialities. Outcomes are resolved as Harris performs intuitively within the situation with his physical form.

“I feel that the landscape occupies the body as much as the body occupies the landscape,” Harris says. “I generate a narrative scene by using my body as a stamp. The surfaces upon which I leave marks are material vehicles for spirit.” 

Armani Howard is a multi-disciplinary, African American-Thai artist whose work cross-examines the roles of memory, nostalgia, and folkloric narratives in the creation and preservation of identity.

Howard’s interest in the ways storytelling is used to construct identity developed early in life. The loss of his father when Howard was a young child led him to search for information about his father’s life and history.

“Through learning more about him I realized the connection of how an individual’s passing, unspoken creeds and the memories that are shared begins to dictate their Identity,” Howard says. “I began to question the roles that help shape identity and how they can mold the beliefs in one’s heritage.”

Thinking about what that dynamic means to a family over generations, Howard draws heavily upon family folklore in his work. His nebulous, conceptually layered compositions depict an intersectional space between objective reality and the more speculative mental, emo tional, and spiritual aspects of life.

Mia Lee is a multi-media artist whose practice includes painting, illustration, animation, and design. Lee’s practice is deeply influenced by nostalgia for the people, places, and experiences of her youth. The figures and landscapes in her paintings take shape in a liminal space between dream life and reality, a perceptual zone in which angels and monsters coexist, and are sometimes hard to tell apart. 

Lee grew up on the South Side of Chicago. Her family immigrated from the Honduran island of Roatán. Her grandparents and parents are artists, musicians, and designers. Their embrace of multiple mediums and forms influenced Lee’s development as an artist, encouraging her to embrace experimentation with any medium or mode of expression that fits her ideas. Inspiration for Lee’s aesthetic universe comes from a mixture of her Caribbean cultural roots, American visual culture, and her own vivid dream life. 

Terron Cooper Sorrells (b. 1994, USA) is an African American painter and printmaker whose work deploys imagery, motifs, and references from Western art history to broaden the African American narrative in contemporary art. 

Raised in a military family, Sorrells recall frequently moving and visiting an assortment of American art museums as a child. He noticed a lack of African American representation not only in the artists whose work was collected, but also in the content in the works on view. The stories being told either entirely excluded African American history, or told limited versions of those stories from the majoritarian perspective. 

By including mythological and religious references and other narrative devices that will be instantly recognizable to American art audiences, Sorrells’s larger than life figurative scenes illuminate the cultural and historical layers that have intentionally been left out, or erased. 

R. Treshawn Williamson (B. 1998, USA) is an essayist and multidisciplinary artist whose work is a meditation on the obstruction and surveillance of the lived experiences of African-Americans. He investigates the application of cultural re-imagination in the African Diaspora through the engagement of oral histories, post-colonial theory, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Materials and methods intersect in Williamson’s work in ways that allow the image or object to be a carrier of meaning. One example is a series of screenprinted tapestries that employ laborious studio processes and charcoal as a medium as reference symbolic references to Williamson’s family roots in the coal mining industry. Williamson earned his BFA in Visual Critical Studies and Interdisciplinary Studio Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nikko Washington  is a multimedia artist from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His work is rooted in portraiture, and frequently centers the artists, activists, and influencers who have made an impact on his community. A believer in the idea that if people don’t learn from their history they’ll repeat it, Washington makes work that archives and contextualizes the present moment through the lens of mythology and storytelling. 

Washington’s studio practice is also deeply influenced by the fighting arts. He has used punching bags, boxing gloves, and riot shields as material elements in his work. His practice is also informed by the less obvious mental aspects of the fighting arts, such as precision and discipline. “The push and pull of the physical and the mental, grappling in the studio with my work—boxing gave me mind and body control that is similar to the mental head space of painting,” Washington says. 

Washington’s visual language conveys a sense of heroism in his figures. His style marries Mannerist-inspired figuration with highly emotive abstract markings, w with brightly colored, gestural brush strokes expressing movement and constant evolution. Stars appear frequently in his work, suggesting a range of symbolic meanings from the celestial to the celebrity to the political. 

Gerald Williams is an American painter whose work explores culture, place and identity from a global perspective. Williams is one of the original five founders of AFRICOBRA, an internationally influential Black arts collective formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1967.

Williams’ paintings depict a polyrhythmic visual representation of life at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. Defined by what he calls “mimesis at midpoint,” his images unfold in a liminal space between what we can see and describe objectively, and what must be thought or felt intuitively.

In addition to the influence AFRICOBRA has had on his development as an artist, the distinctive aesthetic style Williams employs has been informed by a lifetime of international travel and a diverse range of professional, intellectual and aesthetic experiences. After serving in the U.S. Air Force for four years, Williams earned his BA from Chicago Teachers College in 1969, and his MFA from Howard University in 1976. He served two years in the Peace Corps as Prevocational Director in the Jacaranda School for the Mentally Handicapped in Nairobi, Kenya, then taught for four years in the Washington, D.C. public schools. From 1984 through 2005, Williams served as the Director of Arts and Crafts Centers on United States Air Force bases in South Korea, Japan, Italy, the Azores and the United States.

Sherman Beck is a Chicago-based painter who was among the original ten members of AFRICOBRA, a foundational Black arts collective formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1967.

Beck’s aesthetic vision is rooted in positive portrayals of Black family, a central tenet of AFRICOBRA’s philosophy. Reveling in the mystery and mysticism of everyday life, Beck extends the definition of family through space and time to include humanity’s kinship with nature and the metaphysical world.

Consistent throughout Beck’s oeuvre is a sense of technical mastery and aesthetic clarity, projected by an artist defined by both humility and erudition. Exalting the enduring power of the medium of painting to spark moments of intrigue for viewers, Beck perceives his paintings less as definitive statements about subject matter, and more as pliable visual examinations of the space where ideas and intuition meet.