When artist Adeshola Makinde thinks about the work in his current exhibition, it’s a giant, larger-than-life canvas image of the legendary Louis Armstrong—Makinde’s largest-scale piece he’s done to date—that rises to the top of his favorites list.
“To me, [Armstrong] represented unrelenting optimism, amidst what I could imagine was pretty, pretty unbearable things that he had to deal with going to certain clubs he went to, at the height of which he was doing his thing,” he says. “So, I wanted to show that in the show.”
The title of the piece is What a ____ world!, as a play off Armstrong’s famous song, “What a Wonderful World.”
“[The piece is] kind of asking that question as to: ‘Is it really?’ That piece means a lot to me.”
The exhibition, “Is where it’s at!,” is the first in a new collaborative series spotlighting the importance of Black space, Black art, and Black artists. Throughout 2022, Rebuild Foundation and Anthony Gallery will showcase work at the Stony Island Arts Bank that is from both emerging and established artists whose work surrounds Black identity.
Makinde’s exhibition is the first of this partnership, and Isimeme “Easy” Otabor, who is the founder of Anthony Gallery, says it’s “a dream” to be able to uplift artists in this way. Theaster Gates, founder and executive director of Rebuild Foundation, says he’s excited to provide a platform for artists such as Makinde to display their “creative ambition.” And for Makinde, this opportunity to show his work in the Arts Bank—a place he says is “inextricably linked to Black excellence”—is an honor.
“When people are viewing the show, I want them to feel proud of what they’re seeing, especially Black people viewing the work,” he says.
‘Is where it’s at!’ work by Adeshola Makinde
Through 2/27, Thu-Sun, noon-6 PM, Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island,
312-857-5561, rebuild-foundation.org.
Makinde’s inspiration for the exhibition’s title came to him while watching a then-26-year-old Nina Simone perform during Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which is a documentary on the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival.
“I honestly just wanted to have an accompanying visual element to that feeling that I felt watching that performance—all the Black faces that you saw in the crowd were extremely joyful and just in community and happy to be there,” Makinde says. “I wanted to create a body of work that, I think, is a good visual representation of that feeling.”
One of Simone’s songs she sings is “Young, Gifted and Black,” a tribute to her friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who—before she died in 1965—told a group of young writers: “Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic—to be young, gifted and black.”
Simone’s song was a dedication to this, ending with: “Oh, but my joy of today, Is that we can all be proud to say, ‘To be young, gifted and black, Is where it’s at.’” Hearing this song performed by an outspoken risk-taker like Simone and then seeing how her performance affected the audience inspired Makinde.
“I wanted to say something,” he says. “Finding an overarching theme that I think connects all the pieces was what I was aiming for. And, honestly, the ‘Is where it’s at!’ kind of came to me out of the blue as I was watching that, kind of something I stumbled upon, and I really dove into that once I discovered it.”
The works in the show themselves were created over multiple years (since 2019) and include many archival prints on canvas and mixed-media collages, which pay homage to Ebony and Jet magazines, and the legacy of Johnson Publishing Company as a recorder of Black life—and also, Black joy.
“Once I was able to figure out the feeling and the mood that I was trying to portray in the show, a lot of the source material that I was finding really was easy to find, honestly,” Makinde says. “[For] a lot of the newer collage work in the show, I went towards more 70s-era Ebony because it felt like a more joyful, green time, in the way that the imagery was shown.”
And with the abundance of source material that Johnson Publishing magazines provide, Makinde is still sorting through everything he’s found so far.
“It’s just endless, in terms of the amount of source material,” he says. “There’s still so much stuff on my table that’s just scattered about that I’m still going to use . . . and to give a new light to that—a part of my art practice is trying to do that.”
As visitors to the Stony Island Arts Bank view the strong images of Black pride—especially the collages with sayings such as “Dare to be more” and “We don’t owe nobody nothin’”—Makinde wants the pieces to feel familiar, but also, be thought-provoking and a way to start conversations.
“I just want people to take in the work, make their own conclusions as to what things might mean to them,” Makinde says. “But the point of this show is to just show what Black people have offered to the world, especially in terms of culture and everything in between.”
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