Africa at the Art Institute of Chicago

A tour guide in the Arts of Africa section of the Art Institute of Chicago isn’t sure about Ethiopia.

A woman is confused about the Christian iconography in Ethiopian art. She’s always thought Ethiopia was home to a majority of Muslims so she enquires about the country’s religious composition, seeking clarity.

To answer her question, the tour guide gives the guest their undivided attention before erasing about 33% of Ethiopia’s population. “Christian”, they confirm confidently, and I’m completely unsurprised.

A few minutes before, I’d made my way to gallery 137, happened upon another tour guide who struck up a conversation and was delighted that there was a bona fide African in the corresponding art gallery before quickly declaring that I would undoubtedly know far more about Cameroonian art than she did.

Africa remains a country and in contemporary art gallery 295, it hangs on a wall.

Artist Kerry James Marshall reconfigures the shape of Africa as a cubist sculpture honouring black freedom activists and Egyptian iconography used to challenge western ideology in the 1970s and in an American Art section, Beauford Delaney paints himself in vivid, abstract expressionistic strokes.

His black face recollected as a figure of the Harlem Renaissance is one of the melanin-rich ones at the institute I pause to regard.

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s regal bronze ‘Bust of an African Woman’ is another, as is John Philip Simpson’s oil on canvas ‘The Captive Slave’ – a painting of shackled free-born American Ira Aldridge, who was the first black man to play Othello in London and modelled for Simpson’s famed abolitionist work.

Archibald J Motley Jr’s ‘Nightlife’ fast-forwards to relatively better days. Drinks flow and African Americans boogie in a Chicago dance hall in the artist’s response to the white, far less frenzied late night scene in ‘Nighthawks’ by Edward Hopper.

I smile at the difference in colour and of culture and walk on, looking for myself.

It’s become my little ritual.

This artistic search for skin.

This pausing by black figures and black art in these big, important museums where it doesn’t always draw crowds.

Sure, I visit some of the most famous works – Van Gogh, Wood, Picasso, O’Keefe – but I always make sure to visit Africa, correct tour guides, marvel at black art and eventually find someone new to me.

Someone black, brilliant, creating space.

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