Chicago’s Smart Museum celebrates the art of Bob Thompson, Nina Simone – ARTnews.com

“It’s just a feeling – it’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell someone what it’s like to be in love? … You can’t do that to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them, but you know when they happen. That’s what I mean by freedom” .

This is how Nina Simone sings in an archival interview when asked to explain her 1967 rendition of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”. Simone’s words resonated throughout the lobby of the Smart Art Museum in Chicago last night as part of a program called “Art After Dark: Art and Protest” to launch the city’s art week, fitting for the Chicago Art Expo that opens to VIPs on Thursday.

“Art and Protest” featured an eight-song program from Simone, along with discussing her music and that of Bob Thompson, who is currently undergoing a travel retrospective at Smart on view through May 15. Catherine Davis, SMART’s principal museum educator, is also a famous blues musician. She described the evening’s program as “a roadmap from the 1960s to today.”

For decades, Simon has served as a springboard for generations of artists, including four of them — Rashid Johnson, Julie Mihrito, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher — who come together Save Simon’s childhood home In 2017. This quartet is currently looking to turn a home in North Carolina into a creative destination.

There is a special relationship between Simone and Thompson, who were close friends and tireless artist activists during the civil rights era. They have used their art to imagine new possibilities for freedom for blacks – and thus other marginalized groups – in this country. Thomson even named a painting in 1965 Greetings from Nina Simone, which depicts a colorful Pachanal where a blue female figure sits in the center, flanked by an orange winding corridor, holding a brown guitar. Around her are various other characters who relax and welcome her playing. The pastels swirl in the sky above, while shades of green mingle with each other at the bottom.

The Thompson retrospective, organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and will then travel to Atlanta and Los Angeles, charts the artist’s short but prolific career. Over the course of eight years, he created around 1,000 works before his untimely death at the age of 28 in 1966. Thompson’s stunning portraits are defined by their high-impact visuals – their striking, electric colors that he intentionally flattened. Artist Robert Colescot once said of Thomson’s art, “When you think you’ve got it—certainly, it’s about black and white”—you find out it’s really about red and purple. “

The exhibition’s title takes its name from a modest 1960 oil painting showing a black figure at the center of the composition. In the upper left corner is a red house. As with many of his works, expressive strokes limit abstraction. This piece is the only work that Thompson has ever released in first person and, according to the Wall text, “insults into his larger ambitions. Working in the midst of the civil rights and black power movements, Thompson confronted centuries of plunder in his art and created a new visual language from the European artistic tradition” .

In her opening remarks, Davis asked the audience to think deeply about Thompson’s claim to having his own space: “If you read over those doors, you’ll find, ‘This house is mine.’ What do you mean by that? What did you mean by that? If you named the artwork you created? From lived experiences, what would you say by saying, “This house is mine.”

As with many artists before him, Thompson looked to the giants of art history as starting points, using pieces by Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, Titian, Poussin, Goya, Gauguin, and Munch as inspiration. Greco-Roman myths and tribal and pastoral scenes were important sources for Thomson. However, he put his own style into these historical images, creating a universe that was entirely Thompson’s.

particularly impressive work, execution (1961), loosely based on Fra Angelico’s Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian beheaded (1438-40). While Fra Angelico has Saint Cosmas waiting to be decapitated in the center of the composition, standing over his brother’s severed head and body, Thompson has Saint Cosmas as a black man hanging from a tree while the executioner beats him. The work is a vivid recall of the history of the murder of blacks in the United States. We can’t forget these brutal dates when imagining a new future, Thompson seems to say.

Before the start of the evening programme, the band played instrumental music that can be heard in all the galleries. Thompson’s music pulsed in response. On the walls, Thompson’s rich colors seemed to sway along with these sounds. in the funny painting Bacchus victory (1964) For example, equipping a group of characters shining and dancing.

Overall, Thompson’s work was a means of dealing with how art history—and its artistic spiritual teachers—excluded blacks from the law. In his hands the possibilities of life with freedom are endless.

As Rashid Johnson wrote in the show’s catalog, “I have seldom come across the work of a black artist in which characters are freely represented in outdoor settings. Thompson’s heroes flow unimpeded across colorful landscapes, redefining the terrain and writing their own destiny.”

Tonight’s program began with four singers dressed in purple – Davis, M. Reese, Devin Longstry, and Kayla Henderson — took the stage to sing powerful pieces from such classics as “Feelin’ Good,” “I Put a Spell on You,” and “Mississippi Goddam,” and finished with all four women joining Crohn’s. Young, talented and black people.”

As Dorian H. Nash, interim director of public programs at the Smart Museum, said just before the last song, “By invoking the [Nina’s] So here in this place, we wanted to embody what it was like to think about how art can affect change — real change.”