Count it a lucky thing that the Art Institute of Chicago was too booked to put “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” on its schedule this year. Instead, the touring exhibit of more than 40 paintings by this quintessential Chicago artist landed on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, where you can see it as many times as you like between now and the end of August, without having to pony up an entry fee.
In 1924, Motley married a high school friend, Edith Granzo, over the objections of her German immigrant parents. (There are two handsome portraits of Edith in this show—one with attire, one without.) He landed a New York solo show (noted by both the Times and the New Yorker) in 1928, and in 1929 headed to Paris for a year on a Guggenheim fellowship. But though he’s frequently referred to as part of the Harlem Renaissance, he never lived in New York, always preferring his beloved Chicago. His son, Archibald J. Motley III (a future archivist at the Chicago Historical Society, now the Chicago History Museum), was born in 1933, when Motley was finding work on Depression-era public projects, like the mural he completed for Evanston’s Nichols school in 1935.
“It’s the reason for the exhibit,” Mooney says. Duke University dean and art historian Richard J. Powell, who curated the show and edited the catalog, “wanted to address the use of stereotype and minstrelsy in Motley’s work.” At a time when there was pressure from the black community to stay away from negative images, she says, for Motley, “the point was not to fall in line and produce positive propaganda. He was interested in working-class culture, in the history of stereotypes, the experience of racism, and in bringing in humor. When we look at his genre scenes, his street scenes, it brings up all of that history.”
Through 8/31 Chicago Cultural Center 78 E. Washington 312-744-6630chicagoculturalcenter.org Free
