ReSOURCE

Artists

Ravi Arupa
October 5, 2024
Ravi Arupa. A Builder's Archetype, 2015. Found poplar, found birch, found bed part, plywood, Masonite, metal screw, fence staples, enamel, pumice, tung oil, 13" (W) x 12" (H) x 8.5" (D). Courtesy of the artist.

Ravi Arupa

Ravi Arupa (b. 1951) is an artist whose family settled on the South Side of Chicago after moving from a small farm in Arkansas when he was nine years old. Inspired by images of Richard Hunt’s abstract sculptures, Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Maya Deren’s short films, and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” (to name a few), Arupa’s creative life manifests through his work which features drawings, painting, mixed-media, sculpture, and photography. In 2005, he received his BA from Columbia College Chicago, majoring in Art and Design with a concentration in Fine Arts and a minor in Art History. His work has been featured in the 38th, 46th, and 47th Annual Black Creativity Art Exhibitions at the Museum of Science and Industry as well as the 11th Annual Hokin Honors Exhibition at Columbia College Chicago. Much like the Surrealists, Arupa instinctively finds inspiration late at night while he’s sleeping and allows that inspiration to give life and meaning to the found materials that are used in his sculptures. Instead of going to look for objects, he allows them to reveal themselves through the inspiration he receives subconsciously. Ravi Arupa is a Red Line Service artist and recently received a public commission from the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum for his Spiral (2024), which is on permanent view at the Marovitz Savanna Natural Area, Montrose Harbor, Chicago.

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Michael Qualls
Robert A. Ferris
Theaster Gates
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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.