Opening Reception

April 7 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Artists Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden consider the many definitions of space, site, and home.

Spatial griots Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden invite you to consider how socio-economic and geographic oppressions impact the way we see (or don’t see) our environments. Hernandez uncovers embedded histories and systems of power within built and speculative landscapes to imagine these spaces otherwise. Social justice artist Lewis Johnson advocates for urban communities by documenting the disparities among Chicago residents who live on opposite ends of the same streets across the city’s racial and economic divides. Knowlden critically deconstructs the elements of our urban fabric and its architectural histories to reassemble them as cartographic abstractions and imagined landscapes.

Gwendolyn Brooks, a brilliant author, poet, and life-long resident of the historic neighborhood of Bronzeville, becomes the Mecca of these stories as this exhibition interrogates dilapidation, buried histories, and what it could mean to be Black in space. Architecture is an ever-present form of storytelling. The architectural historiographies of Black space have often been written by poets who have elegantly told our stories of spatiality. Brooks gave us a voice we didn’t know we needed while underlining the importance of Black interiority. Like Brooks, June Jordan has used poetry to advocate for Black lives. Jordan was an architect, through a feminist practice that centers how we think about cartographies. Jordan invited us to challenge and redefine prevailing socio-spatial constructs towards dignified spaces for all communities. This is one of many reasons why she is an additional pinnacle of reference for an exhibition which poetically grapples with the many definitions of space, site, and home.