The AfriCOBRA spirit is still alive in Chicag

About the Expo Chicago fair and the city's artistic buzz since AfriCOBRA.

The contemporary art magazine Artpress looks back this month at the Expo Chicago fair, which brought together no less than 140 art galleries from 25 countries last April. More precisely, the journalist and art critic Julie Chaizemartin refers to it to take "the African-American pulse of Chicago". Because the event, which has not been held since 2019 due to the pandemic, is the ideal opportunity in 2022 to take stock of the contemporary scene in this city dotted with skyscrapers, which is one of the largest in the United States, "renowned for its galleries, its prestigious institutions and its critical eye". A city also well known for having been formidably marked by the spirit of AfriCOBRA, this collective of African-American artists formed in Chicago in 1968, in parallel with the promulgation of the Civil Rights Act.

One can imagine the emotion of the journalists gathered, like Julie Chaizemartin, at the bar of the very chic Peninsula Hotel in Chicago, when they saw them arrive hand in hand, "as shy as two attentive and discreet children", the mythical couple formed by Wadsworth Jarell, 93, and Jae Jarell, 87, co-founders of AfriCOBRA with, at the time, Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004), Barbara Jones-Hogu (1938-2017), Nelson Stevens (1938-2022) and Gerald Williams (born in 1941). It was at their home on the South Side that struggling African-American artists gathered, fuelled by hopes for change, "with the idea of constructing a new aesthetic in which they could etch the economic and social difficulties yet to be overcome.

Wadsworth Jarell was one of those who, in 1967, with the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), decided to cover the outside of a shop in the heavily African-American neighbourhood of Bronzeville with the painted faces of inspirational figures from the black community, such as Aretha Franklin, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. The painter, who was passionate about jazz and blues, chose to depict the figures of musicians Louis Armstrong and Quincy Jones on what would become the famous "Wall of Respect", which was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1971. This wall is now considered no more and no less than the first urban mural in the United States!

"Today, Wadsworth Jarell, wearing a grey suit and dark hat, a purple shirt with an elegant medallion, stands next to his wife Jae Jarell, his eyes brighter than a young girl's under his reserved air," says the Artpress journalist. For whom there is no doubt: "they are still proudly AfriCOBRA. For a year after the famous Wall of Respect, this artistic movement was born in their living room, spreading a very colourful palette, "made up of scanned letters and slogans for freedom that swirl around the canvas like a free jazz beat", writes Julie Chaizemartin. "The colours we were using are part of the AfriCOBRA philosophy, we call them the 'cool-ade colours', which refer to the colours that African-Americans wore in the 1960s all over the country," Wadsworth Jarell explained at a 2019 exhibition.

So while Wadsworth was making brightly coloured paintings of his kaleidoscopic portraits of icons of the black art community, particularly Angela Davis, his wife Jae, influenced by her tailor grandfather's work, was making equally brightly coloured dresses and coats, which she sold in her shop, like revolutionary suits with bullet belts made of oil pastels. It is hard not to think of Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), the couple who co-founded Orphism in France at the beginning of the 20th century. The community claim is less important.

Because, of course, the spirit of AfriCOBRA is activist. "Needless to say, our contemporary times, shaken by new community demands, of which the Black Lives Matter movement is one of the most powerful banners, are reviving its heritage, while racial discrimination is far from being abandoned in the United States, notes the Artpress journalist who met the Jarell couple in the middle of an exhibition organised with the Kavi Gupta art gallery in Chicago at the Peninsula Hotel in conjunction with the Expo Chicago fair, the name of which was taken from a 1969 painting by Gerald Williams: I Am Somebody.

For of course, the spirit of AfriCOBRA is activist. "Needless to say, our contemporary times, shaken by new community demands, of which the Black Lives Matter movement is one of the most powerful banners, are reviving its heritage, while racial discrimination is far from being abandoned in the United States, notes the Artpress journalist who met the Jarell couple in the middle of an exhibition organised with the Kavi Gupta art gallery in Chicago at the Peninsula Hotel in conjunction with the Expo Chicago fair, the name of which was taken from a 1969 painting by Gerald Williams: I Am Somebody.

On the stands of the art galleries gathered for Expo Chicago, the trend is clearly affirmed according to the journalist: "a young generation is once again working to make visible the identity of the bodies and faces of the Black People, echoing the clamours of the street, but above all to inscribe it within a history of art". And it's been a success, if the prices achieved by the artworks for sale by Ghanaian Amoako Boafo, the thirty-year-old star of the Mariane Ibrahim art gallery, whose luminous brushstrokes bring out the tastefully dressed black silhouettes of his paintings, are any indication. Spotted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, the painter saw one of his paintings auctioned for over $1 million the following year at Christie's.

The work of Stan Squirewell, Robert Peterson and Gio Swaby, three artists represented by the Harlem art gallery Claire Oliver, who revisit the genre of portraiture to better magnify African bodies or explore traditional motifs, should also be remembered from the production of this young and ebullient generation. Elian Almeida's black women posing as models on the covers of Vogue were also highly visible on the stand of New York gallery owner Nara Roesler. Mariane Ibrahim, the gallery owner of the famous Amoako Boafo, who has opened a space in Paris on Avenue Matignon in 2021, also presented the lyrical abstractions of the young artist Carmen Neely in Chicago.

"Collectors here are very interested in painting, and there is very little conceptual art on the stands," said Jean de Malherbe, of the French art gallery La Forest-Divonne, which made the trip to Expo Chicago for the second time, with paintings for sale by Jeff Kowatch and Vincent Bouliès. "This is probably partly because the Art Institute has one of the most fabulous collections of paintings in the world. Here, the act of buying is decided quickly, on the spur of the moment. Don't forget that Chicago is the second largest financial centre after New York and the first on the commodities exchange, the price of grain is set in Chicago. Proof that everything is indeed linked in this city of formidable culture with its robust museums and art galleries: the Parisian gallery owner sold ten of the twelve paintings he had brought to Chicago.