More than five decades after \u201cBlack Esthetics\u201d debuted at the Museum of Science and Industry, the annual exhibition now known as \u201cBlack Creativity\u201d opened last month with a juried show of professional and teen artists from Chicago and beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the longest continuously running juried exhibition of Black art in the nation,\u201d said Angela Williams, the museum\u2019s director of design.<\/p>\n
When \u201cBlack Esthetics\u201d debuted in 1970, Chicago was in the midst of upheaval \u2014 reeling from the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King Jr., war protests, and economic disinvestment, while Black artists were building new cultural institutions of their own.<\/p>\n
An outgrowth of Chicago\u2019s Black Arts Movement, \u201cBlack Esthetics\u201d was first curated by artist Douglas Williams, director of the South Side Community Art Center from 1966 to 1970. The show included dance, sound, public programming as well as an exhibition of visual arts. Among the artists whose work was presented at \u201cBlack Esthetics\u201d were\u00a0 Walter Sanford, Nathan Wright \u2014 who began painting while wrongfully imprisoned \u2014\u00a0 Ben Bey, and Nii-Oti. The exhibition helped inspire other collectives and spaces, including the Black Arts Guild and the Chicago Mural Group.<\/p>\n
In 1984, the program was renamed \u201cBlack Creativity\u201d and expanded to celebrate work by artists and thinkers working across art and the sciences. That expansive definition continues to shape the exhibition today, with selected works addressing questions of identity, memory, history, and cultural inheritance across generations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went through the 1,300 images and we brought that number down to the best 100,\u201d said Norman Teague, an artist, designer and educator from Chicago\u2019s South Side who served as one of the jurors this year alongside Akilah S. Halley, the executive director of Marwen.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A defining feature of the annual show is its emphasis on youth artists. Two galleries on the museum\u2019s lower level are dedicated to Chicago-area teens. In \u201cAngels Have Bad Days Too,\u201d Morgan Park High School student Heaven Williams depicts a genderless Black angel wrapped in white fabric against a dark sky, with wings adorned in white flower petals. White shapes hover above the figure, evoking cowrie shells, which are frequently associated with wealth, prosperity and spiritual protection across the African diaspora.\u00a0<\/p>\n