VISUAL ART ‘Don’t Act Like You Forgot:’

Shonna Pryor’s ‘Fiscal Frontiers’

The Chicago artist casts reclaimed objects as pathways to a more just future.

BY ANNETTE LEPIQUE

Aportal can be a gate, a door, a website. A pathway is what exists beyond the gate, the door, the webpage. Portals are changed by the people who once occupied their ether, just as pathways are shaped by all those who’ve traveled their twists and turns. This is good, this is how futures begin.

In Shonna Pryor’s “Of Portals and Pathways II: Fiscal Frontiers,” at the Evanston Art Center, the dinner table functions as art object, portal, and path. Reclaimed dining table legs form the base of each piece in the artist’s Tribe of Mansa Musa series. Named after the 14th-century emperor of the Mali Empire, each of the seven works in the series is suspended from the ceiling and gently sways as visitors walk through their field of installation. Salvaged tablecloths, brightly colored and delicately embroidered, sit atop the table legs and intertwine with laser-printed canvas featuring 1872 ledger records from the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. Colloquially known as the Freedman’s Bank, the company was chartered through federal legislation signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Freedman’s Bank catered to America’s newly freed population of Black Americans, helping to provide a fiscal infrastructure to communities previously unrecognized by the country’s banking institutions. Though the bank eventually fell victim to Congress’s lack of oversight, the volatility of the country’s post-Civil War economy, and the rising tide of white supremacist terror that accompanied the civil and political gains of Black Americans during the Reconstruction Era, the total amount invested in all branches would, in today’s numbers, range in the billions.

The Freedman ledgers appear throughout “Fiscal Frontiers.” Viewers encounter the names of account holders at the bank upon entering the exhibition in the immersive WallPAPER of Respect. In WallPAPER, images of names and family details extend from the gallery’s floor to its ceiling. Upon these facsimiles of the ledgers, Pryor has sketched vibrant flowers in varying shapes and sizes as a way to honor the folx who invested in generations yet to come. The motif of the financial document—the evidence of numbers, the undeniable weight of one’s funds—is no coincidence. Pryor is an artist who is acutely aware of how money inscribes and legitimizes one’s citizenship, one’s very personhood, under racial capitalism. The lost Black wealth of the Freedman’s Bank functions, then, as Pryor’s raw material, the launch pad by which “Fiscal Frontiers” honors untold histories and imagines unknown futures.

During Pryor’s artist talk, which accompanied the exhibition’s opening, she mentioned the “ports” fashioned onto each of the tablecloths in the Mansa Musa series. Pryor explained that the ports serve to center the alterity of each object and its hidden histories and lives. Her use of Afrofuturist iconography further challenges the viewer’s relationship to each piece. For Pryor, a tablecloth is never simply fabric. When you sit at a table (or have a seat at the table), you enter another world. You join a family, you make a memory, you start the day. The table and the tablecloth are sites of stories, secrets, and love. These are objects that do not just contain history but also possess the potential for a future. What will happen next?

History is palpable throughout “Fiscal Frontiers.” It can be felt within the plush tactility of each tablecloth’s well-worn embroidery and in the creamy reams of blank paper spilling out from an adding machine. Unlike Pryor’s frames, tablecloths, and tables—objects that digress, ramble, and explore with idiosyn- cratic style—the adding machine forces a return from the realm of a ect. Numbers have weight, they make history concrete. From the money in your wallet to the food on your table, numbers make the material of everyday life manifest. Such, then, is the poignancy of the blank paper. As Pryor explained, the white skein signifies the debt of reparations. This is a debt not easily paid, for how can the immaterial and spiritual tolls of atrocities be tallied? How can a world shaped through violence be changed? Pryor would assert that we look first to the material of the everyday, the stuff of the mundane, the weight of the dollars in our pockets.

While the first installment of Pryor’s “Portals and Pathways” also premiered during Black History Month last year (a conscious choice of Pryor’s for both exhibitions) at Material Exhibitions on West Belmont, Evanston proves a meaningful site from which to stage the series’s second installment. In November 2019, Evanston became the only city in America to legislate reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, through Resolution 126-R-19. According to the city’s website, the resolution committed the first $10 million the city made through the Municipal Cannabis Retailers’ Occupation Tax to fund housing and economic development programs for Black Evanston residents.

In “Fiscal Frontiers” Pryor is both a cartographer and storyteller of the object, of the things touched and that touch you in return. Speaking from her experience as a Black woman, Pryor uses money, food, and things as the mile markers of life under capitalism to map what it means to be read as “other” by society. Yet she also gives each object, each artifact, agency. There’s power in telling your story, power in the things you collect and give to those yet to come. There is power in community, power in subaltern spaces, power in frames and around tables reclaimed. Cycles, cyclical returns, and departures have ways of appearing throughout Pryor’s corpus. It seems almost fated that the artist shares her surname with one of the Freedman’s Bank account holders featured in the show. There’s a certain inevitability to Pryor’s work, for a philosopher of the everyday knows how to make art that touches you. “Fiscal Frontiers” is an exhilarating reminder of art’s power to speak in the realm of the tangible, the material, the stu that touches back. v @Chicago_Reader

Books

White people have Emily Dickinson, Mexicans have José Olivarez

In his second poetry collection, Olivarez gi s readers a promise of hope.

By LUZ MAGDALENO FLORES

The first time I met José Olivarez was in 2018, while organizing with Brown and Proud Press. BPP hosted a series of events we called “Cumbia & Stanzas” where poets shared the stage with DJs. We were so excited to welcome Olivarez, who graciously agreed to be a part of our Pilsen DIY event; this was right before the release of his Citizen Illegal book. I remember Olivarez reading “Mexican Heaven”: there are white people in heaven, too. they build condos across the street & ask the Mexicans to speak English. i’m just kidding. there are no white people in heaven.

The crowd, made up of mostly Black and Brown people, laughed so loud! Fast-forward five years: it is 2023, and I am on a flight back to my homeland of southern California to visit my family and homies. I am reading Olivarez’s new book, Promises of Gold, and I am CRYING. Don’t get me wrong, Olivarez also made me laugh again, but Promises of Gold is a collection of poetry that came out of the pandemic, which may have a ected us all, but hit people of color across barrios the hardest.

Olivarez writes in the author’s note, “I wish I could have written you a straightforward book of love poems. I wish healing was as easy as putting a Band-Aid over a wound & watching it close. If I wrote that book, I’d be ignoring all the contradictions & messiness of the world we live in, all the ways in which love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts. I choose to bring the world & its chaos into these poems.” And to say he brought it is

AUTHOR PHOTO BY MERCEDES ZAPATA

an understatement. His Spanglish poetry is reminiscent of Gary Soto, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros but what makes it stand apart is its Brown boy magic, hip-hop influence, and south-side Chicago energy—Olivarez’s words hit di erent.

Promises of Gold is written in 11 sections: Folk Tales, Ojalá Ojalá Ojalá, Gold, Untranslatable, Receding, Ojalá Ojalá Ojalá, God, Before Monday Arrives Like A Fist, Glory, Glory, Glory—all of which take the reader through a journey of love, loss, pain, pandemic, memories, Mexicanidad, machismo, cariño, Calumet City, Harlem, and into our hearts made of gold. I cried because Olivarez created a space I have never experienced before while reading poetry. With his poetic verses, Olivarez instigates Mexicano men to cry, no drink or boleros needed (OK, they might pair perfectly while reading). The poems take me, a first-generation Chicana, into a memory that I’ve lived but never dared to write before.

“Fathers” it has to hurt— those basement parties where even the worm at the bottom of the bottle was singing full hearted about some love they fucked up. i should apologize— it’s true my dad stopped hugging me, but I never say the other part: i stopped loving him too. those basement parties where the men would drink & then drink some more— they only sang when they were drunk— they only hugged when they sang— they only cried when they hugged—

The reader is transported into a nostalgic place that smells of tortillas made by a woman who is tired from working at the warehouse but still comes home to cook, where one hears the Bulls game with a grito of disapproval from the man in the house who is also so tired, where a brother or primo is making a bad joke outside while smoking a J and wearing them too: a Mexican household in Chicago.

I am also crying because I, like so many transplants, have migrated far far away from my fam. Choosing to leave them behind for the

OF GOLD BY J OSÉ OLIVAREZ Henry Holt and Co., hardcover, 320 pp., $24 99, us.macmillan.com/books

sake of my art and to find trabajo, just like they did when they left Mexico for Estados Unidos. Latinx migrants cultivate a new belonging in cities like Los Angeles, Houston, New York City, and Chicago. There is something so special about finding your people in lands far away from them. It is why I live in Pilsen and why the poems of Promises of Gold are important. They force us to be seen amidst and beyond the struggle.

Olivarez, who grew up in the south suburb of Calumet City, wrote this book while living in Harlem. He experienced the heartache of being 800 miles away from what home used to be and from the people who raised you, in a time when being close was prohibited. It is a love letter to our folks, our homies, the nice shoes we keep clean because the streets are dirty, to madres with dreams unspoken, to the lovers who get to experience our familias and their bad jokes, to the ongoing search for hope in a country that upholds a system uglier than our ugly brother, Mexican Heavens, and yes, tortillas too.

Citizen Illegal started with a quote by JayZ, “Not bad, huh, for some immigrants.” In Promises of Gold Olivarez includes two, one of which is a well-known quote from a Vicente Fernández song, “Yo sé perder/Yo sé perder,” a great epigraph that sets the mood for his second collection of poetry.

“Ojalá” oldies on the speaker & my love asleep on the couch. all my uncles rise from their graves or from basement bars— all those years they used to sing the saddest songs: it wasn’t a mourning. it was a cleansing

Despite the pain we encounter in loving and losing, Olivarez gifts us with a promise of hope disguised in gold. He is handing us a mirror and inviting us to remember who we are, who is holding it down for us, and where we come from, no matter where we choose to be. This book reads like an ode to people of color who are handed a broom, assumed to be the help, when in reality we are equal. He’s rewriting the history of colonization and challenging us to unlearn its impacts one poem at a time. v

@lightofyourvida

R “ABBATOIR, U.S.A.!”

Through 4/ 16 : Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun noon- 6 PM, Fri 1-7 PM, Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis, Cobb Hall, 4th floor, renaissancesociety.org/ exhibitions, 773 -702- 8670

ARTS & CULTURE

Aria Dean, “Abattoir, U.S.A.!,” installation view, 2023, the Renaissance Society.

ROBERT CHASE HEISHMAN

Visual Art

These nothings

By EMELINE BOEHRINGER

Aria Dean wants you in the hot seat—or cold storage. Her intentions aren’t subtle: you enter her exhibition at the Renaissance Society through aluminum double doors with rubber-trimmed circular windows and step onto a field of black industrial rubber flooring blanketed in nonslip nubbins. Natural light is restricted by a low, hulking perimeter wall, and artificial light ebbs and flows from a giant screen looping the New York-based artist’s ten-minute animated journey through an empty slaughterhouse. Welcome to “Abattoir, U.S.A.!”

From the Latin battare meaning “to beat up” or “to bang,” the French word “abattoir” was coined in the early 19th century to name the final destination of animals bound for slaughter. Abattoir, U.S.A.! (the name of both the exhibition and the film) sees double. The vertiginous sense of watching one abattoir inside another creates a fluidity between the virtual and physical developed by the artist in other recent installations including Suite! (the wry exclamation is a signature, too) at REDCAT and King of the Loop at the Hammer Museum, both in Los Angeles.

The gallery-as-abattoir metaphor is borrowed from 20th-century philosopher Georges Bataille, heavily cited in Dean’s artwork and writing. Bataille proposed that the museum and slaughterhouse were not so different, both relying on the illusion of objectivity to produce violence, one typically ideological, the other literal. These violences are distinct. As Bataille wrote in 1929, the modern slaughterhouse in particular is “cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship.”

In early 19th-century Paris, however, slaughter was still being performed in backyards and butcher shops. The spiriting away of the city’s abattoir was still in its early stages when urban improvements fell to Parisian bureaucrat-turned-urban-planner Georges-Eugéne Hausmann. Hausmann infamously razed the city’s medieval structure and erected La Villette, an iron-and-glass mega-slaughterhouse unveiled at the 1867 World’s Fair.

La Villette could be the initial setting of Dean’s animation, which opens with a camera panning through her digital environment, passing from a blue sky framed by gray beams to brick and scrolled metal trim. Created using the 3D animation graphics software Unreal Engine with animator Filip Kostic and modeler Maya Lila, the interior has a smooth, video game appearance that melts through 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century abattoir. On its initial sweep, the camera skirts an architectural bull’s head ornament, familiar to Chicagoans as the icon crowning the Union Stock Yards.

Historical easter eggs are not marginal to Dean’s project. Abattoir, U.S.A.! is part of her larger mission to track the slaughterhouse’s influence on modern architecture and design. The fact that industry inspired architects is well known: American grain elevators informed the development of the modern “international style” via Bauhaus giant Walter Gropius and father-of-modernism Le Corbusier. Less known are Corbusier’s unrealized abattoir designs, and the rumor that they might have provided the template for his famous social housing experiment Unité d’habitacion. Dean, however, is not an architectural historian. Her writing has focused on art and politics, especially the relationship between Blackness and representation, minimalism, and poststructuralism. In two essays, “Notes on Blacceleration” and “Black Bataille,” she positions Afropessimism, through the writing of scholar Frank B. Wilderson III, at the heart of debates around aesthetics, capitalism, and the human. Wilderson’s work focuses on racial capitalism and the ramifications of the Atlantic slave trade, arguing that American society fundamentally depends on Black death, and, moreover, that Blackness is necessarily excluded from liberal ideas of the “human” subject. Dean is interested in how modern architecture encodes and maintains the contours of this subject, constituted in the negative by its exclusion—those left outside. For Wilderson, the outside is the unthinkable position of Blackness. Bataille, too, wrote about the outside, the l’informe or “the formless.” The abattoir concretizes these ideas in a physical place where architecture and technology delimit human, animal, and machine. The animal ultimately faces the absolute violence at the heart of the modern: some beings have the right to live, others do not.

That’s a lot to fit into ten minutes. The elegance of Abattoir, U.S.A.! lies in its simplicity—not much is needed to show that something is deeply wrong here. In the first act, Dean’s camera adopts a first-person pointof-view, swiveling toward an infinite row of holding pens and turning a sickening backflip scored to a swell in the electronic soundtrack by Evan Zierk. The camera enters a slow trod along a curving metal pathway braced with rust-red beams, occasionally pausing to glance around, oblivious to its final destination. Dean alludes to death here through dark art-world jokes. The scale and geometry of the pathway echoes the monumental coiled steel sculptures of minimalist Richard Serra and the steel beams bracing the corridor resemble those used by land artist Michael Heizer for his construction-material sculptures, especially Collapse , a menacing 40-foot-deep pit filled with massive girders. Heizer’s work only seems deadly, Serra’s has been—the collapse of Sculpture No. 3 in 1971 resulted in the death of art installer Raymond Johnson. Death haunts the art world in the other direction, too. La Villette is now a fashionable cultural space housing exhibitions and film screenings. The curved route to slaughter is, in real life, the design of animal scientist Temple Grandin, whose Big Meat-sponsored slaughterhouse video tours (an influence and inside joke, Dean confided at her opening) extoll the calming quality of a gentle path obscuring the macabre activity beyond. Dean’s thick references validate the sheer dread that slowly builds to terminal claustrophobia at the site of the guillotine-ish “stun box,” where animals are anesthetized with a bolt gun shot to the head before exsanguination. Compared to the abattoir film genre, from the recent EO and Cow to the PETA slaughterhouse exposé, the empty landscape of Abattoir, U.S.A.! creates an especially strong emotional response—less empathy than immediate and jarring atmospheric awareness. Were the film to end at the stun box, it might land on an empty note, like the trailer for a scared-straight Abattoir Simulator. Instead, the deluge. The stun box ushers in a hellish second act of strobing yellow and black blots that throws the gallery into visual chaos. (The gallery advises that individuals with photosensitive epilepsy or fragrance sensitivity practice discretion.) It’s an obliterating death. The end of life, the end of vision, and the end of the sensible culminate in structuralist purgatory, mimicking improperly developed film or the eye left sightless at the receiving end of a sucker punch.

The death of the subject resurrects the third-person view. In Dean’s final act, the camera swings over a blood-drenched kill floor, flying through the same aluminum doors installed at the gallery’s entrance toward a row of swaying meat hooks keeping time with a wordless electronic pop melody. The hooks rock happily of their own accord, ending the film on an artificially sentimental note suitable for Okja or Homeward Bound. The upswing is ironic, and the long line of ready and willing hooks are a reminder that we’ve just witnessed a process through its absence, the millions of animals executed at a breakneck speed missing.

A big, complicated nothingness writhes at the heart of Dean’s entire project, a nothingness where the subject should be. In the real world, the state of nothingness works in favor of the abattoir, which thrives on a reality so central yet so unbearable that it must be banished to a massive cultural, social, and emotional blindspot. There is also the bleak, instrumental state of nonbeing that defines Wilderson’s Afropessimism and Bataille’s “formlessness.” These nothings have di erent properties but no shape, no texture, no color, no form, but it is these nothings that will follow you, far beyond the abattoir doors. v @ Chicago_Reader