In Motion:

“I keep saying, in this moment, I think we may be one of the bestkept secrets,” says Nicole Clarke-Springer, the artistic director of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater.

The critically acclaimed Chicago-based dance company is beloved for its spectacular storytelling and world-class performers, but still, it’s o en flown under the radar. In 2019, WTTW theater critic Hedy Weiss questioned why the company, which she described as “thrilling,” wasn’t more famous, informing readers, “If you haven’t caught up with this company, now is the time.”

Soon, though, Chicago’s best-kept secret will be secret no more because in 2023, Deeply Rooted is poised to break out in a major way: In addition to producing innovative performances, they’re building a new 30,000 square-foot state-of-the-art dance center at 5345 S. State and increasing their educational programming.

“Everyone needs to know who Deeply Rooted is,” says its executive director, Makeda Crayton. “We’re looking to elevate the status of the company and increase the visibility of the company in the city.”

Deeply Rooted was cofounded in the mid-90s by Kevin Iega Jeff and Gary Abbott with LaVerne Alaphaire Jeff, Diane Shober, and Linda Spriggs and made its public debut in 1996. The company has since performed around the world; in 2013, it became the first U.S.-based dance company to perform at Africa’s leading contemporary dance festival, JOMBA!, which is held in Durban, South Africa.

The company stands out for uniting modern, classical, American, and African American traditions in dance and storytelling. Much of its work centers the Black experience, but its themes are universal.

“We tell our stories, but we tell them so well that they become human stories,” Clarke-Springer says. “We’re all human. We have all those feelings of love, envy—anything that you have going on there’s something there you can identify with.”

Deeply Rooted is currently in the process of raising capital for their new facility, South Side Dance Center. Their plans include six studios—one of which will double as a black box theater—offic- es, and green space. They hope the center will be used by several dance organizations, dancers, and artists from across the city.

“I wanted to help develop some institutions that would help to develop little Black girls and boys like me coming from the south side,” Crayton says. “I wanted to do it in the neighborhood or in the community that poured into me.”

As Deeply Rooted set its eyes on elevation, it’s connected with like-minded organizations. In 2019, the company joined the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project, an initiative housed at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts that seeks to eliminate inequities within Chicago’s dance landscape by providing funding, operational support, and performance opportunities to some of the city’s most revered Black dance institutions.

Following the Black Lives Matter movement, Crayton says that there’s been an increased focus on the inequity of resources and funding within the arts industry, making the mission of the CBDLP more important than ever.

“There’s been a shi in society,” Crayton says. “What came out of that time period was the realization that equity of resources in many different sectors [has] been lacking.”

The collective nature of CBDLP has felt special, Clarke-Springer says. A er years where some of the city’s Black dance institutions, unfortunately, felt siloed from one another, coming together to amplify Black dance has been a positive change.

“Before CBDLP, there has never been an intentional opportunity for a true sense of collaboration or a space for us to come together as the Black companies in the city to feel as if we were one entity,” she says. “Funding inequities siloed many of our or- ganizations as we each worked to move our companies forward.”

Along with receiving funding, the companies within the cohort have performed together several times, the significance of which Clarke-Springer says cannot be understated. Last summer, the company performed in a CBDLP-hosted event at Millennium Park, which drew more than 7,000 people.

“I think performances like the Millennium Park performance, and people being able to come and see all eight of these companies, are important,” Clarke-Springer says. “That’s pretty impactful, whether we realize it or not, to see Brown bodies doing ballet, Horton, Graham, West African, and tap all in one space.”

Deeply Rooted has several of its own exciting events coming this year. It’s currently hosting auditions for its six-week dance intensive that kicks off June 5. Then on May 6, the company will honor Jeff and Abbott at its Annual Dance Education Spring Showcase. And this summer, the company will perform in the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks outdoor arts series.

As Deeply Rooted prepares for those upcoming events and performances, its leaders continue to foster community and provide opportunities for local dancers while centering the importance of storytelling through the art of dance.

“Part of the reason why the organization was founded as Deeply Rooted Productions is because there was always a greater vision than just a dance company,” Crayton says. “There was always more work to this, and that’s ingrained in everything that Deeply does. The dance is the vehicle, but what we’re here to do is to help people.”

The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is a program of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Their current cohort of local dance companies includes Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center & Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, the Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Praize Productions Inc. For more about CBDLP, visit chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, and chicagoreader.com/special/ logan-center-for-the-arts-at-the-university-of-chicago.

Visual Art

An ode to Black women

Gio Swaby’s textile portraits honor the style and individuality of women.

By JACQUELINE WAYNEGUITE

At first glance, Gio Swaby’s artwork can be deceptively simple. Her portraits are marked by thin, black lines that sketch the images of beautiful, confident Black women. But looking closer, you are drawn into a complex composition of stitched, knotted, and dangling threads and colorful appliqued fabric on a raw canvas background.

Simplicity and complexity coexist in her portraits, and this is intentional. Swaby, who is from the Bahamas and currently lives in Toronto, begins each piece with a reference photo of a Black woman in her life—her sisters, friends, and family members. She translates the photo into a drawing on canvas and uses a sewing machine to trace those lines with free-motion quilting techniques. She achieves this by using the needle like a pen and moving the fabric in any direction to create the image.

Swaby’s work is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago in a solo exhibition titled “Fresh Up.” It is the second location on a multistop journey—it kicked o at the Museum of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, Florida, and, in August, it will go to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

The Art Institute exhibition is a remarkable feat for the 31-year-old artist, who has had a meteoric rise in the past few years. Her 2021 debut solo exhibition, “Both Sides of the Sun,” at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, sold out. Her work is now in several major museum collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the

Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Almost all of Swaby’s pieces are individual portraits, ranging from a depiction from the shoulders up to full-length, practically lifesized images. Most of the portrait sitters stare out at the viewer with confidence and swagger, asserting their right to take up space. They are dressed to impress. For instance, in Another Side to Me Second Chapter 5, (2021), the sitter looks at the viewer over her right shoulder, where an oversized pink plaid coat is strategically draped. Her locks of hair are rendered with detail, and loose black threads emanate from the corner of her mouth and from the crown of her head, creating squiggles against the canvas.

“Aesthetics are important to my work,” Swaby said. “It’s what makes my practice joyful. I try to give each work what it really needs. I try not to prescribe too many rules ahead of time.”

Sometimes she’ll add vibrant patterned fabric, representative of Bahamian life, through applique, in which pieces of fabric are added as decorative elements on top of the background, or freestyle stitch with the sewing machine.

“It depends so much on the person I’m representing what these choices are,” Swaby said. “Does it feel right for their portrait? Is it bringing this work to life, or is it stifling it in some ways? It’s a combination of things.”

Swaby works in series, meaning that she creates art in a grouping that shares concepts,

R“GIO SWABY: FRESH UP”

Through 7/3: Mon 11 AM-5 PM, Thu 11 AM-8 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/exhibitions, adults $25 ($35 Fast Pass, $22 Illinois residents, $20 Chicago residents), seniors 65+, students, and teens 14-17 $19 ($29 Fast Pass, $16 Illinois residents, $14 Chicago residents), children under 14 free

Gio Swaby, New Growth 2 (triptych), 2021 GIO SWABY

techniques, and subjects, to create a cohesive body of work. At the Art Institute, the pieces are arranged by series with Swaby’s own words accompanying them on wall labels and in the audio guide. The portraits in “Going Out Clothes” celebrate the stylish clothes Bahamian women wear out. The “Pretty Pretty” series achieves an extraordinary level of stitched detail in full-length portraiture, with one element of the subject’s clothing highlighted in colorful fabric. And the series “New Growth” depicts the silhouettes of Black women in patterned fabric. It is “an homage to the unique beauty of Black hair and celebrates the depth of skill and creativity that gives rise to such a vast and ever-growing catalogue of styles,” Swaby says in the wall label.

“Seeing this show at the Art Institute has been really interesting because I’m seeing stu that I didn’t recognize fully at the time [that I made it],” Swaby said.

The exhibition is a powerful expression of love for Black women and girls. Using an anti-colonialist lens, Swaby aims to represent the Black women in her life as multidimensional and full of life. The care and attention she puts into each piece is also a political act—historically, art museums have rarely exhibited artwork about or for Black women. Her work is in conversation with other Black artists such as Bisa Butler, Ebony G. Patterson, and Kehinde Wiley, who work to reclaim and reimagine how Black people are represented in art, and the writer and theorist bell hooks.

“For me, at the core, it is about expressing love, creating these moments of joy and creating these moments of reflection for Black folks—and especially for Black women and girls coming into the space and being able to see some version of themselves,” Swaby said.

Swaby began her artistic career studying fine art at the College of the Bahamas, in a program based on traditional artmaking ideas, such as painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics. But it was at a residency at Popop Studios in Nassau, the Bahamas, when Swaby met the quilter Jan Elliott, that she pivoted from painting and ceramics to an art practice rooted in textiles. Swaby’s mother taught her to sew as a child, but until that moment with Elliott, she hadn’t connected sewing to her artmaking. She made her first fabric-based portrait in 2013. Now it’s the central feature of her practice and an ongoing way to express her love for her mother.

Another turning point in Swaby’s practice came when she began working on the “Another Side To Me” series. This was the first time she exhibited the back of the canvas, the side typically hidden from view, as the front.

“It’s definitely an exploration of vulnerability. That vulnerability as an artist—to show the part that technically is where the mistakes are, the mistakes and corrections,” Swaby said. “To celebrate those imperfections and understand them as the thing that makes me me.” Swaby later earned a degree in film, video, and integrated media at Emily Carr University. Last year she earned a master of fine arts degree in interdisciplinary art, media, and design at Ontario College of Art & Design University. Despite her academic credentials, Swaby wants her work to feel accessible to the viewer without the pressure to have a highly intellectual experience every time.

“Sometimes you just want to see this work and feel this moment of joy,” Swaby said. “You want to celebrate the beauty of it. And that is perfectly good. Sometimes . . . you do want to have that very strong heady experience and connect with the work in that way. Both of those things are incredibly valid. I don’t want to hold a hierarchy of how the work is seen or received.”

The Art Institute’s installation was a very collaborative process. Melinda Watt, textiles department chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman curator for the museum, said that the team working on the exhibition wanted to honor Swaby’s intentions, down to the positioning of dangling threads and how her works on unstretched canvases were hung.

“Those little, hopefully invisible distinctions—invisible to the visitor—have been the subject of long conversations with the artist, the conservators, and myself as a curator,” Watt said. “That was . . . really particularly special to us.”

Swaby often works on as many as three to four portraits concurrently. She shifts fluidly between series, letting her formal training and instinct guide her process. She said her practice combines her head and heart, but love always rules.

“I want to be a girl that thinks with her heart.” v

@hourglass

Through 5/7: Wed and Fri 9:30 AM-2 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM- 4 PM, Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 238 W. 23 rd St., 312-949-1000, ccamuseum.org, suggested admission: adults $ 8, students/seniors $ 5, free for members

Visual Art

Layers of identity

Artist Sarah Whyte makes space for transnational adoptees.

By KOJI TAYLOR

When Sarah Whyte was a child, her parents said it didn’t matter that she was Asian and they were white. What mattered, they said, was that she was their daughter.

That didn’t stop adults from reminding her she was adopted, telling her to be grateful she’d been “saved” from the orphanage in China. Nor did it stop other kids from calling her slurs like “twinkie”—yellow on the outside and white on the inside. “I struggled with the feelings of being too Chinese to be American and yet too American to be Chinese,” Whyte later wrote.

Her first solo exhibition, “What Color Am I?,” on view at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, expresses her complex relationship with race and identity as a transnational adoptee. “There are so many questions I have that may or may not have answers,” she said. “I use art to explore what I’m thinking and as a way to visualize that internal dialogue.”

Whyte, an MFA student at the University of Illinois Chicago, was adopted from Jiangxi province, China, and grew up in Virginia and Texas. Because she was raised without a cultural connection to her birthplace, many Asian Americans have labeled her “fake” or “whitewashed.” Her best models of authenticity were local Chinatowns; sometimes, she wonders if she’s appropriating Chinese culture while trying to get in touch.

Her parents’ privilege o ered security and some protection in public but never masked her appearance. “Although my parents are white, their presence cannot erase the fact that I still experience slurs, jokes, and other racial stigmatization as someone who is ethnically Asian,” Whyte said. “These slurs have a ected and shaped my racial consciousness.”

For the exhibition, Whyte embroidered slurs including “GOOK,” “CHINK,” and “F.O.B. (Fresh O The Boat)” onto pieces of fake Chi- nese silk, playing on authenticity with the material. Each hand-stitched work, a close study of hateful language, took months to complete.

RThe panel “Adoptee Identity: Are We Asian American Too?” will be held April 30, 2-3:30 PM at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, 238 W. 23rd St.

Also on display are large clouded self-portraits reflecting Whyte’s ambiguous racial identity and obscured personal history. White gesso primer conceals her face and other images from orphanage photographs. Red Chinese characters in one painting question her name; in another, white English text tries to define her race. A closer look reveals more poetry, embroidered onto the canvas and neatly redacted by lines of acrylic paint.

“I think with adoption, there’s a lot of erasure,” said Whyte, who doesn’t fully trust the few photos and documents she has from the orphanage. “By adding a gesso wash, I’m erasing and covering up what was there before. But at the same time, all those layers have a history.”

In March, Whyte spoke about her work at the UIC Women’s Leadership and Resource Center. Associate director Ramona Gupta said that any immigrant or child of immigrants understands the tension between identity and culture, which can be magnified for a transnational adoptee.

“What does it mean to be raised by people who are not of the culture of the home country that I was taken from?” asked Gupta, hypothetically. “How is assimilation approached or handled di erently, versus acculturation—are folks who are transnational adoptees encouraged to learn about and embrace the cultures of their home countries?”

Whyte’s exhibition is the seventh feature in the Chinese American Museum of Chicago’s spotlight series. The recent initiative is designed to revitalize the museum by showcasing local artists from across the Chinese diaspora.

“The spotlight series is an opportunity for the community to expand its voice and embrace not only the past and the present but the future,” said series curator Larry Lee.

As a community organizer, Gupta said she notices Asian adoptees are often excluded from Asian American spaces. “It’s really exciting that the museum is opening the door to these kinds of conversations,” she said. “I really hope it’s well received by the community and that folks are paying attention.”

In her next series, entitled “No Space to Mourn,” Whyte is tackling white saviorism in transnational adoption. When she was a child, people often called her parents “angels” and praised their humanitarianism.

“They would point out how grateful I should be for being saved from the country that is my motherland,” Whyte said. “They placed an invisible debt on my shoulders, the debt of needing to prove my worth as someone given the opportunity to navigate a white reality.”

Ömür Harmanşah, Whyte’s advisor and director of the UIC art history department, noted the role of Whyte’s studies in her work.

“She’s taking classes and mobilizing ideas that she learns about: feminism, transnationalism, immigration, racism,” he said, adding her art is “based on her own experience and trauma but also touches the lives of so many people.”

Funded by a research award from UIC’s provost, Whyte is prioritizing audience engagement and connection in her new series. She’s expanding the conversation through collaborative panels, creating spaces for fellow adoptees to share and unpack their experiences.

“I’m networking, saying hello, and just putting myself out there to meet people—which is really hard as someone who’s a natural introvert,” Whyte said. She’s never had a community of other adoptees but is excited to build and take part in one through her art.

“Whether I had an audience or not, I would be making this work,” she said. “In a way of being true to ourselves, we find community.”