Featuring iconic artist Robert Earl Paige and Keny De La Peña for a weaving workshop, highlighting AfriCOBRA and the EVERDAY ART movement!

In tandem with Robert Earl Paige’s survey exhibition The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige, at the Hyde Park Art Center, we’re thrilled to host a workshop in relation to themes in the exhibition, through textile practices using everyday materials!

Early in his career, Paige and Dr. Carol Adams, founded EVERYDAY ART, an organization that hosted art exhibitions in unlikely places (like laundromats and funeral homes) and the first arts festival at South Shore Cultural Center in Chicago. Through EVERYDAY ART, Paige and Adams thought to generate a community aesthetic that considered how Black community members both design and work toward a unified neighborhood appearance that embraces culture and heritage. In Paige’s words, “Everyday Art is designed to demonstrate the role of the arts in the revitalization of a rapidly changing community and to involve all residents –artist and non-artist alike– in the creation of a community aesthetic.”

As a nod to Robert Earl Paige’s community art practice, EVERYDAY ART, and his exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center, The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige, the Hyde Park Art Center is hosting free all ages art making workshops on the South Side and across Chicago at partner organizations, institutions, and will bring art making to unconventional spaces like churches, libraries, gardens, festivals, and farmers markets that will be facilitated by HPAC Community Engagement Fellow, Keny De La Peña.

We hope you’ll join us not only for the workshop, but to learn more about Rober Earl Paige’s robust arts practice and it’s connection to the broader Black culturally specific history of arts movements here in Chicago!

Robert Earl Paige (b.1937, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator actively making work that challenges the distinction between fine art and craft by combining elements from African aesthetic traditions, modernist painting, Bauhaus architecture, and vernacular invention in his objects, collages, and fabrics. He earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began his career working for the architectural design firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill before transitioning to creating commercial objects and fashion. He has partnered with commercial enterprises such as the Italian fashion house Fiorio and Sears, Roebuck and Co. department stores to produce scarves and interior decor respectively. His signature line the Dakkabar Collection was sold nationwide in over 100 stores and included several bedroom and home furnishing pieces inspired by West African imagery with a contemporary palette in the 1970s.

Early in the Black Arts Movement, Paige participated and believes strongly in its ideology of community participation in art and culture, which continues to be of focus in his pedagogy today. He has taught art and design principles to youth through Gallery 37 and is a frequent lecturer with the nomadic Black Arts Movement School Modality. Paige has been an artist-in-residence for many organizations, including the Cabrini Green neighborhood alliance, DuSable Museum of African American History, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), Ndebele Foundation (South Africa) and Hyde Park Art Center. Works by Robert Paige have been exhibited at Salon94 Design and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and in Chicago at the SMART Museum of Art and the Chicago Cultural Center, among others.

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Tags: Chicago, EVERYBODY'S ART: A Kool-Aid Color Weaving Workshop, Hyde Park, Hyde Park Art Center, Robert Paige, Robert Paige: The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige, South Side Community Art Center