Blanc Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its 2024 inaugural exhibit, GuestBook, curated by Blanc co-founder Cliff Rome.  GuestBook breathes life into the historic Parkway Ballroom’s remarkable archive, fusing the past and present into a participatory dialogue between the community and the gallery.

The Parkway Ballroom was founded in Bronzeville in 1940 as the South Side’s only black owned venue for black entertainment and celebration. Rome’s exhibit revolves around — literally and figuratively— the Guest Book that was used for decades to record the signatures and well wishes of luminaries that visited the Parkway Ballroom. Nat King Cole, Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, Ralph Metcalfe and others graced the halls and signed the book. With the Guest Book on pristine display, the exhibit radiates outward to create a mood balanced between nostalgic reverence for what was and a dynamic reaching for what is being created by today’s Black entrepreneurs and artists.

Rome has crafted an exhibition that emanates from the Guest Book into a space designed to encourage reading, reflection and conversation. Featuring brilliant partners like historians Sherry Williams, Ayana Contreras and Myiti Sengstacke, Rome reveals that the intellectual and entrepreneurial dynamism of the Parkway’s heyday laid a foundation for the cultural and economic power of today’s Bronzeville.

GuestBook introduces Chicago to Parkway Social a co-working space for artists and business people. And it is the first step in an archival journey that will invite Chicagoans to contribute their stories and artifacts to an exhibit memorializing the Parkway Ballroom.

Blanc Gallery’s 2024 Exhibition series is To Reveal the Beloved in honor of James Baldwin’s 100th birthday year. Baldwin states, “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.” Throughout 2024 we will engage with our community to co-think how important the artist and the arts ecosystem is in the process of revealing the edges of the world to itself. Using a local lens, we will be looking at the way arts networks can provide a framework for engaging with and addressing the issues that our communities face at the level of the individual, communal and infrastructural.

Save the date
To foster a Culture of Conversation during the run of show Blanc will host several Salons:
Opening Reception
February 16 2024
6-9 PM

Salon 1
February 24, 2024
2 – 4 pm
Memory Keeper Ione Graves and Historian and Archivist Sherry Williams will discuss the history of Bronzeville generally and the Parkway Ballroom more particularly.

Salon 2
March 2, 2024
Famed DJ and Music Historian, Ayana Contreras will create and explicate a playlist of tunes that would have been playing at the Parkway Ballroom in its heyday.

Salon 3
March 9, 2024
Journalist and Historian Myiti Sengstacke wlll lecture from her Bronzeville archive about the neighborhood’s entrepreneurial and artistic roots.
for further information contact: Eileen Rhodes eyerhodes@gmail.com

Bios
Cliff Rome is a chef and entrepreneur with 30 years’ experience in the culinary arts. In 2000, Chef Rome moved to Bronzeville to bring fine dining to the neighborhood. Integral to his practice has been a commitment to providing culinary training to Bronzeville’s residents. After hosting numerous events at the historic Parkway Ballroom, Rome recognized the critical need for liberated artist run spaces on the South Side. He co-founded Blanc Gallery as a space of liberation and expression. Chef Rome has developed an interior design practice and is a master gardener, having cultivated an exquisite garden at the gallery.

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Tags: Ayana Contreras, Blanc Gallery, bronzeville, Chicago, cliff rome, GUESTBOOK, Sherry Williams