Please join curator Jenny Harris for a walkthrough of Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years on Saturday, September 19th at 11am as part of Chicago Exhibition Week.

Space is limited, RSVP required.

Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years charts a provisional history of art made during the years of the Obama presidency—a period marked as much by continuity as by change. Comprising nearly forty works by a multigenerational group of artists, it centers on artistic practices that gained relevance for the ways they engaged self-reflexively with their historical moment. Stylistically varied, these artworks have been assembled for the ways they offer distinct perspectives on the shared circumstances in which they were made. While some address specific political events, the majority evoke their political context more obliquely, highlighting a set of overlapping social, technological, and aesthetic concerns that shaped the art of this era.

The exhibition’s title, Longer Than the Sky, comes from James Baldwin’s 1957 short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” and evokes the intermingling of optimism and despair that defined the period between 2008 and 2016. The story concludes when the younger of two brothers performs a stirring rendition of the blues, an event that carries the fleeting glimmer of hopefulness, even freedom. “I was yet aware that this was only a moment,” the narrator subsequently reflects, “that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”

Opened in 2012 at the height of the Obama years, the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts is part of this history. Through its exhibitions and programs, the Logan Center has played a key role in supporting artistic communities on the South Side of Chicago where Barack Obama launched his political career. In keeping with this context, Longer Than the Sky situates the work of several Chicago-based artists within broader conversations about global contemporary art.

Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and curated by Jenny Harris, doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago. The Logan Center is pleased to partner with the Obama Presidential Center on related programs that will take place during the exhibition. Exhibition-related programs will be developed in partnership with Dorian Sylvain, an artist and curator who has frequently partnered with the Logan Center and was commissioned by The Obama Foundation to develop a collaborative site-specific mural at the Obama Presidential Center’s Home Court. Exhibition and programming support has been provided by the Ng Family Visiting Artist Fund, the Revada Foundation, and Friends of the Logan Center.

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Tags: Chicago, Jenny Harris, Logan Center for the Arts, Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years, The University of Chicago