Art Students’ Work Included in Chicago Museum Exhibition

Works by UNC Charlotte art students Ajané Williams and Malik J. Norman have been accepted into the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on April 7. Held annually since 1970, the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition is the nation’s longest-running exhibition of African American art and features paintings, drawings, fine art prints, sculpture, mixed-media, ceramics, and photography by professional and emerging artists. Department of Art & Art History Chair Lydia Thompson also has works in the exhibition.

The Museum of Science and Industry is the largest science center in the Western Hemisphere. The Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition is part of the Museum’s Black Creativity program, which showcases African-American achievement in a variety of scientific, artistic, and technological fields. This year’s exhibition focuses on innovation and includes more than 200 works chosen by a distinguished panel of jurors.

Among the works is Williams’s abstract painting, Untitled II, pictured, one of a pair of acrylic and gel paintings she created “in dialogue with one another” in 2020, Williams said in an artist statement.

“I worked on these paintings at the same time, going back and forth to create a conversation with gestural mark-making. I feel like every time I am creating I am always learning from my artwork…as if we are exchanging knowledge with each other. As if I was talking to someone who isn’t me but is me at the same time. I had a lot of pent-up energy inside of me at the time and I wanted a release. A release of energy, a release of fear, a release of all of the suffering I was clinging to that was no longer serving my three-dimensional body.”

Two photographic works by Norman appear in the show: Still Life #4 and Reaching Beyond the Line (photograph wheat pasted onto canvas, pictured). Both pieces address themes of stagnation and resilience in the lives of Black Americans – expansive themes that Norman explores through the particular place and perspective of his family’s lived experience in Union County.

“In the unceded territory of the Waxhaw, Catawba, and Cheraw people presently colonized as Mineral Springs, North Carolina, is the Black realm of Western Union Park,” Norman wrote in an artist statement. “This land was refuge for callused palms. A place where hymns for solace to woes. Faith and stillness ran southern roots deep. Empowered by the legacy of Black Gold, liberation was roped together by an individual ability to navigate nature and night. These artworks render light through self-portraiture as a mode to construct realities to critique the oppressive obscures that befall on Black Americans. Despite it all one must reach towards the heavens.”

Norman will graduate from UNC Charlotte in May with his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Art and a photography concentration. Williams will earn her BFA in Art with a concentration in painting in 2022. In June 2020, both students were among eleven artists featured in an exhibition at Gallery C3 in Charlotte’s South End district.

Department Chair Lydia Thompson contributed two works to the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition, both from her Post Migration Series, large slab built clay and wood sculptures created in 2019. “My current research investigates the ideas of migration and residual ancestral memories that examine space and place that reference human existence,” Thompson wrote in an artist statement. “Through continuous mobility and the physical process of reduction made by nature, humans create pathways that explore the physical space which produce a visual silence, evoke the imagination, notions of commodities and illustrate a sense of desperation that provides insights to various cultural practices and traditions. I also see my images as reminders of the past and current lessons that we need to learn about the persistence and preservation of one’s own culture and identity.” (Pictured: Post Migration Series #6)

The Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Science and Industry through July 4.