The Time Is Now Celebrates The Black Artists Of The South Side Who Used Their Work As A Vehicle For Social Change

The Time is Now!” is the title of both a big, beautiful exhibit on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum through December, and the equally big and beautiful book that functions as its catalog. It was taken from one of the artworks in the show, a 1968 photograph by Darryl Cowherd.

There are white artists here—most notably the Hairy Who and other Chicago Imagists who showed their work at the Hyde Park Art Center when it was headed by Don Baum—but really, it’s not about them. It’s about a context of segregation, suppression, and lynching (the latter referenced in, among others, Nathan Wright’s exquisite and surreal 1971 oil Bound). And it’s about the response to that context—expressed, for example, in the raised fists of a black-power salute, commemorated in Murry DePillars’s powerfully satirical 1969 lithograph Untitled (Aunt Jemima Pancake and Waffle Mix), and in the potent screen prints of Barbara Jones-Hogu.

So many of the problems these south-side artists were grappling with between 1960 and 1980 are still with us. The title, unfortunately, remains apt.   v

Edited by Rebecca Zorach and Marissa H. Baker (Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago) Exhibition through 12/30: Tue-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Smart Museum, 5550 S. Greenwood, 773-702-0200, smartmuseumuchicago.edu, free.