Like many of his peers at the time, Binion was influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and developed a deep interest in visual communication and Modernism. Entitled Ghost: Rhythms, the work from this exhibition was originally curated into a show at the Artists Space New York during its inaugural year by Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, and Ronald Bladen.

While Binion was interested in the formal qualities of medium, shape, and color like his contemporaries, he also found a powerful voice in the language of modernism to share personal and African-American narratives. McArthur Binion was the first African American to graduate from Cranbrook University with an MFA, after which he would move to New York City and eventually to Chicago, where he has lived and worked for the last thirty years. His experience as a child picking cotton in rural Mississippi was also an influence on Binion's practice of labor-intenstive mark making, grinding wax crayon into canvas, panel, and aluminum creating hard-earned layers over time. A large part of this exhibition focuses on his large tarp-like works on unstretched canvas that simulate aerial views of rural landscapes, abstracted and made of repetitive and diligent mark making.

McArthur Binion (b. 1946) lives and works in Chicago. McArthur Binion is in numerous private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and the Detroit Institute of Art.

Kavi Gupta
835 W. Washington Blvd.
Chicago IL 60607

The cave paintings of Lascaux (Lass-KOH) are the world’s premier example of prehistoric art. Discovered in 1940 in southwest France, these masterpieces were made by our early ancestors almost 20,000 years ago. French officials closed the cave in 1963 to preserve the paintings but now, thanks to the latest digital technology, the cave has been painstakingly re-created with full-sized replicas of the artworks including some shown for the first time to the public.


Hall of Bulls, North Wall, contains 36 images of bulls, horses and stag. One bull measures 17 feet long — the largest animal depicted in cave art. © LRMH

Exhibition visitors will experience the thrill of walking through the cave and discovering beautiful, ancient artworks lit by simulated torch light. Along the way, they will encounter a lifelike stone-age family – an old man, an adolescent, a woman, and a child – created by sculptor Elisabeth Daynčs. The exhibition also features rare stone-age artifacts from the Museum’s collections. Videos and interactives explain how Paleolithic people lived and how the cave paintings were made, but the purpose of the paintings remains a tantalizing mystery. The Field Museum is the first North American venue for this  exhibition.

The contemporary American artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) —widely recognized for her exploration of issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the 18th-century medium of cut-paper silhouettes is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation. For Walker, the simplified details of a human form in the black cutouts resonate with racial stereotypes. She has said, "The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does."

Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! at the Art Institute of Chicago

Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses and slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. 

In the Chicago exhibition, she returns to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that she has designed especially for display at the Art Institute. The installation, titled Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! (2013), includes five large framed graphite drawings and 40 small framed mixed-media drawings along with the cut paper silhouettes. The title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Merging handwritten text with the images in the drawings, the work takes a diaristic form that revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce, and investigates the notion of the “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work in progress as, “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work — with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race."

The unveiling of the Jaharis Galleries also celebrates the opening of a special exhibition of more than 50 incomparable works of late Roman and early Byzantine art lent by the British Museum. Comprised of luxurious yet portable items such as silver vessels, carved ivories, and gem-encrusted jewelry, these artworks reflect the splendor of wealthy households and important ecclesiastical sites between A.D. 350 and 650.

These centuries saw great shifts in the Roman Empire: Constantinople replaced Rome as the imperial capital, Christianity became the official imperial religion, and Greek eclipsed Latin as the official administrative language. Beautifully illustrating these transitions, the objects in the exhibition were employed in a variety of civic, domestic, and sacred contexts. For example, a gilded silver chest for bathing accessories and perfumed oils that belonged to a Roman noblewoman named Projecta stands as an eloquent witness to the intersection of classical iconography and Christian belief; above the inscription indicating that its owner was indeed a Christian appears a seductive image of the goddess Venus. The gradual stylistic shift from a classical naturalism towards a Byzantine aesthetic can be seen in the Reliquary of St. Menas. Carved in ivory during the sixth century and markedly different in style from the earlier objects in the exhibition, the imagery—charged with spiritual import—is more abstract, static, and hieratic. For its part, The Lycurgus Cup vividly exemplifies the refinement and spectacle of lavish tableware proudly used throughout the late Roman Empire. In a display of technical virtuosity, this cup appears green in reflected light but turns a brilliant red when light is transmitted through it, thanks to the addition of gold and silver particles to the molten glass.

Most of the treasures in this exhibition have never before traveled to the United States.

Bates: Liquid Interface
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 25
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mead Composer-in-Residence Mason Bates created Liquid Interface in 2006, inspired by the various states of water, from frozen to evaporated. The work was composed after the time Mason Bates spent living on Berlin’s Lake Wannsee. Liquid Interface explores water in various climates. Movement by movement, Bates’ music explores increasingly warmer regions, one of which is New Orleans, dubbed the Crescent City because of its geographical location along a bend in the Mississippi River.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Jaap van Zweden, conductor
David Fray, piano