HCL Commission

Included as a part of Chicago Takes 10 | Supported by the Walder Foundation

Black American Monument (CTT cut)

Barber performs a talk, which moves from constructing a new three-dimensional work to the reveal of his true purpose: to show the progression of truth telling to healing. A “work-talk”, it is among several projects in which Barber examines creative spaces for collective knowledge. Much of Barber’s art production is a method of commemoration and memorialization, for holding and allowing multiple histories and interpretations in the act of engaging the public. This talk, currently untitled, examines revisionist history for its open forum and performative nature. It specifically contends with monument art. It asks if the means of memorializing can be other than fixed mass, such as stone or metal, and instead something more intimate, human scale, more tentative, and non-heroic. If it can be portable or mobile, if it can live in the domestic space as well as the public square.  

The “work-talk” includes sharing plans for an interdisciplinary project, unveiled in 2022 by Barber in conversation with Alison Saar’s Monument to the Great Migration, which the City of Chicago installed in 1996 on Martin Luther King Drive to honor the courage of millions of Black Americans to pursue greater opportunity — some under great persecution.

About the artist

Barber uses interdisciplinary practice to articulate testimonies within and surrounding Black America. He  received a Stanley Grant and holds an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, and is recipient of an Alonzo  Davis Award from Virginia Center for Creative Arts and a 2020 Residency from the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. His performance and visual art have been presented at the Englert Theatre and Levitt  Gallery (Iowa City, Iowa); Museum of Science and Industry and Ignition Project Space (Chicago); Rialto Theatre and Mason Murer Gallery (Atlanta, Georgia); Lexington Theatre (Kentucky); and Gallery 4731 (Detroit,  Michigan). He is a founding member of the artist collective Propelled Animals. 

His dual performance and visual art works address the fluidity of personhood and oneness of humanity.  Formative to Barber is the work of Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015), feminist author, activist, and philosopher,  and the writings of Devon W. Carbado on constitutional law and critical race theory. In making performance  and two- and three-dimensional art, his interest is in the viewer personifying the figure, altering the personal  narrative to contribute to a shift in the culture that moves beyond the constructs of race and gender. 

About Propelled Animals

Propelled Animals organized as a collective in 2014 and in addition to Barber includes Esther Baker-Tarpaga  (performance artist/choreographer, Philadelphia), Raquel Monroe (interdisciplinary performance  artist/scholar, Chicago), Boubacar Djiga (composer/musician, Burkina Faso), Heidi Wiren Bartlett (performance artist/designer, Pittsburg). They create site-specific work to facilitate conversations around anti-racism, gender  inclusivity, and environmental justice. Their process encourages audiences and collaborators alike to consider the efficacy of the body, resilience, protest, and radical tenderness as strategies against institutional racism.