A spokesperson says---
"...The exhibition presents a constellation of around thirty works by an intergenerational group of artists, amounting to a significant sliver of art produced during the Obama Presidency. Longer Than the Sky charts a provisional art history of the recent past..."
"...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... 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..."
"...Longer Than the Sky centers on artistic practices that gained relevance for the ways they engaged self-reflexively with their historical moment. These artworks have been assembled not for their stylistic similarities, but rather, for the ways they offer distinct perspectives on the circumstances in which they were made. While some address specific political events, the majority evoke their political context more obliquely, highlighting an overlapping set of social, technological, and aesthetic concerns that shaped the art of this era. Though the exhibition includes several artists who launched their careers in these years, it also foregrounds many who made period-defining work long before 2008. The prominence of the latter points to the ways these years were marked as much by continuity as they were by change and rupture..."
"...Longer Than the Sky situates the work of several Chicago-based artists within broader conversations about global contemporary art..."
