CHICAGO — Memories, good and bad, are imprinted on our souls and woven into our DNA: To witness a moment is to have it become a part of your identity. When meaningful moments are shared among a group, they become integrated into a communal understanding of self. Cosmo Whyte’s solo exhibition, The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone, at the Arts Club of Chicago, captures the hazy, amorphous nature of memory, grounding it in collective history. The exhibition is part of Panafrica Across Chicago, a citywide series of art exhibitions at museums and galleries exploring the common themes and cultural manifestations of Panafrican thought in Black art.
Whyte’s metallic structure “4×4 Timing/Hush Now, Don’t Explain” (2023), inspired by his late father’s architectural drawings, opens the exhibition, presenting doorways to memories. The elegant and daunting artwork resembles a massive tri-fold picture frame; in place of the black and white photographs it usually contains, however, are portraits hand-painted on beaded curtains. Viewers are invited to walk through these portals, the heavy beads whispering and clattering with the movement. Seen from a distance, one of the curtains depicts young men lying stretched out, their hands behind their heads; up close, however, the picture is completely indecipherable.
Across the rest of the show, Whyte deftly weaves personal histories into historical narratives by combining family documents with archival news images. In works such as the painted beaded-curtain sculpture “Ballad for Rodney” (2024), for instance, Whyte references pivotal moments in Black history such as the 2014 Ferguson Protests in Missouri or the 1968 Rodney Riots in Kingston, Jamaica. By blurring the line between individual and collective memory, the works demonstrate the Panafrican ideal that while our narratives may be unique, our experiences are part of a shared narrative.
Whyte’s work exists in the gap between that which is archived by history and that which is actually remembered. Instead of depicting people and moments in their entirety, he merges images and obscures crucial details, making the figures hard to parse. In the painting “Agitation 9-Conductor” (2024), for instance, pixelated orange squares on one side of the canvas suggest a fire. On the other side, a shock of white obliterates part of the image. What is shown is all the more striking as a result: a reaching arm, running feet, and a turned body — the moment is tense but undiscernible. Similarly, the painting “Agitation 2 – Wailer and the Griot” (2023) depicts a wizened hand in an otherwise pixelated scene clutching a shirt, tension evident in the veins thrumming under the deep brown skin. The pixelated scene behind the figure suggests more fire and smoke, but the image superimposed on top — a black-and-white drawing of a person in a headstand — suggests a more playful scene. The contrast between them is striking: the technicolor present and the black-and-white past.
In a global society, extraordinary historical events inevitably become generational memories. By juxtaposing intimate moments with images of public protest, Whyte forges a connection between Black experiences across people and generations, while elegantly capturing the fallibility of memory. He uncovers a kinship in collective memories, arguing that these moments bring us together.
Cosmo Whyte: The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone continues at the Arts Club of Chicago (201 E Ontario Street, Chicago, Illinois) through April 2. The exhibition was curated by Janine Mileaf.
