Women Artists of Chicago
Skip to: Brittney Leeanne Williams, Cecilia Beaven, SHENEQUA
The artist Christalena Hughmanick
Christalena Hughmanick
Over the course of this pandemic, I’ve spoken to several studio art professors who have struggled to adapt to teaching remotely over Zoom. Sure, you can still lecture about the ins and outs of negotiating a gallery contract online, but how do you teach students metalworking without access to a blowtorch?
For Christalena Hughmanick, who teaches fiber art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, things weren’t as complicated, as so much of the tradition and theory of textile work is rooted in adaptability and reuse. “Recycling and upcycling are a huge part of quilting,” she explains. When COVID hit, her students didn’t so much turn their backs on their studios as enter new ones, whether their childhood bedrooms, closets full of concert t-shirts of their favorite boy bands, or their own houses already filled with scraps of accumulated fabric. In March 2020, their engagement with the great American tradition of quilting began in earnest.
Freedom Quilt Hungary. Image courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.
Hughmanick began her own story with quilts at a young age, having grown up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—Amish country. Her love of their methods was for the same reason quilting at home is so easy: it’s “so analog,” as almost “no tools are required.” Instead “practice and dedication” are a quilter’s most essential attributes. Quilt patterns are “open source,” a non-proprietary language accessible to all, allowing anyone to partake and thus connect to a lineage that stretches back generations and across the globe.
It was on her Fulbright in Hungary (which the artist received in 2018)—in search of the six remaining families with the knowledge of a block printing technique called Kékfestö—that Hughmanick uncovered a wild connection—the most recent influences on Hungarian quilt making can be traced back just 30 years, to the fall of the Soviet Union and the beginnings of the Hungarian Patchwork Guild (HPG), when its founder staged an exhibition of American quilts in her newly liberated country.
The artist in front of the quilt. Image courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.
As an American artist in Hungary, it seemed appropriate, then, to foster this connection. When a McDonald’s opened in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990 (with lines around the block) it indicated the thawing of the Cold War. The rapid adaptation of American quilt squares into a Hungarian tradition is a similar, though perhaps more quietly meaningful, change in the former Soviet state, as it signaled the end of a creative chokehold the USSR had on its satellites, as creative groups were not allowed to gather during the Soviet era.
The realization that the introduction of American quilting coincided with the rise of post-Soviet quilting bees “spiraled into” Hughmanick’s Freedom Quilt Hungary project, a crowdsourced quilt of blocks solicited from rural Hungarian communities completed in collaboration with the HPG. To get them started, Hughmanick would ask participants, “what does freedom mean to you?” She then had volunteers assemble the quilted “answers” into a larger patchwork, which ended up containing more than two hundred fifty blocks. “I got to cross ‘being a living history actor’ off my bucket list,” the artist said of the public demonstrations she would do for these communities, to demonstrate to the non-veterans how to construct a quilt block.
Hughmanick takes the meaning of open source to a new level in her latest project, conceived during quarantine, which will crowdsource a digitally facilitated collaborative quilt, with the intention of its becoming an “artifact” of the moment.
Participants with their quilt blocks
The artist will ask participants to submit reflections on quarantine using a publicly available QR code. She will render these words in thread, as a top stitch (the method used to bind both sides of a blanket together) in a quilt she will produce by the project’s end. Quilts have always been a “recording device,” she says, a story in themselves. The story of COVID-19 maps particularly well onto the metaphor of quilting, as it is a universal trauma which we have suffered in isolation. We will come together at the end of this moment, however, to stitch our individual experiences into the collective memory.
The artist is planning on launching this project in New York, with the hope of an eventual expansion into other American cities. Though you might not be able to participate directly, I encourage you to start a quilt as your own record—even better if it’s made from the sweatpants you’ve been wearing for the past six months.
More on Chirstalena here.
You can find out more about her forthcoming project here.
Brittney Leeanne Williams
The artist Brittney Leeanne Williams
During quarantine, the painter Brittney Leeanne Williams has been paying frequent visits to Lake Michigan. The lake is a cool tone, an indifferent body abutting Chicago, a city alive with pain. In its seemingly infinite expanse, Lake Michigan doesn’t exist on the same plane as the pandemic, and it is this neutrality the artist seeks out in an attempt to “break the fever” of this collective disease.
“I love distance in landscape,” she says, just as “I love distance in emotional life.” Both these stances—one literal and one metaphorical—make their way into Williams’s paintings, in which red, faceless women bend and twist, throbbing with color within expansive vistas of deserts, mountain ranges, and open skies.
Sometimes these figures—which are not meant to be a likeness (hence their lack of features), but rather “house a collective”—hunch in open landscapes, themselves often acting as the architecture of their space, representing “portals or doorways” through which others (we the viewers?) can pass.
Untitled, 24in x 24in, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 2018.
To me, these figures evoke the red rocks of the American desert, particularly Utah’s famous arches, whose central structure has been eroded away by the elements, leaving only their strongest parts. The internal power of rock is also evoked in Williams’s use of cadmium red, a pigment made from minerals extracted from the earth. (Though the artist is not from Utah, she is from Los Angeles and therefore is no stranger to dry, arid climes.) The structural integrity of her figures, who are often locked in an embrace (a “merging of a shared weight”), or physically carrying other bodies (evoking the iconic essay collection A Bridge Called My Back), is a beautiful metaphor for the role many Black women play in their families, as the keystones of community.
But why red? “Trauma is hot,” the artist states, and red—like the red of sirens or stop signs, has the ability to dictate the “choreography of the street,” as traffic clears for an ambulance or cars pause for a red light. They’re red because Williams needs you to pay attention to them.
Williams knows what she’s trying to say, but her practice is a quest to find the right way to say it. She thinks expansively, approaching these forms from the perspective of not just seeing, but hearing: “What is that sound that these bodies make?” she asks, and how can she depict it? The artist is seeking what is elusive to almost all of us who aren’t white and male (and probably a few among that group as well)—how to define yourself in no one’s terms but your own. “I don’t want to be the byproduct of subtraction,” she says, the stuff that is left over when you carve out all that is “not you.”
Naomi and Ruth: Mitosis, 35.5in x 72in, Oil on Canvas, 2020.
But why painting? Though her figures have the presence of sculpture, Williams insists that her choosing painting was “not a default.” While sculptors “like the conflict with material,” she says, what she's doing is “very tricky,” a “journey to find that shape” of selfhood. She was trained in painting, and feels like if she is ever to articulate her identity fully, it will only happen armed with the tools she is most adept at using.
Among those tools is literature. Williams enjoys reading novels, and their effect on her makes it into the work—“I move through the world looking for signs,” she says. She is always seeking something onto which to map her experience, that choice metaphor or relatable character to help her wrap her arms around difficult moments.
Naomi and Ruth: No Beginning and No End, 44.5in x 32in, Oil on Canvas, 2019.
When I spoke with Williams, we talked about the healing power of art as it operates at a remove and gives us a vantage from which we can view the “whole of it”—not necessarily the “bigger picture,” but the edges of our pain, the enormity of something not quite distilled, but manageable. That’s what art is. We need metaphor to survive, to bring ourselves out of ourselves and into a space of comprehension. “I am a painter towards the world,” Williams insists, and in this statement I hear her acknowledge a duty as an artist to transform her pain into relief for others.
To Williams's practical explanation for why she paints rather than sculpts, I will add a more poetic one. The artist’s red bodies are deeply felt, heavy with the weight of their experience. A sculpture of these bodies would be physically heavy—a literal translation of their being. Within the metaphorical language of painting, however, Williams allows us a leap from presence into meaning. Her paintings embody the distance she finds so valuable. Perhaps that is the “shape” she is seeking: the empty spaces of separation which grants us the ability to see the whole of it.
More on Brittney here.
The artist will be in an upcoming group exhibition with Newchild Gallery in Antwerp in October as well as a solo exhibition with Mamoth Gallery in London in November.
Cecilia Beaven
The artist Cecilia Beaven
For Cecilia Beaven, drawing is more of a philosophy than a method of rendering. It is present across her work no matter the media, an oeuvre which expands to include animation, painting, and—most recently—tapestry weaving, all of which are defined by the same colorful, energetic bulbosity, making the work unmistakably her own.
When I ask Beaven how she maintains this cartoony sensibility throughout, she claims it is a “condition” from which she suffers. Drawing is just in her bones, impossible to purge from her hand. She’s been doing it since she was a kid growing up in Mexico City. It’s her “way of thinking,” what she goes as far as to say is her “way of interacting with reality.”
This might explain why she herself—in cartoon form, of course—appears often in her work, whether it's in finding herself swallowed by an enormous fish or befriending a giant snail. (Okay, obviously what she depicts is not reality reality, but these are metaphors, people!) “I would often draw myself to be reflective of my consciousness,” she says of this Cecilia-esque cartoon’s origins. “It eventually became a character… I really like the idea that I can build a world for myself to inhabit and literalize it for the character.”
Though her alter-ego has been known to perform fantastically (in one instance, even wrestling with an alligator), she notes that drawing is “very honest as a medium. Every decision that you take stays in the paper... Every mark stays there. You can see the whole process of thinking,” whereas painting is “about the illusion.” How, then, do we reconcile the frankness of the medium with the fantasy of its content, especially when she merges the two, bringing her drawing philosophy into the realm of painting?
Though Beaven has tried in the past to be “painterly,” she has not been successful in purging cartoons from her canvases. She brings the same honesty to her paintings, staying true to one of the main tenets of her drawing practice. To maintain this integrity, her method is very specific, almost formulaic. She begins by pouring and mixing paints directly on the canvas. “I think of that as setting problems for myself that I will solve later. Then I start to build layers that are more planned that respond to the first problems that I established.” She continues with “layer on top of layer on top of layer.” It is the final layer, however, that her impulse towards the graphic re-emerges. “That one is completely planned,” she says, as with the last layer, “I’m going to be under control completely.” The finishing touch is often matte black paint. These additions make sense of the quasi-surrealist foundations of the works by foregrounding her frank reaction, unambiguously in black. This method strikes me not dissimilar to the diaries she began after college, in which she drew to process change. In both cases, her line was drawn as a method of curbing the chaos she encountered (only in her paintings, of course, that chaos is self-made).
The black planes, Beaven notes, are also a nod to the rabbit holes and portals common in Looney Toons and Tex Avery cartoons—an alternate dimension that does not abide by the laws of physics. “I like that they could be read as depth, but also floating in front, but also holes and blurbs and all these different things at the same time,” the artist explains. In other words, she may have solved the “problem” she set for herself, but she by no means has answered all the questions.
While her work is deeply inspired by comics, they are not immediately recognizable as such. (There are very few instances in her work where she includes text—speech bubbles or otherwise.) Even when Beaven’s works are contained on a single canvas (which she tellingly calls a “frame”), there is a narrative. Take her monumental self-portrait, in which she appears contorted, limbs twisting to fit themselves into the 8’x5’ frame. Painted soon after her arrival in Chicago three years ago, Beaven talks about it as her reaction to having to “fit into a studio practice... feeling uncomfortable, bending in an impossible way. Confined in a space.”
Because I never can resist a dig at Picasso (though I do love his blue period), I chose to interpret it another way, in relation to one of the Art Institute of Chicago’s most famous paintings, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, who cranes his neck in parallel to the top of the canvas, as if he had to duck to fit into the picture. I think of Beaven contorting herself to fit into the canon, trying to find ways in which that “cartoony sensibility” can be integrated into the realm of fine art. Her figure’s wide eyes (as well as star shaped butthole!), however, make it clear that she is not willing to compromise herself to fit in—after all, she’s only ever one pen stroke away from escaping into another world.
More on Cecilia here.
Shenequa
The artist SHENEQUA in front of her loom
The textile artist SHENEQUA grew up around Caribbean and Black women, and when you’re around these women, you’re around hair. Her aunt owned a Black hair salon, and the artist recalls that her “hair would be done every other week in different styles.” The constant presence of her mother, sister, aunts, and cousins (as well as childhood memories in the salon) is at the center of her work. “I’ve always been inspired by the women in my life,” she says, “Just thinking about how they would handle themselves or how they would carry themselves.”
When she moved from Miami to Kansas City to attend college, she was away from her family for the first time. To distract herself from the distance, Brooks began to weave, finding it filled the space that they left. “I always say there’s a pun between weaving with weave,” the artist notes, as if she replaced braiding with textiles, trading one style of handiwork for another. It wasn’t long, however, before she found she could do both at once.
Warm & Tender. Photo by Kendra Powers.
Early on in college she questioned her professor’s assertion that you can weave with anything. “Yeah, right,” she thought, but she tried anyway, becoming a weaver of an unconventional material: synthetic hair, which she treats as she does the simple cotton threads that constitute the foundations of her weavings. Hair has its unique properties, of course, but it also can do what thread does, just as thread can do what hair does. They are similar enough to work together, but different enough to enhance each other. Brooks braids hair and then weaves those braids as if they were threads, twists cotton into hair curlers, and leaves hair loose as fringe—all within the structure the loom provides. What results are stunningly intricate tapestries whose various techniques blur to create textures warm with human presence.
By merging traditional African and Black hairstyles she saw growing up with weaving, she treats the two as if they were words from the same language. Take the braids trailing at the bottom of Warm and Tender, which are tightly braided in black cotton thread. By finishing the piece with braids of threads rather than of hair, SHENEQUA acknowledges the techniques of hair styling as legitimately employable by the medium of weaving. In Blonde Plaits, the orderly patterning at the top of the tapestry denatures into a tangle of braids. Both weft and braids are made of synthetic hair, proving the material can do double duty, capable of forming both structure and its undoing. She establishes both traditions on equal footing, capable of bleeding into each other. These distinctions might not seem to matter much at first (a fiber is a fiber, after all), but they are the way in which SHENEQUA is able to create works that have life within them, rather than the feeling of being spent, dead things.
Blonde Plaits. Photo by Sergio Mantilla.
Hair is not an unknown material in art, of course. The Victorians brought it to its macabre apogee in the fashioning of momentos of the dead—preserved under glass—which seem to have gathered dust the moment they were made, while the 50 Women Project’s own Natalie Ball uses wigs in her practice to connote society’s racialized expectations. But Brooks doesn’t necessarily use hair for its symbolic resonance, but rather for its role in reference to human relationships.
This vitality defines the way SHENEQUA speaks of her works, referencing them as if they were individuals. The artist even admits to calling her loom a “she,” as well as her textiles her “children” (“I birth a lot of kids,” she says), an analogy that is perhaps unsurprising as the development of a weaving can often feel like it has a life of its own. As a textile is being woven, the weaver winds it onto a roll at the front of the loom. This obscures part of the textile, making it impossible to view in its entirety at one time. “I only have a snapshot of what I’m making that day,” she explains. It’s not “until it’s done and I unravel it and I’m like, ‘I did that?’” I may not be a mother, but I’ve certainly heard a parent or two exclaim the same thing in reference to their progeny!
Detail of Blonde Plaits. Photo by Sergio Mantilla.
Historically, the making of textiles has been surrounded by life. In the Andes, where cooperatives are common, weaving is not a solitary activity. Rather, women gather to weave and often collaborate throughout the process, from cleaning just shorn wool to dressing the loom. It is social, and children are often close by. SHENEQUA mirrors this communion in several performance pieces, staged around the significance of Black women gathering at the hair salon. She personally finds meaning in having her sister T’keyeh Brooks do her hair. “Every time she would braid my hair we would actually have a good conversation,” Brooks explains. By uniting weaving and braiding in her work, the artist draws an elegant line between these traditions—similar in their duration, intricacy, and intimacy—as well as honors the bonds women build in spaces of creative activity across cultures.
In the hands of SHENEQUA, weaving—a millennia old tradition—is given new life. By merging two parallel traditions she is able to foreground weaving as fundamental to our social fabric, all the while elevating the artistry of hairdressing. There have been few since the 1960s who have innovated in the realm of textile art as significantly and successfully.
More on SHENEQUA here.