New Arts Incubator show explores Dan Ryan displacement, intersecting identity

Zoe Pharo, staff writer
Nov 15, 2024

For those who grew up on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1950s, the image of a makeshift fence made from mismatched front doors stretching two blocks down State Street may have left a lasting impression.

It certainly did for Candace Hunter, a Chicago installation artist who remembers driving past it once with her father as a child. It wasn’t until years later that someone explained what she had seen—the doors, she learned, “hid the detritus of the homes of the people who were evacuated because of the Dan Ryan.”

Construction on the 16-mile Dan Ryan Expressway continued into the early 1960s. A highly destructive infrastructure project, the Dan Ryan cut directly through South Side neighborhoods to create easier suburban access to the city. It displaced more than 81,000 people, as did other urban renewal efforts on Chicago’s South and West Sides.

Despite making up only 23% of the city’s population at the time, Black residents accounted for 64% of those displaced.

Those were people whose parents or grandparents might have been sharecroppers and worked their fingers to the bone to own property, and then the city and federal government took those properties,” Hunter said.

The doors and stories of those forced out are the subject of a series of works by Hunter featured in “Remembering Ghosts,” a new exhibition at Washington Park’s Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Created as part of a 10-month fellowship, a joint program of the U. of C.'s Arts + Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, Hunter’s works join those of artists Ayanah Moor and Johnaé Strong in a haunting show about lost histories, memory and identity.

Some of Hunter’s works try to jog South Siders’ memories. In a corner of the gallery, a fence of doors replicated on fabric hangs on a curtain wall behind a pile of Samsonite suitcases, books, a doll and a bowler hat – a few of the items a family may have taken with them when they were forced to evacuate their home.

On another wall, entire doors and windows dating to the 1930s and 1940s recreate the entryways to the kinds of homes that were bulldozed.

When Hunter began to research the totality of the displacement, she found little information. Looking through archival photographs, she primarily saw images of places like the infamous slums along Federal Street – eliminating blight was part of the rationale given for expressways and other urban renewal projects – rather than documentations of the two- and three-flat homes that were also destroyed.

“People had houses. So where were those neighborhoods?” she questioned. “Urban renewal (said), ‘It was a slum and we had to destroy it.’ That’s not even close to the entire truth.”

So Hunter began “Memory Teas,” events where she invited eight to 10 South Siders her age or older, roughly 70 to 85 years old, to her studio to share their memories of this time together.

“It was important to me that I start doing this right now, because those people who were affected, if they were adults they’re long gone. If they’re teens, they’re older than I am,” Hunter said. “We’re losing that moment, either through age or dementia.”

Some had no memory of the doors or had only heard about the destruction; others were displaced from their homes as children. Hunter also learned of the businesses and neighborhood institutions that were built over. Some places, she said, were raised on stilts and relocated to a new neighborhood, including Rev. Arthur M. Brazier’s the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn.

Hunter, who also works in collages, painting, performance art, has said she likes to weave stories together using appropriated materials. A three-panel collage work also on display does just that, exploring the deferred dreams and resilience of those subject to displacement. In one, the skeleton of a Chicago-style back porch constructed from newspaper clippings floats over a blue and black gradient. In another, cutouts of Ebony magazines from the time period form the window pane and brickwork of a building. In the last, rows of red squares invoking Amanda Williams’ “Redefining Redlining” trickle out of formation.

“As a Black person in the history of Blackness in this country, we’ve always had dreams. There are entities and people who would want to shatter them, and so we turn around and make a new dream,” Hunter said. “We would not be here if we allowed people to squash and destroy.”

Hunter has exhibited work in a few local venues this past year, among them the South Shore Nature Sanctuary and the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC). An avid Octavia Butler reader, Hunter’s immersive solo show at HPAC paid homage to Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and The Parable of the Sower.

Alenson Pan-Africanism, Blackness and Queerness

Elsewhere in the Arts Incubator, Johnaé Strong, a video artist in the exhibition, approaches memory from a different lens. A writer, filmmaker, and organizer, Strong delves in materiality and time in her work, intertwining film and digital mediums.

Three screens display excerpts from her film “Black Things Today: Proof of Concept,” a project that documents the work of alumni of the Betty Shabazz International Charter School (BSICS) “Village” to carry on the legacy of their Pan-African upbringing in Chicago.

“The idea for this came from my childhood growing up in East Cleveland, later moving around the Midwest and changing schools. It comes from being a child who celebrated Kwanzaa and learned about Pan Africanism and the Black Power Movement from a young age,” Strong writes in an artist statement. “I’m exploring themes of community, intergenerational love and healing, and the beauty of Black girls.”

In front of the three screens sit mementos and other small objects – a funeral program, the Pan-African flag, and a booklet on her own family’s history.

In another room, visual artist Ayanah Moor displays a series of color-blocked and collaged paintings in the studio in which she worked during the residency. Her approach to painting, she said in her artist statement, centers on the poetics of Blackness and queerness.

“Through social abstraction, I explore multiple interpretations of these concepts, questioning how Blackness is rendered and how its boundaries shift,” Moor writes in her artist statement. “My visual field includes representations of Black women and femmes to convey same-gender love, desire, and joy.”

Moor, who has exhibited in permanent collections worldwide and participated in group shows at places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Studio Museum in Harlem, wrote that her work often focuses on the formal elements of painting and integrating print material, creating a tension between the two.

“This visual approach may appear fluid and evolving, rather than fixed and concrete – a queerness of possibility,” she said.

“Remembering Ghosts” is open at the Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd., through December 14.