Robert Earl Paige “Power to the People”
Salon 94 Freemans
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Salon 94 Design presents Robert Earl Paige: Power to the People, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City, curated by Duro Olowu. The show includes Paiges’s textile design, glazed ceramics, collages and etchings. Olowu’s interventions reflect the artist’s myriad of artistic influences and approach to making.
Robert Earl Paige (b. 1936) remembers growing up in a city mapped by racial color lines: “When you talk about keeping me ‘in the loop’, you’re talking about downtown Chicago… and we were not permitted in downtown Chicago.” He lived this discrimination, but he refused to be defined by it. Nurtured by an innate sense of beauty and the creative energies of the South Side, Paige has spent his career creating the world he wants to see with a design practice that has become his own personal Gesamtkunstwerk — a ‘total work of art’ encompassing visual art, textile design, and, ultimately, life itself. For Paige beauty is inherently political, a means of overcoming the pain of slavery and segregation; a pathway to liberation for all who seek it.
Paige lives and works on the South Side of Chicago. His body of work is informed by influences as diverse as African American tradition in decorative arts (including blankets, quilts, graveyard ornaments 19th and early 20th century architecture of “Shotgun” houses), African art and textiles, Jazz music, and Bauhaus.
Media
Schedule
from September 16, 2022 to October 29, 2022
Opening Reception on 2022-09-15 from 17:00 to 20:00