Hyde Park Youth Artists Show Promontory Point Paintings in Citywide Exhibition
Revelers in formal dress mixed with young artists, eating hors d’oeuvres from black platters and listening to speeches at a massive three-story gallery opening at the downtown art education center, Marwen.
By Morley Musick [Originally posted on Hyde Park Herald]
Revelers in formal dress mixed with young artists, eating hors d’oeuvres from black platters and listening to speeches at a massive three-story gallery opening at the downtown art education center, Marwen.
Paintings by Hyde Park youth artists Via McEwen and Asha A. Edwards were given pride of place in the Oct. 17 show, which featured more than 400 works from more than 150 young artists. Like the other artists whose work was on display in the annual Art Fair event, McEwen and Edwards had completed years of coursework at Marwen, a nonprofit that offers free art classes to predominantly low-income students throughout the city.
Sixteen-year-old McEwen, a lifelong Hyde Parker and a student at Jones College Prep, painted various languorous scenes in warm blues, oranges and violets. The first and largest painting showed the artist up close beside her girlfriend, whose hair covers a portion of Via’s face; the second represented a garage near a Philly cheesesteak restaurant that the artist likes in Philadelphia; the third showed a woman with her eyes closed; and the fourth, a nude model reclining on a yellow chair, made during a figure painting class that Via had taken at Marwen the previous year.
Each of the works is suffused with calm and intimacy, as was an older painting of hers that had been printed on Valentine’s Day cards available on the first floor of the show.
“It shows our first date,” Via said, explaining the card, which shows her and her girlfriend reclining on a hammock facing north at Promontory Point. “We crocheted rice pillows together on the hammock because it was chilly out. It was a wonderful day.”
Via and her mother, Tessa McEwen, said that the neighborhood had inspired her work in numerous ways, beginning from when she was a child.
“We went to the beach by the Point, and drew paintings in the sand with natural materials,” Tessa McEwen said. “We drew with sticks of wood, and used a Snickers bar too.”
Tessa McEwen explained that Via came from a family of artists — she herself had wanted to study painting but decided to switch majors out of economic concerns, while her brother was a graffiti artist in New York and New Jersey.
“I’ve always loved art since I was little,” Via said. “But I don’t have a studio at home, or oil paints, or the space or the money, so being able to study at Marwen was really special.”
Via said she likes to visit the Osaka Garden in Jackson Park for inspiration, and that she hopes to continue pursuing art for the rest of her life.
Hyde Park also had a formative impact on Edwards’ art, the 23-year-old said. The artist grew up between Hyde Park and Bronzeville. Her work represented sunsets as seen from Promontory Point. The first was in black and red, and the second — made after she had listened to the singer Frank Ocean while out on a walk — was white, yellow, orange and pink.
“When I was at The Point it was so eerie how it seemed like the moon would rise as if it was coming out of the lake. And it would get really, really orange, and I have never seen that anywhere else, except in Chicago, and I just thought it was beautiful,” Edwards said.
The geography of the neighborhood is not the only thing that has influenced her work, Edwards said. It was also its social dynamics, both good and bad.
“Hyde Park almost radicalized me because a former alderman and UChicago bulldozed our community garden on the tip of Washington Park,” Edwards said. “And then I learned about University of Chicago and University of Chicago police, and I spoke at a few protests in 2020 and 2022 about how Chicago was exploiting and taking away property of Black people.”
It was also in Hyde Park that Edwards said she first was exposed to the activist organization Assata’s Daughters, from whom she derived an abolitionist and anti-capitalist outlook. These ideas are present in a digital homage Edwards made to the activist and poet bell hooks, shown next to a quote from hooks about war as a means of appropriating wealth.
Edwards also noted the formative impact that a Marwen-sponsored free art trip to Maine had on her art: “It was my first time seeing the ocean and first time going on a plane over Lake Michigan and my first time on the island. And I was like, ‘Wow, this was all free.’ I got exposed to salt water and I got over my fear of dogs. But most importantly, I just loved all the art we got to experiment with. There was no expectation and they just let us be in tune with nature.”
Read the full article at Hyde Park Herald
