Reading Room Office Hours with Ron Carter: The Robert Taylor Homes
Drop by for a conversation about the Robert Taylor Homes with Ron Carter, a former resident and community organizer.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
A Love Letter to My Mother
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Erica with the Pearl Earring (detail), 2015, Black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel, oil paint, paint stick, and silver oil pastel on Coventry Vellum Paper, 25 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches (64.8 x 64.6 cm). Collection of Rhona Hoffman. © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
-
Special Exhibits Gallery, 2nd Floor
- Free
- Press Release (PDF)
In Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s first solo museum show in Chicago, visitors are invited to consider humanity in all of its complexity by processing our lived experiences through a lens of artistic innovation.
Alongside the artist’s works on canvas and paper, Nathaniel Mary Quinn: A Love Letter to My Mother includes a Robert Taylor Homes living room designed from memory to conjure the artist’s family apartment circa 1984.
Anchored by the recreated living room, the exhibition explores Quinn’s formative years growing up in public housing, which he describes as “my first studio.” There, with his mother’s encouragement, he covered the walls of their family apartment with his childhood sketches. To create fresh canvases for her son, she would wash away the drawings, and Quinn would begin anew.
Today, in his collage-like composite portraits, integrated with his “paint-drawing” technique, and derived from both personal and found sources, Quinn probes the relationship between visual memory and perception, exploring the rainbow-like spectrum of humanity. While Quinn’s practice is diverse in its exploration of various subject matter, tender remembrances of his mother’s death and his separation from his family remain a compositional touchstone in his works that feature richly complex portraits of people met throughout his life, including powerful Black women and community members bent on survival. Fragments of images drawn from online sources, fashion magazines, seventeenth-century portraiture, and photographs come together to form hybrid faces and figures that evoke the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter.
About the artist
Nathaniel Mary Quinn was born in 1977 in Chicago, Illinois, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Quinn received an MFA from New York University in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 2023. Quinn’s work can be found in major institutional collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, amongst others. Quinn’s practice operates within a world of visual metaphor, in which he mobilizes identifiable forms and features to reveal aspects of character and the human essence.
Photo: Kyle Dorosz
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Select works
Related events
Support
Lead support for Nathaniel Mary Quinn: A Love Letter to My Mother and related programming is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and Gagosian.
Special thanks to Rhona Hoffman for her support in making this exhibit possible.