Join us to celebrate the release of South Side photographer Rose Blouin’s To Washington Park, With Love, a vibrant collection of stunning black and white photographs capturing the events, people, and landscape of Washington Park during the summer of 1987.
Rose Blouin will be in conversation with writer and UChicago professor Eve L. Ewing, architecture critic Lee Bey, and journalist and political commentator Salim Muwakkil, moderated by UChicago professor and Arts + Public Life director Adrienne Brown.
With great intimacy, even amid a crowd of hundreds, Blouin’s sharp eye finds summer scenes familiar to anyone who frequents the park, and returns them to us so that we are compelled to see these sites and this era anew. These images allow us to see a conversation unfolding, about the relationship between the community of Washington Park and the land itself. With a foreword by Adrienne Brown and Eve L. Ewing, as well as essays by Lee Bey, Salim Muwakkil, Tracie D. Hall, Romi Crawford, and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neil, the book represents an affectionate profile of Chicago’s Black community in a place where we continue to come together for recreation, relaxation, and celebration.
Books, notecards and mounted prints will be available for purchase in the lobby. Presented by Arts + Public Life and Haymarket Books.
BIO:
Rose Blouin has created documentary and fine art photography since 1980. Blouin’s work has been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including Woman Made Gallery, Nicole Gallery, The South Side Community Art Center, Artemesia Gallery, The North Suburban Fine Arts Center, Evanston Arts Center, and the State of Illinois Art Gallery. Her work has received awards in juried exhibitions including Tall Grass Arts “From Earth” exhibition, Black Creativity (Museum of Science and Industry), University of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts “Chicago Jazz: A Photographer’s View,” DuSable Museum Annual Art Fair, and the Milwaukee Inner City Art Fair. Her photographs have been published on the covers of South Side Stories (City Stoop Press), Columbia Poetry Review (Columbia College Chicago), and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors by Haki Madhubuti (Lotus Press). Photos of Gwendolyn Brooks are included in Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (Third World Press, 1991) and Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating The Writing Of Gwendolyn Brooks (Curbside Splendor, 2017.) Blouin has had solo shows at the South Side Community Art Center and at the Ferguson Gallery of Concordia University featuring photographs from South Africa. Most recently, Blouin mounted a solo exhibition of photographs from Havana at The New Studio in Evanston (2016). She is also a founding member of Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African-American women artists.