Exceptional-height African-American male.

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a 1991 piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a spilled pile of candy. 

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) represents a specific body, that of Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’ partner who died of AIDS in 1991. This piece of art serves as an “allegorical portrait,” of Laycock’s life. 

The pile of candy consists of commercially available, shiny wrapped confections. The physical form of the work changes depending on the way it is installed. The work ideally weighs 175 pounds (79 kg) at installation, which is the weight of Ross Laycock when healthy. 

Visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from the work. Gonzalez-Torres grew up Roman Catholic and taking a candy is a symbolic act of communion, but instead of taking a piece of Christ, the participant partakes of the “sweetness” of Ross. As the patrons take candy, they are participants in the art. Each piece of candy consumed is like the illness that ate away at Ross’s body.  

Multiple art museums around the world have installed this piece.

Per Gonzalez-Torres’ parameters, it is up to the museum how often the pile is restocked, or whether it is restocked at all. Whether, instead, it is permitted to deplete to nothing. If the pile is replenished, it is metaphorically granting perpetual life to Ross.

In 1991, public funding of the arts and public funding for AIDS research were both hot issues. HIV-positive male artists were being targeted for censorship. Part of the logic of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is you can’t censor free candy without looking ridiculous, and the ease of replicability of the piece in other museums makes it virtually indestructible.

Left: old wall text. Right: new wall text as of 9/28/22.

Gonna put this over here too.

It’s Life as I See it: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940 - 1980 (2021)

 "Between the 1940s and 1980s, Chicago’s Black press—from The Chicago Defender to the Negro Digest to self-published pamphlets—was home to some of the best cartoonists in America. 

Kept out of the pages of white-owned newspapers, Black cartoonists found space to address the joys, the horrors, and the everyday realities of Black life in America. 

From Jay Jackson’s anti-racist time travel adventure serial Bungleton Green, to Morrie Turner’s radical mixed-race strip Dinky Fellas, to the Afrofuturist comics of Yaoundé Olu and Turtel Onli, to National Book Award–winning novelist Charles Johnson’s blistering and deeply funny gag cartoons, this is work that has for far too long been excluded and overlooked. Also featuring the work of Tom Floyd, Seitu Hayden, Jackie Ormes, and Grass Green, this anthology accompanies the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition Chicago Comics: 1960 to Now, and is an essential addition to the history of American comics.”

by Dan Nadel  (Editor), Ronald Wimberly (Afterword), Charles Johnson (Contributor), Kerry James Marshall (Designer)

Get it here 

postcard c1910

The World Of Becca Blake

—if a “conservative” controls the presidency, then every executive order is constitutional.

—if “conservatives” control one or both houses of Congress, “bipartisanship” consists entirely of doing whatever that “conservative” branch of Congress demands.

—if “conservatives” control the Court, every ruling is constitutional.

—if “conservatives” don’t control one or more of these, nothing the “wrong” branch does is constitutional or moral.