When viewing the sketched topics of Miami artist Chris Friday, no eyes meet your gaze as you stroll round “Good Times,” the artist’s solo exhibition on view by April 2 at Oolite Arts’ Lincoln Road gallery. The topics within the intimate portraits of Black identification hold to themselves in acts of painful storytelling, joyful dancing, and home beautification — they’re being and residing in their very own world, detached to the viewer’s presence.
Assembled by Laura Novoa, an impartial curator and humanities administrator, “Good Times” pays reverential homage to the Seventies CBS sitcom of the identical identify by the artist’s intricately detailed chalk sketches on archival black paper.
In the exhibition’s brochure, Novoa recounts the present’s genesis by studio visits with Friday, conferences she describes as nonlinear conversational vignettes. A printed, chat-like dialogue between curator and artist contains moments just like the second when Friday marvels, “Are these bodies twerking or catching the Holy Ghost?” and Novoa responds, “Lmaooo. Maybe they’re one and the same!”
Ernie Barnes, The Sugar Shack, 1976, acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas/© Ernie Barnes Family Trust
It’s clear that Novoa’s curatorial eye served to bolster and problem the inspiration of Friday’s apply.
Coupled with pops of coloration, ceramic, and textual content, “Good Times” provides its topics the authority to speak in confidence to the viewer no matter they want. That stands in stark distinction to the nostalgic depiction of a Black household residing in a Chicago housing venture, which hundreds of thousands of Americans tuned in each week to look at.
Appearing within the credit of “Good Times” is the portray that ignited Friday’s drive towards an exhibition crammed with Black pleasure and leisure: Ernie Barnes’ 1976 work, The Sugar Shack.
“I discovered inspiration within the work of Ernie Barnes. Particularly two work: The Sugar Shack and Friendly Friendship Baptist Church characteristic Black figures in expressive dancing movement,” Friday explains. “Absent of iconography like crosses or wine bottles that signified both the membership or the church, I felt like the way in which the figures moved was so comparable that the figures have been nearly interchangeable and capable of exist in both surroundings or each concurrently. Figuring out find out how to carry the same ambiguity and celebratory power into the exhibition with out pointing too concretely at anybody purpose, period, or place, led to all the environmental coloration selections, and the multidisciplinary strategy to how the work was created and ultimately displayed.”
Friday’s blueprint as a Southern Black artist comes throughout within the duality of laughing by the ache whereas sanctifying the sacredness of peaceable moments in Black life. In a young video piece entitled Comfort Food, a classic TV set is used to inform the story of Friday’s Mississippi-born grandmother and the problem that got here with being raised within the Jim Crow South. While trying down and vocalizing the scars, Friday’s grandmother chuckles all through the storytelling — an earnest admission {that a} sense of self-mockery is required to relive these hard-to-hear experiences.
Throughout the exhibition, inside jokes populate the highest of the viewer’s direct line of sight, weaving handwritten cursive textual content. The ambiguous phrases are decoded to be messages solely understood by the Black group: “And then, they told us to relax.” That phrase is juxtaposed with a haloed feminine determine, considered from the again, her pure hair adorned with jewel-like barrettes that cascade down and pile onto the ground.
Novoa particulars the colour selections as “placing the quotidian in a divine context, elevating the figure to a sacred position.” The phrases mirror the humor required to outlive day by day microaggressions in in any other case mundane moments.
Much like the ironies embedded in the theme song of 1974’s Good Times — “Temporary layoffs/Good times/Easy credit rip-offs/Good times/Scratchin’ and survivin’/Good times/Hangin’ in and jivin’/ Good times” — the double meaning carries the weight of laughing through the pain. Whether it’s the perils of gun violence or the daily inability to avoid unsolicited beauty advice, Friday wants the viewer to understand the varied manifestations of “good times” for Blackness as a collective culture, a sole individual, and by extension, one’s own personal understanding of the “not-so-good times” of life, and humor as a coping mechanism.
When asked about how she “turns away” toward realms of privacy to practice her own form of resting, Friday says, “Funny enough, there is still the small thought in the back of my mind that my works will also be read as stereotypical depictions of Black bodies — laziness instead of leisure. But I think there is something so ironic about the hundreds of hours it can take to bring into existence a Black body at rest; something poetic in the way I work to manifest, through art, what I fail to achieve for my own body in waking life. My work reflects a desire to rest, and the same desire gets me through the work.”
Chris Friday: “Good Times.” On view by April 2, at Oolite Arts, 924 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach; 305-674-8278; oolitearts.org. Monday by Sunday midday to five p.m.