Whatever You Think I Am, I’m Not – Out of Easy Reach Review
“Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. [Art] says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this;…

“Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. [Art] says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself” – Jeanette Winterson1
Ayanah Moor’s Good News makes me smile. It was the first thing I saw walking into the “Out of Easy Reach” exhibit at the DePaul Art Museum this summer. A grid of eight-by-three screen printed sheets of paper showing cream colored text set against a black background. The first reads, “Chicago: Chicago has a lot of professional Black women. But a lot of the women just don’t have their heads together. They try to be professional, but they forget that it takes a well-rounded life to be happy. – Danielle Thomas.” 23 more sheets list women’s candid remarks on the dating scene for women loving women in different cities across the U.S. Instantly there is a sense of a queer satire — taking the viewer’s knowledge (physical, visual, and sensual) of relationships and sex and gender, and transforming them. The wall text tells us that the writing in the piece originates from an Ebony article entitled What They Say About the Men in Their Towns, and Moor has feminized the male gendered pronouns and words in the responses.
Whatever you think I am, I’m not.
This edict seems to be at the heart of “Out of Easy Reach,” a cross-institutional exhibit covering the myriad contributions of Black and Latina women artists to the genre of abstract art. It is filled with shapeshifters, apparitions, the calm and the storm dancing in and out with each other.
What best to illustrate the mutability of this exhibit than Fight The Power, a work that does its disappearing dance before your very eyes? Here, Maren Hassinger printed sheets of paper with the titular phrase, then shredded, crumpled, and wrapped them around each other. The call to action is wound in and around itself, looking simultaneously weathered and secure, frustrated and triumphant (as it hangs “above eye-level, like a frieze in a Greek temple”2). In the end (where we started), the words are not even visible.
![Image: Maren Hassinger, Fight the Power, 2016 [installation view]. A panel of tightly rolled papers extending from the wall. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.](http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Fight-the-power.jpg)
Image: Maren Hassinger, Fight the Power, 2016 [installation view]. A panel of tightly rolled papers extending from the wall. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
![Image: Bethany Collins, Southern Review 1985 (Special Edition), 2014-15 [installation view]. 64 sheets fill a 13x5 panel with the lower-rightmost square removed. Each sheet is filled with blacked-out squares covering whatever text might appear on the page. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.](http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Southern-review.jpg)
Image: Bethany Collins, Southern Review 1985 (Special Edition), 2014-15 [installation view]. 64 sheets fill a 13×5 panel with the lower-rightmost square removed. Each sheet is filled with blacked-out squares covering whatever text might appear on the page. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
![Image: Abigail DeVille, I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me from Nobody Knows My Name, 2015 [installation view]. A collage of shattered glass and imagery covers a gutted television leaning against the corner of a room. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.](http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/I-am-invisible-understand-simply-because-people-refuse-to-see-me.jpg)
Image: Abigail DeVille, I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me from Nobody Knows My Name, 2015 [installation view]. A collage of shattered glass and imagery covers a gutted television leaning against the corner of a room. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
The artists in this exhibit evade simplification, many using themes of what is lost in translation, or even further, what can never be communicated. Two of Caroline Kent’s paintings, with their air of mysticality and unfulfilled symmetry, hang in a separate room. They contain extensive blackness as a background, contrasted sometimes sharply, sometimes gently, by geometric motifs from the artist’s imagination. According to conversations between the artist and Mia Lopez, Kent’s inspiration comes partly from a childhood of watching foreign films, observing the dissonance between what is said and what is read in captions.
![Image: Steffani Jemison, Same Time, 2016 [installation view]. Two shapes resembling thick-bordered ovals on a panel attached to a wall, with a second panel on the ground with another, similar shape and two thick slightly curved black lines. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.](http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Same-Time.jpg)
Image: Steffani Jemison, Same Time, 2016 [installation view]. Two shapes resembling thick-bordered ovals on a panel attached to a wall, with a second panel on the ground with another, similar shape and two thick slightly curved black lines. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
![Image: Brenna Youngblood, Untitled, 2012 [installation view]. Several everyday objects, including a flattened 30-pack of beer, are painted white and plastered onto a white canvas. A red soda can tab linked to a long red line stands out. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.](http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Untitled.jpg)
Image: Brenna Youngblood, Untitled, 2012 [installation view]. Several everyday objects, including a flattened 30-pack of beer, are painted white and plastered onto a white canvas. A red soda can tab linked to a long red line stands out. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
Out of Easy Reach presented Chicago with ghost stories in the form of abstraction: artists whose work remained fluidly self-contradictory, and asked us to do the same.
Out of Easy Reach was shown at UIC Gallery 400, the DePaul Art Museum, and Rebuild Foundation through August 5, 2018.
Works Referenced
1Wachtel, Eleanor, and Jeanette Winterson. “Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel.” Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel, CBC Radio, Sept. 1994.
2Wall text for Fight the Power, by Maren Hassinger. Out of Easy Reach, 26 Apr.-5 Aug. 2018, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago.
3Solange Knowles. “Locked in Closets.” True.
4Widholm, Julie Rodrigues. “Brenna Youngblood.” Out of Easy Reach, edited by Allison Glenn, University of Chicago Press, 2018.
5Chang, Lan Samantha. Hunger: a Novella and Stories. W.W. Norton & Co., 2009.
Featured Image: Ayanah Moor, Good News, 2011 [installation view]. 24 black panels span the corner of a white room. White text covers each panel, unreadable from this distance. Image courtesy of DePaul Art Museum.
Kanyinsola Anifowoshe is a 17 year old Nigerian-American who is a senior at Whitney Young high school. She is usually thinking about the architecture of justice, radical hope, and building new art histories. She is editor-in-chief of Wahala Zine, a platform for the creative work of young people in the Nigerian diaspora, and host of The Now podcast where she interviews young creatives. She is also a co-organizer with Fempowerment Chicago and Youth for Black Lives, organizations intended to amplify the power of young people within activism.