Claire Oliver Gallery is thrilled to announce our return to Chicago for a long-overdue in-person celebration of art. At this inception of EXPO CHICAGO, the Gallery will bring major new works by artists Gio Swaby, Robert Peterson, Adebunmi Gbadebo, and Stan Squirewell. These artists whose practices vary but share a commonality in their desire to reframe the often-politicized Black body.
In addition to these powerful voices the Gallery will present a special exhibition, "The Lost Negatives," the works of photographer Jeffery Henson Scales. Historically significant, culturally cool, and artistically framed, the works transcend the view into the artist's unique vantage point to history. The exhibition features photographs from the 1960s including Henson Scales’ earliest forays as a photographer during the electrifying summer of 1967 when, at age 13, he toured the Midwest to see relatives in Chicago. As a Black teenager, he saw the poverty and oppression of Northern Black communities and when he returned to Oakland, CA became immersed in photographing the milieu of the Black Panther movement in Northern California. These images chart the emergence of his awakening as a documentary photographer as well as a Black man in a pivotal moment in the 20th century that echoes today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
