Cosmo Whyte: Solo Exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago
Charcoal and acrylic on paper
60‑¼ x 87‑½ in. (153 x 222.3 cm)
Collection of JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey
Work by Cosmo Whyte (MFA ’15) is featured in The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone, a solo exhibition on view at The Arts Club of Chicago through April 2, 2025.
In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based and Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte situates the architectural archives of his late father as the structural ground for an intervention and interrogation into the spaces and forms of diasporic protest, spectacle, and witnessing. Presented by The Arts Club of Chicago, in The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone the artist reformulates photojournalistic images onto materials ranging from drawings to hand-painted beaded curtains and steel framings of unrealized structures. In so doing, Whyte poetically asks “what makes a witness? And what does it mean to have become one?”
Jen Torwudzo-Stroh reviewed the exhibition for Hyperallergic, writing: “Memories, good and bad, are imprinted on our souls and woven into our DNA: To witness a moment is to have it become a part of your identity. When meaningful moments are shared among a group, they become integrated into a communal understanding of self. Cosmo Whyte’s solo exhibition, The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone, at the Arts Club of Chicago, captures the hazy, amorphous nature of memory, grounding it in collective history.”
Cosmo Whyte: The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone
The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E Ontario Street, Chicago, IL
January 23 — April 2, 2025
Curated by Janine Mileaf.