"Consider a shoulder": Leaning on Collaboration in Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time

In the fall of 2021, the Newberry Library's exhibit Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time considered the lives and contributions of five extraordinary women in midcentury Chicago: Gertrude Abercrombie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Katherine Dunham, Katherine Kuh, and Ruth Page. In the book that accompanies the exhibit, Liesl Olson charts the contributions of perhaps the least visible of this quintet, Kuh: "Kuh's relationship to modern art, which was also a relationship to modern artists, underlies an important distinction of the avant-gardists in Chicago. Their art was personal; it was tied up in their communities, in the politics of the period, and in the place of its making" (48). Kuh did not make art herself, but she made art possible through her curation at the Katherine Kuh gallery on the city's Northside and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kuh's career and relationships are emblematic of the exhibit's central interest in the interconnections of female artists' works and their relationships with each other and the city. In this way, the exhibit and book are an extension of Olson's 2017 monograph, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis, in which some of the most interesting work centers on women who made Chicago art possible, including Poetry editor Harriet Monroe and Chicago Tribune book reviewer and critic Fanny Butcher. The spirit of community and collaboration pervades both the exhibit and book Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time.

The book would make Kuh, who celebrated graphic design and advertising, proud. In the foreword, Daniel Greene, President and Librarian at the Newberry, writes that the volume "is itself a product by Chicago artists who are engaged in understanding the city's history and culture while inventing new ways to see its future" (8). Sonnenzimmer, a Chicago-based graphic arts team of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi, collaborated with letterpress printer Ben Blount to create the book's design. The copyright page includes this note: "The generative print experiments showcased throughout this book" are "improvisatory works" that "merge screen printing (Sonnenzimmer) and letterpress printing (Blount) as an idiosyncratic collaborative form-finding technique." The artists created a "layered and rich ecology of graphic expression" by exchanging the press sheets with each other. The effect is a book that celebrates modernist typography, color, and design.

I teach at a small liberal arts college outside of Chicago, and I used this book as part of a firstyear seminar. One of my students, Andrea Peguero Gonzalez, noted the way the color scheme created a kind of restrained rainbow, the colors muted and varied; she argued that the way the bands of color worked separately yet together resonated with the five subjects. This book was a lovely addition to an interdisciplinary introduction to the liberal arts as it celebrates design, visual art, dance, poetry, and the scholarship that goes into each field. On October 23, 2021, I took my students to the exhibit where we also heard a lecture on Katherine Dunham from professors Joanna Dee Das and Amansu Eason, both trained in the Dunham technique. The fusion of scholarship and practice that Eason and Dee Das evinced that day had my students, quite literally, dancing. Their talk centered on Dunham's revolutionary use of the pelvis as she introduced Afro-Caribbean dance to Chicago and beyond. This talk was one of several hosted by the Newberry to bring the exhibit to the masses.

Highlights from the exhibit include Gertrude Abercrombie's paintings, including Self-Portrait of My Sister (1941), which depicts a rendering of the artist herself, who had no sister. Abercrombie's series on the doors that came to populate Chicago's South Side during midcentury gentrification were epitomized by the inclusion of Doors (3 Demolition) (1957). The painter became fascinated by the doors that covered up the destruction of her longtime neighborhood. In a letter from Abercrombie to longtime friends, she writes, "Working on pictures of doors that they put up around all of the demolition. … It's so sad. I can't even look. But the doors are gorgeous" (90). This painting and the letter complement Brooks's poem "The Vacant Lot" from A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Of the five figures, Brooks receives the least attention at the exhibit, which instead spotlights primary documents from less studied figures.

The exhibit is interested in showcasing how each woman embraced experimentation and pushed boundaries in this period. For instance, Ruth Page's love affair with Isamu Noguchi gets an extended treatment in Page's four-page essay titled "Sex," where she recounts her intense and immediate attraction to the artist, her encounters with other men, and also her happy, longtime marriage. The blue sack he designed and in which she danced in Miss Expanding Universe (1932) signals the artistic collaboration between Noguchi and Page. The blue sack is in the exhibit and a photograph of Page is included in the book as is a photograph of Noguchi's sculptural treatment on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit includes silent footage of her experimental piece Variations on Euclid characterized as her "sack, mask, and stick period" (23). The inclusion of the essay, the sack dress, and the archival footage at the exhibit serve to prove Olson's claim in the book that Page's most avant-garde period was the 1930s and 1940s.

Olson's five-part essay anchors the book, offering a multilayered argument. Most centrally, she attends to how these artists knew each other (for instance, Dunham danced Page's choreography), how they got paid (Abercrombie established herself as an independent artist because of the WPA), and how they defied convention (Kuh's gallery was vandalized by a conservative arts group and Brooks wrote of abortion). She also traces how Chicago's history of redlining, contract leasing, and gentrification institutionalized the city's deep racial divisions; all of these artists grappled with the racism at home in their city in some measure. However, it is Brooks's physical and social distance, evident in the included map and in her relative lack of interaction with the other figures, that most dramatically underscores the city's divisions. Most interesting to scholars of modernism will be Olson's arguments about why Chicago: "Chicago was neither provincial nor insular, but it was removed from the American coasts, at the center of lines of railroad track, a place that anyone could get to, or leave" (37). She contends, for instance, that Abercrombie's surrealism held less sway than abstract expressionism popular amongst art critics of the period and that Page and Dunham were able to revolutionize dance far from the critical gaze of the dance establishment in New York and Europe. Chicago made possible what she calls "brave art: art created through risk" (38).

In this company, Eve Ewing's ekphrastic poems find a fitting home. Ewing's five poems, each inspired by one of the central figures, are contained within as a distinct booklet. The first, "Steps of the Gods," draws from Dunham's anthropological study of dance in the Caribbean. The opening lines resonate with Carl Sandburg's famous metaphor for the city: "consider a shoulder, the place where man becomes mule // and all its promises, carrying the hurts" (lines 1–2). Dunham invested great meaning not just into the pelvis but also the shoulder as she considered the physical work and cultural labor the shoulder does—whether it is in the cane field or the dance studio. The shoulder signifies, alternately, as a "burden," "a weight," "a cost," "a promise," "an entry," and "a respite" (lines 6, 8, 9, 27, 29, 30). Ewing's treatment of the multiple meanings of key moments in these five women's lives recur in the five poems.

The exhibit and book align with recent work on feminist archives, including the fall 2021 special double issue on Women and Archives in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, the 2013 special issue of Literature Compass entitled The Future of Women in Modernism, and the 2017 forum Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis in Modernism/modernity. In the introduction to Mind the Gap!, Urmila Seshagiri argues that the transnational and planetary turns in modernist studies, while good and necessary, also elided feminism's role in modernism. The city-centered approach of the exhibit and book promise to center feminist praxis. As Olson puts it, Abercrombie, Brooks, Dunham, Kuh, and Page were "singular geniuses, each of them, though their genius did not flourish alone"; instead, it flourished in community, in collaboration, and in finding "freedom and expansion in a circumscribed world" (71).