THE LEGACY COLLECTION

A wonderful thing about Jamea Richmond-Edwards and her work is that she believes in a shared experience, a cultural experience, and an emotional experience that everyone on earth can relate to. She believes that no one is totally Black or White, Asian or Latin, gay or straight, that a little bit of everyone lives inside all of us and portrays that in the paintings. Her shimmering collages are an investigation into her family's story and diverse history dating back to the 18th century in America. Jamea Richmond-Edwards was born in the 1980s in Detroit and decided to attend Howard University for graduate school and has lived and worked in the D.C. area ever since.

Phyllis Stephens (b. 1955) is an Atlanta-based, fifth-generation quilt maker considered by critics to be a Master of Black American story quilts. Having quilted professionally for more than thirty years, she describes her practice as a way to travel through time and revisit fond memories that feature cities and nature scenes as backgrounds and women, children, and families as subjects. Her quilts have been displayed in some of the most prestigious museums and galleries in the world including The Museum of the American Quilter’s Society in Paducah, Kentucky and the Fine Art Museum of Ghana. Her vibrant practice has won her fans across the world; notable collectors include Samuel L. and LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Denzel and Pauletta Washington, and the late Aretha Franklin.

Abdoulaye Konaté (b. 1953, Diré, Mali) employs woven and dyed cloths native to Mali to explore socio-political and environmental issues. The artist creates large-scale figurative compositions that question how societies and individuals worldwide have been affected by factors including war, the struggle for power, ecological shifts, and the AIDS epidemic. He refers to the West African tradition of using textiles as a means of commemoration and communication, balancing global political and social reflections with a reference to his own local and cultural history.

Hugh Hayden’s artistic trajectory is a slow burn that continues to evolve. An architect by training, the Dallas native (b. 1983) continued designing stores for Starbucks while pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University (MFA, 2018). He recently presented American Food, his first solo exhibition in the UK; the show brought together wooden picnic tables, cast-iron skillets, and a multimedia stove as an homage to the history and significance of cooking and dining together in America. As Hayden considers Southern cooking the first uniquely American cuisine—which originated in kitchens run by enslaved cooks who infused recipes with African ingredients and techniques—the exhibition featured a variety of new and recent works, including 26 ‘skillets’, recast from a unique pairing of a wooden West African-style mask and a found cast iron frying pan. The artist holds this mirror up to his own identity as an African American: an abstraction on the African antecedent.

Purvis Young (1943-2010) was a self-taught artist from the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, Florida whose work combined blend painting and drawing with utilizing discarded found objects. Young maintained a vast visual vocabulary that was inspired by documentaries, literature, American history and spiritual folklore. His fascination with urban landscapes, processions, and incarceration, is reflected in his wooden paintings that depict the lives of Black Americans in historical and religious landscapes

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is an American conceptual artist known for his multi-disciplinary practice, involving painting, silkscreen, collage, video, and performance. His work uses philosophy and historical movements as a basis to investigate language and reevaluate history through imagery with varied interpretations. Sites of Pendleton’s domestic exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and internationally, La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Manifesta 7 in Rovereto, Italy.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, and personal narratives. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, his practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation—yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism. Many of Johnson’s works convey rhythms of the occult and mystic: evoking his desire to transform and expand neach included object’s field of association in the process of reception. Johnson is the 2012 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize and premiered his first feature-length film, an adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, on HBO in 2019.

Pope.L (b. 1955, Newark, NJ) is a Chicago-based visual and performance artist whose multidisciplinary practice assesses preconceived notions within contemporary culture through painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Aside from his physical body, works throughout his nearly 50-year career have employed a variety of materials including magazine clippings, plastic bottles, and cardboard which allow him to question the foundations of language, gender, race, and community. His work has been exhibited in major institutions worldwide, including Art Basel in Miami.

Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, NJ) creates paintings, collages, photography, video, and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Her works often utilize collage methods and vibrant backgrounds as a reference to the varied but orderly and beautiful nature of women’s lives. Blurring the distinction between object and subject; real and imaginary, Thomas’ complex portraits and interiors that examine popular culture’s impact on women’s identity, gender, and self-awareness have been exhibited internationally.

British contemporary painter Chris Ofili (b. 1968, Manchester, England) works in a vibrant palette and a variety of applied textures to examine both the contemporary and historical Black experience. In intricately detailed works, Ofili deploys inventive figuration through paint and collaged materials such as glitter and magazine cut-outs. His portrait works typically subvert stereotypical features like dark skin and full lips to frame from a place of beauty, with natural elements like leaves and flowers as background elements. Ofili’s work has been exhibited worldwide, notably in New York with a critically acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014, “Chris Ofili: Night and Day.”

Gerald Williams is an American painter whose work explores culture, place and identity from a global perspective. Williams is one of the original five cofounders of AFRICOBRA, an artist collective formed on the south side of Chicago in 1967, which became the definitive visual expression of the Black Arts Movement. Over time, Williams’ work has evolved into a polyrhythmic representation of life at the intersection of figuration and abstraction, defined by what he calls “mimesis at midpoint.” Williams distills the visual language of time, place, culture and identity in order to express the essence of reality in an aesthetically contemplative way. Influenced both by AFRICOBRA and his travels, he has continued the practice of aesthetic distillation while opening himself up to new techniques, materials and processes.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, and personal narratives. Based in New York City, his expansive practice embraces a wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation—yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism. Johnson often uses culturally specific materials including shea butter, black soap, and varied living elements like household plants to explore the individual emblems that combine to create broader meaning in Black American cultures.

Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929, Albany, GA) is a painter and photographer who creates pattern-intensive portraits that combine vibrant colors with Black Power slogans to depict the intensity of political activism. The artist is part of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a collective founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1968 by a collective of young Black artists who characterized vibrant “Kool-Aid” colors, bold text, and positive images of Black people. AfriCOBRA established a philosophical and aesthetic foundation for the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, and 70s and generations of Black artists afterward. Jarrell has recently exhibited in the 58th Venice Biennale, Cleveland Museum of Art, Smart Museum of Art, ICA Boston, MoCA North Miami and continues to experiment in his practice with past and present topics surrounding Blackness.

Michael St. John’s work conveys a sustained commitment to observing and re-presenting experiences of the everyday. Born in Indiana in 1963 and based in Massachusetts, St. John casts an inclusive and penetrating gaze on the world through which he moves. His practice involves layering newspaper clippings, found images, fragmented language, and everyday objects into captivating collaged portraits of the world at present. St. John also maintains a breadth of curatorial, editorial, and academic professional experience, and his work is in the collections of institutions including The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, in Miami, Florida.

Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1915) is known as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. Narratives from her family shaped her early awareness of the suffering and exploitation of Black people in the United States and laid the groundwork for her artistic vision. Her printworks typically center on working-class Black women and the resilience they embody in an effort to support their families and communities. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Art, cum laude, from Howard University in 1935 and taught drawing, painting, printmaking, and art history at Dillard University while struggling to enter the art industry as a Black woman. Catlett later earned an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University and had a residence hall named in her honor at the University of Iowa in 2017.

Born in 1978 in Winston-Salem, NC, Rashaun Rucker is a product of North Carolina Central University and Marygrove College. He makes photographs, prints, and drawings that feature Black men embodying and interfacing with birds, referencing Black men being literally and figuratively being pigeonholed throughout their lives and larger issues that silo Black communities into cycles of poverty and neglect. In 2008, Rucker became the first African American to be named Michigan Press Photographer of the Year, and he has received a national Emmy Award and two regional Emmys for documentary photography. He currently serves as a 2021 Resident at the International Studios and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York.

Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, MD) is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video, sound, textile- and paper-based collage, and multimedia sculpture. With a desire to examine pop culture’s impact on self-image, his practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His 2018 exhibition Sanctuary was inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book— an annual guidebook for black American road-trippers during the Jim Crow era—and contained 50 works of mixed-media collage, assemblage on wood panels, and sculpture to reimagine safe destinations for the Black Americans during the mid-twentieth century.

Sanford Biggers’ (b. 1970, Los Angeles) exceptionally varied oeuvre includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles, films, mixed-media installation, music, and performance. Based in Harlem, New York since 1999 after studying at Morehouse College and the School at the Art Institute of Chicago, his work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. In 2015, he created the socially charged Laocoön (Fatal Bert) inflatable sculpture and began his much-acclaimed BAM series where he re-sculpted African statues with bullets before casting them into bronze to memorialize Black American victims of police brutality.

Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) is a fiber artist whose vibrant works reflect a commitment to exploring how Black Americans have experienced and created various facets of history. Her subjects are ordinary individuals whose stories have generally been overlooked and underestimated, and she often depicts them using various colorful threads against bright backgrounds. The artist earned her B.A. in Painting from Howard University and later studied Art Education at Montclair State University. Butler has had several solo exhibitions in 2020 alone, including at the Art Institute of Chicago and Claire Oliver Gallery, where she is represented.

Stephen Arboite (b.1987) is a multidisciplinary artist of Haitian descent who was born and raised in New York City and now resides in Miami. Arboite’s work considers beauty outside of classical aesthetic paradigms, and places an emphasis on spiritual transformation and evolution of human consciousness. Arboite considers himself primarily a self-taught artist, with a foundation in drawing and painting from State University of New York, Purchase College. His works have been exhibited nationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, N’Namdi Contemporary in Detroit and Miami, Prizm Art Fair and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Michigan, amongst others. Some notable collections include the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami, the Eric and Donna Johnson Collection, and the Arthur Primas Collection of African American Art.

Born, raised, and currently living and working in Chicago, Theaster Gates (b. 1973) creates conceptual art and performances that focus on spatial theory and land development, sculpture, and performance. Gates draws on his training in urban planning and preservation to redeem communities where disinvestment creates a cycle of violence and neglect through art, and his installations largely rely on unique natural materials that reflect their community of origin. He has performed and installed his works throughout Chicago and worldwide, including Black Vessel (2020) at Gagosian Gallery in New York.

The second-floor lounge is anchored by our “Legacy History Staircase” lined with an array of adverts, flyers, and posters of vintage Black celebrities that minted the rich cultural legacy of Overtown that we carry on today. The intentional design and layout radiate throughout the restaurant, telling a story highlighting critical facets of Black culture through soulful cuisine, music, and visual art. The Legacy collection serves as a cultural third-space for people of all walks of life to join in on learning, celebrating, and preserving the artistic freedom and creative excellence of the Black community.