Will Aurora mayor run for governor?
Robert Colescott’s satirical art gets some overdue attention at Chicago Cultural Center
The hottest political candidate of 2022 has not yet declared — Aurora Mayor Richard C. Irvin.
For weeks, the political classes have been buzzing that billionaire Ken Griffin will back Irvin to run for Illinois governor.
Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel and Illinois’ richest man, is gunning for a fellow billionaire, Gov. J.B. Pritzker. He has been tearing into Pritzker for months, and may put up a small chunk of his fortune to take the first-time governor out.
“I’m going to make sure that if he runs again, that I am all in to support the candidate who will beat him,” Crain’s Chicago Business quoted Griffin as saying. “He doesn’t deserve to be the governor of our state.”
He has criticized Pritzker for everything from his handling of the state’s economy to Chicago’s explosive crime problem. Griffin also wants a Republican governor to help keep his tax bill as low as possible.
According to some news reports, Griffin is prepared to plunk down as much as $300 million to back a Pritzker challenger, and Irvin tops his list.
Griffin’s people have denied the rumors. Irvin isn’t talking. A decision is expected very soon.
In 2017, Irvin was elected mayor of Aurora, becoming the first African American to lead the second-largest city in Illinois. Now in his second term, Irvin, 51, has pushed small business growth and economic and community development in his hometown.
His official website boasts an up-from-the-bottom bio. Irvin was raised by a single mother in public housing; the first in his family to graduate from college; an Army veteran who served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He has a law degree from Northern Illinois University and is a former county prosecutor.
This booster of diversity in politics says, bring Irvin on.
He’s got charm and charisma. Twice elected mayor in a racially mixed city, he demonstrates broad appeal.
Griffin’s millions would help Irvin stand out from four others contending for the Republican nomination: state Sen. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia; former state Sen. Paul Schimpf, from Waterloo; Jesse Sullivan, a venture capitalist; and businessman Gary Rabine.
Griffin may calculate that a credentialed, engaging Black Republican could attract moderate voters from the Chicago suburbs and beyond.
And while Pritzker has keenly courted Black voters, Irvin might tempt them to abandon the Democrats and cross over to help make Irvin Illinois’ first Black governor, or so goes the rationale. Crazy?
Maybe, but Illinois Democrats are taking Irvin seriously. No one will go on the record, but many privately argue Irvin is a Democrat in the GOP’s clothing. As the Sun-Times reported last month, Irvin pulled ballots in Democratic primaries in 2014, 2016 and 2020.
Irvin would be Griffin’s boughtand-paid-for patsy, they say.
“Does Irvin, who has a potentially very bright political career in front of him, want to be a Griffin pawn in a race that could end up killing his political future?” a top Pritzker ally wrote me last week. “It would be very difficult for him to win the Republican primary even with Griffin money given where Republicans are today (sadly) even in IL.”
Others label Irvin “Rauner 2.0” and claim that with Griffin’s blessing, he would continue the disastrous legacy of Bruce Rauner, the one-term former governor who is reviled by Democrats.
Others might remind Republicans of the Alan Keyes blowout. The Illinois GOP slated Keyes, a pompously kooky African American diplomat, to challenge Barack Obama in the November 2004 race for U.S. Senate. Keyes lost by 43 percentage points.
No one can top that.
HE’S GOT CHARM AND CHARISMA. TWICE ELECTED MAYOR IN A RACIALLY MIXED CITY, HE DEMONSTRATES BROAD APPEAL.
Boosted in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, top-level contemporary African American artists finally are getting the recognition they deserve, including soaring sale prices and major shows like the muchheralded touring survey devoted to Chicagoan Kerry James Marshall in 2016-17.
But many people probably have still never heard of Robert Colescott, who set the stage for many of the Black artists who have followed him but remains stubbornly and unfairly overlooked since his death in 2009 at age 83.
A touring retrospective on view at the Chicago Cultural Center through May 29 — the largest ever devoted to the Oakland, California, native — seeks to at least partially redress this oversight. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” comprises 55 paintings and works on paper spanning 50 years, including littleknown early examples from his time in Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Egypt.
The show was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and it originally was scheduled for 2020 at the Cultural Center but was postponed because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
Colescott is best known for his satirical, often biting examinations of race, gender and identity. Some draw on and reimagine art history, like his 1975 reworking of Emanuel Leutze’s famed painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” with George Washington Carver and allBlack figures. (A 1974 pencil study for the composition is on view here.)
“It’s my belief that he combined appropriation with transgressive attitudes in a way that nobody else has done,” said Lowery Stokes Sims, one of the retrospective’s two New York-based co-curators.
In 2017, Colescott was included in “Fast Forward,” an examination of 1980s painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But according to Sims, his work stood out like a “sore thumb” in comparison to such other artists as Robert Longo, David Salle and Julian Schnabel. “He wasn’t that kind of slick, clean-cut New York look,” she said.
His work from the 1970s and ’80s drew on California funk and had more to do with Chicago’s Hairy Who movement than what was happening in mainstream East Coast art. That dichotomy helps explain why he was featured in 1987, 1990 and 1992 at Chicago’s Phyllis Kind Gallery, which championed the Chicago Imagists.
“He didn’t really fit in very well,” Sims said. “Even if you look at him in the context of those important shows that Marcia Tucker did in the late ’70s like ‘Bad Painting,’ he was of a similar sensibility but the way he painted was so much more robust. His figures were very well articulated — you could call them raw and raunchy.”
Here are some highlights of the Cultural Center exhibition:
“We Await Thee” (1964). This is a rarely seen example of his works from his time in Egypt, including his exploration of an ancient necropolis there. “He got very involved in the ideas of reincarnation, which is what Egypt art is all about,” co-curator Matthew Weseley said. “That painting is about that but in a painterly technique derived from 20th-century modernism like Matisse.”
“Colored T.V.” (1977) Weseley described it as an “extraordinary” painting that has been interpreted and misinterpreted in multiple ways. “Colescott in more than one place said that the central figure is a transvestite,” he said, noting the work’s reference to a transformational song from the movie “Pinocchio” — “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
“Shirley Temple Black and Bill Bojangles White” (1980). The artist draws on Black’s surname and imagines her as a Black woman and Robinson as white. “It’s what he would call a switcheroo,” Sims said, “and it shows how his mind works. It just throws up in our face so many attitudes about how we perceive and characterize people of different races.”
“The Three Graces: Art, Sex and Death” (1981). Sims called it a transitional piece from Colescott’s purely appropriationist work to a group of paintings that lead to his 1984-85 “Bather” series on Black and white beauty. “It’s interesting,” she said, “how he takes The Three Graces, which have been done by everybody from Raphael to Rubens, and plays them up in a way that one would expect to see in a pin-up.”
While the co-curators know this retrospective alone won’t accomplish everything, they hope, it is a major step toward moving Colescott into his rightful place in 20th-century American art history.