‘IN PURSUIT OF BEAUTY’
Hyde Park Art Center is staging the largest exhibition to date of artist Robert Earl Paige’s work, including fabrics, clay, textiles, collage and paintings
Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve felt the influence of Robert Earl Paige. The artist, who has lived across the world but is now back in his home neighborhood of Woodlawn, has designed scarves for Italian fashion houses and textiles for the likes of Sears and Walmart. His fabric patterns are, in many ways, the backdrop of our world.
The Hyde Park Art Center is staging “The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige,” the largest exhibition to date of Paige’s work, through Oct. 27. Beyond fabrics, it spans clay, textiles, collage and paintings on walls and floors. To Paige, everything has the potential to be art, from a tiny scrap of cardboard to tree bark.
Paige recently sat down with WBEZ’s “The Rundown” podcast to talk about his path to becoming an artist, his advice for young creatives and why he still looks for beauty everywhere.
I’ve heard you say the words, “Beauty is a public service.” And I would love to hear you just talk about beauty. When you’re searching for beauty, where do you find it?
You find it everywhere. As you said, I’m in pursuit of beauty. And if you think about it, you know, color is the skin of the world, and so I’m looking for it. I’m trying to turn ugliness into beauty. They say beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But if you’re not trained to see, then it doesn’t mean anything.
Tell me about the Hyde Park Art Center. What do you love about being here and making here?
It’s home. I was familiar with the art center because I moved in Hyde Park, 1967. So my first recollection of it was, because it was Blackstone, I wasn’t too impressed but at least they put me in a venue where there were artists. And then it happened to have the Hairy Who? exhibition and a bunch of them were at the Art Institute the same time I was there.
When I got the residency here, it gave me a real opportunity to operate as a job. I spent 35 hours a week. I don’t know any artists that spent that much time in their studio.
But what that offered me, as I said, a job. I’d get up at 8 a.m., get here at 8:15 every morning, leave about 5 p.m. or so. I established wonderful relationships with everyone and I’m sure that while the show was so wonderful and beautiful, because they saw me work my tail off, it helped everybody lift their game up. And that’s the idea. You know, that’s what association should do. They should be able to touch one, teach one. I like that idea in Hyde Park Art Center. It offered me a home to come and experiment. As an artist, most of us are concerned with two things: either money or space. And you get sick and tired of cleaning up your bed to get in it. So I was able to put up work on the wall and then close the door and leave it, but I still took it home!
You have some pretty legendary contemporaries. Visual artists Margaret TaylorBurroughs, Richard Hunt, Faith Ringgold, who recently passed away. You mentioned spending time with James Baldwin. How do you think about the legacy that they’ve left and your own legacy as a living legend in this realm?
Well, that’s one of Margaret’s poems: What will your legacy be? Margaret Burroughs [the co-founder of the DuSable Black History Museum] I knew very well. And my Margaret Burroughs story was [that] I was once in the west coast of Africa, in Abidjan, and I was in a Hotel Ivoire. I was going up to my room and someone said, ‘Hold the elevators, it’s Margaret Burroughs!’ I had never met her before.
But Faith Ringgold, we hung out a little bit in New York. I knew her and thank God I got an opportunity to see her show at the MCA. I spent a day in that bad boy!
Richard Hunt, they had a beautiful article on him in New City. When I was reading it, of course, they talked about the music and so forth. He used to have, on Sunday, these salons with Baroque music and Champagne.
This was in his studio?
Yeah. They were a group of us artists that hung out, but we were clowning! We were having a wonderful time. You know, so I said, ‘You can have fun.’ That’s what I wanted this show to be. I wanted to be fun and play.
I sent something to one of my colleagues and it said, ‘Don’t grow up, I think it’s a trap.’ And that has a lot to do with how I feel about things. I feel if you lose the kid in you, I think you lost a lot. People talk about happiness; I prefer to think about joy. You can be happy one minute and sad the next. But if you have joy, then you can sustain that over a longer period of time.
This interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.