Carr Center Gallery
15 E. Kirby Street
Gallery Hours are: Wednesday – Saturday,
Noon – 5:00pm
Traveling exhibition and programming series developed and curated by Erin Falker-Obichigha in collaboration with|The Harvey Museum of Art and the Carr Center. Special thank you to Kravets Wehby Gallery and Arnika Dawkins Gallery.
This exhibition insightfully explores the fullness of Black experience in America and abroad. Through exhibitions, lectures, and artist engagements artists and scholars contribute to nuanced, and unique dissections on the historical, embodied, and psychological experiences of people of color. This ongoing engagement draws ties between three solo exhibitions, each of which speak from black experience. Ervin Johnson, Jamea Richmond-Edwards and Olivier Souffrant, in their own voices, offer a perspective. Edwards depicts black life, fashion, and and iconic personas, Johnson violently deforms skin and color, and Souffrant explores personal and collective narratives.
Ervin A. Johnson Ervin A. Johnson was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois- Urbana Champaign with a bachelor’s in Rhetoric he began work on his second bachelor’s at Columbia College Chicago in photography. Most recently he has completed his MFA in photography at Savannah College of Art and Design. Ervin utilizes photo-based mixed media to reimagine his cultural and racial identity via photography and video. In his most recent body of work, #InHonor, Ervin pays homage to the lives lost to police brutality and racism. He is represented by the Arnika Dawkins Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jamea Richmond-Edwards Detroit-bred Jamea Richmond-Edwards graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Art degree from Jackson State University in 2004 where she studied painting and drawing. She went on to earn a MFA from Howard University in 2012. Jamea is inspired by the black figures of artist Kerry James Marshall and drawings of Charles White. She offers a repertoire of portraits of black women drawn using ink and graphite. Her lionized figures are portrayed in regal poses, with eyes that possess alluring gazes and bodies adored with rich tapestries of color and patterns made of sequins, rhinestones, paper and textiles. Their clothing, which mimics designer fashion, conceals their vulnerability and weaknesses, while elevating them from the disdained to the revered. Richmond-Edward’s work has garnered the attention of art critics including in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post’s “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know”.
Olivier Souffrant Emerging Chicago-based artist Olivier-Jean-Daniel Souffrant, born in Haiti and witness to the coup d’état of 2004 and later the earthquake of 2010, explores the depths of emotional and physical interiors through the layering of paint and images culled from social media.
Please note we adhere to a strict set of Covid-19 policies to visit the gallery. You must register for timed tickets at . In addition, proof of vaccination, mask wearing and social distancing are required when inside the gallery.