Cultivating a Practice Rooted in Process
Commissioned Essay for the monograph The United Colors of Robert R. Paige, published with the University of Minnesota Press on the occasion of Paige’s exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Creative expression will always exceed the parameters of artistic mediums and disciplinary boundaries, spurred by desires to experiment both conceptually and materially. The vitality of Robert Earl Paige’s practice is animated by the urge to cultivate continued growth, drawing on a rich archive of experience and a deep respect for process with attention to details. His intentional approach to art-making and community-building, define his career and demonstrate that the two are always intertwined. Paige refers to himself as an artist, not limited by any qualifier but instead regarded for the expanse of his craft. While often identified by his textile works, his multifaceted practice also encompasses sculpture, painting, performance, collage, and ceramics. This essay focuses on aspects of his work within the context of abstraction, assemblage, and social practice, thinking alongside a generation of artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and for whom static categories proved insufficient.
Paige’s painting practice draws on fundamental elements of design, West African modernism, gestural abstraction, and text. His textile works are hand painted and dyed, using both gum resist and batik techniques that are integral to West African textile traditions of countries like Ghana and Nigeria. This region’s architectural and textile design aesthetics, along with the natural landscape, have been influential in his practice and served as inspiration for his famed Dakkabar home interior collection (1968). Named after Dakar, it was released across 126 Sears stores in the 1970s. By situating cultural resonances of the African diaspora within interior design, Paige affirmed the right for the Black citizen to create home within a US context, “so the black homemaker can find something that speaks directly to her.” [1] His interest in African motifs, and the warmer tones of the terrain grew with trips to Senegal around this period, and later to South Africa. His skill for juxtaposition is apparent, often playing with identifiable images such as hearts, basic facial features, musical notes, and flowers, alongside geometric shapes and textual references. In works such as Homage to Milano (1964), Series of Hand Paints (1997), Rhythmic Patterns (1992), and Nature Drawing series (1990–1992), Paige draws on organic abstraction, with curved forms that take cues from more rounded shapes found in the natural environment. These forms continue in his more recent hand-painted ceramic works, included in his exhibition Power to the People (2022) at Salon 94. More distinct polygonal designs are evident in painted textile pieces, such as Composition #2 (1997), In the Beginning (1967), and Fabric Man (2001), and works on linen, such as the two series Composition in Elementary Form (1990) and Seaberg’s Leftovers (1997).
Through his investment in abstraction, Paige presents another lens through which to consider experiential elements of Black life. It is generative to consider Paige within a broader analysis of Black painters and their relationships to abstraction, as is put forward in Darby English’s 1971: A Year in the Life of Color. [2] English highlights artists like Peter Bradley, Raymond Saunders, Alvin Loving, Richard Hunt, Alma Thomas, Howardena Pindell and Ed Clark, and discusses the response to their focus on abstraction amidst the pressure to create more representational work that was considered politically aligned with the continued fight for racial equity that increased during the Civil Rights era. He writes: “I argue that black artists who took up a place within modernism at this juncture did not undermine vigorous claims to representation so much as complicate them.” He further notes that abstraction allowed at times for greater interrogation of “mass politics,” while disrupting the superficial binary of explicit political imagery and supposed indifference of modernism. [3]
Robert Paige was at the intersection of creative and political energy as part of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, which built on the momentum of the Civil Rights movement. As one of the initial members of African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA), he introduced the concept of Kool-Aid colors to the collective and highlighted the communicative and political potential of vibrant colors in their work. Paige employed abstraction in his exploration of sociocultural realities among peers who chose more politically legible imagery. As he remarks in a recent interview: “Everything is abstract. I don’t see a differentiation between what I do, how I think is part of the norm as a creative person. It is just part of who I am.” The quotidian world one creates, no matter how local, has always been central to his work and can be understood as political in ways too often overlooked.
Paige’s assemblage process often uses found materials, such as flattened soda cans, rocks, twigs, product cartons, cardboard, ribbons, and scraps of cloth, often creating relatively small sculptural works. He developed this practice at an early age, recounting of his childhood, “I was always collecting things, you know, picking up things off the street . . . found objects can be incorporated into artwork, you don’t always have to go to the art store to get the material.” He later adds: “You have to be not only creative but observant of things that you think may make something.” This ethos emanates across his oeuvre, the configurations of objects animating three-dimensional extensions of imagery and geometric forms found in his textile works. For Paige, beauty can be gleaned anywhere and in any form; even the simplest, nondescript object has value. Paige has spent the majority of his career working on the South Side of Chicago, and has witnessed the structural disinvestment in the area throughout his lifetime. He asserts that while segregation was always present, growing up on the South Side provided access to a brilliant network of thinkers and creatives, and the communities garnered their own resources. This belief in the constant presence of beauty also interrogates the labeling of parts of Chicago that are often scapegoated as spaces of violence and deterioration, instead affirming them as sites of abundant expressive possibility. His assemblage techniques align with the communities of artists in California who emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, such as Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Betye Saar, and John Outterbridge. Kellie Jones, writing about this period and the work of assemblage for the exhibition Now Dig This!, notes: “Embedded in the narrative of this method too is the concept of transformation, the alchemy of taking a thing discarded and changing it into a thing of (re)use.” [4] For Paige and the artists mentioned above, assemblage fostered an acute awareness of the dynamism and psychic meaning imbued in objects, at times intervening in fixed discursive signs, and instead offering a multiplicity of readings.
The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige is anchored in a foundation of social practice and collaboration, and includes collaborative pieces made by Paige along with artists such as Dorian Sylvain, Emily Winter, and Jeff Robinson. The exhibition also includes a series of community-centered workshops influenced by Paige’s decades-long pedagogical approach and led by teaching artist Kenny De La Peña. Paige characterizes his method of collaboration as parapluie, in which everyone is connected and learns together under his metaphorical umbrella. He also believes in the significance of intergenerational work relationships, bringing together his “big-shorties” (youth) and “people of long standing” (older adults) through art making programs. This spirit of collectivity has echoed throughout Paige’s career, as seen with the organization Everyday Art, which he cofounded with Dr. Carol Adams in the 1960s. Everyday Art promotes the notion of a community aesthetic through art programming for Chicago’s South Side, including summer festivals. This is complemented by Paige’s citational practice—which has long carried references in his work to other artists for whom he has tremendous respect—and further extends his understanding of collaboration. He has created pieces citing Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Patrick Kelly, and the Bauhaus school, among others. Paige deeply values the different relationships and travels he has experienced over the years, including time spent in Italy working with the Fiorio design house, residencies with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, the Ndebele Foundation in South Africa, and Gallery 37 with the Cabrini Green community in Chicago. Rather than purport a singular narrative that he is the sole originator of his creative ideas, Paige celebrates the varied sources that shape his artistry with a generous perspective on interconnection.
It continues to be a gift to learn with Robert E. Paige and witness his practice take on new forms. His work is a reminder that the impetus to create art does not need to be categorized, and conceptual imagination will always extend across mediums and disciplines. The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige is a beautiful chapter in the legacy that he continues to build, driven by his unending curiosity.
Notes:
Bernadine Morris, “Shop Talk,” New York Times, March 3, 1973, https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/03/archives/household-linens-with-bold-primitive-look-shop-talk.html.
2. Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
3. English, 1971, 8.
4. Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2012).