Expression of Gratitude

Commissioned Essay for the catalog Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century. Thinking alongside Robert Earl Paige’s extensive practice, and his installation Fahara: Chicago in View for The Smithsonian Design Triennial

“I'm constantly trying to find ways to utilize elements…everything has a pattern. Everything can be something. There's no mistakes in art, and there's no expiration date on ideas.” I have heard variations of these statements throughout the two years I’ve been collaborating with and learning from artist Robert Paige. This notion that design can be perceived everywhere is integral to my understanding of his practice, which is rooted in the experiences of quotidian life. He emphasizes moments that, while seemingly ordinary, richly illustrate how people make meaning in their lives and negotiate the world around them. This infuses Paige’s multidisciplinary approach, which spans more than 60 years, and encompasses textile dyeing, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation. His critical eye towards juxtaposition brings seemingly incongruous colors and shapes together to accentuate underlying hues and shades, and brings dimensional elements into intricate dialogue. Always maintaining his position as both a fine artist and commercial designer, Paige continues to grow as he experiments with new mediums and methods of making, fueled by his belief in the ever-shifting modes of creativity.  

In an iconic image from a magazine advertisement, Paige sits amidst lush greenery, surrounded by his designs adorning pillowcases, duvet covers, and drapes. Seated cross-legged in a brown suit, his calm, intent stare pulls the viewer into his world of geometric shapes in vibrant, warm tones. The image is an advertisement for Paige’s Dakkabar home furnishing collection, which was inspired by patterns, colors, and object designs from Senegal, and distributed across 126 Sears stores throughout the U.S. in the early 1970’s. Released at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, the distinctly West African diasporic aesthetic approach of the collection both affirmed the rich artistry of this region, and the complex histories of Black life in the United States. Paige gestured to more expansive conceptions of home by situating African American place-making within the quintessentially “American” brand of Sears. Reflecting on the collection, he emphasizes a pleasure in creating accessible home interior designs that resonated with Black communities, so they felt seen. “It gave my community and friends something to be elated over… it gave you the idea that there are not only possibilities, but no limits on how you can extend yourself”.

Scholar Kevin Quashie theorizes “quiet” as an orientation toward the interior self, and interrogates the expectations placed on Black life to be understood predominantly through public expression, often overlooking emotional depth. He writes, “So much of the discourse of racial blackness imagines black people as public subjects with identities formed and articulated and resisted in public” (1). With the Dakkabar collection, Paige markedly shifts how creative expression from Black communities can be imagined, shaping the intimate, often quieter refuge of the home. 

Paige grew up in Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago in the 1940’s, amongst a Black community establishing itself in the city during the Great Migration from the South. His family came from Mississippi, and this history reverberates in a saying he often repeats, “The beauty you see is the Mississippi in me.” For many Black communities who moved to the Midwest, ties to the South shaped ideas of home that valued collectivity, understanding that family extends beyond biological connections. They also maintained a respect for the natural environment, recognizing that the land is crucial to sustenance. In his piece Pat Kelly, Paige celebrates the famed fashion designer Patrick Kelly, who also hailed from Mississippi, and whom he greatly admired for his innovative designs; the work emphasizes the connection between Black communities in the South and Midwest. Against a violet background, Paige interweaves the words “Pat Kelly”, “Chicago”, “Mississippi”, and “Paris” with graphic images such as bright red lips, multicolored hearts, and watermelons, referencing the bright buttons that adorned Kelly’s clothing, and subversively contending with racial stereotypes. In doing so, Paige displays his talent of balancing form while exploring saturation. (2)

While racial segregation dictated that Black residents mostly lived in the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods, Paige articulates that there was no need for him to venture past the Downtown area, for Chicago’s South Side was coursing with life, a plethora of businesses and recreational activities. He was given free rein to explore his childhood curiosities, with home broadening beyond the confines of the building where he lived. Paige recalls running through Jackson Park with friends, collecting rocks, twigs, and leaves which he assembled into his early artworks. As for many assemblage artists emerging in the 1960’s, all objects became materials for creating, a practice that remains evident in his sculptural works that incorporate flattened soda cans, candy bar wrappers, pebbles and scraps of cloth. (3) This innovation continued into the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, a time he describes as overflowing with creative potential. He had frequen run-ins at that time with artists and design professionals, from graphic designer and art director Emmett McBain to Paige’s fellow members of the collective AfriCOBRA, Bill Abernathy and Gerald Williams. Black artists were collaborating and seeking to strengthen their practices. “It was electric… It was the establishing of an aesthetic conversation that had everybody in sync. We were in harmony.” There was a focus on the nuanced layers of Chicago, a city teeming with possibility, even amid difficult sociopolitical realities. 

For Paige, creating home does not signify annexation, but rather an opportunity to foster new adaptations for livable moments. In constant observation of his surroundings, he invests in deep relationality, and the interconnections amongst human beings, animals, and the natural and built landscape. He echoes the decolonial and environmentally conscious theories of Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant, claiming that we are all in relation, and thus should embrace the complexities of specificity, even if it cannot be fully grasped, rather than flatten in attempts to understand “completely”. (4)

On one of our walks through Hyde Park in Chicago, Paige gestures to a tree limb inching towards a window and pointed out the shapes made between the branches. He pulled my eye to the intertwined spatial possibilities in the architecture of the building, the colors of the leaves and the light reflected in the glass. “If we allow ourselves to understand everything’s connected, completely, you shouldn't try to break the chain. I am connected to everything, so I am appreciative of that knowledge; it's all humanity.” 

Notes:

1.  Kevin Quashie. “Quiet is antithetical to how we think about black culture, and by extension, black people. So much of the discourse of racial blackness imagines black people as public subjects with identities formed and articulated and resisted in public. Such blackness is dramatic, symbolic, never for its own vagary, always representative and engaged with how it is imagined publicly. These characterizations are the legacy of racism and they become the common way we understand and represent blackness; literally they become a lingua franca. The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior.” The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture.” New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 

2. Pritchard, Eric Darnell. "Race WERK: WilliWear and Patrick Kelly Paris." Black Designers in American Fashion (2021): 239.

3.  Von Blum, P. (2011). Recovering the rubble: African American assemblage art in Los Angeles. Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(5), 248-262.

4.  Édouard Glissant. “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity…The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms.” Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990.