PATRON

Kent sources from the legacies of geometric abstraction to develop her own, ever-evolving, gestural language. In paintings, sculptures, and, at times, performance, Kent’s practice extends the traditions of abstraction. For the artist, abstraction—in its various forms—ignites new modes of meaning-making. The artist imagines interior architectures as sites of encoded exchange. In her current treatment of the exhibition space, Kent incorporates floor plans of traditional Mexican homes with modernist influences and adaptations. She has painted large-scale details from these plans directly onto the walls, shifting our viewing perspective of architectural plans from an aerial to an alternate point of view. Kent draws a comparison between the architectural floor plan and a theatrical stage: both are sites for projecting imaginative speculation. The gallery visitor becomes both a spectator and an actor in the space of this exhibition.

PATRON presents new paintings within an immersive installation by Caroline Kent. This exhibition responds to the architectural character of the galleries through a series of gestures that combine wall paintings, text and chromatic compositions.

Heft is a three-person exhibition featuring works by Daniel G. Baird, Dominique Knowles and Kaveri Raina. Occupying all four galleries of PATRON, these paintings, sculptures and installations stage a ceremonial procession of loss and becoming.

Nyeema Morgan’s practice is characterized by an interplay between text, image and object. Her work questions our systems of knowledge and information production: what stories have we been told? Who has done the telling? How have images and language been used to tell those stories? Inspired by recent political events, our angst-ridden culture and media, and the death of her mother in 2017, Morgan grapples with the subject of catharsis in narrative forms such as storytelling, history, and jokes. The exhibition features three bodies of work—horror horror, a print-based series begun in 2018; Like It Is, an on-going series of graphite drawings, and two new sculptures. In The Set-Up, Morgan re-presents iconography to critique the structures and devices that influence our social, political and historical ideologies.

PATRON is proud to present our third solo exhibition with artist Bethany Collins. The exhibition titled, Cadence, opens to the public Saturday, March 5, and continues through April 16, 2022. Cadence reveals the complicated histories embedded in the songs and narratives that echo from our collective past into the present. Collins’ language-driven, often multipanel works unveil the many translations, adaptations, and erasures present in the texts that shape our national identity. The exhibition’s title refers to the combination of chords that bring a section, movement, or entire piece of music to a close. Cadence focuses on three American songs: The Star-Spangled Banner, Dixie, and Auld Lang Syne. Each of these songs are contrafactum, a musical term referring to a song in which the melody is similar to another, but the lyrics have changed. This tactic of altering the lyrics of important songs has been historically used to serve different political agendas.



PATRON is proud to present, We, Dandelions, our second solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Soo Shin. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, March 5 and continues through April 16, 2022. Soo Shin’s sculpture and installation-based practice emphasizes materials charged with their own poetry, such as brass, iron, cedar, and found feathers. Here Shin employs these materials often to render parts of the human body in uncertain states of transformation where the hint of a foot, leg, or forearm outline the absence of a full figure. It’s a language of objects described by their implied movements, gestures. Shin incorporates her own body in many of the casts. In this way, her work is a fragmentary self-portrait. However, this composite is not just of isolated elements of her own body, but also seeks to render the affect of a space, an experience, a personal memory. One that reaches towards a longing. Something akin to walking into the memory of a stranger.

For his second solo exhibition with PATRON, Los Angeles based artist Greg Breda paints masterful portraits depicting revelatory moments for African American characters within film spanning the mid-1960s to 2019. Rendering the figures in his paintings with lush brushstrokes on vellum, Breda’s compositions reference film stills that portray scenes of self-reflection and contemplation for the character. Still, the exhibition’s title alludes to meditative and spiritual connotations of stillness, as well as the reality that society continues to grapple with and rehash the same issues.

PATRON is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Melanie Schiff. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, September 18 and will continue through November 27, 2021. While reservations on tock are encouraged, they are not required to visit the gallery.

PATRON is proud to present our first solo exhibition with Columbus-based artist Carmen Winant. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, September 18 and will continue through November 27, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present Value Studies, our second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Anna Plesset. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 17 and will continue through August 28, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present, Proximity, our first solo exhibition with New Jersey-based artist Claire Sherman. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 17 and will continue through August 28, 2021.

PATRON is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Samira Yamin. The exhibition titled, All the Skies Over Syria, will open to the public on Saturday, June 5 and will continue through July 10, 2021

PATRON is proud to present our third solo exhibition with Indiana based artist Samuel Levi Jones. The exhibition titled, No color on the pages, will open to the public on Saturday, June 5 and will continue through July 10, 2021

PATRON is proud to present, Manna and Braised Collards, our first solo exhibition with Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Chicago and is followed later this year by a traveling solo exhibition at The Blaffer Museum of Art in Houston as well as his participation in Prospect 5 in New Orleans in October. Manna and Braised Collards will open to the public on April 24 and continue through May 29, 2021. Manna and Braised Collards is grounded in the collaboration of religion and social resistance as practiced in Black America. Known in some circles as Black religion, this non-denominational force integrates political action with moral values and eschatological frameworks. One of the inspirations for this exhibition is the long tradition of storefront churches in Chicago and the handmade design aesthetic that are often part of those spaces. These are spaces of recharge and rejuvenation. Of spiritual and artistic vitality, but one is able to fortify oneself before stepping back into the series of tests presented by the world or dunia. All nine works in the exhibition are created using recycled or repurposed objects and materials. In much of my work, I see collage as the motivating technique and accumulation as the formal determiner. In the objects and materials I use, I seek a certain flexibility in meaning or voice. And deeply rooted cultural foundations. Sometimes these connections are personal. Sometimes relate more to the Black experience collectively. Through these works, I am attempting to formulate a series of object lessons which ruminate on the connections between the spiritual and political. To show the perennial importance of this collaboration to American social justice and Democratic efforts. And to re-energize the broader nonlinear historical paradigm in thinking about the Black American plight and role within the cosmos as practiced by its earliest communities.
 JAMAL CYRUS (b. 1973, Houston, TX) lives and works in Houston, TX. Cyrus received an MFA from University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from the University of Houston. Cyrus has won several awards, most recently the David C. Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2020); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019); and BMW Art Journey. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including The End of My Beginning, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX (2021); Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2020); Direct Message: Art, Language and Power, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2019); Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH (2018); Jamal Cyrus x Jamire Williams: Boogaloo & The Midnite Hours, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018); and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 – Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2016).