Fifteen years ago, the Chicago-based chef Cliff Rome decided to start an art gallery on a block in Bronzeville with a distinctive history of Black enterprise. On one corner he had already reopened the Parkway Ballroom, a former events venue that hosted Blues legends in its heyday. Wanting to help rekindle the neighbourhood’s mid-century artistic renown, which had been deeply impacted by segregation, he co-founded Blanc gallery with Eileen Rhodes, who works in real estate development and helped initiate the ballroom’s revival. The gallery quickly built its connections, opening with early shows by Olalekan Jeyifous, who was awarded a Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, and Amanda Williams, who became a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.
As the gallery reached this milestone, it staged the anniversary show In Retrospect (1-29 March), featuring both new and historical works dating back to Blanc’s earliest years. Since its inception, the gallery has shown the work of influential Black artists, architects and designers from Chicago and beyond, including Norman Teague and Faheem Majeed, and has also showcased emerging artists and community members.
“It really has been that space of experimentation and validation for artists who maybe were overlooked or ignored,” says Williams, who has been involved with Blanc since the beginning, “and then these younger artists that you know will be in the canon.”
Rhodes says they have been “lucky since day one” with the gallery’s exhibition programme. “We wanted to bring the neighbourhood in,” she says, “and we wanted to be a serious art gallery, embedded in community.”
Blanc largely built its connections through word of mouth and, in turn, has become a bridge linking artists with major institutions and other opportunities. The gallery has partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), the Expo Chicago fair and the Chicago Humanities Festival, among many others, on a wide range of programmes in its indoor-outdoor space, which includes a patio that comes alive in the summer with music and outdoor film screenings. Last year’s events included a public performance by Chicago’s South Shore Drill Team, which was the subject of Lawrence Agyei’s concurrent photography exhibition DRILL—supported by the Hyde Park Art Center and Terra Foundation—and a lunch for local artists with Arthur Jafa during his solo exhibition at the MCA (until 11 May).
“Just to see the conversations happening… It was another moment when you’re thinking, ‘This is what we’ve been trying to accomplish,’” Rhodes says of the Jafa event. “That was one of those affirming moments.”
The gallery has received small grants over the years, but Rhodes says that the team has never done “dramatic fundraising”. She adds that selling artists’ work the way a traditional gallery would is not their model, and the freedom of the space is part of its appeal to the artists who show there.
No rules, just respect
“It’s a little bit of a residency, but not a residency, a little bit of an incubator, but not an incubator, a sales gallery, a meeting space—it’s a lot of different things,” Majeed says. “There are no rules; it’s just respect.”
In 2013, Majeed exhibited at Blanc as part of his Shacks and Shanties project, which consisted of temporary structures built in vacant lots that were handed over to artists. At Blanc, in an installation built from the same wood, he asked participants to drop off an item of significance. (Some of the items were displayed as a sculpture at In Retrospect.) “What I was suggesting was a very odd project,” Majeed recalls. “I had some interesting ideas for programming, and I didn’t have everything all the way formed. It wasn’t even a question that it was weird; they’re open to figuring it out.”
The gallery’s small staff includes the chief curator Rohan Ayinde and the gallery manager Jalen Hamilton. Blanc has always been “a blank canvas for an artist, so you can come in and dream a little bit around how you want your work to be shown”, Hamilton says.
That has been the spirit of Blanc since the beginning, Williams says. Through her own shows there, she adds—including Dreams in Jay-Z Minor, a 2012 joint exhibition with Krista Franklin—she has demonstrated how versatile Blanc can and should be.
“[Franklin and I had] independently been having very strange dreams about Jay-Z and neither one of us is like a Jay zealot,” she says. “But as part of it, we made this ice sculpture [of Lil’ Kim]. And at the end of the night, we took some ice picks and broke the sculpture up. Cliff was like, ‘Is this what we were talking about?’ You know, when you tell artists they have free rein, they have free rein.”
For his part, Majeed says wider recognition is long overdue. “I want them to continue to get their flowers,” he says. “It is time for them to be acknowledged for their commitment to artists in Bronzeville, Black artists and to the culture of Chicago.”
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