The Chicago Cultural Center took first prize in asserting Chicago’s artistic legacy by booking the traveling retrospective exhibition of Archibald Motley, who was among the first of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s African-American students and one of the most prominent painters of the Harlem Renaissance, despite the fact that he called Chicago home for most of his life. Gathering more than forty paintings from public and (mostly) private collections, the exhibition paid triumphant homage to Motley’s singular vision of black life in the first half of the twentieth century.
