Exhibitions

Fragments of a Crucifixion–

  • McCormick Tribune Gallery
    Second Floor, North Side
    220 E Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
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Featured images

  • A basketball player leaping toward the hoop as if to dunk looks as if their body is collaged with an image of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns. A large audience looks on.
  • A dark-skinned basketball player wearing a light-blue uniform shouts in the middle of an empty basketball court.
  • A depiction shows a faded image of a young person. There is a target outline over the image with text that reads "Imagine what it was like to be me."
A basketball player leaping toward the hoop as if to dunk looks as if their body is collaged with an image of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns. A large audience looks on.
Titus Kaphar, Ascension, 2016. Oil on canvas with brass nails. 108 × 84 × 1 ½ in. Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotel
Image courtesy of the artist
Ana Mendieta, Untitled from the Silueta series, 1973–77. Silver dye-bleach print Sheet for parts 1, 6, 9, 10: 15 7/8 × 19 7/8 in. (40.3 × 50.5 cm); sheet for parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12: 19 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (50.5 × 40.3 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, gift from The Howard and Donna Stone Collection, 2002.46.10. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
A dark-skinned basketball player wearing a light-blue uniform shouts in the middle of an empty basketball court.
Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), 1999. Digital video loop, projector, metal armature. 5 min.; 20 × 5 x 15 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Kenneth C. Griffin, 2000.8
© Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Andres Serrano, Untitled (Knifed to Death I and II), 1992. Cibachrome. Two parts, each: 49 × 59 ½ in. (124.5 × 151.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Carol and Douglas Cohen, Lynn and Allen Turner, Ruth Horwich, H. Gael Neeson and Stefan T. Edlis, and Gerald S. Elliott by exchange, 1996.4.a-b. Courtesy of the artist and Nathalie Obadia gallery
Photo: James Isberner, © MCA Chicago
A depiction shows a faded image of a young person. There is a target outline over the image with text that reads "Imagine what it was like to be me."
Adrian Piper, Imagine [Trayvon Martin] 2013. Digital PNG formatted image; 10.76" x 10.43" (27.33 cm x 26.49), 300 dpi. Available for free download. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin
© Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin
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Text

Artists have used the crucifixion of Christ as a powerful symbol to address suffering and redemption in the history of racial violence in the United States. Fragments of a Crucifixion explores the continuing relevance of the crucifixion, even as our society becomes increasingly diverse in its religious beliefs. Rather than depict the image of the crucifixion itself, artworks in this exhibition offer only fragments—incomplete images and narratives. These works invoke agony and ecstasy through bodily traces and scenes of absence and loss. Featuring works in the MCA Collection, this show is dedicated to the spiritual in art, and to art’s capacity to evoke life and love in the face of brutality.

The exhibition is organized by Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow. It is presented in the McCormick Tribune Orientation Gallery on the museum’s second floor.

Website

Installation Images

Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Installation view, Fragments of a Crucifixion, MCA Chicago. May 25 – November 3, 2019
Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
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Related content

Programs

  • Canceled
    Curator Tour: Fragments of a Crucifixion
    –
    Free With Admission
    A black-and-white photograph depicts smoke billowing from a body-sized trench in a clearing with weeds and trees on the horizon.
    1. Long In the photograph you seem to stand in a small clearing sparsely populated with flattened weeds in the fore and middle grounds and with an uneven arc of wild grass two-thirds up the image. An impenetrably dark row of trees fills the horizon. The photograph is black and white and strongly lit, so that each blade of grass and clump of dirt casts an intense shadow. At your feet lies a short, crudely dug body-sized trench, whose excavated soil remains, forming a rim around it. The shallow slit, dug from bone-dry earth, lies in the middle of the image and tapers at the end nearest you. From the trench’s pitch-black interior, a blast of opaque, white smoke streams out, billowing directly up and off the photograph’s top edge.

Collection

  • Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (The End), 1990
    A rectangular column of white paper with a black border rests on a concrete floor in a neat stack that is nearly as tall as the paper is wide.
  • Jenny Holzer, In a paradisiac climate everything is clear..., 1980–82
    Black, uppercase, words appear on a white background that read: "IN A PARADISIAC CLIMATE EVERYTHING IS CLEAR AND SIMPLE WHEN YOU ARE PERFORMING BASIC ACTS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL."
  • Jason Lazarus, Standing at the Grave of Emmett Till, day of exhumation, June 1st, 2005 (Alsip, IL), 2005
  • Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 1992
    A framed text, black on white, reads "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background". This phrase is repeated and gradually becomes distorted until illegible at the bottom.
    1. Long A body of black text is printed on a white rectangle with even borders of white space on all four sides. The text reads "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," repeated without punctuation or line breaks to separate the repetitions. The text is printed in a stenciled font with gritty smudges that become more and more prominent as the text continues, eventually blending with the text at the bottom of the image, rendering it almost illegible. It has a narrow black frame.
  • Kerry James Marshall, Mementos, 1998
  • Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976/1991
    A statue made of loosely woven branches fills a niche in a crumbling stone wall. The statue is in the rough shape of a human figure with its elbows bent and arms raised to its sides.
  • Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1977/1991
    A photograph of a hard dirt landscape with a rectangle of planted grass that frames a depression filled with white flowers in the silhouette of a human body.
  • Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976/1991
    In a dark, nighttime scene, firework sparklers burn in the shape of a human with their hands held upward.
  • Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976/1991
    A white piece of fabric with a blood red imprint of a human figure is suspended on the back wall of a stone alcove. Dried branches rest in the bottom of the alcove.
  • Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion (after Francis Bacon), 1999
    A palm-sized digital projector is mounted a few inches away from a white wall. It projects a small image of a uniformed athlete standing in a crowded arena.
  • Andres Serrano, Untitled (Knifed to Death I and II), 1992
    Two side-by-side photos each show a light-skinned hand extending away from the other. The hands each have small, bloodied wounds on their wrists and blackened fingertips.