iMuseum of Contemporary PhotographySouth Loop / Near South Side
If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground
Over 110 artists from the MoCP collection imagine the years Emmett Till never had, developed with his cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.: a creative monument to an unlived life.
More in Chicago
In Stephen Marc's 1988 photograph, a father on a Chicago shoreline has just thrown his son into the air, and the boy hangs there between release and catch. Guest curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis calls it the epigraph for the whole show. Her first question was whether Emmett Till was the boy or the father.
The show imagines the life Till would have had if he'd made it home from Mississippi in 1955. More than 110 photographs from MoCP's own collection run from childhood to adulthood, north to South and back: hopscotch, prom, the Bulls, a portrait of Barack Obama. Train tracks keep returning, for the ride home he never took. The pictures hang without captions, so you meet Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks without being told it's them. Responses come from Ava DuVernay, John Legend and Till's cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.
Newcity found it heart-wrenching, though the walls are "humming with life" rather than violence. Entry is free, Thursdays run until 8pm, and it closes 19 December.
Editor's pick
In Stephen Marc's 1988 photograph a Chicago father has just thrown his son into the air; the curator asked whether Till was the boy or the father. More than 110 uncaptioned photographs imagine the life he never got.
Look for
Stephen Marc's shoreline throw
A Chicago father tosses his son into the air in 1988, the boy suspended mid-flight; Lewis chose it as the epigraph for the exhibition.
Gordon Parks's segregated drinking fountains
A colour photograph from Mobile, Alabama, taken the year after Till's death; Lonnie Bunch reads the subjects' clothes as a refusal of second-class citizenship.
Walter Rosenblum's Hopscotch
Children at play in 1952, chosen by Till's cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., whose whole response is three words: "A time of innocence."
Dawoud Bey's Barack Obama
A 2006 portrait of then-Senator Obama looking straight into the camera, commissioned by Columbia College and chosen by Hank Willis Thomas.
Todd Hido beside Paul D'Amato
A blonde woman's sunlit hair seen from behind, hung next to a young Black boy at a pool's edge in golden-hour light, looking back at you.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Evening Visits
- Out-Of-Town Guests
Skip if
You want a label beside every picture: the 110-plus photographs hang uncaptioned.
Also at Museum of Contemporary Photography
On now nearby
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Image credits
9
- If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American GroundCourtesy of Museum of Contemporary Photography
- After the Age of DinosaursField Museum
- Pokémon Fossil MuseumPeter Pawinski / Field Museum
- Self, Made: Fourteen Modern Artists from the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family CollectionCourtesy of Richard and Ellen Sandor.
- Museum of Contemporary PhotographyAjay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Field MuseumPaul Sableman via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Shedd AquariumDiego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Art Institute of ChicagoDiego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Adler PlanetariumMichael Barera, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0