Buried Beauty, Broken Block: Davey Friday & Roland Knowlden

Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center

November 11th – December 17th, 2022

Buried Beauty, Broken Block is an exhibition of works by two artists, who together span notions of black spatiality across two scales. From the micro, intimate features of the body, to the macro systems of a cityscape. The works in the show collage these elements through painting and drawing, to externalize the layered, yet often invisible tensions that exist between the black body and the spaces in which these two artists occupy. 

While Knowlden and Friday’s work expand outward in scale, they intersect at a specific geographical location. The Mecca Flats Building, which was once a black hub of Bronzeville and the center of Gwendolyn Brooks “In the Mecca”, was demolished to build Mies Van Der Rohe’s prized architecture school building, S.R. Crown Hall; where the two artists met. The influence of their architectural education is rooted in their spatial sensibilities to drawing and painting, but also to their adept vision to see and feel the stories that lie buried beneath the ground. It is through their individual techniques of reenvisioning those spatial realities, that the works allow for imaginative new connections and paths to emerge, amongst gestures and worlds.