Tuned Mass

Chicago Cultural Center, 2018

Tuned Mass featured Board-up and Lean-to, two works that continued my exploration of how materials revealed the layered conditions of a place—its value, fragility, and endurance. Board-up pointed to the tension between care and abandonment—what was meant to protect a home also signaled its vacancy. Constructed from wood stained with Kool-Aid drink mix, the work referenced AfriCOBRA’s “Cool-Ade Colors” and the bold visual language of the 1960s Black Arts Movement. The sugary pigment, absorbed into the grain, transformed an ordinary surface into something luminous and celebratory, asserting beauty where it wasn’t expected.

Installed in the Chicago Cultural Center—the city’s municipal headquarters for cultural administration—Board-up took on new meaning. Boarding up a window in such a space, using brightly colored wood resembling OSB particle board, became a potent gesture. Some viewers interpreted it as a stained-glass window, while others were reminded of the countless boarded-up buildings on Chicago’s South and West Sides. The work blurred the line between protection and erasure, safety and neglect, turning a defensive architecture into a meditation on visibility and value.

Lean-to distilled shelter to its most elemental form—a structure built from necessity and resourcefulness. Together, these works considered how people persisted, rebuilt, and redefined stability amid shifting conditions. Through color, material, and gesture, Tuned Mass invited reflection on what we chose to preserve, how we navigated vulnerability, and how acts of repair—no matter how provisional—became expressions of resilience and care.

Curated by Greg Lunceford