Talk | The Color Is: A Behind-the-Scenes Conversation

About the Event

Earlier this year, artists and brothers Nick and Jack Cave created The Color Is—a multimedia extravaganza combining art, fashion, and performance hosted inside the Roundhouse at the DuSable Museum of African American History. The Color Is paid tribute to Black excellence and innovation throughout history, drawing on influences including the Ebony Fashion Fair, ball culture, and the iconic Emerald City sequence from the 1978 film The Wiz. 

Director Claude-Aline Miller documented the whole production, creating 376 Days—a film that honors this unique experience. For this special event, Miller premieres her film capturing The Color Is, and is joined by Nick and Jack Cave to discuss the project after the screening. The conversation is moderated by Bob Faust, an artist, designer, and the special projects director for Nick Cave. 

About the Exhibition

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first career-spanning survey of the internationally renowned Chicagoan Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives in Chicago, IL), an artist celebrated for projects that blend community building with vibrant works of art across disciplines, including immersive installations, textural sculptures, impeccably crafted fashion, and dynamic videos and performances. Highlights of the exhibition include never-before-seen works, including a continuation of the artist’s popular Soundsuits series with the premiere of Soundsuits 9:29 and a mesmerizing, site-specific installation, Spinner Forest, comprised of thousands of kinetic spinners that hang in the museum’s two-story atrium and fourth-floor lobby.

Cave came to prominence as a visual artist almost 20 years ago with his dazzling, sculptural Soundsuits, and works in Chicago as an activist, educator, designer, and performer. Nick Cave: Forothermore gathers all of these aspects of Cave’s work into the artist’s largest museum survey to date. This immersive journey through Cave’s distinct bodies of work is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue designed with Cave’s partner, Bob Faust. Nick Cave: Forothermore is an ode to those who, whether due to racism, homophobia, or other forms of bigotry, live their lives as the “other”—and a celebration of the way art, music, fashion, and performance can help us envision a more just future.

The exhibition is curated by Naomi Beckwith, former Manilow Senior Curator. It is presented in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art on the museum’s fourth floor.