The Arts Club of Chicago
Cosmo Whyte The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone
Jan 23–Apr 2, 2025
In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based and Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte situates the architectural archives of his late father as the structural ground for an intervention and interrogation into the spaces and forms of diasporic protest, spectacle, and witnessing. Presented by The Arts Club of Chicago, in The Mother’s Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone the artist reformulates photojournalistic images onto materials ranging from drawings to hand-painted beaded curtains and steel framings of unrealized structures. In so doing, Whyte poetically asks “what makes a witness? And what does it mean to have become one?”
Cosmo Whyte
Agitation 2- Wailer and the Griot, 2023
Charcoal and gouache on paper
60 1/4 x 87 1/2 x 2 in.