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Support the Alliance with a donation of $100 or more before September 30 and receive a one-year membership to the Alliance and a crossbody bag designed by renowned Chicago artist Robert Earl Paige.
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Photo credit: Tom Van Eynde, 2022
About the Artist
Robert Earl Paige (b.1937, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator actively making work that challenges the distinction between fine art and craft by combining elements from African aesthetic traditions, modernist painting, Bauhaus architecture, and vernacular invention in his objects, collages, and fabrics. He earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began his career working for the architectural design firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill before transitioning to creating commercial objects and fashion. He has partnered with commercial enterprises such as the Italian fashion house Fiorio and Sears, Roebuck and Co. department stores to produce scarves and interior decor respectively. His signature line the Dakkabar Collection was sold nationwide in over 100 stores and included several bedroom and home furnishing pieces inspired by West African imagery with a contemporary palette in the 1970s.
Early in the Black Arts Movement, Paige participated and believes strongly in its ideology of community participation in art and culture, which continues to be of focus in his pedagogy today. He has taught art and design principles to youth through Gallery 37 and is a frequent lecturer with the nomadic Black Arts Movement School Modality. Paige has been an artist-in-residence for many organizations, including the Cabrini Green neighborhood alliance, DuSable Museum of African American History, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), Ndebele Foundation (South Africa) and Hyde Park Art Center. Works by Robert Paige have been exhibited at Salon94 Design and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and in Chicago at the SMART Museum of Art and the Chicago Cultural Center, among others.
Don’t miss the United Colors of Robert Earl Paige, showing now through October 27 at the Hyde Park Art Center.
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