Constellations & Throughlines
Open through Spring 2025
In a world of constant connection and endless scrolling, it's easy to forget the simple wonders surrounding us. When was the last time you truly looked up and saw the stars blazing with ancient light? Just as light pollution dims their brilliance, so do traditional museums and galleries dim the light of the artists all around us, telling us who the "real" artists are. But just like those stars, these artists persist. This exhibit, Constellations & Throughlines, invites you to rediscover those hidden stars – both in the night sky and our community. These elder artists, with their lifetimes of wisdom and creativity, remind us of the beauty we overlook when we forget to look up.
Constellations & Throughlines is more than an exhibition; it's a curated assemblage of artists converging at the Civic Arts Church at The Commonwealth. It is a constellation of unique creative forces with shared life experiences - through lines - who have cultivated artistic practices and woven together bodies of work over a generation. This dynamic gathering embodies Sweet Water Foundation's essential value of Sankofa – an Akan-Twi word that speaks to the importance of retrieving and re-membering what is at risk of being forgotten – and is the culminating event of the inaugural Civic Arts Workshop Series.
Featuring works of four local artists – Ricardia Davis, Rhonda Long, Rudy Taylor, and Dr. Derise "Mama Afua" Tolliver – each with over two decades of artistic practice, the workshop series and this exhibition challenge traditional notions of who is an artist and what constitutes “valuable” artistic expression. Each artist, deeply rooted in the Sweet Water Foundation community, has cultivated a unique practice and impressive body of work amidst their personal and professional lives.
Like a rich tapestry, where disparate elements come together to create something new and unexpected, Constellations & Throughlines is an assemblage, highlighting the potential for transformation through interconnection.
“Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making.
Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them. Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts? If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities?”
The throughlines of this assemblage - self-taught artists who have nourished their practices over decades while teaching others in homage to ancestors and shared legacy of excellence, struggle, and perseverance - form a network where new perspectives and creative possibilities emerge.
The Civic Arts Church has been reborn as a space for such assemblages; a neighborhood hub once-forgotten and resurrected by Sweet Water Foundation as a dynamic community design center. Constellations + Throughlines mirrors the history of the Civic Arts Church itself as a celebration of the power of Civic Arts to illuminate, regenerate, and connect. Civic Arts goes beyond typical "social practice" and "public art" to engage all members of a community – not just those who identify themselves as "artists" – to cultivate and catalyze meaningful change in the built environment and the social fabric of the community.
The Constellations + Throughlines exhibit explores themes of heritage, spirituality, culture, and the interconnectedness of nature and urban life through a diverse range of mediums, including collage, paper cutting, painting, and technical drawing, all centered on reclaiming otherwise wasted materials. Like a constellation in the night sky and an assemblage of found objects, the exhibit reveals the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate elements, inviting viewers to contemplate the intricate relationships between individual expression, collective memory, and the power of a community to come together and "re-member" itself.
Read more about each of the artists, their artwork and throughlines:
EXHIBIT HOURS + LOCATION
Fridays 12:00 - 3:00p
Starting January 17, 2025
SWF Civic Arts Church
5810 S Lafayette Ave, Chicago, IL 60621
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ricardia Davis
b: Lake County, Illinois
Ricardia Davis is a native Chicagoan, Foundational Black American, and visionary creator with an imaginative eye for structure and form. From her start as an architecture student at Tuskegee University to forging a vanguard career as a blueprint quality technician in manufacturing, her mind is attuned to intricate designs and the balance of spatial dimensions.
What started in fourth grade as a youthful fascination with making paper snowflakes has transformed into mastery of the fine art of paper cutting, resulting in thousands of mesmerizing paper fractals that carve infinities into being. She makes art out of pure love for the craft. The evolution of her decades-long practice is visible in her work, beginning with more traditional snowflakes reflecting seasonal changes and holidays, to faces resembling West African masks, to rugs and most recently expanding to delicate insects.
Ricardia’s process emerged from her intuitive sense of space and fearless spirit of experimentation. She works without sketches or templates; her designs simply appear to her, and she materializes them. Ricardia transforms the mundane into the extraordinary and exquisite, crafting her art from discarded coffee filters and packing paper. Ricardia’s ability to see the beauty in commonly discarded material is not only an ecological choice, it’s also just smart. It demonstrates that ecologically conscious art can come to people organically and that art-making doesn’t require expensive supplies.
With scissors as her primary tool, she transforms each piece into a unique and precious story. Her designs arise intuitively, guided by an innate spatial understanding honed through years of experience as a blueprint quality control technician and her studies in architecture. This deep understanding of form and structure allows her to visualize intricate folds and cuts, ultimately producing complex and moving tableaus from the simplest of materials.
Rhonda Long
b: Detroit, Michigan
Rhonda Long is a lifelong artist and educator who sees it as her responsibility to share what she knows. In Rhonda’s words, “Art is part of me, it's who I am. I am supposed to share what I know.” Whether teaching in a traditional classroom or one-on-one, imparting her creativity and wisdom is an integral part of Long’s pedagogy. Her medium of choice is pencil, but she is a virtuoso of many mediums. She generously offers her talents as a seamstress, painter, sketch artist, [etc.].
A common thread within her work is an intimate and inspiring celebration of humanity. Whether working with the warm sepia tones of coffee or the rich grayscale of charcoal, her expressive power is evident in her focus on anatomy and expression, powerfully bringing to life the magic of a windswept sari or the charm of a boyish smile.
To date, Long has exhibited her work in multiple exhibits – including in Tampa, Florida (at Jazz in the Garden and as part of the Howard Alan Events Art Festival over six years) and more recently, in her second solo exhibition in Chicago (The Water Collection, JaRes Gallery, 2023). Her work is also featured in the permanent collections of the Sweet Water Foundation as displayed in Gallery at [Re]Construction House.
Rudy Taylor, Jr.
b: Chicago, Illinois
Rudy Taylor, Jr., is an industrial designer, mentor, technical drafter, carpenter, artist, and musician with more than 35 years of experience designing and building custom furniture and cabinetry, as well as working in interior design and exhibit design.
A Chicago native, Rudy graduated from Hales Franciscan High School. His passion for illustration began early, with childhood sketches of sports figures. As a student at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), he first pursued architecture before transferring to and graduating with a degree in Industrial Design and Product Design. The quick feedback cycle of design challenged and captivated him – he could rapidly translate concepts into tangible prototypes.
With each new experience, Rudy refines his craft in carpentry and technical drawing, drawing inspiration from his surroundings and translating what he sees into his designs. Through working at an interior design firm and experience with exhibit design, he honed his perspective drawings and their presentation. Guidance from a friend who is a fine artist helped him refine his shading and blending techniques.
As a designer, Rudy approaches projects sculpturally, with an eye towards aesthetics. He particularly enjoys designing and building lighting that plays with the balance of light and shade, reclaiming and remixing otherwise wasted materials to test different light diffusion techniques.
Each designed object starts with five to seven quick hand sketches to conceptualize the idea, aesthetics, sculptural form, and relationships between components. From there, he integrates the actual dimensions, refining the technicalities of the design as the product is engineered. The technical drawings capture and translate the function and form of each designed object, while hand-sketches illustrate unique aspects and relationships between each component within the design.
Derise “Mama Afua” Tolliver
b: Cincinnati, Ohio
Derise “Mama Afua” Tolliver is a healer, teacher, writer, plant rescuer, multi-disciplinary artist, Jegna, and dream worker – a descendant of many African warriors, healers, and builders, among many other interconnected roles and abilities.
She grew up in the inner city and suburbs of Cincinnati, learning the gifts and values of cultivating life through her family garden, full of fruit trees, vegetables, and berries. A clinical psychologist by training and a healer by nurture, Mama Afua invests in teaching and caring for each person as an integral way to know, heal, and build community. A graduate internship brought her to Chicago in 1982. After completing her doctorate at Duke University in North Carolina, she returned in 1985 and has been in Chicago ever since. She continues to deepen her connection to traditional African healing, spirituality, and culture during this time of refirement in her life, which is embedded in how she engages in the world around her.
Mama Afua creates collages using found objects, magazine pieces, fabric, materials from nature, ephemera, words, and sounds, often drawing from an African Indigenous Perspective. Her assemblage process is alchemical, transforming items by imbuing a new sense of value into what is often discarded. She honors the guidance of her foremothers, as well as her own decades-long scholarship and wisdom gained from many journeys to her ancestral lands. Mama Afua presents her collages as storytellers that inspire a profound “re-membering,” which she describes as “com[ing] back into wholeness– individually and collectively–from the brokenness that our people experience [due to] cultural and racial oppression.”
The practice of collage illuminates the deeper purpose of her work, which embodies the Kiswahili principle of Kuumba – “to bring things together to make them more beautiful than they were before for the community.” For Mama Afua, collage is a way of doing and being, with many different mediums and applications, from fashion and mixed-media collages to the “collage” of community members and the information, knowledge, and wisdom born from those connections. Each element, when connected through observation and reflection, tells us about how the Universe operates and functions.
CONTRIBUTORS
Sweet Water Foundation Core Team and Humans-in-Residence and Collaborators.
SWF Core Team: Emmanuel Pratt, Jia Lok Pratt, Courtney Hug, David Snowdy, Rudy Taylor, Jr., Lucero Flores, Alysse Hines, Phoenix Lewis, Lucas Marqués.
Humans-in-Residence: Kate Martin Mytty.
Exhibit Design Collaborator: Ray Klemchuk.