Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago is pleased to announce The Mask of Prosperity, a group exhibition that takes shape around the role inheritance has across multiple dimensions of our lives. Inheritance is commonly understood as a will, a promise of ownership that ensures the passing down and accumulation of property and capital from one generation to the next. For many, this topic strikes a personal chord, demanding reflection on our relationships with ancestors and what we would like to endow our descendants with. Expanding on this strand of thinking, The Mask of Prosperity is posed as an inquiry that probes the tensions between which legacies we choose to acquire, hold on to, or reject across culture and personal life.

The featured artists present a spectrum of reflections interrogating how legacies linked to language, property, social movement, and moral principles intensify to possibly build a prosperous life. A central concern in the exhibition is, how do we come into possession of material and intangible things and what are their lasting impressions on determining our sense of self? The scenes of life collected and animated in the exhibition capture intimate pursuits to parse out unfinished business with loss, grief, past, present, and future. These scenes, born from the artists’ keen observation of their kinship structures, political environments, and private lives, are rendered into a mirror in which we can recognize inheritance’s meaning and value in our lives. 

Newly commissioned contributions by Caroline Kent and Nate Young, Eli Greene, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, and S*an D. Henry-Smith emerged from conversations with these artists over the past two years. Artists and spouses Caroline Kent and Nate Young present a collaborative installation that holds a legacy of their dedication to an uncompromising work ethic embedded in their practices. The work traces back to both their family’s prior generations and functions as an archive of photographs, documents, and works from their oeuvres that they will pass down to their children. Katherine Simóne Reynolds meditates on her parents’ marriage, their divorce, her father’s death, and her inheritance through opaque and transparent display approaches that reveal the existence of a predatory industry that preys on and profits off estate heirs. cameron clayborn’s cell-like sculpture utilizes architectural materials and draws from their childhood memories in their grandmother’s house in Malvern, Arkansas, to consider its importance in forming their Black, femme, and Southern identity.

Artists: Sonya Clark, cameron clayborn, Eli Greene, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Caroline Kent and Nate Young, Bouchra Khalili, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Carmen Winant