Menie residents Mike & Sheila Forbes are celebrated in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) Chicago this year. LOVE: Still Not the Lesser, Aug 17–Dec 22, 2023,
MoCP is across the road from Art Institute Chicago which holds Grant Wood’s iconic ‘American Gothic’ and a street away from Trump Tower Chicago so having Mike and Sheila exhibited in between these is poigniant, especially now as their portrait enters the permanent collection of MoCP.
About the Exhibition (Text from MoCP)
“I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace…”
—James Baldwin, excerpt from The Fire Next Time, 1963
“Has everyone been in love? Not on the basis of the evidence. If they have, they’ve forgotten it.
If everyone had been in love, they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently.”
—James Baldwin, from “Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris,” 1970
LOVE: Still Not the Lesser brings together twelve international artists, uniting across communities to share the ways they encounter and understand love. These artists explore dynamics within romantic partnership, sensual eroticism, family structures, social utopia, and life and death. They observe and declare circumstances of love that serve various intentions.
The projects on view in LOVE range from an expressive courtship dance enacted by two people learning how to meaningfully connect despite barriers of distance, to an embodied portrayal of feeling one’s own sensuality and pleasure. From an adult son’s photo collaboration with his nonagenarian father during his artist mother’s last weeks of life, to the love and pride held within queer parenting.
Themes of visibility and adoration recur as concepts embraced by many of the LOVE photographers, as they use portraiture and self-portraiture to affirm many different types of bodies as divinely worthy of enjoying gentle care and affection. The exhibition presents love as a universal value of respect and care for all humans.
LOVE: Still Not the Lesser features artists Alia Ali, Alicia Bruce, Jorian Charlton, Jess T. Dugan, Mari Katayama, Kierah KIKI King, Mous Lamrabat, Tom Merilion, Salma Abedin Prithi, Modou Dieng Yacine, Yuge Zhou, and the debut of Jorge Ariel Escobar.
Love is a right of existence.
– Led by Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator
