Program Type:
Arts & Culture, Civic Learning, Equity & Anti-Racism, Multicultural, Students Grades 6-8, Students Grades 9-12Program Description
Event Details
Meet the Artist and enjoy light refreshments.
The controversial Moynihan Report of 1965 delivered a bleak and problematic assessment on the state of the African American family. It included some of the following brooding pronouncements: “The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability. By contrast, the family structure of lower-class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.” He went on to say, “The breakdown of the negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency" and that “almost one-fourth of negro families are headed by females.”
This exhibition, Our Reality Not Your Pathology, now sixty years later, represents a rebuttal to the famous Moynihan Report, which sought to distill the Black family as deeply broken, deviant, weighed down by misery and deprivation. The ensemble of paintings by Shane-Jahi Jackson provides his personal assessment using his own family and the friends he deems family to illustrate the strength, resilience, and joy that exist within the Black family.
Each of his paintings defiantly challenges Moynihan’s claim that “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is too out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress.” Defying stereotypes, Shane-Jahi works celebrate the Black woman as the pillar and protector of the black family to include mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters, and daughters alongside Black men and sons.
This exhibition lays bare the humanity and range of the Black experience and contends that “it takes a village” not only the traditional family unit to raise a child.
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About the artist
Shane-Jahi Jackson was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1987. He is a self-taught artist and has exhibited in the Midwest at various venues, and most recently at the University of Chicago, the Reva & David Logan Arts Center in 2023 with Voices through the Orb, and in 2024 and Generations: Opaque Mirrors of Beauty at the Saint Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2025, he has two upcoming solo exhibitions at the Oak Park Public Library this summer and at Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago in the fall. He lives and works in Morris, Illinois, and is represented by D-Squared Art & Company.