Built around a local collection of art-adjacent artifacts produced during the “Obama Years,” this small exhibition offers a necessarily—and inescapably—opaque window out onto the wide world of Our Literal Speed (OLS), an art-and-text undertaking based in Selma, Alabama, since 2006. More creative ethos than circumscribed collective, OLS has no fixed membership and is not anchored to any individual practice or medium. Rather, OLS simply does OLS, which means, at least in part, sitting with strangeness—with confusion and difficulty—in art, in life, and in the space of their in-between.
Consequently, to best accord with what they understand the spirit of OLS to be, the curators have chosen to limit the usage of explanatory texts and/or other standard galleristic interventions that typically render art too immediately or easily legible, believing instead that good things come to those who wait…
…and wait…
…and wait some more…
…all the while letting that perennially Modernist question—“But is this art really?”—bug them until they feel compelled to judge, even if only for themselves, whether any of it matters in the first place.
After all, it probably doesn't. But it very well might—and there is nothing more OLS than that.
Curators
doing our literal speed is curated by Cole Gruber and Hannah Michelle Ivanov.
Support
CWAC Exhibitions is organized by the Department of Art History’s Visual Resources Center. Additional support for this exhibition provided by the Department of Visual Arts. Installation support and preparation by the curators and Audrey Rasmuss. Special thanks to Zachary Cahill, Jenny Harris, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and Christine Mehring.
Visit
The Cochrane-Woods Art Center is open:
Mondays 8:30am–5:00pm
Tuesdays 8:30am–5:00pm
Wednesdays 8:30am–5:00pm
Thursdays 8:30am–5:00pm
Fridays 8:30–5:00pm
and by appointment
Related Programming
- doing our literal speed is presented in conversation with Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years, curated by Jenny Harris, on view at the Logan Center through October 11.
Accessibility
CWAC Exhibitions is committed to accessibility for all our exhibitions. However, the second floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center is accessible only by stairs. To request an accommodation or alternative format, please email visualresources@uchicago.edu.