Opening | Saturday, April 19th 2:30-4:30
Book Talk | Saturday, June 28, 2-4pm

Narrow Bridge Arts Club is pleased to announce the unveiling of our first 2025 outdoor exhibition artist, Rose Blouin.

Following Blouin’s solo exhibition, To Washington Park, With Love: Photography from the Summer of 1987 at APL’s Arts Incubator in 2022, the corresponding book by the same name was released last fall. Blouin’s “Washington Park” series is a timeless relic of our southsider history and a true affirmation, a touching presentation of Afro-nostalgia, presentism, and joy for Black Chicagoans and others alike, that holds an intergenerational impact beyond comparison.

“As a documentary photographer, it's really important for me to capture events and the spirit and the humanity of the people, and give someone who wasn't there a sense of what it was and make sure he was listening, and was like, and uh, I accomplished that with these photographs and had an appreciation for what showed up as my love for the community for Black people for our culture.”

Launched in October 2024, “To Washington Park with Love” is a soul-nourishing binding of one hundred and twenty plus images derived from the 800 pictures taken by Blouin in the summer of 1987 in Washington park, and thought pieces by Chicago based , including a forward by Adrienne Brown & Eve L. Ewing. “To Washington Park with Love” is a tangible archive of the familiar romance southsiders share with Washington Park.

“I really felt it was important to present something that offered a different image of Black people creating, loving, being themselves, being joyful. I mean, you could add so many adjectives to that.”

For a more intimate glimpse at Blouin’s motivations surrounding her practice, and to read more about the process behind her debut solo exhibition in 2022, affirmation of southern tradition and the influence of Toni Morrison’s writing, and the people involved in the Washington Park project, read the full interview here:

Phia lynne: You began this project in 1987 and didn’t return to the images until over three decades later. How did your perspective on the photos change during that time, especially after retiring and revisiting them?

Rose Bluoin: Ah, that's a good question. Thirty plus years is a really long time to have not really looked at work that I had done, I mean if I go back and dig up writing that I did 30 plus years ago, I'm sure I would read it differently, but I had a general memory sense of how important that project was and that there were probably some really great images in there but I mean, in 2019 when I received a grant which enabled me to have all of the images, the negatives professionally scanned and digitized, and I mean I had contact sheets, but if you know contact sheets, the images are so tiny that you don't get a real feel for how they look enlarged.

I remember getting the digital files and just being amazed at what I was seeing. And I'm like, 'Oh my God', there's some great stuff here. It really gave me a renewed appreciation and validation for what I had done in '87 by proposing the project and making it a documentary project of all the events in Washington Park during that one summer. As a documentary photographer, it's really important for me to capture events and the spirit and the humanity of the people, and give someone who wasn't there a sense of what it was and make sure he was listening, and was like, and uh, I really think I accomplished that with these, these photographs, and just really had an appreciation for what showed up as my love for the community for Black people for our culture.

PL: What called you to choose to publicize the selected images we see in your book out of the hundreds of negatives you had held onto? What did that curatorial process look like?

RB: I grew up on the South Side, spent some summers in North Carolina, rural North Carolina, on my grandmother's farm, and really developed an appreciation for wide open spaces and nature. I remember going to Washington Park as a kid, and of course I had been to Washington Park so many times over the decades and took my children there and had family outings there and so on. And just as I was looking through the images and making selections, because it's really tough to narrow down, I think I ended up with around 800 images that I thought would really be great images and having to narrow that down to just the 40 for the initial exhibition.

I think there's 120 in the book. I wanted to present the real sense of community that was evident in the photographs–the landscape, how people interacted, how people interacted with the landscape. I was especially drawn to my photographs of children and families and particularly children with Black men, their dads or uncles or grandfathers or whoever they were with. And because I think those values are still so important. And so I think the photographs are kind of a reminder of how precious all of that is. And also the idea that it, and also the idea that it, presents the Black community in a way that's different from how Black folks are generally seen in the media. I mean, the media pays a lot of attention to that–to crime and violence and celebrity and nonsense. So I really felt it was important to present something that offered a different image of Black people creating, loving, being themselves, being joyful. And you could just add so many adjectives to that.

PL: In your book, “To Washington Park with Love”, you shared how the representation of black southern culture within Toni Morrison’s work gave inspiration to the imagery you sought after and captured in your Washington Park series. How has photography served for you and your audience as a reunification with southern life and tradition?

RB: I'm not so sure it necessarily represents a reunification as an affirmation. When I was teaching at Columbia, I taught a seminar on Toni Morrison. And she's just absolutely my favorite writer–partly because I know her characters, and particularly with the lived experience of spending summers in the South, and being surrounded by family and community throughout my life who had come from the South. And who had brought their traditions, and character and personalities and language and speech and all of that with them. Morrison's characters were so alive for me. It's sort of like If you go to Africa, uh, or, yeah. And you see people who look just like somebody you know here. the way her characters express their own humanity, as well as their grief, their suffering, but also their joy. So when I'm out shooting, I look for those things. I recognize them. And I think it has to do with capturing the essence, the soul, the spirit of the people I'm photographing.

PL: What relationships emerged from the people involved in this project? What intergenerational conversations have you encountered in response to your Washington Park series?

RB: I've had a lot of conversations actually with people who, when they've seen the images, they immediately start telling me about their own experiences in Washington park growing up, which is really great because it seems to affirm that the photographs captured something that a whole lot of people can relate to. I know a lot of the people who were in the photographs. I mean, not the majority, I would say maybe, oh, five to ten percent of the people. And a lot of the people I know, their photographs are not in the book. For example, my children are in the book. My goddaughter is in the book. D Alexander, Henry Huff, and a lot of the drummers and dancers that you see in the photographs. Douglas Ewert, Margaret Burroughs. In the wedding photos, I came to know a couple of people who were in the book, and a couple that was getting married, though I didn't know them at the time.

After the exhibition was up at Arts Incubator, one day this woman came by, and she turned out to be– I never knew that the University of Chicago Hospitals have a curator, and she's responsible for exhibiting and purchasing art for the University of Chicago Hospitals. There's a long hallway in DCAM, and she wanted to exhibit the images there, so she took probably two-thirds of them, and some of them were really big, like 35 by 50 inches, and she did a really great job of curating and hanging and putting text and everything.

Anyway, she contacted me and told me that one of the hospital employees was walking through the gallery and saw a photograph of her, and said, ‘that's my father in that photograph,’ and so I was able to contact her and find out which photograph, and there's a guy and two girls in [this] photograph, and there's an ice cream vendor kind of in the background. Her dad was the ice cream vendor, and it turned out that her dad was still selling ice cream in 2021, but he'd gotten 35 years older, and she said that he's usually around Ray school.

I was supposed to hook up with her because I wanted to give her a print of the photograph, and for some reason she couldn't meet me, but she said, ‘you'll probably see my dad, I think he's out today,’ and I had to go pick up my granddaughter from Ray anyway, so I went. I was parked waiting for school to get out, and I saw him across the street, with his ice cream cart, and, you know, he was really old and barely able to push that cart around, but I got to talk to him, and he told me how when I took that photograph, he had wanted to open an ice cream shop, and he never could.

Because he was always getting hassled about not having a vendor's license or something, and he basically blames the city for destroying his dream of having an ice cream shop, but he was still out there selling his ice cream, and I was able to give him the print, so that was really great. I keep hearing all kinds of things from people who remembered and were there during that time, that's really sweet.

Interview and Opening with Rose Blouin

Year of Repair