21c Museum Hotel Chicago Free Admission Friday

Free Admission Friday from 24 hours a day at 21C Museum Hotel Chicago - see INFO below. Politicians and athletes too, are subject to mediatization; the exponential circulation of their images online and in print reduces Obama to magazine profiles accumulated into a portrait by Robert Silvers, and stills from on-camera appearances by Condoleezza Rice fix her identity as a powerful, larger-than-life woman, a status Mickalene Thomas emphasizes by presenting her images in diptychs alongside those of mega media mogul Oprah Winfrey. An archival press photo of Britains Queen Elizabeth is incorporated into April Beys mixed-media Power Girl (Incarcerated Queen), combined with references to colonialism, commerce, and Afrofuturism. The image of the young monarch appears behind fabric bars, alluding both to Elizabeths early, possibly reluctant, ascendance to the throne, and to the reproduction of her likeness on the currency and goods of Commonwealth nations, this portrait depicts more symbol than substance. Bey titles this series after Kendrick Lamars Black Panther songs, which celebrate the resilience of Black womentrue power girls, rather than a monarch who has inherited the exploitative legacy of colonialist practices without the power to assert individual agency, forever subject to her inherited, mediatized, celebrity status. More Info below.