Focus: Sharon Hayes

Art Institute of Chicago

Through March 11

“Pictures of protesters carrying signs have become familiar sights this year, but Sharon Hayes makes us look twice at the slogans she brandishes,” said Lauren Weinberg in Time Out Chicago. In the Near Future (2005–09), one of three installations in Hayes’s first-ever solo show in a U.S. museum, presents the artist as a one-woman political movement. Thirteen slide projectors throw up hundreds of snapshots of Hayes standing next to police officers, holding protest signs and raising her fists. She could be any number of Occupy Wall Streeters photographed for the front pages. Yet look closely and check the dates: There she is in 2008 holding a sign that says “Organise or Starve,” a slogan that was prominent during 1933 unemployment strikes. In another shot, taken in 2005, she holds a sign declaring, “Ratify E.R.A. Now!”

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The Art Institute’s decision to mount this show in the fall now seems positively “prescient,” said Sam Worley in the Chicago Reader. Hayes began the work years ago, apparently in an attempt to find out “how the language of bygone protests—women’s lib, civil rights, the Vietnam War—speaks to the present.” Today, all of us are interested in the commonalities between the political struggles of the past and of our own time. Though In the Near Future steals the show because of its topicality, Hayes’s two other installations also demand attention. In Parole (2010), a silent central character gradually assumes an identity as we watch her record other people reading love letters and political tracts. In An Ear to the Sounds of History (2011), Hayes turns a collection of old spoken-word LPs—featuring Eleanor Roosevelt, Malcolm X, and others—into “an exploration of how some voices gain purchase in the public sphere while others don’t.”