Image credit: Michael Abramson, Untitled, 1974-1977, gelatin silver print

A Space To Appear, A Space To Tarry offers an immersive engagement with work from the photographic series “Black Nightclubs of Chicago’s South Side” by the late artist Michael Abramson.

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For nearly three consecutive years (1974 - 1977), the photographer Michael Abramson amassed hundreds of images of beer-happy barflies, sharply-dressed couples, and jaunty performers who assembled every night in Black disco nights on the South Side of Chicago. One such club was called Pepper’s Hideout.

Small, square-shaped mirrors were installed on the floral patterned walls of Pepper’s Hideout, which allowed patrons to encounter throughout the night their own reflections/appearances and those of the other club-goers. The establishment’s name—Pepper’s Hideout—prompts us to consider what types of visibility were desired and accessed in a place intended to conceal.

This exhibition considers how the club-goers in Pepper’s Hideout used the mirrors to place themselves in, as scholar Krista Thompson describes, “alternative modes of visibility,” where their bodies linger in this Ellisonian threshold of “hypervisibility and disappearance.” The mirrors in Pepper’s Hideout activated the nightclub as both a space to appear and a space to tarry.

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A Space To Appear, A Space To Tarry is curated by Tamir Williams.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, University of Pennsylvania.