UIC Gallery 400 40th anniversary

This drawing was inspired by the story of Patty Hearst who was hidden in different homes during her kidnapping in 1979, in Berkley, California. Patricia Hearst, of the Hearst newspaper magnate family, had been confined to a closet, blindfolded, and subjected to mind games for eight weeks following her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). By the end of her capture, she was converted into a SLA  member. The controversy around her conversion centers around how she was converted and if it was under her own will or of her captors. This drawing is Edgar Arceneaux’s imagining of what that closet looked like and if what motivated her to join a militant group was there all along, but just beneath the surface.

Born in 1972, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Arceneaux constructs drawings, installations, video and film works as complex arrangements of association that examine adjacencies and points of contact between implausible relations. Constantly working in new modes, Arceneaux directed his first play at the Performa Biannual in NYC in November 2015, for his first play Until, Until, Until... and was awarded the Malcolm McLaren, Best of Show Award. His new play, film, and installation is entitled Boney Manilli and is loosely inspired by the infamous pop duo Milli Vanilli. Staged in Nigeria at the Lagos Theater Festival in Spring 2019, the work will premiere in the US in 2023 at the REDCAT. Arceneaux received the prestigious Mike Kelley Foundation Award in 2019 and the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship in 2020.

UIC Gallery 400 commissioned, produced, and presented his large-scale 2006 solo exhibition The Alchemy of Comedy...Stupid, which was later exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.