You are growing into consciousness and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

– Ta-Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me

A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. You must participate in the self in order to know what it is.

-Paul Tillich¹

You must let suffering speak if you want to hear the truth.

-Cornell West, Race Matters

Hangups, letdowns, bad brakes, setbacks

Natural fact is, oh honey, I can’t pay my taxes

Make me holler and throw up my hands

-Marvin Gaye, Inner City Blues

The black homeless man in Jesse Howard’s drawing Inner City Chaos (2023) looks directly at me with unnatural pale blue eyes that seem both suffering and hallucinatory at the same time. His forehead is white as though his thoughts have been wiped from existence, contrasting with the delicate ashen layers of charcoal that render every cranny and muscle of his face. His lips hang agape, as though trying to communicate a matter of vital yet inarticulate urgency while his head is framed by finely observed yet disarrayed hair, even exposing wisps of grey and droplets of condensation that cling to the edges of his unkempt mustache. I am magnetically possessed by this larger-than-life portrait, elongated as if to enhance the expression of suffering, speaking from the edge of incoherence with astonishing dignity.

        Jesse Howard’s drawings of African American people in his exhibition “The Emerging of a Black Diaspora” at Lewis University confront the viewer with their often larger than life scale. It feels as though we are encountering them on the street for the first time. Whether they are homeless people, millennials, gangbangers, or everyday citizens, we are often confronted by their direct forward gaze that forces us to acknowledge their presence. These are often, though not exclusively, depictions of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and forgotten.

        One of Howard’s major influences is Charles White, a Chicago-based artist who became well known for murals created in the 1930s and afterwards depicting African American historical figures and communal life. White’s powerful use of expressive distortion, influenced by the work of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, was achieved by rendering the heads of his figures small in proportion to their massive bodies and hands, giving the effect of monumentality to his subjects. Jacob Lawrence is also a major influence on Howard, using the same monumental graphic expressiveness to powerful effect in his work. On a local level, Howard was mentored by the Chicago-based artist Judith Roth, known for her expressive figure drawing and portraiture using charcoal and pastel. Other influences include Jim Dine’s late 70s figure drawings in charcoal and pastel as well as his experimental tearing and collaging of the paper surface. The stark frontal encounters in New York artist Alfred Leslie’s portraits also had their impact. Howard mentioned “I love the way he used shadows across the face and across the body itself.”²

        Howard’s work reflects a deeply personal consciousness of the African American community in Chicago and the vitality of its street life and unique individuals. This has a relationship to the deep history of his upbringing on the West Side of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. “I had a good deep sense of what was going on… to understanding the deepness about myself… I am an urban Chicago Boy. I need to embrace where I come from.”³ While this included a background consciousness of the major struggles and tragedies surrounding Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy Brothers, Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton, it also had to do with how the West Side, unlike Chicago’s South Side, did not have a lot of African Americans assimilated into the communities. The racist bigotry by the white community was palpable in the schools and neighborhood. “We didn’t know them; they didn’t know us. How does this affect my art? Eventually, it becomes a part of you because you see it all…absorbing what’s around you unconsciously… If you are really honest about yourself all that plays a part on a subliminal level.”⁴

        Howard’s drawings of homeless people are particularly arresting for how he expresses their humanity overlaid with the psychological sense of disconnection and trauma they have experienced in life. “These people were not born into the state they arrived at.”⁵ Howard’s proficiency lies in how he rehumanizes them, making psychologically visible what the most invisible people in our society experience. “My figures are often solitary and distorted. They speak of being disenfranchised, homeless, and barely visible.”⁶ Walking into the Abyss (2019) portrays a black homeless man wrapped in a blanket and jacket with a bundle on his back, rendered in carefully observed detail using black charcoal and highlighted by a few selected areas of color which move the eye around the composition. The closed eyes of the man’s sharply delineated profile seem to be trying to shut out the world’s troubles as he strides towards the right edge of the drawing as though attempting to escape its frame. Many of the same elements are present in Urban Metamorphosis (2018) which depicts the figure of a homeless man with his small face protruding from the top of a large quilted blanket that enfolds him. He becomes a kind of monumental sculpture defined by the folds and bulges in the blanket that embrace him, with a subtlety of detail that is marvelously fantastic and concrete at the same time. Howard’s work is not interested in illustrating the hardship of poverty, but expressing the deep psychological effect it has had on his subjects, uplifting their dignity while expressing empathy for them as human beings. His expressive use of distortion emphasizes how the disintegrative anguish of social and racial injustice has had a deep impact upon them.

        Several of Howard’s portraits such as Evening News Entertainment (2024) and Sundown in Blue (2024) use collage and paint elements that are brushed, pasted, and spattered on plexiglass sheets. These are overlayed onto charcoal portraits of men with weary and pensive faces, as if to express the chaotic impact of urban life and media on the mind. One of the most powerful drawings in the exhibition, A Cry for Justice Throughout the Ages (2019) portrays a woman on her knees, sprawled upon the ground in a state of hysteria with one hand grasping her cell phone as the other flails with an upturned palm as if to ask the question “Why?” The scream coming from her distorted mouth echoes the emotional scars of urban suffering and neglect, as the shadows of erased versions of her hair and face create a futurist-like reverberation of shapes that amplify the intensity of her scream. Her barely controlled outrage is Howard at his most expressively provocative as witness to the effects of oppression that is racially designed to operate the way it does, unmitigated into the present day.

        The-Street-Warrior-In-Hieroglyphics-1 and 2 (2018) depict a young man (perhaps a gangbanger?) looking us square in the face with eyes that penetrate with disarming frankness. He expressively gestures with his large hands that protrude from his oversized jacket. The plexiglass panel covering the drawing is scrawled with writing (as is the accompanying panel next to him) by urban high school students who were asked to contribute their authentic thoughts and feelings about life. Messages about love and struggle, guns and suicide prevention are summed up by the largest word HELP—saying volumes about the communities and schools in Chicago with often traumatic results imprinted on children’s lives. There are also other drawings of African American citizenry wearing COVID masks with long distinctive braids and elaborate hairstyles. A policewoman points her finger in warning to a pair of street performers in a drawing to her right. Another shows a group of three millennials dynamically suspended at the moment of taking a selfie, filled with a compelling sense of action in the moment.

        Much of Howard’s curiosity and intimacy with his subjects is aided by his skill as a photographer who stops people on the street and strikes up relationships with them. The pictures are used as reference material when creating a drawing, chosen because of how his subject’s faces resonate with mental images he has been intuitively seeking, to “find and engage the human subject and how they relate to themselves… I like to think of myself as a reporter to some degree.”⁷ Howard explains “I am not trying to get a likeness of the person. I am trying to use it as a guide to help me portray whatever I have in my head that I’m trying to put out there. I don’t know what it is until I see it.”⁸ Howard’s sympathetic portrait of Blues for Naima (2021) depicts a homeless young man created using a photo reference that emphasized his youthful vulnerability and anxiety. His remarkably drawn head has multiple eyes, graphically expressing the phenomenon of a hyperactive blur of motion caught on camera. Similar to the African American photojournalist Gordon Parks, Howard creates a special bond with his subjects, holding a space of intimacy and trust that reveals the soul of the person in the artwork.

        On a moral level, deep looking comes with deep feeling, especially in how the psychological power of Howard’s subjects mirrors the intensity of his own search for self-discovery. “Through art, I can capture some of those subliminal emotions that a person has… It’s really about me trying to understand myself at this moment in time.”⁹ Authenticity and embracing one’s emotional truth matters a great deal to Howard, using the power of self-truth to express radical humanism in a critically atomized and racialized American society. These works stand as a heroic challenge against the forces of alienation, trusting the power of his intuition and skill to communicate existential truths about our social and human state through the witnessing of his community. “This is my time and my period to show in my own way what is happening to African Americans… whether it’s a lack of funding in the community, lack of education, all of those things!”¹⁰ By relentlessly pursuing his authentic self-truth, Howard’s art stands as a rare example of psychologically expressive humanism that reconnects us to our authentic selves and our relationships to others, succeeding on its deepest level as a powerful expressive conscience against dehumanization and injustice.

Footnotes

1. The Courage to Be Paul Tillich, 1952, Yale University Press, p. 124
2. Interview with Jesse Howard by Diane Thodos, December 3, 2024
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Ibid

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollack Krasner Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information visit dianethodos.com.