Current Exhibit

Currently in our Changing Gallery: “LOVE IN THE CLUB: Black Chicago Nightclub Photos by Michael Abramson 1974-1976.”

clock 3 years ago user Tim Sampson

Join us for an opening reception party at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music for our newest exhibit, “LOVE IN THE Club: Chicago Nightclub Photos by Michael Abramson 1974-1976.”

  • Friday March 11, 6-8 pm at the Stax Museum.
  • Free admission..
  • Music by DJ Bizzle Bluebland in a DJ booth, food, beer by Soul & Spirits Brewery, dancing, and more, all in an underground nightclub atmosphere.
  • Chicago author and DJ Ayana Contreras will be our special guest. She’ll be spinning tunes later that evening at Central Station Hotel’s Eight & Sand lobby bar, and will be at the Stax Museum the following day, Saturday March 12, 2-4 for a lecture and book signing for her new book, Energy Never Dies Afro-Optimism and Creativity in Chicago.

MORE ABOUT LOVE IN THE CLUB

Carefully coiffed cross dressers and bell bottomed dancers bumping the nights away in the smoky clubs of Chicago’s South Side in the mid 1970s. It was a far-out party scene that brimmed over with style and free expression to the sounds of blues, disco, funk, and soul. A photographer from New Jersey, Michael Abramson, became so infatuated with this slice of underground life that he took more than 5,000 photographs for his thesis while attending Chicago’s IIT Institute of Design. They were unobtrusive black-and-white images captured as Abramson himself became a welcomed part of the scene at legendary clubs like Pepper’s Hideout, the High Chapparal, the Patio Lounge, Showcase Lounge, and Perv’s House, owned by Pervis Staples after his retirement from pioneering group the Staple Singers.

Now, 30 of these legendary photographs will be on display at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music March 1 through September 4, 2022 in an exhibit titled “Love in the Club,” all in display in a gallery set up to resemble a combination of Chicago’s legendary nightspots and Memphis’ own R&B palace hot in that era, Club Paradise.

Abramson’s provocative photographs have been published so far in two major hardback books: Light: On the South Side by the Numero Group in 2009 and Gotta Go Gotta Flow by City Files Press in 2015. Both were multimedia releases, the first accompanied by two LPs of blues music likely playing in the clubs at the time that earned a GRAMMY nomination, and the second pairing his South side images with slam poetry by the acclaimed writer Patricia Smith. The Stax Museum exhibit will be based on Gotta Go Gotta Flow and will also feature some of Smith’s poems.

Abramson went on to become a commercial photographer and photojournalist who traveled the world and photographed many notables from Oprah to Steve Jobs before his death in 2011. These South Side photographs have been compared to the work of the great Hungarian photographer Brassai, who captured the seedy and sensuous Parisian nightlife of the 1920s and 30’s.

Today Abramson’s photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago History Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the California Museum of Photography.

 

 

 

 

 

This project is funded in part by a grant from Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.