We’ve had the pleasure of spending time in a number of galleries lately and we’re happier for it. Long ago we dismissed the notion that when we enter a museum, we must see everything. Who wants to run by works of art as if we’ve entered an obstacle course?

Here are two shows featuring artists and their contemporary portraits. One in Chicago and the other in New York. I’d long to see attention for Juan de Pareja since I first learned of his existence back in the 80s. A quick trip for love to NYC made the show at the Met the icing on the cake. This exquisite show draws from the well of research by the extraordinary Arturo Schomburg in the 1920s. More of his story in a future post.

Enslaved by Velázquez and a painter himself, Juan de Pareja was rumored to be responsible for some of the more well-known works attributed to the famous artist. Newer research seems to bear that out. Time will tell.

The Met’s show highlights the period and contextualizes what life might have been like for this enslaved artist who traveled everywhere Velázquez went including to the Vatican. One heart-wrenching gallery includes both the central portrait of Juan de Pareja with Velázquez‘s signed document “freeing” him and his progeny (on the condition that he remained enslaved four additional years) inside a fading book positioned squarely in front of his portrait. Hauntingly sad doesn’t begin to describe how I felt standing there.

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And then we return to Chicago for Patric McCoy’s show of 80s Black gay life downtown through photographs thoughtfully curated by Juarez Hawkins at Wrightwood 659.