Pullman Porters & Maids: Invisible Labor, Visible Legacies

Pullman Porters & Maids: Invisible Labor, Visible Legacies presents new paintings by Chicago artist Shane-Jahi Jackson at the Block House Gallery in the city's historic Pullman neighborhood. A mix of portraiture and collage, the works restore the humanity of the Black men and women who staffed the Pullman Company's sleeper cars after the Civil War and through the mid-20th century, carrying luggage, shining shoes and providing the beauty services and childcare that kept the railroad running. Many canvases surround a single porter or maid with splashes of color and fragments of archival documents, from newspaper clippings and timesheets to employee records. Jackson developed the series as an artist-in-residence at the Newberry Library, where he was researching Pullman employment records and unexpectedly found his own family name, discovering that his great-great-grandfather worked as a Pullman porter from 1945 to 1950. The paintings respond to a history in which porters were stripped of their identities, commonly addressed only as George, and in which the labor of Pullman maids went largely undocumented. Working between abstraction and figuration, Jackson drops each figure into a built-up field of emotion and gesture, in collaboration with his curator Juelle Daley. The exhibition continues through July 11 at the Block House Gallery, 11137 South Langley Avenue, presented by Pullman Arts. It arrives in the same neighborhood that is home to the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, extending a local history long overshadowed by the story of the Pullman Company's factory town and the 1894 Pullman strike.