Digital Exhibitions

In a time when Black existence is too often reduced to trauma, statistics, or abstraction, Everyday Gods insists on visibility, nuance, and reverence. Samuel Trotter’s photography calls us to look — really look — at Black bodies, Black lives, Black communities: not as news, not as spectacle, but as living, breathing futures.

Curated by Michael Cortor and Dr. Kelli Morgan, this exhibition explores the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930s–1950s) as a chorus of voices—painters, printmakers, writers, poets, and playwrights—each weaving stories of Black life through brushstrokes and verse. Eldzier Cortor stood among them, his work in conversation with artists such as Margaret Burroughs, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White, as well as the literary contributions of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. Alongside figures like Gordon Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright, they shaped a movement that was both a reckoning and a rebirth—one in which Black creativity refused confinement.