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During a break from his MFA studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 15 years ago, Tony Lewis took a trip to Cleveland, where he wandered into a thrift store. He picked up a manual on Gregg shorthand, a writing system once used by secretaries and stenographers to transcribe at the speed of speech. Over the next two years, Lewis taught himself shorthand and started introducing the fluid gestural characters into his drawings. “I’ve always been attracted to artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who use text as a fundamental aspect of their work,” explains Lewis, 40, an L.A. native who moved to Chicago in 2009 to attend SAIC.
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The Long and Short of It, Lewis’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Hyde Park, spotlights his long-running, evolving series that incorporates these shorthand symbols. Assembling a career-spanning mix of old and new work, the show demonstrates how Lewis uses pencils and graphite powder — a material that requires him to don protective gloves and a respirator while working in his McKinley Park studio — to create intricate, abstract images.
The artist’s work has hung in Paris, Amsterdam, and Chicago (including in Lewis Bag, his private gallery above his studio), but this is his first institutional solo show here at home. There’s personal significance in its being at the Ren: One of his mentors, Hamza Walker, was once the museum’s director of education. Lewis says the essays Walker wrote to accompany the exhibitions he curated there, such as Kara Walker’s Presenting Negro Scenes and the group show Black Is, Black Ain’t, had a “tremendous impact” on how The Long and Short of It took shape.
Though he hesitates to call it a survey, Lewis views the exhibition at the Ren (and the eventual catalog) as an extensive look at how drawing and writing coexist in his work. “I like the idea of going back and forth between abstract expressionism and a more conceptual understanding of how language might function in art,” he says. Considering just how much Lewis is trying to impart, his use of shorthand is an efficient way to accomplish that.
The Long and Short of It runs December 12 to February 7 at the Renaissance Society.
Zach Long is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.
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