This generously illustrated book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Athi-Patra Ruga: ...looking for the One at Iceberg Projects, Chicago. In the exhibition, acclaimed South African artist Ruga uses the archive of 20th-century photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten as a starting point to continue his decade-long interest in unpacking Black modernists' response to European and American negrophilia of the early 20th century. Through a series of oil pastel portraits, hand-embroidered tapestry, and stained glass, Ruga probes the continued influence of historical tropes on performativity, agency, and representations and of the queer, male, Black body.
By creating a series of speculative portraits and studies of Van Vechten's anonymous muse, Ruga seeks to reimagine an alternative history for one nameless model exotically/erotically depicted in Van Vechten's photographs. In this process, Ruga embodies a type of double consciousness by becoming both the artist and the muse.
This publication includes a foreword by curators Dr. Daniel Berger and John Neff reflecting on the artist's practice, and a conversation between Ruga and Neff about the exhibition.
Ruga is one of the few artists working in South Africa today whose work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars as a way to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. His artistic approach of creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history from a place of detachment—at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalized grief and subjective defensiveness.
The philosophical allure and allegorical value of utopia has been central to Ruga's practice. His construction of a mythical metaverse populated by characters which he has created and depicted in his work have allowed Ruga to create an interesting space of self reflexivity in which political, cultural, and social systems can be critiqued and parodied. Ruga has used his utopia as a lens to process the fraught history of a colonial past, to critique the present, and to propose a possible humanist vision for the future.
Dr. Daniel S. Berger is the founder of Northstar Medical Center and a national leader in HIV treatment and research; he is a key contributor to the development of antiretroviral drug therapies over the past 30 years. Berger is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois. As a dedicated researcher in HIV/AIDS, he has authored more than 90 published medical abstracts and articles and has been an investigator in more than 200 HIV/AIDS research trials. Berger is also an art collector and author of articles and books about queer art, often focusing on the impact of AIDS in the art world. In Chicago and New York, he has served on many boards and advisory committees of such organizations as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Test Positive Aware Network, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, Visual AIDS, New York, the Collections and Acquisitions Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, and the Medical Issues Advisory Board for the Illinois AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Among his many awards, Berger received the Distinguished Researcher in HIV Medicine Award, Serono Laboratories (2000); the Charles E. Clifton Leadership Award, Test Positive Aware Network (2006); #1 Practitioner of the Year, The Chicago Reader (2016); and the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award (2021) for his contributions to HIV/AIDS medical treatments, as well as his passion for art and the legacy of art AIDS activism as a collector, curator, archivist, and philanthropist. In 2024, Berger was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
