Marcus the Artist: City of Gold

May 17 - August 18, 2024

Poster for the exhibit. There is a gold sun with black splotches at the top and streams of gold with those same splotches going all the way down the canvas. There is also one dark blue stripe with light blue, gold, and black splotches.

The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is proud to present Marcus the Artist’s “City of Gold" curated by Dorian Sylvain. The exhibition will be on view in Café Logan, 915 E 60th, from May 17 - August 11, 2024.

Inspired by a VISION during a near death experience, Marcus the Artist’s series of celestial cityscape collages represent a golden city of light reflective of Chicago’s rich, cultural backdrop of arts and architecture but are also symbolic of an otherworldly, spiritual experience that transcends the physical dimension.

Throughout history, humans have been fascinated with the properties of gold and its many uses. Gold is a conduit between the spiritual and physical words, but also a measure of status and advanced cultural consciousness. In some indigenous cultures it is said that when a person dies, they walk the galaxy to a city of golden light. This city of gold represents the penultimate attainment of a higher consciousness where a soul resides on the heavenly plane of paradise after its physical existence reaches completion and reunites with the universe.

However, Marcus the Artist believes that humans were not necessarily meant to die to arrive in this paradise, but to fulfill their purpose here on earth and LIVE in paradise. If the kingdom of heaven truly exists within each one of us, we can create that image and manifest it into our world. By combining the elements of spiritual and material worlds with an emphasis on light (specifically the light of the sun), each “City of Gold” collage is a reimagining of the artist’s personal relationship with divine forces and the ancestral, cosmic community. He arranges hand-embellished gold and silver leaf with silk and linen into abstract architectures that touch the skies and bask in the heavenly glow of the sun, moon, and stars.