Whitaker
Solomon Whitaker | Intermedia Artist | aka NeilSHowe
Biography:
Solomon received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. He also studied writing at the University of Iowa, and was deeply engaged with the Intermedia Department in the late 1990s.
Outside Austin, Texas, he founded Cedar Valley Spirits Gallery, an artist-driven space that helped catalyze a vibrant local arts community. In 2012, the gallery presented Three Generations, a group exhibition featuring Solomon alongside his mother and grandfather, both lifelong artists.
After returning to Chicago he joined Rogers Park Art Gallery, where he was named gallery co-manager in 2019. That same year, he mounted a solo exhibition there titled TransDisciplinary Artworks. He currently resides outside Chicago where he continues his arts practice.
Artist's Statement:
The Field and the Flock
Within visual, musical and linguistic plains of thought, motifs exist—small gems of meaning and joy.
From a distance, motifs gather as a murmuration does—patterns held in a state of aerial drift. Up close, that field pressurizes: straining against its adjacent compressors.
This is like the movement of a flock turning in the air, where every sudden shift in direction is both a collective necessity and a self-centered impulse.
The Governance of Time
Time governs my work—through duration of my practice—rather than any innate localized immediacy. Whether through the expansive layering of the collages or the urgency of the miniatures, the work relies on motif. It is a cycle of gathering psychic traces, the dense, rhythmic tension of the swarm, and finally, the weightless unfolding of a murmuration finding its breath.
The Active Archive
My process is anchored by an extensive and active archive of works on paper. I utilize inherited structures from my family art-lineage—to provide a stable horizon for sudden and capricious shifts in direction.