Solomon graduated in 2003 with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has studied writing at the University of Iowa and was very active in the Intermedia Department there in the late nineties. The Cedar Valley Spirits Gallery in Austin, TX was his brainchild and through it’s founding he jumpstarted a vibrant, new arts community. His mother and grandfather, both career artists and he, had a successful group show there in 2012 called ‘Three Generations’.  Upon returning to Chicago he worked for the Windy City Winery doing label design and wine work from 2013-2016. He was picked up by the Rogers Park Art Gallery in 2018 and was promoted gallery co-manager in 2019. He staged a solo show there in 2019.

My focus in the arts is a study in expansion and contraction; expanding complications and a return to stillness. I construct in music, writing and drawing. I am furiously ideating a very personal, narrative dialectic into sketchbooks.

Much of my style stems from the work of my mother, Eve Whitaker and grandfather Irwin A. Whitaker who are and were artists respectively. I preserve my process digitally and in sketchbooks, building an archive for my work and the work of my artistic family. I work quick, loose and intuitively, by chance or in stream of consciousness, consciously ekphrasic in humble pursuit of gesamtkunstwerk.  This intersection of work is mentally strenuous. I try to relax by working observationally, figuratively or on landscapes to escape the traps my mental illness sets. When I have myself grounded, I again pursue more complexity and confluence of ideas. 

I want the drawing, writing, and music to come together into a discreet unit. One reason is because I want all these interests to be under one roof so I don’t go on errant tangents but also to find out what they have in common or if there is a intertextuality between them that extends beyond them individually.  My thinking is that after doing this for years that I will begin to discover what this intersection means and it’s significance.

Artists who work as musicians and as writers and as visual artists at the same time fascinate me. Their work inspires me to push and blur boundaries of what combined artworks can be. It is here that I work, in constant oscillation between taking on and shedding in a permanent madness between stillness and fracture.

-NSH, 2021