Exhibitions: Ayé Aton

Ayé Aton: Another Kind of Intellect

In 1960, at the impressionable age of 20 years old, Robert Underwood moved to Chicago and began spending time with a study group made up of older men who played checkers in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side. According to John Corbett: “He was by all accounts, an inquisitive young man, asking deep questions about all manners of obscure topics, and several members of the study group told him about their go-to guy for such queries: a fellow they knew as Sunny Ray (Sun Ra), who had recently left town but was best equipped to help him on his quest for knowledge. Obtaining Ra’s number, he phoned New York. Ra was immediately receptive, and for the next eleven years, the men spoke almost daily. Their conversations amounted to an informal mentorship: Ra gave him instructions, guided him, and discussed his research with the budding visual artist.” Shortly after these conversations began, Underwood changed his name to Ayé Aton and began painting murals across building facades and in the homes of Chicago’s South Side residents. Aesthetically, he was guided by Ra’s suggestions of Egyptian motifs, colorful abstractions, and outer space imagery—themes and subjects that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Inspired by Afrika and seduced by abstraction, Aton was an aesthete with roving and metaphoric interests, creating artworks that both embraced and transcended their formal qualities. The paintings are simultaneously dynamic and static, balanced and chaotic, emblematic of an erudite thinker with an expressive flair. Though he began painting as a muralist, Aton soon thereafter adopted other materials: board, paper, and more manageable and portable surfaces, a practical consideration that also afforded him control over the works’ fate. Conceptually, Aton rejected the notion of Afrofuturism as escapism, wholly embracing Afrocentrism as a guiding philosophy. Indeed, his works consistently reference and honor specific African countries, tribes, dances, and other hallmarks of culture. He also delved into deep meditations on design, abstraction, and aesthetic experiments that rendered unknown events and beings in the future.

Ayé Aton: Another Kind of Intellect borrows its title from a painting executed by the artist in 2014. Depicting the contours of an intelligent being emerging from a celestial gumbo of stars, swirls, and bolts of lightning, the work is essential to our understanding of Aton’s ultimate philosophy shared by many though perfectly articulated by the author James Baldwin: “If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.” In human form, Aton moved from Kentucky to Chicago, and other places along the way, but the most significant moves were through his expansive painting and drawing practice. With color and line, he leapt from the United States to the African continent, from Ghana to Kenya, down to South Africa and back west to Senegal, across the Sahara to Egypt before ascending above the Earth to Outer Space and beyond our common knowledge of time and human space. Aton cycled through bodies of work and interests over the course of his life but his visual language and its deep intellectual roots remained consistent for nearly sixty years, tangible evidence of an artist who sought clarity on the same unanswerable questions that plague us all in a dizzying search for truth that would occupy Aton until his inevitable return to the sun.