{"id":683299,"date":"2026-03-26T14:24:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T14:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/683299\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T14:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T14:24:12","slug":"review-carlos-rolon-at-65grand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/683299\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Carlos Rol\u00f3n at 65Grand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Carlos Rol\u00f3n, \u201cRiot and Remembrance I,\u201d 2026, dye sublimation on aluminum, 16.25\u2033 \u00d7 13.5\u2033\/Photo: 65Grand<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the uneasy truce settled over the community, the game of who to blame started,\u201d wrote Bill Van Alstine in the Chicago Defender, June 29, 1966, in reference to the differing opinions of the catastrophic events of June 12, 1966. The Defender and Chicago Tribune prolifically covered the Division Street riots with complicated (euphemism) editorializing. Protests erupted after the fatal shooting of twenty-year-old Arcelis Cruz, one day following Humboldt Park\u2019s first Puerto Rican Day Parade. Political and social upheaval unfolded. Division Street should\u2019ve been called Disorder Street in the days and weeks\u2014years\u2014following these protests.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a disappointing time-jump to today. Police brutality couples the failures of the state in protecting its citizens\u2014sixty years later. With the gritty gaze of Carlos Rol\u00f3n<\/a>\u2019s solo exhibition \u201cThe Division Street Riots\u201d at 65Grand<\/a>, some amelioration occurs. The artworks act as retributive memorials.<\/p>\n

\"Black-and-white<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Carlos Rol\u00f3n, \u201cYo No Me Quito (Man With Flag, After Frank Espada),\u201d 2024\u20132026, charcoal on Legion paper mounted on Dibond with custom frame and brass plaque, 44.5\u2033 \u00d7 62.5\u2033\/Photo: 65Grand<\/p>\n

Percolating prints stomp on the left side of the gallery; they\u2019re, trickily, plastic films suctioned to aluminum. It\u2019s a print in pointillism style, snapshots of cops and unidentified attendees of the riots. All from 2026, their titles are sequential: \u201cRiot and Remembrance,\u201d one, two, three. Think of photocopying a photocopy; the ontological image diffuses into clones that slowly lose their Walter Benjamin-esque \u201caura.\u201d The fashion catapults me: helmets in the first print, to a \u201csixties\u201d sleeve with a grunting grip of a canister in the next, to a baton-gripping cop, and then to some skip-stepping trousers once more. I, the viewer, am officially in attendance. Next, \u201cYo No Me Quito, (Man With Flag, After Frank Espada)\u201d is an astounding charcoal memorialization on the center gallery wall. Its stark realism in charcoal is baffling and sublime, reminiscent of a refined Chiaroscuro. Its dramatic value dances with dramatic subject matter. Graphite drawings slumber to the right (\u201cRebellion I\u201d and \u201cRebellion II\u201d respectively). Graphite is now smoke, not-value. The cop car smolders in one, the streets are coughing smog in the other. These penultimate artworks in charcoal and graphite indulge my sense of image-versus-surface in the exhibition. Which, of course, can relate to the diffusion of facsimile in Rol\u00f3n\u2019s investigation of the Division Street Riots. I pedal away from these events on the found-object bike sculpture that\u2019s softly playing tunes to the right. It\u2019s the realist object here, but it\u2019s ready to cart me away.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a> Carlos Rol\u00f3n, installation view of \u201cThe Division Street Riots,\u201d 2026, at 65Grand\/Photo: 65Grand<\/p>\n

Perhaps under the glare from coverage of the Whitney Biennial as of late, I\u2019m brewing over one of their most controversial editions in comparison to Rol\u00f3n\u2019s exhibition. Dana Schutz, a white artist, depicted the disfigured face and body of Black American teenager Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955. The differences in subject position are of paramount importance of course: the site specificity of Rol\u00f3n\u2019s autobiographical history and the site-specificity of the exhibition in Humboldt compared to Schutz. But Rol\u00f3n is also not taking advantage, and is not dubious in aesthetic decisions. If you take a look at Schutz\u2019s work, the artist has an infatuation, resoundingly, with the grotesque. Thus, Schutz made Till into a misshapen spectacle aligned with their aesthetic values. In contrast, but with similar political sources, Rol\u00f3n is actually so incredibly protective of the Division Street Riots\u2019 narrative, visually and conceptually. The artist is acting as a caresser and preservationist. He isn\u2019t basking in the spectacle; just the afterglow.<\/p>\n

Rol\u00f3n knows who to blame, though, after the \u201cuneasy truce settled\u201d as the Chicago Defender talked about in 1966. Do you?<\/p>\n

\u201cCarlos Rol\u00f3n: The Division Street Riots\u201d is on view at 65Grand, 3252 West North, through April 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carlos Rol\u00f3n, \u201cRiot and Remembrance I,\u201d 2026, dye sublimation on aluminum, 16.25\u2033 \u00d7 13.5\u2033\/Photo: 65Grand \u201cAs the uneasy…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":683300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-683299","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116295936839125162","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}