'lightweight!', 2025, John Caleb Pendleton

My art practice seeks to actualize the hypothetical world in which my parents were born in a time and place where they could self-identify as artists. Growing up in large, working-class families in 1960s rural Alabama, getting married young, and raising me and my two sisters, they worked jobs to provide for their family and community. Yet, they still created beauty for others via wood, flowers, fiber, and paper. 

Growing up with this people-focused artistic heritage, I now use my work to provoke human flourishing, explore the freedom found in active grieving, and examine the relationship between the two. In 2010, I joined the Great Migration about 40 years too late when I moved to Chicago from Grove Hill, Alabama. With a regular focus on the Great Migration bringing about Black flourishing amidst the challenges of urban life, the silent and subconscious grief of losing regular connection to the land is often overlooked and human flourishing is unfortunately equated to urbanization. With a modern southern experience and my family’s collective grief shaping my past and the artists of the Great Migration inspiring my future, I make work that encourages acceptance of loss and excitement for personal growth.