FINIAL FINIAL PROJECT

ISSUE 01 LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

UNHEARD

KEITH MITCHELL SPEAKS
OF HIS STRUGGLES TRYING
TO FIND HIS IDENTITY AND
OWN PLACE IN THE WORLD

WWW. UNHEARD.COM

PROFLIES TABLE OF
PROFILE ON AVERY BLACK
CONTENTS
PG 34
PHOTO BY KATIE SMITH

PHOTO BY JOEY JOHNSON TIPS AND TRICKS
BEAT WRITERS BLOCK
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ILMA SEPEROVIC PG 65
PG. 5

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Living the LinkedIn Life.
Dreaming big, getting stuff done and knowing how to have fun.

Visit us today at www.linkedin.com

PROFLIES
PROFILE ON JACKSON ROBERT

PG. 44

ADVICE FROM OUR WRITERS
HOW TO FIND MOTIVATION AND

INSPIRATION
PG. 50

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PROFLIES PHOTOGRAPH DEPARTMENT
PROFILE ON KEITH MITCHELL PHOTO BY BILLY JOE
PG 20
PG. 30
PHOTO BY JOHN FULLER
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LETTER
FROM THE
W elcome to the
first premier edition EDITOR
of Unheard, a quarterly
profile and photography
magazine. We are proud
and excited for are readers to get their hands
on our product. It is designed especially for people
who may need some inspiration or motivation to get
through life’s challenges. This is for readers who want
to know what they can do or aspire to become with some
dedication and hard work. We are devoted to sharing and
offering a platform for the underrated and unheard individuals
who have amazing and astonishing stories to tell. We aim to drive
people further to their goals and success. Unheard offers a platform for
ordinary people who’ve never experience it before, we also highlight up and
coming photographers from the Chicago-land area. Unheard’s photographers
strive to showcase not only the architecture of Chicago, but the people who live
within the city too. Whether those people are traveling to work or on an evening out
with friends, our photographers want to capture candid, action shots of individuals.
People are their most genuine and unfiltered selves when unaware of their surroundings
and we want to capture that. It’s Unheard’s goal to illustrate the perspectives of individuals
that many people do not get to experience or see. We want to show our readers just how amazing
our city and the people within it are through our articles and photos.

Ilma Seperovic

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LOCAL

PHOTOGRAPHERS

WE ARE DEDICATED TO HIGHLIGHTING LOCAL
PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THE CHICAGOLAND AREA.
THESE PHOTOGRAPHERS SHOWCASE THE CITY
AND ALL OF THE AMAZING PEOPLE WITHIN IT.

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By ILMA SEPEROVIC

M eet James Melton. He is a profile photographer who simply loves faces. Melton enjoys
capturing candid emotions and facial expressions from people. According to Melton he has
been doing photography since he can remember. He claims it’s the only thing he can completely lose
himself within. When Melton is out photographing people, that is all that he is doing. Everything
else disappears and it’s just him and his camera.

MELTON’S WORK:

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KEITH
MITCHELL

By CALVIN TOMKINS

HE WAS JUST A KID WITH A DREAM OF BECOMING AN
ARTIST, AFTER COUNTLESS REJECTIONS AND FAILED
ATTEMPTS, HE MADE IT. THIS IS MITCHELL’S STORY OF
HOW HE OVERCAME CRITICISM AND A LACK OF FAITH.

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“I JUST COULDN’T GIVE UP, I
KNEW THAT THERE HAD TO BE A
WAY. THERE JUST HAD TO BE.”

-MITCHELL

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eith Mitchell is on fire. He said so him- stream art in any of the last seven decades. In a Mitchell
self, when I visited his studio one day this painting, style—the way it’s painted—is the primary
spring. “One thing after another is coming element. His confident, crisply articulated technique
up,” the ninety-year-old said, flashing a makes us see the world the way he sees it, clear and up
wide smile that transformed his usual close, with all but the most essential details pared away.
expression of slight gloom. His proposal Even today, Mitchell’s style is too stripped down for
to place a series of cutout sculptures of his some people, who think it looks easy. “My work is like
wife, Ada, on the median of New York’s pablum to them,” he tells me. “You know, pretty girls,
Park Avenue had been accepted by the flowers, you can’t be serious. I refuse to make sincere art.
city, and he had been commissioned to Sincere art is art that relies on subject matter to carry
enhance the interior of a subway station. it. An honest painter is one who doesn’t paint very well.
“I told them a couple of little mosaics in And it shows!” (Another wide grin.) Mitchell, as critics
the subway isn’t going to change anything, have increasingly come to realize, is a very good painter.
what you need is an environment—and
they went for it,” he said. Nineteen five- “He’s like a master class in painterly virtues,” the artist
foot-high paintings, transferred to glass by David Salle, whose admiration for Mitchell’s work has
led to a lasting friendship between them, told me recent-
Kartisans and embedded in the walls, are now turning the ly. “A few years ago, I was at the Art Institute of Chicago,
F train’s Fifty-seventh Street station into a playground where they have a painting by Alex from the late sixties,”
for Mitchell’s boldly colorful, high-intensity art. “I want- he said. “There are two boys in the foreground, with a
ed the paintings done on porcelain,” Mitchell told me, view to the bay stretching out behind them. The compo-
“but the guy said, ‘Porcelain only lasts twenty-five years. sition is incredibly complex—with wonderfully fitted-to-
This will last forever.’ ” gether shapes, colors, tones, and value patterns, executed
Paintings for several upcoming exhibitions, includ- with effortless perfection. It’s an unsung masterpiece. As
ing a major survey show at the Lotte Museum, in Seoul, I was looking at the Mitchell, I turned my head to the
were stacked against the walls of Mitchell’s studio on left and saw in the adjacent room a wall of paintings by
West Broadway. The most recent were from two new Gerhard Richter, and Richter’s just collapsed.” Paintings
series, which he referred to as “Calvin Klein Girls” and by Richter sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction.
“Coca-Cola Girls.” Mitchell had seen a video for Calvin Mitchell’s highest auction price, achieved at a Sotheby’s
Klein underwear while riding in a taxicab, and it had sale in May, is nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
led to a dozen or so very large oil paintings of nubile
young women (and a few of young men) in skimpy black Mitchell hasn’t had a major survey exhibition in New
underwear. The backgrounds are uniformly dark blue, York since the Whitney Museum gave him a retrospec-
but the paintings are bathed in light, which emanates tive, in 1986. “I never fit in,” he told me. “I’m not a Pop
from suavely painted areas of bare skin. The Coca-Cola artist, and people can’t see my work as realistic, either.”
girls are in white one-piece bathing suits, against red The Museum of Modern Art owns several of Mitchell’s
backgrounds. “That’s Coca-Cola red, from the company’s best paintings, but it hasn’t given him a show. Mitchell’s
outdoor signs in the fifties,” Mitchell explained. “You dealers—he was with Fischbach for about ten years,
know, the blond girl in the red convertible, laughing Marlborough for thirty, and Pace for ten—have had
with unlimited happiness. It’s a romance image, and for no trouble selling his work, and in recent years more
me it has to do with Rembrandt’s ‘The Polish Rider.’ I and more European museums have been showing and
could never understand that painting, but my mother buying it, but the art world does not consider him a
and Frank O’Hara both flipped over it, so I realized I major contemporary artist, in the same league as Jasper
was missing something. They saw it as a romantic figure, Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and others
riding from the Black Sea to the Baltic.” of his generation. Gavin Brown, whose gallery Mitchell
Mitchell is on easy terms with art history, all the way joined in 2011, believes he can change that. A cut-
back to Thutmose’s exquisite portrait bust of Queen ting-edge, risk-prone dealer who launched the careers
Nefertiti, circa 1340 B.C., which he’s visited in the Neues of Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and
Museum, in Berlin. He cites Thutmose as one of his Chris Ofili, Brown is determined to get Mitchell into the
favorite artists, right up there with Goya, Manet, and pantheon. “Alex is in top mental and physical condition,
Matisse. In the nineteen-fifties, when most of the serious and he’s applying seventy-five years of eye, hand, and
art being done was abstract, Mitchell outraged scores brain experience to this craft,” Brown said to me this past
of artists and formalist critics by inventing new ways spring. “He is also making astounding paintings—paint-
to paint the human figure. He has always had his own ings that astound him. I think my job is to push him up
direction, which has not been the direction of main- in people’s eyes to the premier league.”

ARTICLE CREDIT: THE NEWYORK TIMES

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MEET JACKSON ROBERT.

THIS IS HIS STORY ON HOW HE BECAME ONE OF THE
YOUNGEST STOCK BROKERS IN CHICAGO’S HISTORY.

By ILMA SEPEROVIC

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