Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures
June 7—July 27, 2025
Chicago Cultural Center, Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North
DCASE Homepage > Chicago Cultural Center > Exhibitions > Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures sheds new light on the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (American, 1944-2015). Through a unique movement vocabulary that she called “moving pictures,” Cummings made dance that combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement to explore the emotional details of daily rituals, as well as the intimacy of black home life. Cummings is considered a foundational figure in dance for her ability to bridge postmodern dance experimentation and black dance traditions.
The exhibition draws largely from Cummings’ personal video archive of rarely seen works. Alongside performance documentation, the exhibition features interviews, photographs, and her lesser-known dance films. Together they reveal the artist’s commitment to multidisciplinary art-making that often combined dance with elements of theater, text, photography, and the moving image.
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures began as a collaboration between Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Cummings’ video archive is in the special collections of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of New York Public Library.
This exhibition was co-organized by Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute, and cocurated by Kristin Juarez, Research Specialist; Rebecca Peabody, Head, Research Projects & Academic Outreach; and Glenn Phillips, Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections, with curatorial and research assistance from Samantha Gregg and Alex Jones. The presentation of this exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center was organized by Elise Butterfield, Curator of Exhibitions at DCASE.
Special acknowledgement is given to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of New York Public Library and the Blondell Cummings Estate.

Admission is FREE
Open Daily, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Exhibitions close 15 minutes before the building closes
(Closed Holidays)
Find us:
Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington St.
Chicago, IL 60602

Take CTA to Chicago Cultural Center
- From the elevated lines: exit at Washington/Wabash and walk east.
- From the subway: exit at Lake (Red Line) or Washington (Blue Line) and walk east.
- Served by Michigan Avenue buses 3, 4, 19, 20, 26, 60, 66, 124, 143, 147, 151, 157 and Washington St. buses 4, J14, 20, 56, 66, 147
6:30-8 p.m.
Performance and Conversation with Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop
Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North
Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop shares an excerpt from THICK: a crumbling freak show, a multimedia solo performance that ripples through the canon of works interrogating what it means for a Black woman’s livelihood to rest on the performance of her body.
Through movement, sound, projections, and spacemaking, Freeman evokes the work of Blondell Cummings—whose “moving pictures” gave choreographic shape to the intimacy of Black home life. In this offering, Freeman asks: What does the spatiotemporal history of Black women and our bodies reveal about consent, commodification, and spectacle?
Bio: Jenn Freeman is an interdisciplinary artist who creates on the homeland of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations; as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Meskwaki; the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, and the Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) Nations. Freeman, also known as Po’Chop, weaves dance, storytelling, drag and striptease together to create experiences that illuminate Black queer life. She is a co-founder of House of the Lorde, a multi-functional space rooted in Black Feminist praxis, the co-producer of the adored Notes on Masculinity, a drag king centered cabaret and creator of The Black Burlesque Directory, an archive of Black burlesque performers across the world. Freeman has collaborated with Jamila Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead and VAM Studio. Her work has been supported by Foundation of Contemporary Art, DANCE/USA, Urban Bush Women, United States Artists and Chicago Dancemakers Forum.
Noon - 1 p.m.
Gallery Talk
Sidney R. Yates Gallery, 4th Floor North



