127.0 x 152.4 cm
Just Yell, the title of Cheryl Pope’s first solo exhibition in Chicago at moniquemeloche uses the framework of American High School: yellers (cheerleaders), yearbooks, Varsity patches, and car culture to contain reactions to the current gun violence that is plaguing our city and our nation.
In 1880, a student at Princeton University stood before the crowd and began to yell — the crowd answered and thus began the Yellers (later to become cheerleaders).
Through a collaboration with over 400 teens city-wide from Farragut Career Academy, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, William Taft Academic Center, Walter Payton College Prep, Alfred Nobel Elementary, and Phoenix Military Academy, Pope does not seek to offer solutions but rather to make the invisible visible in a less temporal space and format than the morning news. These yells ask each of us to confront a reality that is both present and absent simultaneously.
