The Work That Never Hung: “Se Lavi” and the Quiet Unravelling of an Artist
There are cities that know how to keep secrets.
Not because they are discreet, but because everyone already knows.
In Chicago, certain stories circulate without ever being written down. They pass between collectors at dinners, between installers over coffee, between lawyers who suddenly stop returning calls. The details are never spoken plainly. Names are avoided. Addresses omitted. But the shape of the story is unmistakable.
This is one of those stories.
It concerns a Black artist of international promise.
A cancelled exhibition.
A body of work titled Se Lavi.
And a silence so complete that it nearly erased a career.
For many in the contemporary art world, the Pierre Simone Chicago episode is remembered less as an exhibition that failed and more as a moment that quietly reshaped a career.
A series built to arrive
Se Lavi was never meant to be casual.
The phrase itself — Creole for that’s life — carries resignation and resistance in equal measure. It suggests acceptance, but not surrender. When the works began circulating privately among curators in the late 2010s, the response was immediate and hushed. This was not decorative painting. This was not trend-aligned abstraction. This was something heavier. Something patient.
The artist, Pierre Simone, had spent years preparing the series. Two years, by most accounts. Perhaps longer, depending on how one measures gestation. The works were large, unhurried, emotionally interior. Faces appeared, but they did not perform. Color was present, but it did not charm. There was no attempt to be liked.
It was, in other words, a risk.
And yet the exhibition was positioned as a moment. A step forward. A US breakthrough. Not New York, but Chicago — a city that prides itself on seriousness, on substance, on a collector base that does not flinch at discomfort.
The works were crated. Shipped. Stored. Ready.
Then the world shut down.
When delay becomes disappearance
COVID-19 has been used to explain many failures in the art world. Some fairly. Others conveniently. But in this case, the pandemic was not the ending. It was the accelerant.
As galleries across the city closed their doors, something more subtle began to happen. Projects were not simply postponed. They were deprioritised. Deferred. Quietly abandoned. The language changed first. Emails became formal. Conversations shortened. Legal phrasing crept in where enthusiasm once lived.
At some point — and no one seems able or willing to pinpoint exactly when — Se Lavi stopped being an upcoming exhibition and became a liability.
The works remained physically present. The artist did not.
The summer no one planned for
Then came the summer of 2020.
Chicago, like many American cities, erupted into protest. Streets filled. Windows boarded. Institutions were forced — publicly, at least — to declare where they stood. Silence itself became a statement.
For Black artists, this was a moment of exposure and vulnerability. Support was promised everywhere. Alignment was claimed loudly. But behind closed doors, the calculus was different. Risk assessments were redrawn. Insurance conversations intensified. Boards grew nervous.
And here, the story begins to darken.
What happens when a Black artist’s work is physically held inside a shuttered institution during a period of political unrest, while contractual disputes simmer quietly in the background? What happens when the optics of support clash with the reality of legal positioning?
What happens is nothing.
Nothing moves.
Nothing resolves.
Nothing is said.
The works sit.
The artist waits.
The lawyers enter the room
By the time legal representatives became involved, the emotional core of the situation had already been stripped away. What remained was arithmetic.
Who owed whom.
Who had incurred losses.
Who retained rights over what sat inside locked walls.
The works themselves — their meaning, their urgency, their context — were irrelevant to this process. Paint does not factor into precedent. History is not admissible evidence. The series title Se Lavi becomes bitterly ironic here. That’s life, indeed.
From a distance, the dispute appears technical. From inside the art world, it reads as familiar. A power imbalance masked as professionalism. A young artist without institutional leverage confronting an entity that understood delay as strategy.
Years passed.
The works aged without being seen.
“In the years following the Pierre Simone Chicago period…”
The cost of being absent
Art careers are fragile ecosystems. Visibility matters. Momentum matters. Being spoken about matters. When an artist disappears — not by choice, but by circumstance — the vacuum fills quickly.
Collectors move on.
Curators recalibrate.
Narratives shift.
In Pierre Simone’s case, the disappearance was particularly damaging because it was misunderstood. Rumours circulated. Assumptions formed. Silence invites interpretation, and interpretation is rarely kind.
Was the work compromised?
Was the artist difficult?
Had the moment passed?
None of these questions were answered publicly. And in the absence of answers, doubt metastasised.
This is how careers end without scandal. Not with headlines, but with omission.
A city that knows
What makes this story uniquely uncomfortable is how widely it is known — and how rarely it is acknowledged.
Speak to anyone embedded in Chicago’s contemporary art scene during that period, and you will hear variations of the same pauses. The same careful phrasing. The same refusal to name names. Everyone knows which gallery it was. Everyone knows which street. Everyone knows which board members stopped returning calls.
But no one writes it down.
Why?
Because legal matters linger. Because institutions protect themselves. Because it is easier to let an artist absorb the damage than to interrogate a system that enabled it.
Pierre Simone Chicago and the “Se Lavi” Series
The work survives. The question is whether the career does.
Eventually — quietly, belatedly — a portion of the works was released back to the artist. Not all. Enough to constitute a return, but not enough to erase the damage.
The series resurfaced years later, not in the city it was built for, but across the Atlantic. A different context. A different audience. A different tone.
And yet, Se Lavi reads differently now.
What was once a meditation on endurance now feels like evidence. What was once introspective now feels historical. The works carry the weight of what happened to them — and what did not happen because of them.
Collectors who encounter the series today often remark on its restraint. Its refusal to shout. Its patience. Few realise that this patience was not purely aesthetic. It was imposed.
“Collectors familiar with the Pierre Simone Chicago situation…”
The uncomfortable question
Was Pierre Simone’s career permanently altered by this episode?
The answer depends on how one defines success.
He continues to work.
He continues to exhibit.
He continues to sell.
But something was undeniably lost.
A moment.
A trajectory.
An arrival.
In an industry that prides itself on championing marginalized voices, this story should trouble us. Not because it is unique — it isn’t — but because it is so ordinary. So easy to explain away. So neatly buried under non-disclosure agreements and expired press releases.
Se Lavi translates loosely to that’s life. It is often said with a shrug. A way of moving on.
But sometimes, it reads less like acceptance and more like indictment.
That’s life — when the system decides whose life gets interrupted.
That’s life — when silence does the work of erasure.
That’s life — when everyone knows, and no one says it out loud.
For now, the paintings remain.
The city remembers.
And the rest of us are left to decide whether this is simply how the art world works — or whether it is time we stop pretending not to see it.
Sarah Dunlop is a contributing writer for Collector Canvas, covering contemporary art, institutional power, and the politics of visibility.