“These artists use humor as a tool because it allows them to get away with stuff,” Bradford says. He compares the show’s humor to the strategies of comedians like Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, whose “entertainment gets at the heart of [social issues] in a way that a social scientist might not.” Bradford also sees parallels to The Daily Show: “For a lot of people, that’s a more relevant and accurate assessment of what’s going on than the real news.”

Pop culture and the media aren’t the only forces “Disinhibition” invokes. Tamasha Williamson and William Pope.L’s work plays with language to highlight ideas and expressions relating to race that, Bradford says, “are so deeply embedded we don’t understand or think about their origins anymore.” The exhibition presents a Williamson drawing with the caption “We Shall Overcome” (beneath a pair of bullets) alongside Dave McKenzie’s 2003 video of the same title, in which the artist dons a suit and Bill Clinton mask to walk through Harlem, where the former president’s office is located. Bradford says the pairing underscores the way civil-rights slogans “now feel almost like jingles for commercials—the way that Malcolm X’s ‘by any means necessary’ has become Kanye West’s ‘buy any jeans necessary.’ ”

Personal experience and what Bradford calls “the sense of cultural absurdity in being revered and reviled in the same moment” also shape the work in “Disinhibition.” A painting by David Leggett quips, “Black men dressed up as fat black women is comic gold.” Other Jayson Scott Musson posters mock the worship of Allen Iverson and Jay-Z, men the artist presents as having achieved staggering professional and financial success—but in ways their fans can’t emulate. “You’ve always got this progress and possibility shackled to the black reality that is persistent in America,” Bradford explains. “This week, all we hear about in Chicago are school shootings,” yet role model Barack Obama “lives down the street” from the South Side’s HPAC.

Bradford believes Chicago is a natural focal point for the nation’s current discussion about race, which also inspired the Renaissance Society’s exhibition “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” opening Sunday 20. Noting the city’s ties to the Great Migration, Chess Records, Oprah, Jesse Jackson, the Nation of Islam, Obama and Johnson Publications (which produces Ebony and Jet), Bradford says, “A sense of black America—in a very real way—emanated from Chicago.”

“Humor allows artists to be both loving and critical,” Bradford concludes. “A lot of people may be more comfortable talking about [race] through that lens than if this were just a show full of angry black art—though it is angry.”

“Disinhibition: Black Art and Blue Humor” runs through June 22. Its opening reception will be April 27, 3–5pm.