PARIS IN BLACK / CHICAGO: WALKTHROUGH & PUBLIC DIALOGUE

Name: PARIS IN BLACK / CHICAGO: WALKTHROUGH & PUBLIC DIALOGUE
Start: 2026-02-07T10:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-02-07T12:00:00-06:00
Location: DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

February 7 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Curator-Led Exhibition Walkthrough & Public Dialogue

Saturday, February 7, 2026

10:00 AM–12:00 PM

DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

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ABOUT THIS EVENT

In connection with PARIS IN BLACK: Internationalism and the Black Renaissance, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) invites the public to a curator-led exhibition walkthrough and dialogue at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.

Led by Danny Dunson, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Arts Education at the DuSable and curator of PARIS IN BLACK, this program brings together two sister institutions shaped by shared histories of Black migration, artistic modernism, and cultural exchange between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century.

PARIS IN BLACK examines how Black artists, writers, and intellectuals navigated the racial constraints of the United States by moving across borders—particularly to Paris—during periods spanning post-Reconstruction, the interwar years, and the rise of modernism. These international movements unfolded alongside the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans relocated from the South to northern cities like Chicago, reshaping Black cultural life, institutions, and artistic networks.

The exhibition includes select works on loan from SSCAC’s permanent collection and archival holdings, including Archibald Motley, Sunday in the Park (1941). Positioned within the exhibition’s broader exploration of Black internationalism, the work anchors global narratives of movement and exchange within the social life, modernity, and visual culture of Black Chicago.

Founded in 1940, the South Side Community Art Center emerged in direct response to the exclusion of Black artists from mainstream museums and galleries, establishing a permanent site for Black artists working across modernist, social realist, and diasporic traditions within both local and international contexts.

The walkthrough offers a structured way to move through the exhibition together—slowing down with the work and creating space to reflect on artistic movement as both physical migration and aesthetic strategy. Following the walkthrough, participants will gather for a facilitated public dialogue connecting Paris, Chicago, and the enduring role of Black institutions in sustaining artistic life, memory, and possibility.

This program is open to the public. Admission is free.

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https://www.eventbrite.com/e/paris-in-black-curator-led-exhibition-tour-tickets-1981871029600?aff=oddtdtcreator

DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

740 East 56th Place
Chicago, IL 60637

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.

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PARIS IN BLACK / CHICAGO: WALKTHROUGH & PUBLIC DIALOGUE

ABOUT THIS EVENT

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DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE