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SSCAC awarded part of $1.8 million grant from Getty Foundation

The Los Angeles-based foundation is offering support to the South Side Community Art Center and the University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project as part of an initiative to support Black visual arts archives.

By  Zoe Singer | May 13, 2026, 4:31pm CDT
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Two South Side-based visual arts organizations will receive part of a $1.8 million grant from the Los Angeles-based Getty Foundation to support Black visual arts archives, the foundation announced Wednesday.

The South Side Community Art Center will receive $250,000, and the University of Chicago’s South Side Home Movie Project will receive $170,000. The two organizations, out of eight total recipients, have been recognized for their work preserving the history of Black art in the U.S.

“It is such a privilege to be in the position of partnering with these organizations so that they can steward their collections even better than they had been before,” said Getty Senior Programming Officer Miguel de Baca. “It’s absolutely vital.”

De Baca said he knew about the Community Art Center’s work from his time teaching at Lake Forest College. The UChicago Home Movie Project, however, contacted the foundation about the grant directly, which de Baca encourages other organizations to do as well.

The South Side Community Art Center, a Bronzeville landmark located at 3831 S Michigan Ave, was founded in 1940 as part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency aimed at lowering mass unemployment during the Great Depression. It’s the oldest Black American arts center in the country, and fostered the work of such Black creatives as Gordon Parks and Charles White.

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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.