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A Message from SSCAC’s Executive Director

Dear Friends,

Since 1940, the South Side Community Art Center has stood as a beacon for the arts, serving as a vital resource not just locally in Chicago, but also on the national and international stages. One of the oldest independent Black art centers in the United States and a designated historic landmark, the Center is deeply rooted in a legacy of cultural excellence.

While we honor this rich past, we are now poised to take bold steps into the future. In 2023, the Center completed a comprehensive strategic planning process which reflects its current operational objectives supporting this Campaign. Our vision is clear, and with your partnership, we will transform this vision into reality. The Center is a place where established Black artists shine and emerging creators find their voice. Through our dynamic educational programs, exhibitions, talks, and tours, we connect the community with the vibrancy of Black art and its creators. Now, we have a unique opportunity to elevate this work to new heights.

We are thrilled to announce Black Art Rising: A Campaign for the South Side Community Art Center. Our goal is ambitious but vital: to raise $18 million to renovate and expand the Center, creating a campus that will allow us to amplify our impact and reach even further.

This transformation includes restoring our historic building and creating a dynamic, interactive new addition. Designed by the visionary team at Future Firm, in collaboration with historic preservation architect K. Kennedy Whiters, our new campus will expand visitor capacity by 398%, allowing us to welcome more visitors and engage with a greater number of artists, researchers, arts administrators, and community members of all ages.

As of April 2026, we have secured more than $12.5 million in commitments from generous public and private donors. We now seek to raise the remaining remaining $5.5 million. When completed in 2027, the new South Side Community Art Center will stand as a vibrant, thriving hub for culture and community in Bronzeville—shaping the cultural landscape for decades to come.

We invite you to join us in this transformative journey. Together we can further build upon and preserve a legacy that will inspire generations. Your support is the key to making this vision possible.

Monique Brinkman-Hill

Recent News

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.