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A Spotlight in The Art Geography of Chicago

Across Chicago, the arts take shape through a deeply layered landscape of institutions, galleries, grassroots spaces, pop-up experiences, and everything in between—each rooted in the city’s diverse neighborhoods and geographies.

Amid its ongoing capital renovation, the South Side Community Art Center was recently spotlighted in NewCity Magazine alongside other influential spaces for its enduring presence in the South Side.

Read the spotlight excerpted from the article, “The Art Geography of Chicago” in NewCity’s April Big Art Issue and get an in-depth guide of Chicago’s diverse, sprawling arts enclaves.

South Side Community Art Center
In the heart of Bronzeville, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) stands as the nation’s first Black art institution and a cornerstone of Chicago’s cultural landscape. Since opening in 1940 through the efforts of local artists and neighbors—among them the legendary Dr. Margaret Taylor-Burroughs—the center has offered space for creativity, connection and artistic growth. Its historic brownstone, typically buzzing with exhibitions, events and classes, is currently undergoing a major renovation and expansion. Once completed, SSCAC will serve as a landmark that not only shaped the city’s artistic past but is actively building its future. (NJ) 3831 South Michigan sscartcenter.org

 

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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.