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Design Dialogue Recap: The Future of South Side Community Art Center

 

The South Side Community Art Center, in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Center, hosted a public Design Dialogue reflecting on the future of SSCAC as it enters a major phase of redevelopment.

Held in Chicago, the conversation brought together lead architect Ann Lui (Future Firm), preservation architect k. kennedy Whiters (wrkSHäp kiloWatt + studio kW Architecture + Preservation), and SSCAC Executive Director Monique Brinkman-Hill, moderated by Lee Bey, architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.

The program opened with a reception and continued with a moderated discussion exploring the Center’s architectural legacy, preservation priorities, and the vision guiding its next chapter—including the rehabilitation of the historic mansion and a proposed 10,000-square-foot expansion.

Founded in 1940, the South Side Community Art Center is the nation’s only remaining WPA-era Black art center still operating in its original location with its original mission. As a cornerstone of Black cultural life in Bronzeville, SSCAC continues to support artists, steward a permanent collection of over 500 works, and serve as a vital space for community engagement.

This dialogue offered an opportunity for the public to engage directly with the architects and leadership shaping the Center’s future, grounding the redevelopment in both history and community vision.

Speakers:
Ann Lui
k. kennedy Whiters
Monique Brinkman-Hill
Lee Bey

Watch the full video on Youtube. 

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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.