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Beyond Frames: Black Women Collectors Shaping Cultural Heritage in Chicago

February 28 @ 4:00 pm - March 29 @ 12:00 am
Featured image for Delita MArtin

Curated by Bethany Hill and rachel dukes

This exhibition highlights a trailblazing group of Black women collectors in Chicago, exploring their practices through care, memory work, and cultural heritage preservation. “Beyond Frames” celebrates an intergenerational group of women who continue this legacy today. Viewers can experience artworks from the personal collections of fourteen different Chicago collectors: Patrica Andrews-Keenan, Carol Briggs, Monique Brinkman-Hill, Faye Edwards, Felicia Grant Preston, Frances Guichard, Eleanor Hambric, Beverly Normand, Cynthia Smith, Arcilla Stahl, Christina Steed, Gail Spann, Sonia Spencer, Alita Tucker, and Shyvette Williams. Each collector was asked:

  • What piece in your collection brings you the most joy?
  • What piece represents an aspect of who you are?
  • What piece best represents your journey as a collector?

Through these reflections and oral interviews, “Beyond Frames” delves into the personal and cultural significance of their collections. These stories reveal how collecting Black art is not only a creative and curatorial act but also an act of cultural preservation, resistance, and community building.

Collage of collectors
Pictured from top left to bottom right: Sonia Spencer, Patricia Andrews-Keenan, Monique Brinkman-Hill, Faye Edwards, Felicia Grant Preston, Frances Guichard, Gail Spann, Cynthia Smith, Shyvette Williams (photography by Marvin Wells), Beverly Normand, Alita Tucker, Carol Briggs, Christina Steed

The exhibition also honors ancestors Etta Moten Barnett, Margaret Burroughs, Frances Minor, Linda Murray, and Susan Woodson, pioneering female collectors of Black art in Chicago. These women dedicated their lives to preserving the art of the African diaspora, creating galleries and museums in their homes and building invaluable networks to support Black artists.

Ancestors
Pictured from top left to bottom right: Dr. Margaret Burroughs, Etta Moten Barnett, Linda Murray (Photo courtesy of Nubia Murray), Susan Cayton Woodson and Frances Minor at a celebration of Etta Moten Barnett

“Beyond Frames” invites viewers to consider how art transcends traditional frames, engaging with lived experience, ancestral homage, and memory. By celebrating these women, “Beyond Frames” underscores the critical role of Black women collectors in sustaining African diasporic heritage.

Beyond Frames Shots
Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center

About the Co-Curators:

Bethany Hill (she/her) is an archivist, curator, and PhD candidate in Art History specializing in Black visual culture and Black feminist spatial practices. Her work explores the ways Black women cultural creators engage in radical spatial thinking and worldbuilding through art and archives. She’s passionate about preserving and celebrating Black cultural heritage by leading archival initiatives, curating exhibitions, and developing research projects that amplify Black creative legacies. She has led numerous curatorial and research projects at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, highlighting its rich history and contemporary significance. Currently, Bethany serves as the Community Engagement Coordinator at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she fosters collaborations that center Black voices in archival stewardship and interpretation.
rachel dukes is a writer and curator based in Chicago. rachel has supported numerous curatorial projects across Chicago, including at the South Side Community Art Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and UIC’s Gallery 400. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader, Sixty Inches From Center, LVL3, and Black Embodiment Studio’s a Year in Black Art. A passionate advocate for community-based arts programming, rachel also serves on the board of Chicago Tap Theatre. In her creative practice, rachel explores the terrain for wonder that is uncovered through art and she is committed to sharing and nurturing this exploration within her community.

About SSCAC:

Founded in 1940, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) stands as a testament to the resilience and creativity of the Black American art community. As the oldest Black American art center in the United States and a Chicago Historic Landmark, SSCAC is a beacon of cultural heritage and innovation. We take pride in our rich past and continue to build on our legacy, serving as an artist- and community-centered resource with diverse programs and exhibitions. The mission of the South Side Community Art Center is to conserve, preserve, and promote the legacy and future of Black American art and artists while educating the community on the value of art and culture.

Categories:

South Side Community Art Center

3831 S Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60653 United States

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.