SATELLITE EVENT: CREATIVE WOLD BUILDING WORKSHOP SERIES

Name: SATELLITE EVENT: CREATIVE WOLD BUILDING WORKSHOP SERIES
Start: 2026-04-18T10:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-04-18T12:00:00-06:00
Location: The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago

April 18 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Join us for a writing & mixed media workshop centered on reflection, creative growth, and building a sustainable creative practice.

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The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Saturday, Apr 18

10 am – 12 pm

6400 South Kimbark Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637

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ABOUT THIS EVENT

What does it mean to build a creative world for yourself in uncertain times? Made with artists in mind, but honestly for anyone who’s ever felt unsure about calling themselves one. If you’ve been sitting with doubt around your creativity, your skill, or where you fit, this space is for you.

Join us for a slow, intentional morning of reflection, writing, and mixed-media artmaking. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s just to move a little differently in your creative practice, without pressure or overthinking.

Facilitated by Rhonda Wheatley, this session leans into intuitive making through guided prompts, writing, and creative play. We’ll spend time building something for ourselves—letting go of rigid expectations and making room for curiosity, care, and possibility.

Participants will create a mixed-media affirmation artwork using text and imagery centered on growth, transformation, and personal direction.

This workshop is part of South Side Community Art Center’s ongoing work to support artists and the creative community. SSCAC is dedicated to conserving, preserving, and promoting the legacy and future of Black art and artists, while holding space for learning, rest, and imagination.

This event is free to attend. A $10 suggested donation can be made in person (QR code, cash, or check).

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Events

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https://www.eventbrite.com/e/creative-world-building-workshop-tickets-1986103452892

The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago

6400 South Kimbark Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637

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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.

HOURS

SATELLITE EVENT: CREATIVE WOLD BUILDING WORKSHOP SERIES

ABOUT THIS EVENT

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Website:

The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE