South Side Community Art Center

Artists and Models: A Tribute to the South Side Community Art Center.
2021-07-10 - 2021-08-29 | IL
Artists and Models: A Tribute to the South Side Community Art Center
July 10-August 29, 2021

Students from across Columbia College Chicago brought the South Side Community Art Center’s (SSCAC) administrative archives to life through a recent exhibition titled, “Artists and Models: A Tribute to the South Side Community Art Center.” The exhibit was previously on display at C33 Gallery (33 Ida B. Wells Dr. first floor).

This student led exhibition celebrates the South Side Community Art Center’s pioneering role in promoting Black art and creativity in Chicago. This exhibition features documents from the Center’s archival records to trace aspects of the Center’s history from its first four decades.
Artists and Models was curated by Charlotte Briskin, Anastasia Murphy, Justin Ridgel, James Ross, Matthew Walcott, and Teanna White in Dr. Melanie Chambliss’s Fall 2020 course Black Artistry and the Archive. The exhibition was designed by Elsa Mae Brydalski, Hannah Davila, Bri Elliott, Raegan Townsend, and Joseph Trezek in Sarah Faust’s Spring 2021 Graphic Design course.

SSCAC is proud to showcase this archive, and we share our thanks to students who brought this to life! We hope you enjoy.

Whitfield Lovell: The Spell Suite | An Initiative of Toward Common Cause
2021-07-17 - 2021-09-25
Whitfield Lovell: The Spell Suite
An Initiative of Toward Common Cause

SSCAC is beyond thrilled to be participate in this 19 institution collaborative exhibit and excited to showcase new works by Whitfield Lovell!

Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance. Presented on the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by 29 visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981.
Mining vintage photographs of unknown people for much of his subject matter, Whitfield Lovell (MacArthur Fellow, 2007) aims to, in his words, “illuminate the humanity and richness” of ordinary African Americans who lived between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement. Shown here are portraits from Lovell’s Spell Suite, a series name that references a sequence of pieces in music or dance and conjures the mesmerizing quality of enchantment. Lucidly rendered and powerfully expressive, these Black figures contradict the stereotypes of African Americans that have been perpetuated by mass media, such as The Beulah Show recording that plays from Lovell’s installation of radios, After an Afternoon. Together, these works probe the effacement of cultural memory with sensuous tones that activate the legacy of those whose personal histories have been lost.
Whitfield Lovell: The Spell Suite is a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and South Side Community Art Center. It is an initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, which is organized by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with exhibition, programmatic, and research partners across Chicago. Toward Common Cause is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and curated by Abigail Winograd, MacArthur Fellows Program 40th Anniversary Exhibition Curator, Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.
Whitfield Lovell’s artwork is also on view at the Stony Island Arts Bank from July 15 to December 19, 2021. For more information, please visit towardcommoncause.org.

Image courtesy:
Whitfield Lovell (b. 1959). “Spell no. 12 (Richesse Noire),” 2021, Conte on paper with attached found object. © Whitfield Lovell. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York
