Exhibitions

Name: The Sound of the South Side: Jazz, Form, and Freedom
Start: 2026-04-21T00:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-12-01T23:59:59-06:00

July 2023
All of Living is Risk | Opening Reception

July 10, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Join us for an opening reception to celebrate and kick off our fall/winter exhibitions alongside curators Rikki Byrd, and Gervais Marsh, with artist Cory Perry! […]
October 2023
Through a Lens of Beauty & Wonderment: Notes on Collaborative Friendship | Opening Reception

October 7, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Join us for an opening reception to celebrate and kick off our fall/winter exhibition with curator and artist Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum! …Notes on Collaborative Friendship (First […]
June 2024
Adler and Adler

June 8, 2024 - August 31, 2024

South Side Community Art Center 3831 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL, United States

Exhibiting Artist Eli Greene | Curated by Amber Nax The South Side Community Art Center in partnership with ICI, presents “Adler & Adler”, a poignant artistic response by Chicago-based artist […]
September 2024
ReSOURCE

September 14, 2024 - December 21, 2024

South Side Community Art Center 3831 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL, United States

Join us for the opening of ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago Visit the Virtual Experience
March 2025
Beyond Frames: Black Women Collectors Shaping Cultural Heritage in Chicago

March 28, 2025 @ 4:00 pm - April 26, 2025 @ 12:00 am

South Side Community Art Center 3831 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL, United States

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 […]
April 2026
The Sound of the South Side: Jazz, Form, and Freedom

April 21 - December 1

In honor of International Jazz Day, 2026, experience the virtual exhibition, The Sound of the South Side: Jazz, Form, and Freedom.

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

Exhibitions

July 2023

All of Living is Risk | Opening Reception

October 2023

Through a Lens of Beauty & Wonderment: Notes on Collaborative Friendship | Opening Reception

June 2024

Adler and Adler

September 2024

ReSOURCE

March 2025

Beyond Frames: Black Women Collectors Shaping Cultural Heritage in Chicago

April 2026

The Sound of the South Side: Jazz, Form, and Freedom

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE