Join us for an artist talk moderated by Paul Branton! Paul Branton, artist and curator of SSCAC's current exhibition BendingLight, will facilitate an artist talk with the exhibiting artists of SSCAC's current exhibition Bending Light, detailing the exhibition’s themes and subject matter as it relates to explorations of color and identity. The artists explore the impact of […]
Join us for Art After Hours powered by Gertie, with screenings from filmmakers Rachel Gadson and Briana Clearly! We're thrilled to host filmmakers Rachel Gadson and Briana Clearly for rotational film screenings as part of Art After Hours Powered by Gertie, for EXPO art week! Sponsored by Arete Wealth & Masterworks, AAH takes […]
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 […]
From Jean Baptiste Point duSable, Ida B. Wells to Chairman Fred Hampton and Late Mayor Harold Washington and so many elders, we will share story, ritual and co-create a series of individual ancestral and community vessels from found and living objects and materials and also weave a community Agon or Ancestral garment that we will […]
From Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, Ida B. Wells to Chairman Fred Hampton and Late Mayor Harold Washington and so many elders, we will share stories, rituals and co-create a series of individual ancestral and community vessels from found and living objects and materials and also weave a community Agon or Ancestral garment that we will […]
Join SSCAC Archives and Collections Manager Lamar Gayles Jr. for a special program on Eselean Goree Henderson. Join us for a conversation with SSCAC Archives and Collections Manager Lamar Gayles Jr. on Eselean Goree Henderson, a prolific Chicago-area ceramicist whose work has heavily impacted the Black artistic landscape of Chicago through her own practice […]
Local Chicago artist Candace Hunter will unveil a decorative bench depicting stories she gathered from Bronzeville residents about their experiences living in Bronzeville.
Join us on August 31st at Bronzeville Neighborhood Farm for a program as part of ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago. Artist Candace Hunter will unveil a public art piece, commissioned as part of ReSOURCE, that captures the stories of Bronzeville residents, reflecting their lived experiences and voices. This program honors the […]
Join us for the opening of ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago
Join Earl’s Garden & Mae’s Kitchen for an evening of food, fun, and culture as we celebrate ten years of art and gardening. The Ancestral Staff and Art Installation is the culmination of our work with One Summer Chicago youth and young adult programs. We will unveil an installation of African staffs, made from reclaimed […]
Join Khadijah Kysia and Rhonda Wheatley for this hands-on workshop to explore and strengthen our resilience—our brilliance, our ability to make a way out of no way, and our capacity for self-renewal, body, mind, and spirit. Khadijah, a Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, will provide an interactive primer on herbs involving taste and touch. […]
Join us for a celebration of the end of the growing season, with food, entertainment, and presentations by our Youth Farmers. Kids and costumes are welcome!
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.
