South Side Community Art Center

The Promised Land: Opening Reception
2023-01-20 17:00 - 20:00 (America/Chicago) | IL
Eleven artists with ties to North and South of the Mason-Dixon Line respond to just how much Black life has always been in transit.

The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. It has transformed cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York and Pittsburgh between 1916 and 1970. Chicago received more than 500,000 Black Southern Americans during this time.

To Southern Blacks, Chicago was considered the “Promised Land”. Stories of big city life — jobs with good wages, homes with running water, and basic freedoms denied to Blacks in the South — made the Northern city a prime destination for Blacks coming from below the Mason-Dixon line. As the most documented migration in US history, photographers like Gordon Parks, Florestine Perrault Collins, Moneta Sleet Jr., Roy DeCarava, and Coreen Simpson created imagery that demonstrated Black life in movement.

Today, contemporary artists and image makers respond to the many migrations of African Diaspora peoples and the influences of these movements in their work.

Derrick Woods-Morrow. Non-traditional Acts of Divination: Impression. Photograph. 18 in. x 24 in. 2019.

Featured Artists:

Lawrence Agyei
Anwulika Anigbo
Rose Blouin
Billie Carter-Rankin
Jen Everett
Mandela Hudson
Shabez Jamal
Sulyiman Stokes
Darryl Terrell
Loren Toney
Derrick Woods-Morrow

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell. 279º W 42º21’39” N 83º2’20″W Detroit, MI. Archival inkjet print. 24 in. x 36 in. 2021

Join us for an opening reception as we celebrate a diverse breath of photo and image works from some of the most promising artists exploring the possibilities and realities of Black life in image-making and photography.

Image courtesy (above). Sulyiman Stokes. Untitled (Momma #2). Photograph. 11 in. x 14 in. 2021

Black Adornment & The Found Object
2023-02-11 13:00 - 15:00
Join SSCAC Archives and Collections Manager LaMar Gayles Jr. for an afternoon exploring mixed media art, our collections, and adornment objects from his personal collection.

In this participatory program, join SSCAC Collections and Archives Manager LaMar Gayles in exploring examples of adornment and mixed media objects from the archives of the South Side Community Art Center and his personal collection.

This will be a unique opportunity for attendees to explore objects with connections to the history of the Center, how these objects have been made, how these works have aged over time, and thinking through the sociocultural materiality of these objects. Participants will have an opportunity to hold and interact with objects, be introduced to art material behaviors as well as preventive conservation practices that can better preserve these works for the future.

This program will be small and intimate with an attendance cap at 25 participants total, please RSVP in advance.

Black Family Portraits with Seed Lynn
2023-02-18 11:30 - 16:00
Join us with photographer Seed Lynn for a free family portrait session!

For this Black History Month, we’re thrilled to partner with photographer Seen Lynn to offer free family portraits to our community!

The Black family portrait, throughout history to the present, has always been an accessible, but vivid practice of self-representation that offers a more genuine and realistic portrayal of Black identity and dignity. Whether being made candidly within the family, or posing for a staged portrait, Black family portraits continue to reveal the inherent beauty, resilience, diversity, and style of our people and culture.

Learn more about our guest photographer below:

Writer, imagist, and artist, Seed Lynn, submits memory work as a liberatory practice. Whether sensually, technically, or artfully applied, Lynn meets the lens as a travelin’ state where listening and witnessing make voice timeless. And true.
This light invades his work, finds and frames subjects honestly, and creates brave space where stories find students. Lynn’s own studies concern how we remember ourselves, how that memory is imaged, and how remembrance itself, in the face of oppression, is a cathartic and radical act of protest.

We hope you’ll join us for what will be a memorable moment for you and your family!

NOTE:
We are prioritizing families who do NOT have studio family portraits, so we ask that you only reserve a space for you and your family if this applies to you. Portraits will be organized through 15-minute time blocks, with limited availability, so RSVP is required!

if for any reason you cannot make your timed reservation, please notify us right away so that we may open a slot to another family.

*notices can be made to SSCAC Programs Manager: zakkiyyah@sscartcenter.org

Artwork Documentation Workshop with Colleen Keihm
2023-02-25 12:00 - 13:00
Learn how to successfully document your artwork!

In conjunction with our current photo exhibition, ‘The Promised Land’, in partnership with LATITUDE, we’re thrilled to offer a free photo-documentation workshop for artists!

If you’re interested in learning more about documenting your artwork in an exhibition, for web use, or for your portfolio we’ll be working with photographer and LATITUDE Executive Director Collen Keihm! She will cover camera basics, what materials to have on hand, and how to set up a basic digital workflow to successfully document your artwork.

Photo credit: Loren Toney.

Colleen Keihm is the Executive Director at Latitude, a Chicago digital lab with high-end printing and scanning equipment that operates an artist in residence program and organizes arts programming. She received her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BS in Photography at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago at FLXST Contemporary, Flatland, Roman Susan, Filter Photo, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. She has been an artist in residence at Hatch Projects at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Institut fur alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and Studio 3325 in Chicago.

Her work is a part of the photography collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and she is a proud member of the Midwest Photographers Project. In addition to her role at Latitude, she is an educator in the Photography Department at University of Illinois at Chicago.

A Promised Land On The Horizon: Artist Talk
2023-03-11 13:00 - 15:00
‘The Promised Land’ exhibiting artists join SSCAC Exhibitions Manager and Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara in conversation.

Our current exhibition ‘The Promised Land’, features eleven contemporary photo and image artists working across a diverse range of visual methods, that re-imagine stories of city life and the Great Migration through the decolonization of the lens, Southern rooted influences, movement, family archives and portraiture.
The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. It has transformed cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York and Pittsburgh between 1916 and 1970. Chicago received more than 500,000 Black Southern Americans during this time. To Southern Blacks, Chicago was considered the “Promised Land”. Stories of big city life — jobs with good wages, homes with running water, and basic freedoms denied to Blacks in the South — made the Northern city a prime destination for Blacks coming from below the Mason-Dixon line. As the most documented migration in US history, photographers like Gordon Parks, Florestine Perrault Collins, Moneta Sleet Jr., Roy DeCarava, and Coreen Simpson created imagery that demonstrated Black life in movement. With familial ties to North and South of the Mason-Dixon Line, this stellar group of contemporary artists respond to the many migrations of African Diaspora peoples and the influences of these movements in their work.

This exhibition was organized and curated by SSCAC Exhibitions Manager Lola Ayisha Ogbara, and features the following artists: Lawrence Ageyi, Anwulika Anigbo, Rose Blouin, Billie Carter-Rankin, Jen Everett, Mandela Hudson, Shabez Jamal, Sulyiman Stokes, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, Loren Toney, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.

Complimentary coffee and cake will be provided during the program.

Learn more about the artists joining us:

Loren Toney is a published fine art and portrait photographer based in Chicago, Illinois. Finding her artistic footing in authentic emotion her portraiture is used in a wide array of spaces. From live music to behind the scenes photography she’s attuned to capturing the present moment. She was raised in the south suburbs of Chicago and received a BA from Columbia College Chicago as a Cinematography major and Photography minor. Her work focuses on the complexities of interpersonal relationships and identity, particularly the experiences of black men and women. She has been featured in “The Art Of Blackness,” exhibition in 2019 as well as Columbia College’s Library for an installation entitled “The Americans Now”. She was an Artist in Residence for Latitude Chicago in April 2018.

Her clients have included Rolling Stone, New York Times, Pitchfork, Goldenvoice.

https://lorentoney.com/

Sulyiman Stokes is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago whose sole focus is telling Black folks’ stories. Though music and photography are his primary areas of exploration, he regularly immerses himself in whatever medium is available to him to maximize expression.
Capturing and keeping a record of the ways Black folk struggle toward liberation by way of his work is his contribution to the very same pursuit.

Stokes’s photographs are Black-centric. Through them, he captures the ways in which Black people express their diverse talents and rich culture in everyday life.
Stokes captures the essence of his subjects through the use of soul-stirring and expressive images.

– Dierdre Robinson, South Side Weekly.

https://sulyiman.com/

Rose Blouin has created documentary and fine art photography since 1980. Blouin’s work has been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including Woman Made Gallery, Nicole Gallery, The South Side Community Art Center, Artemesia Gallery, The North Suburban Fine Arts Center, Evanston Arts Center, and the State of Illinois Art Gallery. Her work has received awards in juried exhibitions including Tall Grass Arts “From Earth” exhibition, Black Creativity (Museum of Science and Industry), University of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts “Chicago Jazz: A Photographer’s View,” DuSable Museum Annual Art Fair, and the Milwaukee Inner City Art Fair. Her photographs have been published on the covers of South Side Stories (City Stoop Press), Columbia Poetry Review (Columbia College Chicago), and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors by Haki Madhubuti (Lotus Press). Photos of Gwendolyn Brooks are included in Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (Third World Press, 1991) and Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating The Writing Of Gwendolyn Brooks (Curbside Splendor, 2017.)
Blouin has had solo shows at the South Side Community Art Center and at the Ferguson Gallery of Concordia University featuring photographs from South Africa.

Most recently, Blouin mounted a solo exhibition of photographs from Havana at The New Studio in Evanston (2016). She is also a founding member of Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African-American women artists.

https://roseblouinphotography.com/documentary-portfolio

Anwulika Anigbo (b. Nigeria 1987) is a Chicago-based artist tracing the historical and somatic roots of everyday life as it is practiced within blackness through imagery and processes. Her work chronicles and investigates self-determination, presence, knowledge production, and memory. Anigbo uses deep embodiment to make meaning at the intersections of life by rooting her practice in creation as a continuous process of personal and domestic liberation.

Anwulika’s work has been exhibited at The Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Chicago Artist Coalition (Chicago), EXPO Chicago with FOR FREEDOMS (Chicago) and the Chicago Athletic Association (Chicago). She was recently a 2022-23 Fellow with the Economic Security Project, the December 2022 and January 2023 Artist in Residence at Chicago Athletic Association, a 2021-22 Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition, and a 2022 3Arts Ignite Fund Awardee. Her work is included in the collection at Ryan Lee Gallery, 21c Museum and private collections. Anwulika is also the founder of The Love Ethic Project which channels creative resources towards the production of a love ethic through direct discourse and action.

At any given moment we stand at the intersection of histories, embodying and accessing more than what we have personally experienced. How far back and forward can individual and collective memory take the process of self-determination. My work uses familiar personal moments and cultural references to access somatic memory and histories of self-determination layered onto our most rudimentary and interior moments. If you know you know, if not discourse is still welcome.
-Anwulika Anigbo

https://anwulikaanigbo.com/

Billie Carter-Rankin (b.1995) is a visual artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She experiments with photography, darkroom processing, and archived images to explore loss within personal and collective memory. Her work primarily focuses on the absence of information, and the potential that is created as a result of that absence.

Carter-Rankin has been featured internationally in exhibitions such as the Setouchi Triennial 2019 in Japan, along with a number of publications such as TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Oxford American.She graduated with a MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and her BA in Media, Journalism, and Film from Howard University in 2018.

https://www.billiecarterrankin.com/

Mandela Hudson is a multidisciplinary artist and designer who lives and works in Chicago, IL. His curiosity and enthusiasm for multiple forms of visual communication assist in the creation of projects in disciplines such as photography, woodworking, filmmaking, and book design. A commitment and the overall aim to build greater bonds and healthier relationships within respective art communities has helped in the growth of his practice.

In 2018, Mandela founded Projection Publishing, a platform that focuses on collaborative contemporary experiences in the visual arts. Projection works to promote and distribute printed matter from an array of creatives working in a multitude of mediums.

*Above image: Rose Blouin.WP People 84. Archival inkjet photograph. 19 in. x 26 in. 1987

"where the light corrupts your face..." | Opening Reception
2023-04-07 17:00 - 20:00
Artists Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden consider the many definitions of space, site, and home.

Spatial griots Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden invite you to consider how socio-economic and geographic oppressions impact the way we see (or don’t see) our environments. Hernandez uncovers embedded histories and systems of power within built and speculative landscapes to imagine these spaces otherwise. Social justice artist Lewis Johnson advocates for urban communities by documenting the disparities among Chicago residents who live on opposite ends of the same streets across the city’s racial and economic divides. Knowlden critically deconstructs the elements of our urban fabric and its architectural histories to reassemble them as cartographic abstractions and imagined landscapes.

Gwendolyn Brooks, a brilliant author, poet, and life-long resident of the historic neighborhood of Bronzeville, becomes the Mecca of these stories as this exhibition interrogates dilapidation, buried histories, and what it could mean to be Black in space. Architecture is an ever-present form of storytelling. The architectural historiographies of Black space have often been written by poets who have elegantly told our stories of spatiality. Brooks gave us a voice we didn’t know we needed while underlining the importance of Black interiority. Like Brooks, June Jordan has used poetry to advocate for Black lives. Jordan was an architect, through a feminist practice that centers how we think about cartographies. Jordan invited us to challenge and redefine prevailing socio-spatial constructs towards dignified spaces for all communities. This is one of many reasons why she is an additional pinnacle of reference for an exhibition which poetically grapples with the many definitions of space, site, and home.

Andres L. Hernandez is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary practitioner. Initially trained as an architect, he has previously worked within architectural offices, community organizations, public schools, museums, and other institutional contexts.

Hernandez’ projects include commissions for the University of Arizona School of Art; 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; and Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. With Dark Adaptive, he co-developed performances for The Drawing Center; MoMA; Sharjah Biennial; and Performa. Hernandez held artist residencies with MCA Chicago; University of Arizona; Chicago DCASE; and University of Chicago. He participated on design teams for the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center. His awards include the Efroymson Family Fund Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and the 3Arts Award in Visual Arts.
Hernandez is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“My work draws forward the latent potential of words, spaces, sounds, and movement to elicit liberatory ways of being. I explore the embedded attitudes, histories, policies, and systems of power within and beyond our world(s) as a method of imagining and existing otherwise. I site my practice at the intersection of the social and the spatial. I consider the symbiotic, yet, fraught relationships between built and natural environments and their inhabitants, and speculate alternative pasts, presents, and futures for all. My work takes many forms, including collaborative and socially-engaged works, as well as independent, studio-based practices. Drawing, installation, and writing are my preferred media, alongside sound and performance”.

https://andreslhernandez.com/

Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s Southside Englewood neighborhood. Her art explores urban segregation and celebrates the nuanced richness of the Black community, countering media depictions of Chicago’s violence. Tonika’s work reveals injustices and inequalities, past and present, evidenced in the built environment and enshrined in real estate and land use practices, including historic preservation. Her Folded Map Project™ brings residents who live at similar addresses but miles apart on Chicago’s racially segregated South and North sides together in conversation about the city’s racial and economic divides. The Folded Map Project™ questions how everyone is socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions segregating the city and challenges viewers to contribute to a solution.

Tonika was selected as the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator to expand her investigation through “Inequity for Sale,” a project highlighting the living history and legacy of greater Englewood homes sold through Land Sale Contracts in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the unscrupulous loss of people’s homes and equity preventing the generational transfer and building of Black wealth. Tonika’s artistic contributions have gained citywide recognition in the last seven years, including being named a 2017 Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine, being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Rootwork Gallery in Pilsen, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harold Washington Library Center and at Loyola University’s Museum of Art. She is a 2019 Field Foundation “Leader for a New Chicago” and a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Cultural Advisory Council member. In 2022, Landmark Illinois’ named her one of their Influencers for her “Inequity For Sale.”

Tonika is the co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, and she now serves as the Creative Executive Officer of the Folded Map Project™ nonprofit organization.

https://www.tonijphotography.com/

Roland Knowlden is a Liberian American interdisciplinary artist and architectural designer from New Jersey, currently based in Chicago, IL. Knowlden’s architectural background has cultivated his ongoing interest in constructed landscapes, city planning, and the cultural and social implications of racialized spatial mapping. Working across painting and drawing, Knowlden’s approach to abstract and experimental mapping articulates a visual language which makes visible the tensions wrought by erasure, displacement, and palimpsest.

Interrogating notions of origin, belonging, boundaries, and power, Knowlden’s critical cartography aims to not only reproduce existing environmental experiences and affects, but to propose new spatial realities. With each new configuration and composition, Knowlden furthers his practice of imagining otherwise.

https://rolandknowlden.com/

BLACK SPACE: Architectural Historiographies & Spatial Landscapes
2023-05-06 14:00 - 16:00
Artists Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden discuss the intersections of space, architecture, and Blackness with SSCAC Exhibitions Manager and Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara.

Artists and spacial griots Andres L. Hernandez, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Roland Knowlden invite you to consider how socio-economic and geographic oppressions impact the way we see (or don’t see) our environments, in a conversation with SSCAC Exhibitions Manager and Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara.

Hernandez uncovers embedded histories and systems of power within built and speculative landscapes to imagine these spaces otherwise. Social justice artist Lewis Johnson advocates for urban communities by documenting the disparities among Chicago residents who live on opposite ends of the same streets across the city’s racial and economic divides. Knowlden critically deconstructs the elements of our urban fabric and its architectural histories to reassemble them as cartographic abstractions and imagined landscapes. Gwendolyn Brooks, a brilliant author, poet, and life-long resident of the historic neighborhood of Bronzeville, becomes the Mecca of these stories as this exhibition interrogates dilapidation, buried histories, and what it could mean to be Black in space.

Themes in the exhibition reference and/or explore the following: Urban planning, socio-economics, equity, Mecca Flats, Psycho-geography: The impact that our physical space has on us, segregation, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Chicago architecture, poetics of black spaces/environments, artists David Hammons and Jack Whitten.

This exhibition was organized and curated by SSCAC Exhibitions Manager Lola Ayisha Ogbara.

*Complimentary coffee and cake will be provided during the program.

Andres L. Hernandez. Benign Neglect. Installation view. 2014. Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Tonika Lewis Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood. Her art explores urban segregation and celebrates the nuanced richness of the Black community, countering media depictions of Chicago’s violence. Tonika’s work reveals injustices and inequalities, past and present, evidenced in the built environment and enshrined in real estate and land use practices, including historic preservation. Her Folded Map Project™ brings residents who live at similar addresses but miles apart on Chicago’s racially segregated South and North sides together in conversation about the city’s racial and economic divides. The Folded Map Project™ questions how everyone is socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions segregating the city and challenges viewers to contribute to a solution.

Tonika was selected as the National Public Housing Museum’s 2021 Artist as Instigator to expand her investigation through “Inequity for Sale,” a project highlighting the living history and legacy of greater Englewood homes sold through Land Sale Contracts in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the unscrupulous loss of people’s homes and equity preventing the generational transfer and building of Black wealth. Tonika’s artistic contributions have gained citywide recognition in the last seven years, including being named a 2017 Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine, being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Rootwork Gallery in Pilsen, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harold Washington Library Center and at Loyola University’s Museum of Art. She is a 2019 Field Foundation “Leader for a New Chicago” and a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Cultural Advisory Council member. In 2022, Landmark Illinois’ named her one of their Influencers for her “Inequity For Sale.”

Tonika is the co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, and she now serves as the Creative Executive Officer of the Folded Map Project™ nonprofit organization.

https://www.tonijphotography.com/

Andres L. Hernandez is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary practitioner. Initially trained as an architect, he has previously worked within architectural offices, community organizations, public schools, museums, and other institutional contexts.

Hernandez’ projects include commissions for the University of Arizona School of Art; 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale; and Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. With Dark Adaptive, he co-developed performances for The Drawing Center; MoMA; Sharjah Biennial; and Performa. Hernandez held artist residencies with MCA Chicago; University of Arizona; Chicago DCASE; and University of Chicago. He participated on design teams for the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center. His awards include the Efroymson Family Fund Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and the 3Arts Award in Visual Arts.
Hernandez is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“My work draws forward the latent potential of words, spaces, sounds, and movement to elicit liberatory ways of being. I explore the embedded attitudes, histories, policies, and systems of power within and beyond our world(s) as a method of imagining and existing otherwise. I site my practice at the intersection of the social and the spatial. I consider the symbiotic, yet, fraught relationships between built and natural environments and their inhabitants, and speculate alternative pasts, presents, and futures for all. My work takes many forms, including collaborative and socially-engaged works, as well as independent, studio-based practices. Drawing, installation, and writing are my preferred media, alongside sound and performance”.

https://andreslhernandez.com/

Roland Knowlden is a Liberian American interdisciplinary artist and architectural designer from New Jersey, currently based in Chicago, IL. Knowlden’s architectural background has cultivated his ongoing interest in constructed landscapes, city planning, and the cultural and social implications of racialized spatial mapping. Working across painting and drawing, Knowlden’s approach to abstract and experimental mapping articulates a visual language which makes visible the tensions wrought by erasure, displacement, and palimpsest.

Interrogating notions of origin, belonging, boundaries, and power, Knowlden’s critical cartography aims to not only reproduce existing environmental experiences and affects, but to propose new spatial realities. With each new configuration and composition, Knowlden furthers his practice of imagining otherwise.

https://rolandknowlden.com/

Mapping Black Archives: A Collage Workshop with Alexandra Antoine
2023-05-13 13:00 - 16:00
An invitation to explore Black archives through collage using maps, magazines, ephemera, and images of Black women to make a “marker”.

The South Side Community Art Center, in collaboration with Mural Arts presents Mapping Black Archives, a collage workshop hosted by Alexandra Antoine, with Andrea Yarbrough. This is an invitation to explore Black archives through collage using maps, magazines, ephemera, and photos of black women as source material. The final works will be markers, honoring Black women cultural workers. Each marker is reserved space in Yarbrough’s forthcoming installation, Collective Steps, an homage to the scores of Black women committed to sustaining the South Side Community Arts Center.

All materials will be supplied, however participants are welcome to bring personal ephemera to be included. This event is open to all ages, and is intended as a moment of connection so partners (mother/daughter, sisters, friends, etc.) are encouraged to attend together.

Please keep the following in mind ahead of your attendance:

You are encouraged to bring your own images/ephemera/materials (no paint)

Images/materials for participants to use will be available

Partners encouraged (mother/daughter, sisters, friend, etc.)

Alexandra Antoine is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural apprentice based in Chicago, IL.

Her work acknowledges the influences of her Haitian culture and interest in portraiture, food, farming and traditional artistic practices of the African diaspora. She received her BFA in Fine Arts and Arts Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

“My works are pathways for the stories, memories and traditional practices of my ancestors and elders. I reflect on memories of communal experiences with my loved ones, the oral histories shared within these spaces, the native language of my people and its use in sustaining my connection to land and spirit…”

Andrea Yarbrough, SSCAC’s 2nd Artist Catalyst Awardee, is a multi-disciplinary maker, curator, and educator based on the South Side of Chicago nurturing sites of care through a blend of urban agriculture, civic engagement, and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative in ℅: Black women (in care of Black women), bringing together writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, to collectively exhume the (in)visibility of care for Black women.

Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.

“As an Artist Catalyst recipient, my learning and collaborative work will further explore Black women’s histories connected to artistic practices, movements, and art objects in service to our grander communities. I am committed to cultivating a world in which art engenders new forms of care and truly impacts our social and political sensibilities. I believe that the Artist Catalyst Program will aid me on my path as I seek to expand the histories and engagement of art within the city of Chicago and beyond as an educator, curator, and artist. My urgency to work with others to re-imagine social praxis art with art and cultural institutions has reached a critical point, and now is the time to merge my work and worldview with this passion. I firmly believe that my time as an Artist Catalyst recipient will generate new schemes of reparations and reconciliation, centering Black women in urban environments, and produce enduring engagements, rewriting the narratives of our future.”

BRONZEVILLE TROLLEY TOUR NIGHT!
2023-06-16 18:00 - 21:00
Please join us for the 3rd Friday of the month for the Bronzeville Art District (BAD) Trolley Tour 2023!

Bronzeville Art District is Celebrating 17 years, Every 3rd Friday between June and September take a ride on the Double-Decker Bus for fine art and entertainment in Bronzeville!

Ride the Double-Decker bus that will take you to the 5 participating art galleries and art institutions in Bronzeville. Featuring some of the best fine art and entertainment in the city of Chicago. Free and Fun for the entire family! Please share with your art friends and family.

2023 Summer Tour Schedule and participating Bronzeville locations:

June 16, July 21, August 18, September 15, 6 pm to 9pm

You can visit any of the galleries, art institutions or studios and experience the amazing art and entertainment!

Blanc Gallery
Bronzeville Artist Lofts
Gallery Guichard
Faie Afrikan Art
South Side Community Art Center

Sponsored by:

University of Illinois Cancer Center
Gift of Hope
Blue Cross Blue Shield
CIBC Bank
Building Community Foundation
Bronzeville Art District

3831 JUNETEENTH!
2023-06-17 12:00 - 16:00
SSCAC is thrilled to host artists Eric Von Haynes and Angela Davis Fegan for an on site letterpress print activation, artist Andrea Yarbrough for a viewing of her PACE Mural Arts outdoor installation commission, and John Pendelton of Planks and Pistils!

Participants at our Juneteenth program will be able to print letterpress broadsides with Eric Von Haynes and Angela Davis Fegan, using a showcard table top press and moveable wood type. Join us to pull a print of your very own to take home in celebration of the intersecting struggles for Black and Queer liberation in honor of Pride month and Juneteenth.

A slogan will be written and specially designed by artist Angela Davis Fegan in advance and will include a blank space for attendees to add what liberation looks like for them! We will have an array of brightly colored papers to choose from and will hang prints to dry along the front fence of our building to activate the space and entice potential participants.

Artist Andrea Yarbrough’s forthcoming installation, Collective Steps is an homage to the scores of Black women committed to sustaining the South Side Community Arts Center. Centered on mapping the stories of understudied Black women, Yarbrough’s approach has been focused on Fern Gayden, who was a leader, writer, and organizer. A founding member of the South Side Writers Group in the 1930s, Fern Gayden’s long and diverse career included leadership roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the South Side Community Art Center.

Andrea Yarbrough, SSCAC’s 2nd Artist Catalyst Awardee, is a multi-disciplinary maker, curator, and educator based on the South Side of Chicago nurturing sites of care through a blend of urban agriculture, civic engagement, and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative in ℅: Black women (in care of Black women), bringing together writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, to collectively exhume the (in)visibility of care for Black women. Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.

Andrea’s commission is supported by the Public Art & Civic Engagement Capacity Building Initiative, granted to the South Side Community Art Center from Mural Arts Institute, a program of Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Angela Davis Fegan (she/they) is a native of Chicago’s South Side. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery, SPACES (OH) and Revolve (AVL).

She has held residencies at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, F4F, Connecticut College, the Hambidge Center (GA), Revolve (NC), and Project Row House (TX). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her lavender menace poster project has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.

Eric Von Haynes (he/him) is a multifaceted creative who merges traditional and modern printing methods and aesthetics in his work. While design and printmaking are Eric’s passions, he is energized by collaborations and the ideas and challenges that come from working within the community.

In 2007, he established Flatlands Press, a platform that produces art objects and printed ephemera such as artist books and periodicals, providing artists worldwide with opportunities to exchange ideas and spark conversations. Eric is currently serving as the President of the Chicago Printers Guild, an Artist in Residence at the Chicago Art Department, and a Co-founder and core organizer with the Love Fridge Network, a mutual aid group that promotes food sovereignty and community care.

John Pendleton, founder of Planks and Pistils. Planks & Pistils exists to design high quality floral art that evokes a social and emotional connection to Black freedom, creativity, self-care and growth.

Originally from Grove Hill, Alabama, John’s love for woodworking and flowers began with his parents. “Planks” honoring his woodworker father who he shadowed in the wood shop and “Pistils” (female reproductive organ of the flower) honoring his mother whose orange rose bush he watered.

An overachiever and lover of excellence all throughout childhood, he didn’t consider artistic expression as a vital part of his life until after he got married and began arranging flowers for his wife. What started as a hobby has become a honed skill which has led him to be the the founder and creative director of Planks & Pistils design studio. John’s floral design work has been in Munaluchi Bridal Magazine and he was included in “125 Florists To Be Celebrated in 2022” by Florists’ Review Magazine.

Black Light Cinema Project and Homecoming: Black Craft & Design in Chicago
2023-07-07 17:00 - 20:00
Join us for an opening reception to celebrate and kick off our summer exhibitions!

In a world rich with diverse cultures and histories, the concept of belonging and homeplace holds profound significance. Within the tapestry of human experiences, one thread stands out with resilience, creativity, and an indomitable spirit – the Black cinematic experience. SSCAC is debuting the ‘Black Light Cinema Project’ to explore the intricate interconnectedness of Black life through new media and film. This inaugural iteration explores themes of belonging, homeplace, and identity, while celebrating the vibrancy of our urban landscapes, partnered alongside our 2nd floor Cortor gallery exhibition ‘Homecoming: Black Craft & Design in Chicago’.
At its core, ‘Black Light Cinema Project’ seeks to dismantle conventional notions of homeplace and embrace a more nuanced understanding through the exhibiting of the underrepresented medium of film in art space. We invite visitors to venture beyond the physical spaces we call home, encouraging them to delve into the emotional, spiritual, and ancestral landscapes that define our sense of belonging. Through ongoing screenings of film shorts, we offer a multifaceted exploration of the Black experience, revealing the complex interplay of history, memory, and identity.

Featured Artists: Jada Amina , zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal, Cameron Granger , Paige Taul, and cai thomas

This exhibition is curated by SSCAC Exhibitions Manager and Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara.

Cameron Granger. Heavy as Heaven. 2022, 11 mins, 3-channel, Sound, Digital file.

‘Homecoming: Black Craft & Design’ in Chicago utilizes the varying practices of several Black craft artists in Chicago working in the mid to late 20th century and pairs their work with historical archival materials from the socio-political movements in the city during the Black Arts Movement, of the 60’s and 70’s.
Chicago is internationally known as a diverse cultural landscape that is rooted in segregation and discrimination, but this exhibition aims to explore how studio craft artists are using their practices and connections to spaces like the South Side Community Art Center to explore these themes. This exhibition seeks to present the complex multivalent histories of Black artists with varying connections to the South Side Community Art Center during its early years in the mid-twentieth century. These artists all in some way play with the performative presentations of body and self through creating ambiguous figures or forms. These artists have explored complex themes of Black cultural representation, concepts around object functionality and performativity, issues in presentation of self through objects, and methods of socio-cultural identity making through creative expression.
The exhibition will present the biographical backgrounds of the artists included while exploring how they technically executed their works (both professionally and personally), as well as reflecting on the conceptual subjects that fueled their practices.

Featured Artists: Elizabeth Catlett, Irene Clark, Bobbe Cotton, Jeremiah Drake, Espi Eph, Clinton Foreman, Eselean Henderson, William McBride, Geraldine McCullough, El Roi Parker, Marva Jolly Pitchford, Allen Stringfellow, Teresa Staats, and Bill Walker.

This exhibition is curated by SSCAC Archives and Collections Manager LaMar Gayles Jr.

William McBride. Balancers. Oil on canvas. 1945

The New School: QTPOC Pathways
2023-07-08 14:00 - 15:00
Join us for a panel discussion navigating the shift in the representation of Black gay/queer/trans/non-binary identities in Chicago from the 1980s to today.

In the 80s, the heat of bodies could be felt throughout downtown Chicago from the clubs to the streets. Passersby called out to each other and occasionally locked eyes holding a knowing sultry gaze. Black men of all ages, fluid in their sexual preferences, crowded the South Loop bars and warehouse raves. As the photographer Patric McCoy moved through the streets and crowded venues, he candidly captured Black men the way they wished to be seen in their spectrum of identities, countering mass media narratives. These photographs, now on view at Wrightwood 659 in Patric McCoy: Take My Picture, document an essential view of an underground culture that has since grown and transformed over the past 40 years.

Moderated by Patric McCoy, “The New School: QTPOC Pathways” features contemporary voices from the arts community, including Jared Brown, an interdisciplinary artist who uses fragments of Black subcultures to investigate the history and the digital space; LaMar Gayles, an archaeologist and curator with a special focus on the work of artist Berry Horton and the Black queer arts communities in Chicago; and Najee-Zaid Searcy, an educator and artist who employs strategies of collaboration and organizing to create safe QTPOC spaces.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Najee-Zaid Searcy (any pronouns with respect) is an interdisciplinary artist rooted in Chicago, IL, originally home to the Council of Three Fires. Najee-Zaid designs, sustains, and transitions spaces for LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC beings through performance art, facilitation, respite, and music. Najee-Zaid is a co-founder of the Queering the Parks Initiative (Chicago Park District) and the Otherhood Collective. They debuted their EP and performance artwork both titled “Immersion” at the Elastic Arts Foundation in 2022 and will further showcase their project through the 2023/2024 season.

Learn more at najeezaidsearcy.com

LaMar R. Gayles Jr. (a native son of the South Side of Chicago) is an archaeologist, independent curator, material culture scholar, and technical art historian. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program in Art Conservation and Preservation Studies at the University of Delaware. Gayles is a 2021 graduate from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) masters program and a 2019 BA (Cum Laude) graduate from St. Olaf College with a triple major in Art History, Ethnic Studies, and Ethno-Aesthetics & Archaeological Materiality. He has researched and curated exhibitions on Black American material culture and its historical progressions from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century.

One of Gayles’s most recent exhibitions was the 2021 exhibition Divine Legacies in Black Jewelry at the National Museum of Ornamental Metals. Gayles’s most recent curatorial project was the 2022 Terra Foundation of American Art funded co-curated exhibition Emergence: Intersections at the Center which explored the trajectories and complex interwoven legacies of the South Side Community Art Center and Chicago LGBTQ+ communities. Gayles’s personal research methodology combines archaeometry, arts-based research, conservation science, art historical analysis, ethnography, historical reproduction, and technical studies to explore material and visual culture.

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Jared broadcasted audio and text-based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah’s description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history, and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. Jared Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

All of Living is Risk | Opening Reception
2023-07-10 12:00 - 15:30
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!

All of Living is Risk (2nd floor Cortor Gallery) brings together works by Cory Perry (b. 1989, Fayetteville, Arkansas) and Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum (b. 1990, Boston). Drawing on Afrodiasporic textile practices of quilting and weaving, respectively, Perry and Ekwelum explore the juxtaposition of Black queer grief, joy, and belonging. Combining second-hand textiles and deconstructed clothing objects given to them by Black queer people whose voices have been underrepresented across the South – and specifically in their hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas – Perry pays homage to the region’s traditions of quilting. Strung along and suspended from string, Perry’s installation recalls a clothesline. They critically engage quotidian and gendered gestures of homemaking to reflect on the ways that queer people in the South build relationships and foster collectivity, despite the ruptures and ephemerality of these spaces caused by harmful societal reactions attempting to stifle their existence.

Image courtesy of artist Cory Perry. 2023.

Ekwelum creates grief cloths using a West African upright loom inspired by Nigerian “abata” cloths, which are used to honor the dead during funerals. The artist extends the intent of these cloths as an archive of feeling to consider his life as a Black queer American-born, Nigerian person. Combining weaving, sculpture, and installation, found and purchased art materials, Ekwelum’s practice puts pressure on and blurs the antiquated delineation between craft and fine art. Central to his artistic materials is a plastic lacing known as “gimp.” Often considered a tool for creative experimentation for children, the artist uses it to represent his “inner child work.” In this exhibition and others, Ekwelum “moves according to feeling,” sculpting each cloth in response to gallery architecture, exhibition themes, and history of location. Perry and Ekwelum engage textiles and found objects as conduits for histories imbued with personal memories, delving into the interiority of Black queer life. They meditate on what cannot be immediately “seen” or “known”, and imagine possibilities for healing while creating spaces for living through joy and collective care.

Image courtesy of Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum. 2023.

Visitors are invited to gently move their bodies through Perry’s installation and closely observe Ekwelum’s cloths, inspiring the beauty of wonderment. Please honor their practices while being respectful and careful with their work. This exhibition is titled after scholar Kevin Quashie’s reflection in his essay “Queer. Caribbean. Miami. Boy: A Personal Geography”: “The truth is, all of living is risk, sometimes more so because of one’s age, gender, race, but all of living is deep risk.”

It is organized by independent curators Gervais Marsh and Rikki Byrd with support by the South Side Community Art Center, Art Noir Jar of Love Fund, and the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University.

Cory D. Perry (b. 1989, Arkansas) is a multimedia quilting and performance folk artist based in Chicago, IL. My art practice and research investigate the possibilities of what queering Black spiritual space can and could be through textiles, images, beads, and various materials. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas School of Art and attended the Post-baccalaureate program in Sculpture and Museum Research at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Perry received their Master’s degree of Fine Arts and graduate certificate of Black Studies from Northwestern University. Perry is a recipient of the 2019 Windgate-Lamar Fellowship and the 2022 Sexualities Project at Northwestern University Award. In 2019 they were an honorary international artist for Chale Wote Performance Art Festival in Accra, Ghana. Most recently, they were a participant artist for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where they created and performed “Queer Black Sunshine” a meditative protest on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
“My art practice and research investigates ways to expand the possibilities of what Black queer space can and could be through textiles, images, beads, and various materials. For me, “to be Black and queer” is the potentiality of another world through self-identifying and self-actualizing gestures. I’m interested in what the materials can tell us through their palimpsest beauty. By layering various translucent textiles and allowing collaged fabrics to shift in composition from different perspectives, windows are created for the seen and unseen. Black queer space is always in a state of flux, and I want to explore that in my work.”

Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator and curator who works across the academy, arts and fashion industries. She has participated in curatorial projects with the Block Museum of Art, SkyART, and most recently curated the fashion presentations in the traveling exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and Saint Louis Art Museum. Her research focuses on Black aesthetic practices including fashion, performance, and contemporary art, and she has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis, where she created new courses on fashion and race. Her writing appears across exhibition catalogs, academic journals, books, and arts and fashion media such as Hyperallergic, Cultured and Teen Vogue.
She is the co-founder and editor of the Fashion and Race Syllabus, founder of Black Fashion Archive, and an editorial advisory board member for Bloomsbury Fashion Publishing. Rikki is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University.

Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar whose work is deeply invested in Black life, concepts of relationality and care. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Their writing, artistic and curatorial work is rooted in Transnational Black feminisms, with recent curatorial projects including To be pained is to have lived through feeling with Canada NYC and Rupture: Interventions of Possibility with Art at a Time Like This. Their writing has been published in several books and exhibition catalogs including Denzil Hurley (monograph), Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Forgotten Lands Vol. 5, KMAC Museum Triennial (2022), as well as online art publications such as Hyperallergic, C Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, ARTS.BLACK, Musée Magazine, and PREE: Caribbean Writing, among others. They have received fellowships and curatorial support from the Jamaica Art Society, Terra Foundation for American Art, VisArts Center, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Northwestern University, and Independent Curators International.
They have taught undergraduate/graduate courses focused on Black Feminist theory, praxis and performance, and Black queer studies. They are an editor with Ruckus Journal and research interests include Black Studies, Art history, Caribbean Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that continues to shape their understanding of self and relationship to the world.

Before I Let Go: Film Screening & Discussion
2023-07-15 13:00 - 15:00
Join us for a special film screening hosted by filmmaker Cameron Granger, with guest filmmakers cai thomas and Bobby T. Luck.

We invite you to join us for a special screening of Cameron Granger’s film Before I Let Go, created during his residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2022, alongside Change The Name (2021) by cai thomas, and Was It Your Trigger Finger (2023) by Bobby T. Luck. A short Q&A session will follow the screening.
Before I Let Go is the latest film from artist Cameron Granger. Set in the fictional town of Bad City, 5 years after a giant monster attack leveled the city’s east side neighborhood, the film follows a documentary filmmaker’s experience covering the community’s recovery efforts.

The Before I Let Go Summer Tour is a series of free screenings at several community and artist-run spaces across the midwest and east coast. Each screening is free and features two filmmakers from or making work in each specific venue.
Each stop on the tour is self funded. If you would like to support the programmers of the tour you can do so here. Your donation will go towards travel, guest filmmaker stipends, and each hosting venue.

You can read more about the tour, and see what other venues they’ll be stopping at here.

Cameron A. Granger is Sandra’s son & came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous archival & homemaking practices of his grandmother, Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt his communal and familial histories, into new, not just potential, but inevitable futures. He’s an alumni of Euclid public schools, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem AIR program.

cai thomas is a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer based in Chicago telling stories at the intersection of location, self determination, and identity about Black youth and elders She grew up in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood and is deeply interested in stories rooted in place. Her film Change The Name which follows young activists organizing in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on BET. Her previous film Queenie about a Black lesbian elder in Brooklyn’s Bed Stuy neighborhood premiered at NewFest in 2020 winning the NY Short Grand Jury award and is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. cai recently completed Beneath The Surface which documents data scientist and journalist Trina Reynolds Tyler investigation into gender based violence at the hands of the Chicago Police Department and is digitally distributed by PBS’ Independent Lens. cai is a proud NeXt Doc Fellow.

An intimate portrayal of Black youth organizing on the west side of Chicago, ‘Change The Name ‘follows a group of 5th graders from Village Leadership Academy as they embark on a campaign to rename Stephen A. Douglas Park after freedom fighters Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass. Over the course of the three-year grassroots campaign the students tackle bureaucratic Chicago Park District systems, underestimations of their capacity to make real change as well as a pandemic and global uprising.

Bobby T. Luck is a visual artist and education activist based in Chicago, IL who works in film, multimedia collage, sculpture, and installation. After relocating to Columbus from Philadelphia he jump-started the Free Skool for Humans initiative, co-founded MINT Collective, and taught collage and film theory workshops across the country. Luck now works as Program Director for Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center.

Where do your values begin and your influences end? Who told you you weren’t safe? Did you believe them? We have been trained since childhood via pop culture government intervention to pull the trigger for a country that had us constantly in its sites. Prison bed, coffin, or barracks?

Our protectors offer us an illusion of choice, while the soft buzzy blue hands of the tv stroke and mold our foreheads, assuring that our personal triggers were imported. ‘Was it Your Trigger Finger’ blurs the line between fact and fiction, exploring how military propaganda in media has shaped our views of where our country’s traumas lie, not within the home, but with a foreign adversary.

PACE Artist Catalyst: A Closing Celebration
2023-08-12 13:00 - 15:00
Join us to celebrate PACE Artist Catalysts Cecil McDonald Jr. & Andrea Yarbrough.

Join us with artists Cecil McDonald Jr. & Andrea Yarbrough to celebrate their commissioned artworks as part of their PACE Artist Catalyst Award!
A conversation will take place with the artists, and Essence McDowell, a communications strategist, organizer and coauthor of two books, including the recently released, “Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping a History of Trailblazing Black Women in Chicago”. We’ll also have sounds from DJ Celeste Alexander and catering from Taylor’s Tacos !

Andrea Yarbrough’s 2023 installation Collective Steps is an homage to the scores of Black women committed to sustaining the South Side Community Arts Center. Centered on mapping the stories of understudied Black women, Yarbrough’s approach has been focused on Fern Gayden, who was a leader, writer, and organizer. A founding member of the South Side Writers Group in the 1930s, Fern Gayden’s long and diverse career included leadership roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the South Side Community Art Center.

Cecil McDonald’s 2022 installation Metropolis: A City In Black, is a public viewing installation in the historic bay window of the venerable South Side Community Art Center. Over six months, McDonald traversed the streets, parks, beaches, porches, and neighborhoods in and around Bronzeville. Photographing friends, strangers, and passersby from a mobile studio, McDonald created both formal and candid portraits; the portraits, collaged with moving abstract imagery, create an odyssey of humanity infused with all the unique sensibility and tempo of black life in the metropolis.

Andrea and Cecil’s commission were supported by the Public Art & Civic Engagement Capacity Building Initiative, granted to the South Side Community Art Center from Mural Arts Institute, a program of Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour with DJ Finding Ijeoma
2023-08-18 18:00 - 21:00
Join us for a night of dancing this Friday for our 3rd Bronzeville Art District (BAD) Trolley Tour of the summer, with guest DJ Finding Ijeoma! She’ll be dj’ing alongside our current video works on view in the Burroughs gallery, as part of ‘Black Light Cinema Project’!

Alexandria Eregbu is a creative anthropologist. Her practice spans across art, music, and poetry in order to consider objects, stories, and experiences that address justice and the humanities. As the founder of FINDING IJEOMA, Alexandria uses her lifestyle and storytelling platform to realize meaningful forums that celebrate African-American experiences, including— DJ sets, exhibitions, product design, programs, and intimate gatherings. Alexandria’s work has appeared on screen in Candyman (2021, directed by Nia DaCosta), performing for musicians and festivals such as Sudan Archives and Englewood Music Fest, on radio and television. Alexandria’s writing has been published by the University of Chicago Press, Sixty Inches from Center, Terremoto Magazine, Candor Arts, and Green Lantern Press. Alexandria is a 3Arts Teaching Artist recipient and current faculty at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.

Every 3rd Friday until September you can take a ride on the Double-Decker Bus for art and entertainment in the Bronzeville neighborhood! 2023 Summer Tour Schedule and participating Bronzeville locations include:
Blanc Gallery, Bronzeville Artist Lofts, Gallery Guichard, Faie Afrikan Art and South Side Community Art Center

Telling Your Story: Grant Writing Workshop for Artists
2023-08-26 12:00 - 14:00
Join us in a workshop with Lauren Woods for a partnership with ILA’s flagship program, G-to-G (Getting to Our Goals) Coaching Series.

ILA’s flagship program, G-to-G (Getting to Our Goals), is an ongoing effort to advance our mission of educating, celebrating, and elevating Black artists across Chicago. These monthly activations serve as an opportunity for working creatives to connect with subject matter experts in their area of interest. G-to-G coaching sessions are presented in a lecture/interactive format, with ample opportunity for group discussions among teaching artists and attendees.

Telling Your Story: Grant Writing for Artists will be led by Lauren Woods of Chicago Community Trust. This workshop, specially catered for Black artists, and creative entrepreneurs will focus on effective strategies for grant writing methods. Participants will learn how to meaningfully communicate their arts practices, missions, values and artist statement as it relates to securing funding, and additional purposes relevant to artists and creative entrepreneurs.

ILA, founded by Rachel Gadson, believes in the power of Black artists and exists to inspire and promote their creative works. Through educational experiences, empowering events, and intentional programming, we are creating a generational web of growth and expansion within the arts.

Lauren M. Woods is a program manager for the Building Collective Power strategy at The Chicago Community Trust. In this role, she is responsible for leading grant making initiatives that support local journalism, media, and civic storytelling in the Chicago region. Prior to joining the Trust, Lauren managed the district-wide Service-Learning Initiative at Chicago Public Schools and directed the Midwest educational partnership strategy for an international nonprofit, WE.

As an artist and fourth generation Chicagoan, Lauren believes in the transformational power of narrative and storytelling to activate community and spark systems change.

Telling Your Story: Grant Writing Workshop for Artists Part ll
2023-09-09 12:00 - 14:00
Join our second workshop with Lauren Woods for a partnership with ILA’s flagship program, G-to-G (Getting to Our Goals) Coaching Series!

After the wealth of information exchanged in our first session of “Telling Your Story” workshop, we invite you to join ILA, SSCAC, and Lauren Woods for an afternoon writing session, specially catered to Black artists, and creative entrepreneurs. Set time aside with us to work on your next grant application, artist statement, or mission/vision statement. We’re excited that Lauren shared an abundance of knowledge that can now be applied tactically in real-time. Join us for an afternoon of building and growing together.

ILA’s flagship program, G-to-G (Getting to Our Goals), is an ongoing effort to advance our mission of educating, celebrating, and elevating Black artists across Chicago. These monthly activations serve as an opportunity for working creatives to connect with subject matter experts in their area of interest. G-to-G coaching sessions are presented in a lecture/interactive format, with ample opportunity for group discussions among teaching artists and attendees.

ILA, founded by Rachel Gadson, believes in the power of Black artists and exists to inspire and promote their creative works. Through educational experiences, empowering events, and intentional programming, we are creating a generational web of growth and expansion within the arts.

Lauren M. Woods is a program manager for the Building Collective Power strategy at The Chicago Community Trust. In this role, she is responsible for leading grant making initiatives that support local journalism, media, and civic storytelling in the Chicago region. Prior to joining the Trust, Lauren managed the district-wide Service-Learning Initiative at Chicago Public Schools and directed the Midwest educational partnership strategy for an international nonprofit, WE.

As an artist and fourth generation Chicagoan, Lauren believes in the transformational power of narrative and storytelling to activate community and spark systems change.

As a young Black girl from the south side of Chicago, my city and environment have always been cultural influences on my creative spirit. I thrive off of creative expression and connection, and as an artist, one of my biggest challenges in advancement became access and resources.
As I’ve learned to progress, I now seek to be the connection with ILA as a trusted resource. Creating community through connection to help Black artists get the opportunities they deserve is the backbone of our impact.

-Rachel Gadson, ILA Creative Studio Founder

3831 Activation | Friendship Meditation: A Rehearsal
2023-09-29 18:00 - 19:30
Join us for an evening of “rehearsal” with Anna Martine Whitehead and Damon Locks !

Presented with Chicago Architecture Biennale, during Chicago Exhibition Weekend.

Locks and Whitehead will activate the basis of their friendship — rehearsal. They think there is something to learn about relationships, energy, and faith from dreaming new worlds together.

They’ll share with you what they think, and they’ll invite Nnaemeka Ekwelum into the conversation, and then they’ll see what you make of all that.

Image courtesy of DJ Schaller.

Anna Martine Whitehead is an artist, performer, educator, and freedom dreamer from Virginia. She teaches with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she makes work about black queer portals.

Image courtesy of Ricardo Adame

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He is a recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and the 2016 MAKER Grant. In 2019, he became a 3Arts Awardee. He teaches in the Sound Department on improvisation at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble and is a founding member of the band The Eternals.

Featured Image (Above), courtesy of William Frederking.

Through a Lens of Beauty & Wonderment: Notes on Collaborative Friendship | Opening Reception
2023-10-07 12:00 - 15:30
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 floor Burroughs Gallery) is the culmination of Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum’s doctoral research on friendship, artistic collaboration, and decolonial Black political thought. Through a series of intentional and creative partnerships between him and eight other US-based artists/scholars, this project experiments with the rigor of collaborative friendship as a creative methodology in contemporary art making and knowledge production. It also affectively explores alternative ways to represent Black Studies scholarship within and beyond academic spaces of learning.

Collaborative artist interventions in the exhibition include: Lishan AZ, Shenequa “SHENEQUA” Brooks, Stephen Hamilton, Noor Jones-Bey, Mercy Emelike, Carmen Neely, and Cordelia Rizzo.

*Co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Department of Black Studies.

Nnaemeka (Emeka) C. Ekwelum is a transnational and multidisciplinary researcher, educator, and artist/curator from Boston, MA. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in Black Studies (African American Studies) at Northwestern University. Emeka’s scholarly and creative interests converge at the intersection of history, critical theory, creative expression, curatorial practice, and political education. His dissertation project–“On Artistic Collaboration & Decolonial Black Political Thought”–examines the critical role(s) of beauty, wonderment, and friendship in contemporary and craft art collaborations between and amongst Black creatives. Prior to returning to graduate school, Emeka held a professional career as an educator in his home state of Massachusetts, formally and informally working with youth and adult learners across a range of cultural contexts in the Boston/Greater Boston Area. His teaching philosophy, interpersonal values, and political commitments are a reflection of his academic training in Comparative Ethnic Studies (Columbia University, B.A.) and Arts in Education (Harvard University, Ed.M.), drawing on theories of Black feminist and political thought to interrogate ideas of power, privilege, and personhood through art and artmaking.

Dr. Burroughs Legacy Day
2023-11-04 13:00 - 15:00
Join us for a family friendly afternoon of celebrating and learning more about the legacy and art practice of Dr. Burroughs!

We’re excited to share this day viewing specially selected works by Dr. Burroughs from the SSCAC Archives and Collections Department, as well as rotational screenings of interviews and talks featuring Dr. Burroughs, and locally published print works and projects exploring her practice and legacy. Dr. Burroughs artwork coloring sheets will be available for a fun family activity!

Margaret Taylor-Burroughs (November 1, 1915 – November 21, 2010), also known as Margaret Taylor Goss, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs or Margaret T G Burroughs; was an African-American artist and writer and a co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History. She also helped to establish the South Side Community Art Center, where at the age of 23 Burroughs served as the youngest member of its board of directors. Dr. Burroughs was also prolific in her dedication to teaching creative writing and art at Stateville Prison for over 25 years paving the way and creating an inspirational example for what is now the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

She was a prolific writer, with her efforts directed toward the exploration of the Black experience and to children, especially to their appreciation of their cultural identity and to their introduction and growing awareness of art. As an artist, Burroughs worked in many mediums, including sculpture and painting, but she is most renowned as a printmaker.

Working primarily with linoleum block prints, Burroughs crafted a lasting body of art that includes striking images of African American leaders, history, and ordinary life.

Haus: An Introspective of House Music, Architecture + Queer Culture at 3831
2023-11-18 13:00 - 15:00
Join us for a special roundtable talk on the iconographic and cultural reference to House as a ‘revolutionary Black Space’!

South Side Community Art Center is thrilled to host an informative and reflective roundtable panel, discussing both the iconographic and cultural reference to House as a ‘revolutionary Black Space’.

This dynamic panel will be moderated by SSCAC Exhibitions Manager and Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara, featuring Boogie McClarin, Antonio Robles Levine (BLESSTONIO), Duane Powell, Frederick Dunson, Meida Teresa McNeal, and Skyla S. Hearn.

The panel will explore central themes such as “The House” as a revolutionary Black space; Architecture (Bauhaus), House Music, Queer Culture, and South Side Community Art Center’s history in relation to such themes.
Expanding upon Floating Museum’s Chicago Architectural Biennial’s theme for this year “This is a Rehearsal” framework, this program intends to highlight how SSCAC, or any other home/house or space in Chicago’s South Side, has served as a place of rehearsal or refinement of craft during the height of house music.

Trail-blazing performer, educator, philosopher, builder and guide, Boogie McClarin explores movement and music for liberation, transformation and celebration. Prolific, award-winning, and ubiquitous, Boogie McClarin has been an integral force in Chicago’s arts and culture for two decades, performing for a broad array of artists including: Chicago Dance Crash, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Chip E, Darryl Pandy, Hieroglyphic Being, Ni’ja Whitson, Orisha Dance Chicago, Kirby Reed, Ron Trent, Lisa Johnson Willingham, Trio Mokili (featuring Makaya McCraven and Junious Paul) and Oveous. She has appearances in videos by Kafele Bandele, Mr Greenweedz, and most notably in the Terry Hunter remix of the House music anthem, “In The Beginning There Was Jack” by Chuck Roberts ft Monique Bingham. A pioneer in dance education, Boogie McClarin began to cultivate her unique curricula and pedagogy while teaching “Hip-Hop/Funk/House” in 1999 at The Old Town School of Folk Music (eventually becoming “Chicago House” and “Urban Social Dance” in 2007).

Boogie McClarin continues to lovingly share her approach to dance in Chicago, nationally and internationally. She has produced shows, workshops, lectures and writing for classrooms, universities, theaters and public spaces.
Recent projects include work with Free Street Theater (“50 in 50” and “Still/Here”), Forward Momentum, and the Chicago House Music Festival.

Antonio Robles Levine (@Blesstonio) is a Chicago-based DJ, classically trained musician, event/music producer, and dancer. Antonio is fascinated with club culture and has spent years studying and curating events in Chicago and Santa Barbara. His multicultural background lends him an attuned, eclectic ear ready to sonically compel audiences and create electric and magnetic dance floor experiences. As a club dancer committed to fostering an inclusive, dance-focused environment, Antonio believes in the legacies of clubs and dance floors as brave spaces for “queerness, blackness, transgression, community, inclusivity, freedom, liberation, inspiration, and radical joy” (Honey Dijon), where dancers and DJs are equal, active participants in protecting these sacred spaces of movement. Antonio was the co-founder and resident DJ of Fortune, a party series that centered dance as liberation and holds a safe space for the TQLGB+, Femme, Non Binary, BIPOC, and disabled communities.

BLESSTONIO was nominated in the Chicago Reader’s 2022 “Best of List” for Best House Music DJ. Fortune won 2nd place in The Chicago Reader’s Best Dance Party category.

BLESSTONIO currently holds DJ residencies at Blind Barber, The Charleston, and AAJA Radio in London. He was an honorary guest DJ at the Frankie Knuckles Tribute two years in a row (Sept 2022 & Sept 2023) in partnership with The Chicago House Music Festival, DCASE, Rebuild Foundation, and The Frankie Knuckles Foundation. He recently sat on The Museum of Contemporary Art panel in discussion with house music pioneer and The Warehouse founder, Robert Williams. He has opened up for The Blessed Madonna, Ron Trent, and Ron Carrol.

Duane Powell‘s love for music started an early age growing up in the 1970’s being exposed to Chicago’s rich soul music scene.

As a historian, Powell created the interactive lecture series Rear View Mirror Sessions sharing his vast knowledge about the history of music legends at UChicago Arts, Stanford University, Detroit Institute Of Arts and Chicago Public Library. With his knowledge of the music industry, Powell became a fixture on the global music scene and began speaking about his knowledge of the business on panels and workshops including The International Soul Summit (ATL), Urban Organic (Detroit), I Got Soul Conference (Dallas), Chicago Artist Resource and the Chicago Cultural Center.

As a DJ, Duane has spun at and held residencies at many of the most popular venues and galleries around the city including the House Of Blues, Virgin Hotel, Museum Of Contemporary Art and Navy Pier. In addition, he has opened for many heavyweights in music including opening for Frankie Beverly & Maze at The Taste Of Chicago and has shared the bill with many legendary DJ’s and Grammy-winning producers in the dance music world including Joe Claussell, DJ Spinna, Steve “Silk” Hurley, Maurice Joshua, Josh Milan, Timmy Regisford, Ron Trent and more. In 2019, he was named Chicago’s best House Music DJ by the Chicago. In 2022, he was chosen to represent Chicago as a featured DJ for the hugely global Boiler Room TV.

In 2022, with his Sunday Service he opened the stage at The Chicago Gospel Fest and in 2023, he was invited to bring Sunday Service to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in D.C.

Frederick Dunson is the Executive Director of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation.
Serving others and giving back to his community has always been important to Frederick Dunson. Born on Chicago’s West Side, he attended Our Lady of Perpetual Help Grammar School, St. Ignatius College Prep and Columbia College where he majored in Arts & Entertainment Management & Public Relations. He was employed at the Office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County for nearly 34 years. He received numerous commendations and acknowledgements for his public service and retired in December of 2014.

Since then he has continued his service work as Founder, President & Executive Director of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation – NFP, formed to honor famed Grammy Award winner Frankie Knuckles, Frederick’s best friend and business partner to continue Frankie’s legacy through charitable endeavors. Dunson and Knuckles who were partners of their production company D/E Entertainment held some of the most highly anticipated and attended events for 13 years at some of the most renown and venerable venues here in the city of Chicago.
Founded in December 2014, the Frankie Knuckles Foundation – NFP is a not for profit educational, and cultural organization dedicated to the advancement of Frankie Knuckles’ mission as the global ambassador of house music through media, conservation and public events continuing and supporting the causes he advocated. The FKF is a recognized 501c3 and focused on these initiatives: music in schools, LGBTQ youth homelessness, AIDS research / prevention & diabetes research / education.

Frederick currently serves on the Board of the Empowerment Center for Better Living where he attends and is a member as well.

Skyla S. Hearn, a proud Chicagoan by way of the Great Migration (Mississippi), is an information professional who is most concerned with supporting community efforts to further substantiate first-person-centered perspectives to strengthen their own documentation and to contribute to incomplete overarching records.
Addressing efforts to establish personal, community and cultural heritage archives, Skyla founded ActivelyArchiving and works closely with creators on local, national, and international projects; and is a co-founder of The Blackivists.

Institutional work includes inaugural Manager of Archives for Cook County Government under the Board President and Commissioners; Director of Archives and Special Collections for DuSable Museum of African American History; Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Skyla is currently the Lead Processing Archivist for the Johnson Publishing Company Archive at the Getty Research Institute.

Towards legacy building, she proudly co-edited the zine publication Our Girl Tuesday: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G.Burroughs alongside Tempestt Hazel and Sarah Ross with an introduction by Mariame Kaba, published by Sojourners for Justice Press.

Meida Teresa McNeal is Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies (Northwestern) and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History (Ohio State). Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in New Performance Forms, Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago, 3Arts Award in Dance, Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, and the Links’ Hall Co-Missions Fellowship.

An Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance, and critical ethnography, Meida teaches at University of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. Meida also works with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events’ Executive Administration team as the Senior Manager of Arts & Community Impact Investments building and implementing artist recovery programs and creative placemaking grantmaking initiatives. Prior to this role, Meida worked with the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives.

Iteration(s), with Jared Brown and Briana Lynn
2023-12-02 13:00 - 15:00
Briana Lynn & Jared Brown will intuitively combine sound, improvisation, and omni-directional text to create a composition unique to SSCAC.

Meditating on this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial’s theme : “This is a Rehearsal,” Briana Lynn and Jared Brown will re-iterate their experimental collaborative composition to the South Side Community Art Center (originally performed last year). They will collaboratively write, perform, and produce poetic sound-based activations utilizing individual and collective narratives, altered voice, color, and speculative explorations that blur the lines between realism and fact, as a means to alter physical space and the viewer’s consciousness.

Collaboratively they are asking questions such as: How do built environments and architectures influence our attunement to sound and perception of time? How might the state of our bodies shift or feel in altered environments? What does it mean to engage with Black poetics as a multi-dimensional object, taking up space?

The composition intuitively combines samples, improvisation, omni-directional text written by Briana Lynn and an electronic produced score by Jared Brown.

Photo credit: Daniel Delgado

A BLACK ARTIST RECEPTION AT 3831
2023-12-09 12:00 - 16:00
A day celebrating Black artists and your hard work throughout the year! We’ll also be joined by artist Cory Perry for a special performance.

The South Side Community Art Center has hosted innovative, ground-breaking, and forward exhibitions and programs throughout 2023, which would not have been possible without the array of Black ingenuity and talent from the artists we’ve been incredibly grateful to work with!

Join us for our first annual Black Artist Reception, celebrating the amazing artists we’ve supported and collaborated with over the year! We’re thrilled to kick off this program with a performance by current exhibiting artist Cory Perry, an Artist Talk moderated by current exhibitions curators Gervais Marsh and Rikki Byrd, with artists Cory Perry and Nnaemeka Ekwelum, followed by a reception with light bites and bubbly! 🥂

Current exhibiting artist Cory Perry will perform: how my Mother cried when her flowers bloomed.

This performance is an ode to resilience, an embrace of memories, and a testament to the enduring spirit that emerges from the confluence of grief and celebration. Black Artist Reception attendees are invited to watch the performance, which will be screened from our Burroughs Gallery, SSCAC’s Instagram Live.

One meaning of a procession is “continuous forward movement.” Another definition is “a ceremonial or funeral procession.”
I’m captivated by how these two, forward movement and death, are intertwined and what can be gleaned. “how my Mother cried when her flowers bloomed” is a participatory art performance/procession that symbolizes living with grief and celebrating life while in the mundane world. I don’t believe that grief is ‘baggage’ we carry along, rather, it looks like an intangible companion that moves with us through life. Grief, as a queer physician, prompts introspection by asking “how can we navigate these physical and mental spaces without the people closest to us?”

The performance will begin at the artist’s dwelling place in Chicago, serving as a symbolic starting point. From there, it unfolds as a procession to The Southside Community Art Center gallery space, inviting the audience to journey alongside the artist through the intricacies of sorrow and celebration. This performance piece delves into the intricate layers of queer grief, highlighting the mundane spaces it appears, inviting the audience to explore the diverse facets of grief within the LGBTQ+ community and the methods of transcending its barriers.
Grief is not something to overcome but a companion to embrace throughout our life. It helps us navigate the delicate balance between mourning the loss and cherishing the legacy of departed loved ones as motivation to keep moving forward.

Following the performance, curators Rikki Byrd and Gervais Marsh will moderate an artist talk with current exhibiting artists Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum and Cory Perry regarding their exhibitions Through A Lens of Beauty and Wonderment: Notes on Collaborative Friendship & All of Living is Risk.

3831 HOLIDAY POP-UP!
2023-12-16 12:00 - 16:00
Join us for our 2nd annual 3831 Holiday Pop-Up, with some of the city’s most talented Black creatives!

Come through to support some of Chicago’s most gifted and talented Black creatives as we move into the Holiday season.

3831 Holiday Pop-Up is a mini pop-up market hosted in our historic Burroughs gallery, that features vendors working across a variety of businesses from jewelry to candles, books, and more!

*This event is free and for all-ages, so we encourage you to bring your family!

Image courtesy of Reformed School.

Check out our incredible list of vendors this year:

-Reformed School
-Red Elephant Candle Co.
-Lingua Nigra
-Da Book Joint
-Keith Connor

Bronzeville in Reel Time with South Side Home Movie Project
2024-02-03 13:00 - 15:00
Join us for an afternoon of South Side home movies, featuring newly preserved films of Bronzeville from filmmaker Ramon Williams!

In partnership with South Side Home Movie Project, with support from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, SSCAC is thrilled to host a special screening showcasing select cinema reels of Ramon Williams. Ramon Williams, Black IBEW electrician and film hobbyist, was an early adopter of amateur filmmaking and invested in documenting the Bronzeville community in which he lived — filming major Bronzeville social and civic events between the 1940s and 1960s.

We’re honored to show a selection of these films during Black History Month, to highlight Ramon Williams’s commitment to documenting Black life on the South Side, and the lasting legacy of Black cinema’s power to visualize Black life in real time.

We’ll be joined by SSHMP Assistant Director, Saroop Singh (fka Justin Williams), Bronzeville Historical Society President Sherry Williams, and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at U Chicago, Avery LaFlamme for a live dialogue about Ramon’s cinema work and legacy in the Bronzeville community.

Donated to South Side Home Movie Project in 2020, the Ramon Williams Collection encompasses 302 film reels, their largest donation yet, representing never-before-seen visual records of Bronzeville authored by one of its few citizens with a movie camera! What was Black social life like during that time? How did Black folks present and fashion themselves? What were significant events that took place in the Bronzeville community? We hope you’ll join us to find out!

*Complimentary refreshments will be provided for attendees.

Honoring Hunt: Legacies in Chicago Black Metalworkers
2024-02-24 13:00 - 15:00
Learn about the artistic histories of Black metalworker artists in Chicago!

SSCAC’s Archives and Collections Manager LaMar R. Gayles Jr. will introduce visitors to different metalworkers who have worked throughout Chicago’s artistic landscape. Amongst these makers there will be special attention given to the work of famed, now ancestral artist Richard Howard Hunt (1935-2023) who made major contributions to the field of Black metalwork.

Presented as a lecture, this program will expose viewers to these histories and makers, while the second portion will invite viewers to touch and interact with a selection of metal objects from the Center’s collection. Some of the artists discussed in addition to Hunt will include Elizabeth Catlett, Ausbra Ford, Geraldine McCullough, and Ramon Price to name a few. This program will work to illustrate how Black artists in Chicago have contributed to the realm of metalworking. As time goes on we continually are losing the elders who have contributed to fields like metalworking and this program intends to create a space to honor these contributions and legacies!

Flash, Focus: A Camera Demo Workshop with Latitude Chicago.
2024-03-10 12:00 - 13:00
Join us for a camera demo workshop to learn the basics of photography!

Latitude’s Executive Director Colleen Keihm and current Artist in Resident Anwulika Angibo will host a Camera Demo workshop here at the Southside Community Art Center in a special continuing partnership with Latitude Chicago.

Guests are invited to bring an analog or digital camera to the workshop to learn more about manual settings, lighting, and digital output methods like how to upload and change image size.

Anwulika Anigbo (b. Nigeria 1987) is a Chicago-based artist tracing the historical and somatic roots of everyday life as it is practiced within blackness through imagery and processes. Anwulika’s work chronicles and investigates self-determination, presence, knowledge production, and memory. Her work has been exhibited at The Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Chicago Artist Coalition (Chicago), EXPO Chicago with FOR FREEDOMS (Chicago) and the NXTHVN (New Haven). She was recently a 22-23 Fellow with the Economic Security Project, the 22-23 Artist in Residence at Chicago Athletic Association, a 21-22 Artist in Residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition, and a 2022 3Arts Ignite Fund Awardee.

Her work is included in the collection at 21c Museum, Ryan Lee Gallery, and various private collections.

Colleen Keihm is the Executive Director at Latitude, a Chicago digital lab with high-end printing and scanning equipment that operates an artist in residence program and organizes arts programming. She received her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BS in Photography at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago at Flatland, Roman Susan, Filter Photo, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. She has been an artist in residence at Hatch Projects at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Institut fur alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and currently at Writing Space.

In addition to her role at Latitude, she is an educator in the Photography Department at University of Illinois at Chicago.

BLACK WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS AS WORLDBUILDERS
2024-03-30 13:00 - 15:00
Join us for a conversation with several Black women creative entrepreneurs traversing fashion, vintage, and design here in Chicago.

SSCAC is proud to host a panel of Black women entrepreneurs whose business models have been crafted to be intentionally centered on fashion, style, vintage, design and jewelry – creating worlds and community within their respective businesses and practices! Featured panelists will include stylist and fashion archivist Mallory Talty, Jeneba Koroma of Limba Gal, Shari Currie of Recycled Modern, and Gilda Norris of Gilda’s Designer Boutique!

Bridging vintage and contemporary focused projects, businesses, and ventures, the panel will focus on their collective and individual experiences as entrepreneurs, the uniqueness of their practices in Chicago, their creative influences, and the ambitious decisions they’ve made along the way.

BENDING LIGHT ARTIST TALK: SOUTH SIDE NIGHT x EXPO CHICAGO
2024-04-09 17:00 - 19:00
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 color on Black identity, potential, and the intricate interplay between societal perceptions and individual existence. Artists will include Eddie “Edo” Santana, Pearlie Taylor, Courtney Collins, Robert Lewis Clark, and Bryant Lamont.

As the official start of EXPO ART WEEK, South Side Night features exhibitions, tours, talks, and performances. Visitors are encouraged to explore the many galleries, museums, and exhibition spaces in this dynamic community for arts and culture. Inaugurated in 2012, EXPO CHICAGO draws upon the city’s rich history as a vibrant international cultural destination, while highlighting the region’s contemporary arts community. In 2023, EXPO CHICAGO was acquired by Frieze, the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art.
