Members of the Dandelion Black Women Artists collective will join SSCAC Exhibitions Manager & Curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara in conversation. RSVP HERE Our upcoming exhibition 9 Artists/ 9 Months/ 9 Perspectives features work from the Dandelion Black Women Artists collective. These nine Black women artists engaged in collaborative efforts to create artworks that […]
We're proud to partner with Pigment International, Pigment International for a Salon Talk that explores Black Chicago Art History and legacies, featuring our favorite TikTok historian '6figga_dilla' ! Known on social media as '6figga_dilla', Shermann “Dilla” Thomas is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood and his Tik Tok videos on Chicago history […]
SSCAC is thrilled to partner with ILA Creative Studio for their G-to-G Coaching Sessions, in a 3-part series of artist development resource workshops that intend to help close the gap of limited, sustainable business resources, specific to the needs of Black artists. You were just paid 7K to create an illustration for a major brand...they […]
SSCAC and Black Harvest Film Festival, in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center invite you to a complimentary afternoon screening of REWIND & PLAY! Image courtesy of REWIND & PLAY. 2022, Alain Gomis, USA, 65 mins In 1969, famed jazz pianist Thelonious Monk performed at the 3,000-seat Salle Pleyel concert hall […]
Join us to get a head start on holiday shopping at our first 3831 Holiday Pop-Up, with some of the city's most talented Black creatives! Image courtesy: Limba Gal Jewelry. Come through to support some of Chicago’s most gifted and talented Black creatives as we move into the Holiday season! 3831 Holiday […]
The second development resource workshop in our series artist development partnership with ILA Creative Studio! SSCAC is thrilled to partner with ILA Creative Studio for their G-to-G Coaching Sessions in a 3-part series of artist development resource workshops that intend to help close the gap of limited, sustainable business resources, specific to the […]
Honoring the future MLK dreamed of, while also bringing in our own visions for the futures we want to create! Join us for an afternoon of vision boarding, as we honor the radical dreaming of Martin Luther King Jr. MLk believed in the dreams of revolution, and creating a society based on […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
'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 […]
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Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.
Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.
William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.
Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.
In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.
