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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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! […]
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.
