WE ARE HERE: Honoring Women in the Center's Collection, features artworks made by several women artists in the Center’s collection. This exhibition provides us an opportunity to think about the materiality of Black women’s art, while also expanding biographical and visual information on Black women artists. The curatorial project permits the center an opportunity […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Exhibiting Artist Eli Greene | Curated by Amber Nax The South Side Community Art Center in partnership with ICI, presents “Adler & Adler”, a poignant artistic response by Chicago-based artist Eli Greene to a selection of archival images from the Adler & Adler Studio: a Black-owned photography studio in what was once the Black Bottom […]
Join us for the opening of ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago Visit the Virtual Experience
Curated by Bethany Hill and rachel dukes This exhibition highlights a trailblazing group of Black women collectors in Chicago, exploring their practices through care, memory work, and cultural heritage preservation. “Beyond Frames” celebrates an intergenerational group of women who continue this legacy today. Viewers can experience artworks from the personal collections of fourteen different Chicago […]
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.
