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Ralph Jenkins (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 1974. Gelatin silver print. Photograph by Harold Murray. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.

The Sound of the South Side: Jazz, Form, and Freedom

This exhibition considers jazz as a living cultural language and lineage—one shaped by migration, experimentation, tension, and collective expression.

Across the South Side of Chicago, musicians transformed neighborhood clubs, theaters, and community spaces into sites of abstraction, pleasure, and political expression. What emerges is not only a history, but an ongoing condition—one that continues to shape how the city is heard and understood.

Drawn from the archives and collections of the South Side Community Art Center, this gallery documents the cultural environments that shaped Chicago’s jazz landscape—tracing the spaces, performances, and everyday conditions through which jazz was lived, made, and carried forward on the South Side.

This presentation also marks the South Side Community Art Center’s first digital exhibition. As we prepare for the next chapter of our historic building through ongoing restoration and expansion, this virtual format allows us to remain in active dialogue with you, our community—extending the reach of our archives while building toward what’s to come.

SOUNDING THE CITY

Chicago is not simply a site where jazz developed—it is a city shaped by it. The movement of sound through clubs, homes, streets, and institutions produced new ways of listening, gathering, and creating.

Jazz emerges here as both structure and improvisation: a form built in real time, shaped by those who play and those who witness.

William Walker (American artist, 1927–2011), Untitled, 20th century.
Ink and colored pencil on paper, 18 × 24 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
William Paglin (American artist, 1907–2009), Untitled, 20th century.
Acrylic on paper, 11 3/4 × 9 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
S. Thomas (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 1970s.
Marker on green paper, 17 × 12 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Annie Lee, Untitled, 1988.
Oil on canvas, 9 7/8 × 8 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Donnie Ray Carter (active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 20th century.
Drawing or woodblock print on wood panel, 20 3/4 × 36 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Donnie Ray Carter (active ca. 20th century), Hot Jazz, 1975.
Acrylic on canvas, 43 3/4 × 30 1/3 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Ralph Jenkins (American artist, active ca. 20th century), 1974.
Gelatin silver print. Photograph by Harold Murray. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.

Sound at The Center

The South Side Community Art Center has long functioned as a site of musical gathering and experimentation. Musicians moved through its spaces to rehearse, perform, and build community. The piano reflects this history of presence, practice, and sound.

The South Side Community Art Center Piano
This piano, housed at the South Side Community Art Center, is part of the material history of jazz in Chicago. Before it became an object of preservation, it functioned as an instrument—played within the everyday life of the South Side. In its early years, it was touched by musicians moving through the city, including a young Nat King Cole. What remains is not only that moment, but the accumulation of others: rehearsal, improvisation, and gathering.
1970s gallery view, Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs Gallery. Photograph. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.

MIGRATION, MOVEMENT & NIGHTLIFE

Jazz arrives in Chicago through movement—through the Great Migration and the reconfiguration of Black life in the urban North. Musicians carried sound across geographies, adapting it to new conditions while preserving its improvisational core.

On the South Side, these transformations produced not only new musical forms, but new social worlds.

Nightlife provided the conditions for this sound to circulate and evolve. Clubs, ballrooms, and informal gathering spaces became sites where sound, style, and community life converged.

Margaret T. Burroughs, 2 Ladies, 1994.
Watercolor, 27 1/2 × 21 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Donald Peterson (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Spiritual – Wade in the Water, 20th century.
Tempera on gessoed hardboard, 20 × 15 1/8 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
William Walker (American artist, 1927–2011), Untitled, 20th century.
Acrylic on hardboard, 35 3/4 × 48 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Norman L. Hunter (American artist, 1932–1992), Phoenix, 20th century.
Color photograph, 23 × 17 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Norman L. Hunter (American artist, 1932–1992), I Gotta Be Me, 20th century.
Color photograph, 18 × 24 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Allen Stringfellow (1923–2004), Untitled, 20th century.
House paint with particulate on cardboard, 19 5/8 × 25 5/8 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Allen Stringfellow (1923–2004), Untitled, 1962.
Collage. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Berry Horton, Untitled, 20th century.
Watercolor. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Ralph Jenkins (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 20th century.
Photograph mounted on board, 20 × 16 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.

IMPROVISATION & STRUGGLE

Source: WGN-TV, “Chicago’s Bronzeville: A Beacon of Black Creativity and Culture” (2026).
Source: WGN-TV, “Chicago’s Bronzeville: A Beacon of Black Creativity and Culture” (2026).

Improvisation operates not only as a musical technique but as an ancestral method of survival and creativity. Jazz, and its improvisational structure, emerges as both a response to condition and a method of making—not only sound, but meaning.

This way of making doesn’t come out of nowhere. It draws from African and African American musical traditions—call and response, rhythmic layering, and improvisation—practices carried across the Middle Passage and reshaped in the United States. These forms were never just aesthetic; they were ways of organizing sound, memory, and collective life under constraint. 

In Chicago, this practice developed within systems of segregation, economic constraint, and ongoing struggle. Musicians worked within and against these structures, producing sound that carried both tension and possibility.

Between 1910 and 1970, as many as six million African Americans left the segregated South in what is now known as the Great Migration. In search of expanded opportunity and self-determination, many arrived in Chicago, reshaping the cultural and social landscape of the city.

Bronzeville emerged as a central hub of Black cultural life—home to artists, musicians, and institutions that defined a new era of creativity. While segregation imposed clear limits, it also concentrated resources, relationships, and networks within the community, creating conditions in which Black cultural production could flourish.

Barbara Jones-Hogu (American artist, 1938–2017), Heritage, 20th century.Silkscreen (artist’s proof), 33 × 24 1/2 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Barbara Jones-Hogu (American artist, 1938–2017), Heritage, 20th century.Silkscreen (artist’s proof), 33 × 24 1/2 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Gerald Williams (American artist, b. 1941), Wake Up, 20th century.Serigraph.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Gerald Williams (American artist, b. 1941), Wake Up, 20th century.Serigraph.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Eileen Nelson (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 1981. Acrylic on canvas board, 24 × 17 7/8 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Eileen Nelson (American artist, active ca. 20th century), Untitled, 1981. Acrylic on canvas board, 24 × 17 7/8 in. Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Bert L. Long (b. 1940), Untitled, 20th century.Acrylic and oil on canvas, 16 × 20 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Bert L. Long (b. 1940), Untitled, 20th century.Acrylic and oil on canvas, 16 × 20 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Jerome T. Neal (American artist, active ca. 20th century), A Dance Affair Until, 20th century.Oil on canvas board, 16 3/4 × 20 3/4 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.
Jerome T. Neal (American artist, active ca. 20th century), A Dance Affair Until, 20th century.Oil on canvas board, 16 3/4 × 20 3/4 in.Courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center Archives.

Watch: The Cry of Jazz (1959)

Directed by Edward O. Bland, The Cry of Jazz (1959) situates jazz as both musical form and social expression, drawing a direct relationship between the structure of jazz and Black life in the United States. Filmed in Chicago, it brings performance, theory, and everyday life into conversation.

Directed by Edward O. Bland, The Cry of Jazz (1959) draws a direct relationship between the structure of jazz and Black life in the United States, positioning jazz as both musical form and social expression. Set in Chicago, the film moves between scenes of everyday life on the South Side and staged conversations among Black and white musicians and intellectuals gathered in a jazz club. Interwoven with performances by artists including Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra, the work situates jazz within the social, political, and spatial conditions that produced it.
Watch the full film

AACM, CONTINUITY & LEGACY

Wadsworth Jarrell, New Orleans–style group photo in painter Wadsworth Jarrell’s backyard, c. 1968. Archival pigment print; 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Courtesy of George Lewis.

Jazz persists not only as sound, but as method and memory. The South Side Community Art Center exists within an ongoing ecosystem of Black artistic production.

Founded on the South Side in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) formalized a commitment to experimental sound, self-determination, and artistic autonomy.

The archive remains active—shaping how this history is preserved, activated, and carried forward.

Special thanks

Support the South Side Community Art Center and help sustain a legacy
of Black artistic production, preservation, and community engagement.

Curated by jada-amina, Public Programs and Engagement Manager, and rachel dukes, Archives fellow

Exhibition Design by Etiti Ayeni, Associate Director, Operations
 
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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

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.