Black Art Rising

A Campaign for the South Side Community Art Center

The South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) has stood as a monument to Black artistic excellence since 1940. Born from the vision and labor of artists, educators, and neighbors—among them the legendary Margaret Burroughs—SSCAC is one of the oldest independent Black art centers in the United States. For over eight decades, it has offered vital space for creativity, education, and community building in the heart of Bronzeville.

Black Art Rising is both a celebration and a call to action. This presentation honors SSCAC’s historic role in shaping the trajectory of Black art and culture, while inviting our community into the next chapter of transformation. From the era of the Works Progress Administration to today’s dynamic contemporary arts landscape, SSCAC has nurtured countless visionaries, hosted landmark exhibitions, and remained a vital gathering place for Black artists, scholars, and cultural workers.

Now, as we prepare for a new era, SSCAC is undergoing a bold expansion. The Black Art Rising Capital Campaign will restore and preserve our historic building while adding a new state-of-the-art wing. This transformation will expand our total square footage by 10,173 square feet, increase our occupancy capacity by 398%, and create flexible galleries, classrooms, and gathering spaces that serve artists and audiences of all ages.

More than a building project, this is a reinvestment in Black imagination, memory, and collective power.

We invite you to learn more, share in this legacy, and help shape the future of SSCAC.

SSCAC Community Renovation Fund

The SSCAC Community Renovation Fund seeks to raise $100,000 from our community by June 30, 2025 to support this exciting project. Contributions to the Community Fund can be made on this website or by contacting Monique Brinkman-Hill, Executive Director of the SSCAC, at monique@sscartcenter.org.

If you would like to consider a gift of over $5,000 to support the project, please reach out to our development advisors: John Pfeiffer john@opendooradvisorsinc.com or Linsey Foster linseyfoster@gmail.com.

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.

HOURS

Black Art Rising

A Campaign for the South Side Community Art Center

SSCAC Community Renovation Fund

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE