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Help us restore, expand and transform restore our historic building in Bronzeville, Chicago. Support our ambitious $18 million campaign.

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. And now, a new journey begins.

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A Renovation and Expansion Project for the South Side Community Art Center

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. 

Our Plan for a Bold New Campus

Through an $18 million capital campaign, the Center will make the following critical investments in its capacity to preserve and promote Black art and to educate and engage the community:

CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT

GOAL: $6,000,000

Complete necessary historic restoration of the Center’s current facility including preservation of the Burroughs Gallery and Ballroom, windows, roof, basement learning studios, upgraded electrical, interior repairs, and facade work.

GOAL: $9,000,000

Expand the Center by constructing new outdoor spaces and an addition to the building. Build state-of-the-art gallery, collection storage, archives, meeting spaces, and guest amenities to support daily operations and increase the Center’s capacity. Expand community gathering and outdoor programming spaces with an expanded performance lawn and a new rooftop deck.

OPERATING AND RESERVE FUNDS

GOAL: $2,000,000

Create a fund to support three years of annual operations, including:

  1. The development of exhibitions and other public programs with the goal of sharing the collection, and the Center, with a wider audience;
  2. The conservation, preservation, and exhibition of the Center’s permanent collection and archive; and,
  3. The launch of an artist-in-residence program.

GOAL: $1,000,000

Create a Board-designated reserve fund that allows the Center to:

  1. Build organizational capacity to advance its mission;
  2. Invest in new program development;
  3. Repair and maintain its expanded campus; and;
  4. Increase financial sustainability.

*** The operating and reserve funds will be directed by the Center’s Board of Directors and managed in accordance with the organization’s financial policies, which prioritize capital preservation.

Our Investment Supports the Bronzeville Community

Investment in the South Side Community Art Center’s Bronzeville campus will help unlock transformative benefits for our community by:

CREATE QUALITY JOBS

Sustaining and growing our workforce with well-paying construction and permanent positions that include benefits, directly contributing to the economic stability of our local community

ENGAGE MINORITY- AND WOMEN-OWNED BUSINESSES

Maximizing Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE) participation. Working with contractors to ensure our diverse local community is well represented, our commitment is to exceed the required 26% MBE, 6% WBE, and 10% apprentice participation

DRIVE COMMUNITY-LED DEVELOPMENT

Actively involving more than 50 community stakeholders in the planning process, ensuring that the new center reflects and responds to the needs and aspirations of the Bronzeville community

FOSTER INCLUSIVITY AND ACCESSIBILITY

In order to grow and deepen our engagement with the community, we will expand and transform exhibition and program spaces, increasing usable space from 8,038 to 18,211 square feet. We will increase visitor capacity by 398%, allowing us to welcome more of our community, as well as visitors from Chicago and beyond. We will also provide the community with an ADA-compliant resource, accommodating various abilities and ensuring everyone can fully participate.

As of Apri 2026, we have secured more than $12.5 million in commitments from generous public and private donors. We now seek to raise the remaining $5.5 million by December 2026. The new South Side Community Art Center will stand as a vibrant, thriving hub for culture and community in Bronzeville—shaping the cultural landscape for decades to come.

We invite you to join us in this transformative journey. Together, we can create a legacy that will inspire generations. Your support is the key to making this vision possible.

SSCAC CHAMPIONS THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Ways to give

With generous support from friends like you, the South Side Community Art Center will bring its ambitious and vital vision to life.

Naming Opportunities

Please reach out to speak with us about naming opportunities. Potential options include but are not limited to the following:

Exhibition Gallery
Ballroom/Multi-Purpose Room
Public Plaza
Art Storage & Archive
Classroom (multiple)
Exhibition & Program Fund

Renovation Funds

The SSCAC Community Renovation Fund with a goal to raise $200,000 is a vital part of our overall $18 million dollar Black Art Rising Campaign. This fund will ensure wide ranging support for this transformative project. Every contribution, whether $50, $200, or $5,000, will make a meaningful impact and help this vision become a reality for future generations to come. Learn more and donate to help us reach this goal!

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Special thanks

Chicago DPD
ComEd
Driehaus Foundation
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IL-DCEO
Illinois Arts Council Logo
Mellon Foundation
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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.