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Multimillion-dollar momentum builds for a 9-site Bronzeville cultural zone

A network of Bronzeville community leaders say they have raised $75 million to help build or redevelop sites that would be anchored by a theater, a food hub and a recreational Bronzeville Trail.

A network of eight community leaders says it has raised $75 million to help build or redevelop nine Bronzeville cultural sites and solidify the neighborhood as a national destination for the arts. The sites include the National Museum of Gospel Music, Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House and a recreational Bronzeville Trail.

The Bronzeville Legacy Collective, the group behind the effort, is trying to raise more amid cuts to federal arts funding for projects that appear to champion diversity, equity and inclusion. Ultimately, the collective has a long-term goal to raise $250 million, which includes $100 million for the Bronzeville Trail to be constructed from 40th and Federal streets to 41st Street and Lake Park Avenue by 2034.

Other sites on the cultural map include a food hub called Bronzeville Cookin,’ the Muddy Waters Mojo Museum, the forthcoming Deeply Rooted Center for Black Dance and Creative Communities, a new home for Definition Theatre, The Forum arts and culture complex, and the South Side Community Art Center.

 

 

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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.