Earl’s Garden Mae’s Kitchen, located in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, is a flourishing community garden born out of a grassroots effort to transform a neglected plot into a vibrant space for […]
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Urban Growers Collective (UGC) operates a network of community gardens and farms across Chicago’s South Side, focusing on transforming disinvested spaces and vacant lots into vibrant, productive urban agriculture sites.
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SkyART is a nonprofit community arts organization with locations on the South and West sides of Chicago. SkyART’s initiatives aim to empower youth through arts education, fostering leadership skills, nurturing
Founded in 2017, Grow Greater Englewood (GGE) is rooted in the Englewood neighborhood. A 501(c)(3) social enterprise, GGE focuses on creating sustainable local food economies, green businesses, and land sovereignty
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Bronzeville Neighborhood Farm, located in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood, began in 2016 as a community-driven initiative, spearheaded by the late Johnnie Owens, to transform a vacant lot into a thriving
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The First Nations Garden (Wiinso, Wiikonge Otishinikaaso), an urban land trust under Neighborspace, was established in the Spring of 2019 through community organizing led by the Chi-Nations Youth Council with
First Nations Garden Read More »
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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.
