SkyART

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 a sense of belonging, and emphasizing self-reliance and creative expression. The organization was founded in 2001 as the South Chicago Art Center, hosting 18 students for art classes twice a week in a small rented studio. Soon after, the organization began teaching classes in nearby schools, and created its Artist’s Garden in 2003—transforming four vacant lots into a vibrant community hub where young people learn to grow healthy food and explore art-making in their neighborhood.

In 2015, the South Chicago Art Center became SkyART and moved into a new, spacious studio facility. SkyART’s headquarters in South Chicago includes three multi-purpose art spaces, a state-of-the-art computer lab equipped for a variety of digital media applications, a sculpture studio, a kitchen studio and a gallery space. Its second location, SkyART West, opened in East Garfield Park in 2024, growing out of the organization’s existing programming in West Side schools. SkyART offers classes and art therapy for children and teens, including young people involved in the juvenile justice system. At the heart of its programs is Family Table, a food, garden, and healthy meal program that supports creativity through health and well-being.

During the ReSOURCE exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center, SkyART will host a dinner at its South Side location, created by a pair of chefs/cooks who will collaborate and combine their own cooking traditions through a community pot of soup. Participants will be invited to share nourishment, connection, and meaningful dialogue.

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.

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SkyART

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MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE