Many prominent artists in Chicago work in an under-recognized tradition of creative genius that “makes do,” recycling materials, repurposing skills, and building on personal and community resources.​​ These practices have a long history on the South Side. From 1940 when the SSCAC was founded by artists like Margaret Burroughs, who scraped together funds for the building’s purchase, to internationally known artists like Theater Gates, Chicago’s Black artists have always made use of what was close to hand: recycled materials, craft skills, and human connections. The Center’s very building, with its New Bauhaus interior design of 1939–40, displays an ethos of resourceful, aesthetically informed repurposing. Famed sculptor Marion Perkins typically sourced his stone for carving from demolition sites in Bronzeville. Using skills brought from the South in the Great Migration, quilters pieced together scraps of fabric into beautiful patterns. An early twentieth-century scrapbook in the Center’s archives displays the common practice of artistically repurposing imagery from advertisements and newspaper clippings. In the mid-twentieth century, “assemblage” artwork was often associated with West Coast Black artists like Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, David Hammons, and John Outterbridge. Less well known is the fact that Outterbridge spent seven years in Chicago, from 1956 to 1963, working closely (among others) with José Williams, one of the artists in the exhibition. 

One of the research discoveries made in the course of planning this exhibition is Mrs. C. Rosenberg Foster. When the Great Depression caused funding cuts for school art classes, Foster devised a way of making art out of trash that she called “trashcraft.” She taught it to her high school students at DuSable High, some of whom went on to be artists and to influence others. She was celebrated nationally and is featured in a 1939 short film called “Unusual Occupations,” which we present here for the run of the exhibition.