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3831 Holiday Pop-Up!REWIND & PLAY | SSCAC x Black Harvest Film FestivalG to G Coaching Session: How To Balance Creative Work & Multiple ProjectsBlack Fine Art Month Salon Talk ‘Who’s Got Next’G to G Coaching Session: Tax Preparation for Artists and FreelancersReSource Symposium: Art and Resourcefulness in Black ChicagoDandelion Black Women Artists Talk9 Artists/ 9 Months/ 9 PerspectivesHOMECOMING: ON THE YARDTHE GESTURE ITSELF IS PROTECTION SPELLMetropolis: A City In BlackD-Composed Gives Family Edition at South Side Community Art Center!We invite you to visit us Tuesdays – Saturdays 12 -4PM! We advise our visitors to wear masks.Riddim Rite of Passage: A Sound Activation with Ajmal ‘Mas Man’ MillarEmerging Artist Series featuring Tianna Bracey…of the land: acts of refusal and ratificationMAMA GLORIA: IN HER HONORJUNETEENTH AT THE HOUSETHE FRONTA Queer History Tour of BronzevilleBlack Magic: A Tintype Photo Project with Adam DavisAN EVENING WITH SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY & CAMILLE BACONCEREMONIES: A SELECTION OF SHORT FILMS BY MARLON RIGGSEMERGENCE CURATORS CONVERSATIONTOWARD THE CENTER: In Conversation with Patric McCoy, Juarez Hawkins, and Jonathan GreenEMERGENCE: Intersections at The CenterCOLLAGE WORKSHOP WITH CECIL MCDONALD JR.BLACK FASHION ARCHIVE: Rikki ByrdPROMPT/ DREAM/ BUILD: Andrea Yarbrough & ebere agwunchaCOMING TO THE TABLE: In Conversation with Archivist Skyla HearnCreative Wellness with Marcus AlleyneAn Unapologetic Dream: A MLK CelebrationWE ARE HERE: Honoring Women in the Center’s CollectionTHE UNDERWORLD: George CrumpThe Balm: Art for Black Women’s WellnessArtists and Models: A Tribute to the South Side Community Art Center.Whitfield Lovell: The Spell Suite | An Initiative of Toward Common CauseBeyond The Wall80th Anniversary Masquerade Kick-Off!Just Above My Wall, (To The Right)Artists At The Center: A RoundtableAn Art Collector’s Conversation with Madeline Murphy RabbPast, Present, & Future Moves: Alexandra Antoine, Paul Branton, and Heather Polk in ConversationA Conversation with Artist Kyrin HobsonDarryl Chappell Foundation, Artist Talk Series #4: John Simmons, Earlie Hudnall, Jr., and April FrazierMLK Talk featuring Artist Stephanie GrahamThe Business of ArtA Conversation with Timuel D. Black Jr.Conjuring Black Histories in Jewelry Closing and Artist TalkResonance Artist TalkThe Forum Clean Up & Neighborhood Walking ToursBronzeville Art District Virtual Trolley ToursBronzeville Art District Virtual Trolley ToursDivine Presence!Conjuring Black Histories in JewelryCosmic Yoga: Smai-TawiExisting Between Line & SpaceFaheem Majeed – From the CenterResonanceJesse Howard – The Spirit of CommunityChicago Printers’ Guild Fundraiser for SSCAC
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REWIND & PLAY | SSCAC x Black Harvest Film Festival
November 20, 2022

REWIND & PLAY | SSCAC x Black Harvest Film Festival

Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N State St
Chicago, IL 60601 United States
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3831 Holiday Pop-Up!

December 1, 2022

Join us to get a head start on holiday shopping at our first 3831 Holiday Pop-Up, with some of the city’s most talented Black creatives!   Image courtesy: Limba Gal

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3831 Holiday Pop-Up!

December 1, 2022

Join us to get a head start on holiday shopping at our first 3831 Holiday Pop-Up, with some of the city’s most talented Black creatives!   Image courtesy: Limba Gal

Read More »

“I wish my art to speak not only for my people but for all humanity… my subject matter is social commentary and seeks to improve the condition of life for all people.”   

~ Dr. Margaret Taylor-Burroughs  

SSCAC founder, visual artist, writer, poet, educator, and arts organizer

     

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BRANDON BREAUX

Brandon Breaux

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Brandon Breaux is a Fine Artist/Designer working out of Chicago. His creative experience is comprised of painting, sculpture, web, video, print, and interactive projects. Currently, his work contributes to clients marketing efforts, attracting and maintaining consumer loyalty and interest. Widely known as the artist behind all 3 of Chance the Rapper's iconic album covers, Brandon continues to meet the demands of the evolving market by having a good understanding of what inspires an audience and what moves the culture. His primary goal is to produce creative solutions, with authentic sensibility and an undeniable aesthetic. Artist Statement Brandon Breaux is a multidisciplinary Contemporary American Artist based in Chicago, IL. His work focuses on identity and how perspective alters reality. With the overall goal to make the material divine and the divine material, Breaux uses type, image, form and sampling to construct narratives that articulate his visual language.
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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.