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3831 JUNETEENTH!

June 17, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm

SSCAC is thrilled to host artists Eric Von Haynes and Angela Davis Fegan for an on site letterpress print activation, artist Andrea Yarbrough for a viewing of her PACE Mural Arts outdoor installation commission, and John Pendelton of Planks and Pistils!

 

Participants at our Juneteenth program will be able to print letterpress broadsides with Eric Von Haynes and Angela Davis Fegan, using a showcard table top press and moveable wood type. Join us to pull a print of your very own to take home in celebration of the intersecting struggles for Black and Queer liberation in honor of Pride month and Juneteenth.

 

A slogan will be written and specially designed by artist Angela Davis Fegan in advance and will include a blank space for attendees to add what liberation looks like for them! We will have an array of brightly colored papers to choose from and will hang prints to dry along the front fence of our building to activate the space and entice potential participants.

 

Artist Andrea Yarbrough’s forthcoming installation, Collective Steps is an homage to the scores of Black women committed to sustaining the South Side Community Arts Center. Centered on mapping the stories of understudied Black women, Yarbrough’s approach has been focused on Fern Gayden, who was a leader, writer, and organizer. A founding member of the South Side Writers Group in the 1930s, Fern Gayden’s long and diverse career included leadership roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the South Side Community Art Center.

 

 

Andrea Yarbrough, SSCAC’s 2nd Artist Catalyst Awardee, is a multi-disciplinary maker, curator, and educator based on the South Side of Chicago nurturing sites of care through a blend of urban agriculture, civic engagement, and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative in ℅: Black women (in care of Black women), bringing together writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, to collectively exhume the (in)visibility of care for Black women. Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.

 

Andrea’s commission is supported by the Public Art & Civic Engagement Capacity Building Initiative, granted to the South Side Community Art Center from Mural Arts Institute, a program of Mural Arts Philadelphia.

 

 

Angela Davis Fegan (she/they) is a native of Chicago’s South Side. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery, SPACES (OH) and Revolve (AVL).

 

She has held residencies at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, F4F, Connecticut College, the Hambidge Center (GA), Revolve (NC), and Project Row House (TX). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her lavender menace poster project has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.

 

 

Eric Von Haynes (he/him) is a multifaceted creative who merges traditional and modern printing methods and aesthetics in his work. While design and printmaking are Eric’s passions, he is energized by collaborations and the ideas and challenges that come from working within the community.

 

In 2007, he established Flatlands Press, a platform that produces art objects and printed ephemera such as artist books and periodicals, providing artists worldwide with opportunities to exchange ideas and spark conversations. Eric is currently serving as the President of the Chicago Printers Guild, an Artist in Residence at the Chicago Art Department, and a Co-founder and core organizer with the Love Fridge Network, a mutual aid group that promotes food sovereignty and community care.

 

John Pendleton, founder of Planks and Pistils. Planks & Pistils exists to design high quality floral art that evokes a social and emotional connection to Black freedom, creativity, self-care and growth.

 

Originally from Grove Hill, Alabama, John’s love for woodworking and flowers began with his parents. “Planks” honoring his woodworker father who he shadowed in the wood shop and “Pistils” (female reproductive organ of the flower) honoring his mother whose orange rose bush he watered.

 

An overachiever and lover of excellence all throughout childhood, he didn’t consider artistic expression as a vital part of his life until after he got married and began arranging flowers for his wife. What started as a hobby has become a honed skill which has led him to be the the founder and creative director of Planks & Pistils design studio. John’s floral design work has been in Munaluchi Bridal Magazine and he was included in “125 Florists To Be Celebrated in 2022” by Florists’ Review Magazine.

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Date:
June 17, 2023
Time:
12:00 pm - 4:00 pm
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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.