Archives of the South Side Community Art Center

Organizational History

The South Side Community Art Center opened in 1940 and is one of the only surviving community art centers founded through New Deal’s Federal Art Project between 1937 and 1942. Four arts projects were established under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Work Projects Administration) of the New Deal. The Federal Art Project offered funding to artists and arts administrators for a variety of projects, most notably the creation of public murals and the institution of 110 community art centers throughout the United States. These art centers would hold classes and exhibit original art work to communities that were perceived as “culturally deprived.” Only handful of FAP art centers were opened in African American communities, in New York, Florida, and Chicago.

Efforts to open a community art center on Chicago’s South Side began in 1938. Peter Pollack, a Federal Art Project official, contacted Metz Lochard, an editor at the Chicago Defender, about having the Art Project sponsor exhibitions of African American artists, who often had trouble securing space to display their work. Pollack, an art dealer, owned a gallery on Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s Loop and had previously displayed the work of African American artists. Lochard arranged a meeting between Pollack and Pauline Kigh Reed, a social worker with extensive connections in the community, and, according to Reed’s recollection, she suggested founding an art center. Reed helped arrange an initial meeting with area artists at the South Side Settlement House at 32nd Street and Wabash Avenue. Businessman Golden Darby, chairman of the board of the Settlement House, became chair of the Sponsoring Committee of the proposed South Side Community Art Center.

Darby chaired the first official meeting of the Sponsoring Committee on October 25, 1938 at the offices of the Chicago Urban League. In addition to Darby, Pollack, and other organizers of the Sponsoring Committee, the meeting was attended by members of the Arts Crafts Guild, a group of Chicago-based African American artists organized in 1932 which included Margaret Taylor (Burroughs), Eldzier Cortor, Bernard Goss, Charles White, William Carter, Joseph Kersey, and Archibald Motley, Jr. George G. Thorpe, the State Director of the Federal Art Project of Illinois, informed the group that the FAP’s community art center program would provide an administrative staff, faculty, and renovation funds for a center if the community could raise funds for the purchase of a building and the costs of utilities and supplies.

The following year was spent organizing and raising funds for the center, with efforts ranging from membership drives and street corner collections (including Margaret Burroughs’s famous “Mile of Dimes” on South Parkway, now Martin Luther King Drive) to benefit parties and lectures by such luminaries as Augusta Savage. The most successful of these events, the Artists’ and Models’ Ball held at the Savoy Ballroom on October 23, 1939, became an annual tradition.

In late May 1940, the group purchased a vacant brownstone on South Michigan Avenue for about $8,000. Built in 1892 by George A. Seaverns, Jr., the building had been designed by Gustav Hallberg. (Though the building is sometimes referred to as the Comiskey Mansion, the house belonging to the former White Sox owner was actually further south on Michigan Avenue.) The Federal Art Project hired Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner from the New Bauhaus School of Design to renovate the deteriorating building.

The South Side Community Art Center opened its doors on December 15, 1940 with an exhibition of paintings that had been displayed at the American Negro Exposition held in Chicago earlier that year, including works by Henry Avery, William Carter, Charles White, Archibald Motely, Jr., Joseph Kersey, Margaret Taylor Goss (Burroughs), Bernard Goss, and William McBride. On May 7, 1941, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt officially dedicated the Center in an extravagant ceremony broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Professor and cultural historian Alain Locke was on hand to introduce the First Lady, and Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters also attended the party. The exhibition, entitled We Too Look at America, included pieces from the inaugural exhibition as well as works of white painters Gertrude Abercrombie, Margaret Brundage, Emil Armen, Si Gordon, Julia Thecla, and Sophie G. Wessel.

In its early years the Center was a hive of activity, as well as a who’s who of the Chicago Renaissance. In addition to exhibitions that changed as often as biweekly, art classes were taught by George Neal, Charles Sebree, Katherine Bell, and Joseph Kersey. Inez Cunningham Stark, the editor of Poetry magazine, taught a poetry class whose students included Gwendolyn Brooks, Henry Blakeley, Margaret Danner, and Robert Davis. A regular writers’ forum was attended by Brooks, Richard Wright, and Willard Motley. On weekends, Nat “King” Cole played jazz. Photographer Gordon Parks, then employed by the Farm Securities Administration, kept a studio at the Center.

Federal spending on WPA projects was cut dramatically upon the country’s entry into World War II, and in 1943 all federal funding for the arts projects ended. But fundraising at the Center enabled it to remain active. In 1944, artist Rex Gorleigh became administrative director, and under his leadership the Center exhibited the works of Hughie Lee-Smith, Augusta Savage, Ellis Wilson, and John Biggers.

The escalation of the Red Scare curbed activity at the Center, as the executive board restricted artists from meeting at the Center in order to avoid suspicion. By the early 1960s, with the Center barely functioning, board members led by Wilhelmina Blanks, Fern Gayden, and Grace Thompson Leaming, along with young artists Sylvester Britton and Ramon Price, collaborated to keep the Center open, taking out a mortgage and instituting a new fundraising tradition: an annual art auction. The Center remains open today, offering classes and exhibiting new and local artists.