South Side Community Art Center
3831 S Michigan Ave (Bronzeville)
The South Side Community Art Center, opened in 1940, was one of about 100 community arts centers opened by the Works Project Administration, but the only one remaining today. Awarded Chicago Landmark status in 1994, this is the country’s oldest African American art center. The center and its programs were components of the federal government’s strategy to restore the nation’s economy by employing artists and encouraging community participation in the development of culture.
This L. Gustav Halberg Georgian Revival building was finished in 1893, originally as grain merchant George A. Seaverns Junior’s home. But by 1940, the brownstone, most recently the family home of Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, was vacant. The community set about raising money for its purchase. The Art Center Association purchased the property, complete with a two-story coach house, for about $8,000.
Eleanor Roosevelt took part in the nationally-broadcast (on CBS Radio) May 7, 1941 dedication of the South Side Community Art Center, and subsequently wrote about it in her newspaper column.
The community paid for the lease and purchase of the building, for utilities, and for art supplies. The federal government helped to stimulate the establishment of the center via support from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. They provided administrative funds for staff and faculty and funds for the remodeling of the building. The interior was remodeled in the New Bauhaus-style by Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner and the center opened unofficially for its first classes on December 15, 1940. The opening was accompanied by an inaugural exhibition of paintings by local Black artists including Charles Davis, Charles White, Bernard Goss, William Carter, Eldzier Cortor, Charles Sebree, Archibald Motley, Jr., amongst others. The interracial faculty of art instructors included Davis, White, Goss, Carter, Morris Topchevsky, Si Gordon, Max Kahn, and Todros Geller. Lessons were free and included oil painting, drawing, composition, watercolor, sculpture, lithography, poster design, fashion illustration, interior decoration, silk screen, weaving, and hooked rug-making. By March 1941, 13,500 people had attended classes, exhibitions, and events at the center.
In its early years, the Center was almost continuously active, and the participants constituted 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. After the government withdrew financial support in 1944, the Bronzeville community developed many solutions to keep the doors open. The community campaign included the inauguration of the wildly popular and lucrative Artists’ and Models’ Balls.
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. Brooks, of course, went on to marry Blakeley. According to Brooks’s daughter, Nora Blakely Brooks, writing in South Side Drive’s March 2022 issue, “Neither knew just how significant that meeting would be! Legend has it that when [Henry Blakely] walked in the door Mama looked up and said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry’. Margaret [Burroughs] yelled out ‘Hey boy! This girl wants to meet you!’ Who knows? Without my mother’s brave announcement and Margaret’s exclamation I might not even be here.”
Brooks also co-founded the SSCAC’s creative writing forum, and taught classes. According to the City of Chicago’s 1983 report submitted to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, “The granddaughter of a field slave turned Union Civil War soldier, Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but has spent most of her life in Chicago. Brooks first gained widespread recognition for her literary efforts as the winner of the Midwest Writers' Conference Poetry Prizes for 1943, '44 and '45. When her first collection of verse, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945, the Center was the site of an autograph reception. Annie Allen, a compendium of verse, won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950. Since that time she has published numerous collections of her work, worked as a critic and book reviewer, and produced such educational books as the Young Poet's Primer and the Primer for Blacks. She was named Poet laureate of Illinois by Governor James Thompson in 1986.” Brooks, in her autobiography Report from Part One, credits the Chicago Poetry Group as an early stage in her development.
On weekends, Nat “King” Cole played jazz. Photographer Gordon Parks, then employed by the Farm Securities Administration, kept a studio at the Center.
