The South Side Community Art Center — a Bronzeville landmark that has been an artistic home for generations of Black creatives such as Margaret Burroughs, Gordon Parks and Kerry James Marshall — received a $2 million grant to help restore its historic building and construct a major addition.
The 9,700-square-foot addition will double the size of the center, located in a stately but aged 1892 brick-and-limestone former residence at 3831 S. Michigan Ave.
Elevators, new gallery space, archive rooms, artist studios, meeting spaces, collection storage and a rooftop deck will be included in the addition.
“This space created some of the most masterful works — some of the most amazing artists who came together,” South Side Community Art Center executive director Monique Brinkman-Hill said of the center. “A Gordon Parks, who had a darkroom in the basement, to the likes of Eldzier Cortor … and other artists, whose names are important today.”
The award from Chicago’s Driehaus Foundation goes toward the project’s $15 million construction budget. Brinkman-Hill said some work, including the instillation of underground geothermal systems that will heat and cool the buildings’ interior, is already underway.
The building opened in 1940 through funding from the federal Works Progress Administration, and it was formally dedicated the next year by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s the nation’s oldest Black American art center.
Burroughs, who would later create Chicago’s DuSable Museum, and Cortor were among its founders, as were other celebrated Black artists, such as Charles White and Archibald Motley.
The construction project includes restoring and rehabilitating the interior and exterior of the building, a city landmark also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
And the center’s remarkable wood-paneled modernist first floor gallery space, designed by Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner of the New Bauhaus — a design school that moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology after being run out of Germany by the Nazis — will be restored and improved, the project’s architect, Ann Lui, a partner with Chicago architects Future Firm, said.
The center’s addition will wrap around the rear of the historic building, creating a new single-story entrance and courtyard on the north side of the center, and an exit and green space on its south edge.
A three-story portion of the addition will sit right behind the existing building but will be connected to it. Other features include new circulation space, restrooms and a small kitchen.
“We did this so the new building doesn’t overpower the historic building,” Lui said. “But it’ll function as one continuous building.”
Wisely, the new entrance wing won’t mimic the Georgian Revival exterior of the existing building, but it’s weathering steel cladding appear to carry over some color from the old manse.
Lui said the steel skin will have perforations, the patterns of which were taken from decades of nail holes made by artists who hung their work in the existing building’s wood-walled gallery.
“The Driehaus Foundation also hopes that its support will serve to leverage support from other foundations and individuals,” said Anita Alexander, senior program officer for the foundation’s Built Environment Portfolio. “The building is just the beginning. SSCAC needs critical operating and reserve funds which are often overlooked by supporters but are essential to long-term sustainability.”
“I am extremely happy to see the SSCAC grow into a space fitting for this next generation of creatives,” Chicago visual artist Raymond Anthony Thomas said. “It is our home.”
The art center will reopen when the project is expected to be completed in 2027.
