The South Side Community Art Center has hosted innovative, ground-breaking, and forward exhibitions and programs throughout 2023, which would not have been possible without the array of Black ingenuity and talent from the artists we’ve been incredibly grateful to work with!

Join us for our first annual Black Artist Reception, celebrating the amazing artists we’ve supported and collaborated with over the year!

We’re thrilled to kick off this program with a performance by current exhibiting artist Cory Perry, an Artist Talk moderated by current exhibitions curators Gervais Marsh and Rikki Byrd, with artists Cory Perry and Nnaemeka Ekwelum, followed by a reception with light bites and bubbles! 🥂

*Full agenda and RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-black-artist-reception-at-3831-tickets-771642642917?aff=oddtdtcreator

This performance is an ode to resilience, an embrace of memories, and a testament to the enduring spirit that emerges from the confluence of grief and celebration. Black Artist Reception attendees are invited to watch the performance, which will be screened from our Burroughs Gallery, SSCAC’s Instagram Live.

One meaning of a procession is “continuous forward movement.” Another definition is “a ceremonial or funeral procession.”

I’m captivated by how these two, forward movement and death, are intertwined and what can be gleaned. “how my Mother cried when her flowers bloomed” is a participatory art performance/procession that symbolizes living with grief and celebrating life while in the mundane world. I don’t believe that grief is ‘baggage’ we carry along, rather, it looks like an intangible companion that moves with us through life. Grief, as a queer physician, prompts introspection by asking “how can we navigate these physical and mental spaces without the people closest to us?”

The performance will begin at the artist’s dwelling place in Chicago, serving as a symbolic starting point. From there, it unfolds as a procession to The Southside Community Art Center gallery space, inviting the audience to journey alongside the artist through the intricacies of sorrow and celebration. This performance piece delves into the intricate layers of queer grief, highlighting the mundane spaces it appears, inviting the audience to explore the diverse facets of grief within the LGBTQ+ community and the methods of transcending its barriers.

Grief is not something to overcome but a companion to embrace throughout our life. It helps us navigate the delicate balance between mourning the loss and cherishing the legacy of departed loved ones as motivation to keep moving forward.

Nnaemeka (Emeka) C. Ekwelum is a transnational and multidisciplinary researcher, educator, and artist/curator from Boston, MA. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in Black Studies (African American Studies) at Northwestern University. Emeka’s scholarly and creative interests converge at the intersection of history, critical theory, creative expression, curatorial practice, and political education. His dissertation project–“On Artistic Collaboration & Decolonial Black Political Thought”–examines the critical role(s) of beauty, wonderment, and friendship in contemporary and craft art collaborations between and amongst Black creatives. Prior to returning to graduate school, Emeka held a professional career as an educator in his home state of Massachusetts, formally and informally working with youth and adult learners across a range of cultural contexts in the Boston/Greater Boston Area. His teaching philosophy, interpersonal values, and political commitments are a reflection of his academic training in Comparative Ethnic Studies (Columbia University, B.A.) and Arts in Education (Harvard University, Ed.M.), drawing on theories of Black feminist and political thought to interrogate ideas of power, privilege, and personhood through art and artmaking.

Cory D. Perry (b. 1989, Arkansas) is a multimedia quilting and performance folk artist based in Chicago, IL. My art practice and research investigate the possibilities of what queering Black spiritual space can and could be through textiles, images, beads, and various materials. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas School of Art and attended the Post-baccalaureate program in Sculpture and Museum Research at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Perry received their Master’s degree of Fine Arts and graduate certificate of Black Studies from Northwestern University. Perry is a recipient of the 2019 Windgate-Lamar Fellowship and the 2022 Sexualities Project at Northwestern University Award. In 2019 they were an honorary international artist for Chale Wote Performance Art Festival in Accra, Ghana. Most recently, they were a participant artist for the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where they created and performed “Queer Black Sunshine” a meditative protest on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Rikki Byrd is a writer, educator and curator who works across the academy, arts and fashion industries. She has participated in curatorial projects with the Block Museum of Art, SkyART, and most recently curated the fashion presentations in the traveling exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and Saint Louis Art Museum. Her research focuses on Black aesthetic practices including fashion, performance, and contemporary art, and she has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis, where she created new courses on fashion and race. Her writing appears across exhibition catalogs, academic journals, books, and arts and fashion media such as Hyperallergic, Cultured and Teen Vogue.

She is the co-founder and editor of the Fashion and Race Syllabus, founder of Black Fashion Archive, and an editorial advisory board member for Bloomsbury Fashion Publishing. Rikki is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Presidential Fellowship at Northwestern University.

Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar whose work is deeply invested in Black life, concepts of relationality and care. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Their writing, artistic and curatorial work is rooted in Transnational Black feminisms, with recent curatorial projects including To be pained is to have lived through feeling with Canada NYC and Rupture: Interventions of Possibility with Art at a Time Like This. Their writing has been published in several books and exhibition catalogs including Denzil Hurley (monograph), Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Forgotten Lands Vol. 5, KMAC Museum Triennial (2022), as well as online art publications such as Hyperallergic, C Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, ARTS.BLACK, Musée Magazine, and PREE: Caribbean Writing, among others.

They have received fellowships and curatorial support from the Jamaica Art Society, Terra Foundation for American Art, VisArts Center, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Northwestern University, and Independent Curators International. They have taught undergraduate/graduate courses focused on Black Feminist theory, praxis and performance, and Black queer studies. They are an editor with Ruckus Journal and research interests include Black Studies, Art history, Caribbean Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that continues to shape their understanding of self and relationship to the world.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: A BLACK ARTIST RECEPTION AT 3831, bronzeville, Chicago, Cory Perry, Gervais Marsh, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Rikki Byrd, South Side Community Art Center