Paola Aguirre Serrano Urban Designer- Common Ground

"Art is Business" reposted May19, 2022 

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS AWARDS URBAN DESIGNER PAOLA AGUIRRE SERRANO WITH THE 2022 JORGE AND DARLENE PÉREZ PRIZE IN PUBLIC ART & CIVIC DESIGN.

THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2022

Americans for the Arts today announced that urban designer Paola Aguirre Serrano has been awarded the 2022 Jorge and Darlene Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design. A first-of-its-kind national recognition program established by the Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation, the prize includes a cash stipend of $30,000 plus opportunities for Aguirre Serrano to participate in discussions about her work with national leaders in the arts and other allied fields.

Aguirre Serrano, a native of Chihuahua, Mexico, was trained as an architect in Mexico and an urban designer in the United States. She has practiced professionally for nearly 15 years, working with government agencies, academic institutions, private design offices, and community organizations. The foundation of her work comes from her earliest professional experiences in Chihuahua, working in an urban planning public agency with public officials, urban planners, social workers, and community organizers to design processes through which the end product could better connect with the communities being served.

In 2016, Aguirre Serrano founded Borderless Studio in Chicago and expanded in 2021 to San Antonio. The urban design and research practice is committed to connecting communities with design processes and envisioning creative ways to invest in spatial justice and equitable spaces. Borderless Studio is built on the values of generosity, empathy, and service and aims to create collaborative city design interventions that address the complexity of urban systems and social equity. Through their work, Aguirre Serrano and her team seek to bring visibility to the impact that segregation and racism have had on communities of color. Examples include projects like Creative Grounds, which explores the community and urban role of school grounds and was sparked by the closure of 45 public schools in Chicago over the past nine years, the largest closure of public schools in the city's history.

Aguirre Serrano is an active educator and has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sam Fox School of Design at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design in Columbus, Indiana. She has served as Commissioner of Chicago Landmarks and has sat on the Cultural Advisory Council of the City of Chicago. Aguirre Serrano currently serves on the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the National Museum of the American Latino.

Nolen V. Bivens, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, commented, "Paola Aguirre Serrano's work adds a deep and meaningful dimension to our human experience of the built environment. She believes that confronting the complex issues facing communities today requires an understanding of architecture, urbanism, landscape design, planning, and civic participatory processes, and her impact on communities has been tremendous, particularly in how she prioritizes working with organizations and groups that are working with or located in communities of color. I congratulate Paola for this well-deserved recognition."

"Supporting programs that improve access to the arts in underserved communities and empower creatives to pursue their artistry on a broader scale is at the core of our mission," said Jorge M. Pérez, a globally recognized collector and philanthropist and one of the nation's top real estate developers. "Paola has demonstrated an extraordinary dedication to bolstering art in various communities to inspire positive change across key social issues. We're excited that this award will allow her to continue making an impact."

The generous gift of $250,000 from The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation established the Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design program, which bears the names of internationally recognized philanthropists Jorge M. Pérez and his wife, Darlene Boytell-Pérez. The program is designed to empower all stakeholders in the public art process and to create a platform to develop greater national visibility and appreciation of the unique role that the arts play in shaping our experience of the built environment. It also seeks to celebrate and highlight the work and contributions of artists, public art administrators, and representatives from the civic design field who support, develop, and manage the incorporation of art into the design of places and spaces across the United States.

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Americans for the Arts is a nonprofit organization that advances the arts and arts education advocacy in America. Based in Washington, D.C., it has a record of more than 60 years of service. Americans for the Arts is dedicated to representing and serving local communities and creating opportunities for everyone to participate in and appreciate all forms of the arts. Additional information is available at www.AmericansForTheArts.org.

The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation fulfills the philanthropic vision of Jorge M. Pérez, chairman and CEO of The Related Group, and his family to develop South Florida as an exemplary world-class urban center. The family foundation promotes sustainable, inclusive, and just communities by supporting programs and organizations focused on arts and culture, health and well-being, education, environment, and economic development – with a particular preference for programs and organizations that could serve as models for other urban centers. For more information, please visit www.jmperezfamilyfoundation.org

International Art Adventures in Berlin Kaleidoscope Retrospective

http://internationalartadventures.com/events_2011/chicago_-_berlin_kaleidoscope

On this day, we set out to see various spaces in the City Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and then to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Gegenwart-Berlin Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin.

City Center Berlin, Landscape Park

City Center, Pieces of the Wall

Piotr (from Poland), Peter (from East Berlin), Tali (from Telavi), Marianna (from Hannover)

Hanging out in the lobby after walking around the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin,   http://www.smb.museum/, reflecting on the influential artwork created in the time of history most dark for the Germans, this became a springboard for dialogue. Peter Vicent grew up in the East and knew life behind the wall. He shared with us stories of his grandfather during the war, and as a doctor, how he was treated by the Russians after declining the offer by the American Army to leave and go with them and was subjected to the life he chose. Piotr and his family fled Poland during the 1980s arriving in Los Angeles, where they began a new life in America, before moving to Chicago when they couldn't find work in California. Tali moved to the Netherlands from Tel Avi where she currently lives with her husband and three daughters. Marianna moved to the United States in the early '80s but remembers growing up in Germany. 

 This was one of my favorites of the collection, the cubism era. The artist in the collection used propaganda to express themselves in a post-socialist climate and capture what was happening in society at that time.

Ausstellungen/Exhibitons
Richard Long's "Berlin Circle" was one of the most exciting installations I got a chance to view. The artist took walks in various landscapes. During these walks, he creates his works. He forms lines or circles with materials he finds or leaves traces with his feet on the ground he treads. Born in Bristol, England, he is one of the most protagonists of land art.

Okay, so I was next to last leaving the museum. Still, I got caught up in the heart of the exhibition, a two-screen video installation, entitled A COUPLE THOUSAND SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD from 2007, recently donated to the museum through Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

JUN 17 THUR “Preserving the House that Art Built.” - The South Side Community Art Center 80th Year Celebration

"Art is Business" Reposted: art.newcity.com/2021/05/26/a-living-institution-the-south-side-community-art-center-celebrates-eighty-years-as-a-force-in-african-american-art/

A Living Institution: The South Side Community Art Center Celebrates Eighty Years as a Force in African American Art

MAY 26, 2021, AT 7:00 AM BY ALISA SWINDELL

Black artist portrait outside SSCAC/Photo: Jonathan Romain

On the near South Side of Chicago, on the 3800 block of South Michigan Avenue in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood, is a beautiful Classical Revival building that has housed a community-based organization dedicated specifically to Black artists for just over eighty years: the South Side Community Art Center. The artist, curator, and former executive director Faheem Majeed describes the Center as a microcosm of the Black art world and Chicago’s South Side. For eight decades, this art center has championed the work of African American artists while serving as a gathering space for not only artists but the broader South Side community. It’s a legacy that continues, with recent exhibitions featuring emerging and mid-career artists such as David Leggett, Krista Thompson, and James T. Green, as well as Majeed.

Faheem Majeed with visitors/Photo: Abena Sharon

The organization came into being through the same dedicated belief in these artists that have kept it going all these years. In the late 1930s, a group of artists, gallerists, and art enthusiasts created an institution that would support Black artists on Chicago’s South Side. This founding group chose to collaborate with the Community Art Center initiative of the Federal Art Project (FAP), one of the many programs that grew out of the Works Project Administration—the federal New Deal agency established to help citizens and communities throughout the United States recover from the Great Depression. The FAP funded part of the renovations and the salaries of the Center’s first staff. Still, it was up to the organizers and the community to raise the money needed to purchase the building that would give the Center the stability that has enabled it to weather eighty years of change. The South Side Community Art Center is the only FAP-funded art center still operating in its original location.

Peter Pollack, Alain Locke, Eleanor Roosevelt, Patrick Prescott at the SSCAC official dedication

Fundraising began in 1938 and was supported by community leaders and local businesses and was bolstered by the philanthropic efforts of women’s organizations, especially middle-class Black women. The successful fundraising from major donors to people on the street proved the community’s support of the project. In 1940, the South Side Community Art Center was opened, and people were welcomed into the renovated building. In 1941, then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a major supporter of the arts, would cut the ribbon for the official dedication of the building as the site of the Center. Though federal support would end two years later, the South Side Community Art Center resides in that same building, designated a historic landmark by the city and a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It still actively provides space for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate and learn their history.

Artist and educator Dr. Margaret Burroughs during an arts conference at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1971. Active in the Chicago arts community, Dr. Burroughs founded the South Side Community Arts Center in 1941 and later co-founded the DuSable Museum of African American History/Photo: Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

The most recognized founder was a visual artist and educator Dr. Margaret Taylor-Burroughs. She was in her early twenties when and the other founding members started the Center. So deep was her investment in the South Side Community Art Center that her contributions would extend to collecting funds on street corners, assisting with the physical labor of readying the space, as well as teaching and exhibiting her artwork. Also, the founder of the DuSable Museum, Taylor-Burroughs, set the stage for African American visual art education and an artist-driven scene that is active to this day.

Painting class with Charles White and Gordon Parks, 1942

The South Side Community Art Center has been a key force in African American art as an incubator for many artists who would go on to define African American visual arts production. When lists are made of the great African American artists of the twentieth century, several key figures always appear Elizabeth Catlett,  Gordon Parks, founding members Archibald Motley, and Charles White. These artists, along with locally renowned Chicago art luminaries and fellow founding members Eldzier Corter, William Carter, and Joseph Kersey, were part of the community that taught classes, learned from their peers, and exhibited at the Center formative years. White created many of the early works included in the “Charles White: A Retrospective,” a major traveling exhibition that opened at the Art Institute in 2018, during his time at the Center. Catlett developed and exhibited her linoleum prints alongside those of Taylor-Burroughs at the Center. It was work done through the South Side Community Art Center and his contacts there that would lead to Parks being awarded the Rosenwald Fellowship, which set the trajectory for the rest of his career.

South Side Community Art Center

The building is a unique space. Unlike the white box gallery that most art patrons are used to, the Center’s exhibition space has wide, wooden plank walls and dark, chocolate-colored floors. The walls cannot be repaired and made to look unused between exhibitions. Instead, the walls show the history of the art that has been hung there. When a young artist in the twenty-first century sees their work hanging in this space, they know that the nails holding it up might be in the same hole a nail was placed to show paintings by Motley or a drawing by White. This unique design is the serendipitous result of another piece of Chicago cultural history, the founding of The Institute of Design in 1937 by German immigrant and Bauhaus member László Moholy-Nagy. Two of the New Bauhaus school members, Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner, reportedly working through the Works Progress Administration, designed the Center’s gallery space in the school’s unconventional style.

Faheem Majeed at his exhibition, “From the Center,” 2021/Photo: Abena Sharon

Majeed, whose passion for the Center is contagious, speaks about the South Side Community Art Center's opportunities over his seventeen-year relationship with the organization. He speaks the most eloquently about the intergenerational knowledge that has been shared with him and other young artists when they spend time at the Center and join its decades-long legacy. He calls it “a living institution that connects the future to the past.” This is central to the ethos that has been a part of the institution since its inception. It is a community center based around art, not a museum. It is designed to allow learning through art and gathering and serve the needs of local artists and ensure that the community is served by art.

Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’Neal is the organization’s public engagement manager, who, in the way of small institutions, also does public relations work and curation at the Center. She is excited about the breadth of exhibitions and planned programs, which she hopes will bring more artists and cultural workers into the facility and create more opportunities to collaborate with other Chicago arts organizations. This includes artist talks, classes, and three exhibitions: “Just Above My Wall,” curated by Ciera Mckissick, will run through the end of June; a Whitfield Lovell solo exhibition in the summer, in collaboration with Smart Museum and in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program; and the year wraps up with a Black Women’s Art Collective curated by artist Kyrin Hobson. Her work will help a new generation of artists at the same age and stage in their careers as their now-famous forebears were when they were part of the South Side Community Art Center. The Center will also participate in the Terra Foundation’s Re-Envisioning Permanent Collections grant program, with the forthcoming exhibition “Love is Universal.” The exhibition will examine the intersections of Chicago’s LGBTQ and Black art histories, focusing “primarily on the Black gay male artists who were closely connected with the center between its founding in 1940 and into the 1980s,” according to the Terra Foundation.

A rising artist on the Chicago scene herself (she was a 2019 Newcity Breakout Artist), Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’Neal spoke to me about what it has meant to her as a Black woman artist to be a part of an organization that has such a long- and well-established history of women in leadership roles and those who have found artistic success through the Center. “Space itself was spearheaded by a Black woman, Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs, which I believe instilled quite a legacy for other Black women to follow,” she says. She provides examples such as Elizabeth Catlett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joyce Owens, Yaoundé Olu, and the Black women artist collective “Sapphire and Crystals.” The collective was conceived by Marva Pitchford Jolly (who was a supporter and volunteer of the Center) and Felicia Grant Preston and held their first exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center in 1987.

Eldzier Cortor visit to SSCAC

In the tradition of women’s leadership, in December of 2019, the board named Monique Brinkman-Hill as their latest executive director. Brinkman-Hill is a former member of the board and an avid art collector with a strong background in finance and leadership as a former senior vice president and managing director at Northern Trust and president and founder of MBH Coaching and Consulting LLC. This experience will be useful, as the Center was awarded a $2 million grant from the State of Illinois to renovate the organization and help ensure its continued success in serving the South Side as a community-based arts organization. An executive director with Brinkman-Hill’s level of business knowledge is well-positioned to use the gift for long-term strategic success. “A building that houses so much history must be preserved and maintained,” Brinkman-Hill says. This is exemplified by the theme that has been selected for the Center’s post-pandemic year, “Preserving the House that Art Built.” The kickoff is June 17, and the delayed eightieth-anniversary celebrations will culminate with their Annual Art Auction.

The South Side Community Art Center was founded not only to provide exhibition space for artists, but more essentially to provide darkroom and printmaking spaces, classes for community members, and a space for African Americans producing and interested in cultural production on the South Side of Chicago to gather in their own neighborhood. What is created there goes out into the world in new ways, taking the knowledge gained and the traces of those who came before. The Center has faced McCarthyism, economic fluctuations in the neighborhood where it is located, new organizations that offer competing programs for the community’s youth. Yet, it remains active and supported by the community in which it has thrived for over eighty years.

Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum Expansion Celebration

Going Out on Top

https://chicagocrusader.com/going-out-on-top/