The South Side Artist Coalition (SSAC) exists to support artists in sustaining their livelihoods and creative practices through collaboration, advocacy, and community-driven work.
We welcome artists of all disciplines from Chicago and beyond to join a space built for organizing, sharing resources, and protecting one another from exploitative practices. Rooted in the liberation of working-class people, we believe artists must be able to thrive, not just survive. Our work ensures that creative practices and artistic livelihoods can be sustained for generations to come.
The SSAC was formed to preserve and uplift the rich culture of Chicago’s South Side. We recognize that chronic disinvestment and systemic inequities have left many of our neighborhoods underdeveloped, with limited access to arts education and creative infrastructure. South Side children often receive less arts funding than their peers across the city. Our communities continue to face displacement and other effects of systemic racism.
We believe that art is not a luxury it is a necessity. Everyone deserves equitable access to spaces and resources for creation, regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
To that end, the SSAC is working to establish an independent makerspace on the South Side of Chicago a community hub featuring studios, classes, film screenings, live performances, art camps, exhibitions, and other creative programming. This space will also offer artist residencies and accommodations for both local and international artists, fostering cross-cultural exchange and collective growth. Our goal is simple: to bring resources directly to our community, empowering South Side artists to build sustainable, liberated, and creative futures together.
We invite you to attend our next South Side Artist Coalition potluck dinner November 29th at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago at 6400 S. Kimbark Ave on the first floor from 6-9pm.
Please follow us on instagram @southsideartistcoailition_ and email us at underelaine@gmail.com to stay up to date.
Donations to the South Side Artist Coalition can be made below. Thank you for your help.
“Ceremonial Rites” a group exhibition July, 2025 at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago curated by the South Side Artist Coalition.
The opening reception for “Ceremonial Rites” at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago (July 12, 2025).
South Side Artist Coalition Potluck Dinner (October 26, 2025)
South Side Artist Coalition Potluck Dinner (September 27, 2025)
Please check out some of the artists below.
Self portrait age 30 in rose crown (24×30 inches, oil on canvas) by South Side Artist Coalition founding member Messejah Washington.
Shiloh age 24 in rose crown (24×30 inches oil on canvas)
Shiloh Tumo Washington is a filmmaker, writer, and photographer from Chicago, Illinois. His intimate, historically-concerned style is fashioned to capture the complex interior lives of his characters and subjects—revealing them to the outside world with a cathartic grace —has been described as a movement in “poetic realism.
Bailey’s Blues – “Qui est-il?” | Short Film Trailer
One For My Baby | Short Film Trailer
Zakia Rowlett (KiaNijee) is a Multifaceted Print maker and Art Director whose work intersects Digital + Print media, visual story telling, and activations. Working through screen printing, woodwork, image manipulation, documentation, & activation she explores identity, self-devotion, and social construct detachment. After earning her BFA in Graphic Design (2018) she entered the print industry as a Production Artist. Later transitioning into Advertising as an Art Director storytelling through campaigns and activations for multicultural audiences. Zakia co-produced Tessellate (2019) an interactive public exhibition centered on collaborative print making, leading her to conceptualize and co-curate her first group exhibition “Epoch” (2025). She remains active in artistic communities as a member of Chicago Based Creative Collective “SUBlvl.” Zakia’s work has been featured in exhibitions including Fluffy Crimes at MANA Contemporary, The Living Exhibit at Contextos Gallery, BYP100 Showcase, and Spudnik Press Monitor Print Show. Her Zine “In The Between” (2025) is featured in SAIC’s Joan Flasch Artist Books Collection + Archive.
Work in Progress 24×19 inches
Screen print and paper weaving on French Paper- 2025
Colorful Aura (8×2 feet)
Screen and relief print on French Paper. Latino Lace threaded-2025
Kopano– Born on Chicago’s Southside, Kopano is a cultural worker who transmutes the present moment into powerful performances. Since finishing at Oberlin College & Conservatory in 2022, Kopano has had the pleasure of performing at The Taste of Chicago, Navy Pier’s Wave Wall Stage, and Dusable’s Annual Nelson Mandela Day. As a 2024 recipient of Chicago DCASE’s Individual Artist Grant, Kopano is on a journey to reintegrate the true purpose of artistry into society as a tool for collective healing & celebration.
Ladipo Famodu– adipo Famodu is an artist, designer, chemist, and capoeirista. He is interested in kinaesthetic learning, where knowledge is exchanged through the manipulation of objects, or by moving one’s body. Much of his work employs playfulness and surrealism in an attempt to undo the tethered logics of anti-blackness and modernity. He is currently working with wire sculpture, performance, and fine jewelry.
Ladipo received an MA in Design from the Sandberg Instituut (2022), and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota (2015). He was a recipient of the Holland Scholarship, and has been awarded a SPARK grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition. His work has been shown at the South Side Community art Center, Museum of Science and Industry, and he has contributed to the German Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. His writing has been featured in The Funambulist, and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Ladipo is currently based in Chicago.
https://www.astro-afro-studio.com/bio
Unity– 15 in x 11 in x 19 1/2 in
Aluminum 2025
.Interface– 16 in x 11 in x 11 in
Aluminum 2025
Descendant– 13 in x 10 1/2 in x 20 1/2 in
Aluminum 2025
Nova Zaii– is a sonic experience designer, drummer, educator, and music producer from Chicago. Zaii (which rhymes with”fly”) invented and patented a touchless musical instrument called the Nova Portals. He performs genre defying, futuristic live solo sets, making music out of thin air with the Nova Portals while knocking satisfying rhythms. His one of one Nova Portals performance has graced audiences the likes of global fashion brand Hermès, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and TEDx Chicago. He is a founding member of the band The JuJu Exchange, which has a broad catalogue of jazz-electronic fusion music, including the chart topping debut record ‘Exchange’, and the most recent full length LP featuring the culmination of six years of production – titled, ‘BEHOLD’. He has also worked with generational talents including aja monet, Vic Mensa, Chance the Rapper, Prefuse 73, Derrick Hodge, Nico Segal, Jamila Woods, KESSWA, Wendell Harrison, Shara Nova, Marcus Elliot, Tank and the Bangas, and many other visionary artists. Zaii’s vision as an experience designer is to immerse the listener in a focused zone of profound creative stimulation, through which identity, purpose, and collective self realization can be vividly explored, and beheld.
Carina Vargas Nunez– Carina Vargas-Nuñez is a multidisciplinary artist who employs paint and textiles to delve into the tapestry of identity, disability, and family history. Carina has used artistic expression from a young age to process their experience with disability, and envision worlds outside of the constraints imposed by their complex health challenges. This world building has continued into their practice today, where Carina uses bright colors and defined lines to illustrate narratives aimed at better understanding their sense of self. Through elements of symbolism and magic realism, the images Carina constructs are crafted from stories of their family’s migration from Cuba, their journey with queerness, and their history with cultural mythology and spirituality. Carina is currently based in Chicago, IL.
https://www.carinavargasnunez.com
Tafari Melisizwe– Through photojournalistic-style portrait photography, Melisizwe participates in historical and contemporary relationships between people of African ancestry in an effort to forge meaningful understandings and connections along the continuing lines of language, geography, culture, and history. This work has taken him across the United States, as well as throughout Ghana, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Cuba and 6 underwhelming hours at the Burkinabe border. While certainly honest, his work is neither neutral nor objective, as he grounds his photography within the social, political, and aspirational tenets of Pan-Africanist praxis. His work presumes the life of black peoples, oft-ignored or obscured from the outset in mainstream discourse. His greatest aspiration through photography is to chronicle Black life as it is, as it unfolds, and to use that as a catalyst for joy, dialogue, inspiration, organizing, and movement work.
Black Children Are- Baltimore, MD 2012
Ancestral Recall- Atlanta, GA 2020