The Art Center is founded as part of the
WPA. Under the name Fifth Ward Art
Guild, arts advocates applied for a not-
for-profit Illinois charter. The name
changes to Hyde Park Art Center the
next year.
1939
Artists left out of the Art Institute of
Chicago’s “Chicago and Vicinity
Exhibition” find a home in the Art
Center’s “Members’ Show.”
1973
The Art Center moves to 5236 S.
Blackstone Ave, recommitting to the
South Side as gentrification and urban
renewal push other Hyde Park art
colonies into North Side
neighborhoods.
1961
1940
Mrs. Ethel Brown, the Center’s first
teaching artist, offers art instruction
after a sign in the window brought
200 requests for classes, inspiring art
critic, artist and art history professor
Harold Haydon to write, “Art is found
wherever people work and live.”
South Side Community Art Center is
founded as a space for Black artists
to thrive in a segregated Chicago.
Listen to artists and community
members reflect on the divergent and
parallel legacies in a roundtable
discussion taped in 2021.
Hyde Park Art Center:
Evolution of Equity, Inclusion,
+ Accessibility
1940
Learn more about the Art Center at
hydeparkart.org
The Art Center holds its first Jurors’
Choice, the first of five juried
exhibitions designed to give Chicago
artists an opportunity to participate in
their community and be judged by
their peers.
1956
Margaret and Charles Burroughs found
the Ebony Museum, eventually to
become the DuSable Museum of
African American History, the first
Midwest museum celebrating Black arts
and culture.
1961
Carlos Tortolero and Helen Valdez
co-chair the new Mexican Fine Arts
Center Museum, later to become the
National Museum for Mexican Art, to
conserve and celebrate
Mexican/Chicano art and culture.
1982
1968
The African Commune of Bad Relevant
Artists (AfriCOBRA) was founded on the
South Side by Jeff Donaldson, Barbara
Jones-Hogu, Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald
Williams.