A Great Day in Bronzeville: (Re) Producing the Black Imaginary with Decolonial AestheSis

Abstract

The South Side Community Art Center remains the only open community art center financed by the New Deal. The budgets for longstanding public institutions charged with funding the arts, however, have constricted in the decades following the Roosevelt Administration. Declining public assistance for the arts rigidizes what art is, can be, or must constitute to be worthy of financial protection, rendering the funding associated with cultural policy both dogmatic and unreliable. American cultural policy replicates conventional assessments of art’s value that overemphasize the status quo aesthetics of high culture, reifying Euro-American conceptions of artistry and productions of art. The impacts of stringent, Eurocentric cultural policy remain palpable in the South Side Community Art Center’s governance. As an institution erected from the interests of Black Chicagoan artists, decoloniality, especially as related to aesthetic production, is embodied in the center’s existence. The center’s prioritization of Black artists supports decolonial aesthetics, in that it focalizes work that subverts European epistemes of beauty, art, and cultural merit. Notwithstanding, administrative barriers, particularly those arising from the Board of Directors, disrupt the center’s ability to achieve comprehensive decoloniality. In efforts to ensure the center’s financial viability, board members historically acquiesce to the neoliberal, Eurocentric demands of American cultural policy; such an effort inhibits the establishment of decolonial aestheSis within the center at large. This research comprises a qualitative case-study and policy analysis of the South Side Community Art Center and its administrative procedures, outlining how the center can liberate itself from the rigidity of cultural policy without provoking financial collapse or sacrificing its foundational ethos. The proposed policy recommendation emphasizes the decolonial potentiality of administrative changes to the South Side Community Art Center’s board governance. The uttermost implication of this recommendation is an exhaustive (re)production of the Black imaginary, one which reappraises the South Side Community Art Center’s worth while simultaneously transforming it into a self-sustaining entity unbound by repressive cultural policy.