SSCAC announces Lola Ayisha Ogbara and
zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal as new staff additions at South Side Community Art Center!

SSCAC is thrilled to announce new staff additions and promotions, as it regards Lola Ayisha Ogbara and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal!

Echoing our Executive Director Monique- Brinkman Hill, we have some exciting improvements and additions here at The Center, as we continue to expand our staffing, programming, exhibitions, and partnerships. On that note, please read about our new staff announcements below!

Learn more about Lola and zakkiyyah’s roles below:

Lola Ayisha Ogbara has joined SSCAC as our Exhibitions Manager!

Lola’s years of experience with project management, community arts programming, and her own robust artistic practice will make a great contribution to the The Center and our community. We’re so thrilled to have her on board!

Lola Ayisha Ogbara (cultural worker & artist) born and raised in Chicago, Illinois holds many talents under her belt, i.e., sculpture, sound, design, photography and installation art.

“My practice explores the multifaceted implications and ramifications of being in regard to the Black experience. I work with clay as a material in order to emphasize a necessary fragility which symbolizes an essential contradiction implicit in empowerments”.

Ogbara holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Entertainment & Media Management from Columbia College Chicago in 2013 and a MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University Sam Fox School of Art & Design.

In 2017, Ogbara co-founded Artists in the Room, a collective of artists and scholars who host artists, emerging and established, in hopes of serving as a catalyst for artist development and networking. Ogbara has also received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Multicultural Fellowship sponsored by the NCECA 52nd Annual Conference, the Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture Residency at the University of Chicago, and the Coney Family Fund Award hosted by the Chicago Artists Coalition.

In addition to Lola, zakkiyyah najeebah Dumas-o’neal has transitioned into our full-time Public Engagement Manager!

zakkiyyah has been with the center over the past year and will be moving into this role to elevate our public engagement and programs. zakkiyyah brings with her 8 years of experience in arts education, independent curatorial work, arts organizing, and an ongoing arts practice.

zakkiyyah najeebah Dumas o’neal (b. Chicago) is an arts educator, visual artist and arts organizer. Her practice engages in how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production, with attention to Black women’s intellectual and creative contributions.

She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She ultimately seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. zakkiyyah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, Indiana University, and South Bend Museum of Art. Her work has been presented in various forms at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design to name a few, in addition to receiving several fellowships and awards.

She was most recently awarded a 2021 SPARK grant, hosted by Chicago Artist Coalition, an Artist in Residence at Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture Residency at the University of Chicago and Engaged Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. She has curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department, Blanc gallery and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago.

zakkiyyah is also the co-founder of CBIM: Concerned Black Image Makers, a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens-based artists of the Black diaspora.

We look forward to Lola and zakkiyyah’s mission in further innovating our ongoing exhibitions
and engagement here at The Center!

For More Information Contact:

Monique Brinkman-Hill
monique@sscartcenter.org
Executive Director

zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal
zakkiyyah@sscartcenter.org
Manager of Public Engagement

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