Little Black Pearl Art & Design Center

ISSUE AREA: JOBS

City: Chicago, IL
Arts - Youth - Urban

Contact:
Little Black Pearl Art & Design Center
1060 East 47th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60653
(773) 285-1211

Date Published: October 2006

The mission of Little Black Pearl is to create opportunities for youth and adults in the Chicago area to deepen their creative involvement through the arts, cultivate their entrepreneurial skills, and use the arts as a means for economic empowerment and community transformation. Little Black Pearl Workshop is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing educational training opportunities in the arts and business to inner-city youth. The main goal is encouraging children to explore art as personal expression and a potential career path. As well as exposing youth to African-American art and history, the programs work to foster entrepreneurship through marketing and selling student artwork.

Little Black Pearl was started in 1993 by Monica Haslip. Haslip, a business-woman with a passion and background in the arts, started the program in the first floor of her home in Chicago’s Oakland district, a once blighted area. The low-income area was home to Lakefront, one of Chicago’s infamous public housing projects that is currently being razed and converted into a new mixed-use/mixed-income development. Monica’s goal was to instill in children both business and art skills by teaching them to make and market functional artwork, while encouraging artistic expression through the visual arts. The program was initially sponsored by the Illinois State Board of Education, and interested Chicago Public School children would apply to the workshop through their school. Student and staff artwork is displayed in the workshop's online gallery. The art instructors are local high school students, volunteers, and a regular staff of teachers.

The program became so popular that Little Black Pearl found itself having to turn students away due to lack of space. Haslip began a campaign to expand the program’s space. In 2000, the workshop received a $1.5 million Empowerment Zone grant. The workshop raised a total of $9 million to finance the new building, and ShoreBank financed the construction. In September of 2004, Little Black Pearl moved into its new 40,000 square foot facility. The city gained title to the building, and donated it to Little Black Pearl to renovate it.

A culmination of years of planning, the new space tripled the size of the center, and includes 2200 feet of commercial space in which participants can sell their art. This new space allows them to serve more students, and to expand its services to adults and neighborhood residents. The facility boasts a two-story glass atrium with courtyard space, including studios to teach ceramics, woodworking, welding, mosaics, painting, glass-blowing and much more for children, adults and families. The computer lab houses state-of-the-art equipment and provides Internet access for students and members of Little Black Pearl. The Kids Café, which was made possible through a grant from BankOne, provides digital technology that allows students to enhance their computer skills, music programming, and free meals for the students by the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Little Black Pearl was one of twelve organizations nationwide chosen by the Ford Foundation to receive a grant to support their community transformation efforts. Little Black Pearl’s vision with the help of this grant was to create a workforce training program in collaboration with the Chicago Housing Authority to empower residents of Chicago public housing who have been relocated from the former public housing units into the CHA’s new mixed-income communities. Through this program, residents will be taught transferable skills in welding, woodworking, glassblowing, pottery, and computer graphics that will prepare them to seek employment in the fields of information technology, manufacturing, and industrial arts.

The program now serves 750 to 1,500 annually. Although there are fees for many of the classes at the Little Black Pearl, they do provide financial aid based on need. During its ten plus years of operation, Little Black Pearl has made great strides in empowering children and adults through the arts, both economically and creatively, and providing resources that help strengthen and transform the Oakland community.

Resources:

www.blackpearl.org
www.hydepark.org/communityorganizations/culture/artsnews.htm#blackpearl