Pollack, an art dealer, owned a gallery on Michigan Avenue in Chicago's Loop and had previously shown the work of African American artists.

Businessman Golden Darby, chairman of the board of the Settlement House, became chair of the Sponsoring Committee of the proposed South Side Community Art Center.

In addition to Darby, Pollack, and other organizers of the Sponsoring Committee, the meeting was attended by members of the Arts Crafts Guild, a group of Chicago-based African American artists organized in 1932 which included Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Bernard Goss, Charles White, William Carter, Joseph Kersey, and Archibald Motley Jr. George G. Thorpe, the State Director of the Federal Art Project of Illinois, informed the group that the FAP's community art center program would provide an administrative staff, faculty, and renovation funds for a center if the community could raise funds for the purchase of a building and the costs of utilities and supplies.

Its alumni are Charles White, Bernard Goss, George Neal, Eldzier Cortor, Gordon Parks, Archibald Motley, Richard Hunt,[6] and Margaret Burroughs.

[12] The interracial faculty of art instructors included Davis, White, Goss, Carter, Morris Topchevsky, Si Gordon, Max Kahn, and Todros Geller.

[15] Lessons were free and included oil painting, drawing, composition, water color, sculpture, lithography, poster design, fashion illustration, interior decoration, silk screen, weaving, and hooked rug-making.