generic Actor Harry Lennix gets $26 million from Illinois for his ‘Black version of Lincoln Center’ in Bronzeville
Harry Lennix’s Lillian Marcie Center for the Performing Arts, a project located at 4343 S. Cottage Grove Ave. on Chicago’s South Side and designed to aid in the renaissance of Bronzeville, will receive capital funding from the State of Illinois to the tune of $26 million, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Tuesday.
“This was a quixotic venture and it felt like an impossible dream,” the Chicago-born actor said in a telephone interview. “The best word I can use is that I feel vindicated.”
By any standards of public support for arts facilities in Illinois, $26 million in state funding is a transformational amount of money.
In a previous Tribune interview, Lennix described his project, which is to contain both a museum and two performing spaces, as “the Black version of the Lincoln Center,” and part of his passion to reinvigorate Chicago’s South Side and give back to the city that launched him on a successful film and television career in New York and Los Angeles, recently including appearances in such shows as “The Blacklist” and “Billions.”
The center is earmarked as a performance home for the Congo Square Theatre Company. Lennix says he also plans a museum dedicated to Black contributions to the performing arts. TaRon Patton has been tapped to be the executive director of the center; Terrence Carey will be the executive director of the center’s new African American Museum of Performing Arts, which Lennix hopes will draw tourists to Bronzeville.
As previously reported by the Tribune, the building, a former warehouse, is to be named after both Lennix’s mother, Lillian, and one of Lennix’s early mentors on Chicago’s South Side, Marcella “Marcie” Gillie.
Lennix said he expects the total cost of the new facility to be about $80 million, for which a capital campaign has been launched. “This gives us a great tail wind,” he said, describing his project as a tool to “reestablish the cultural beauty of the South Side of Chicago.” If all goes according to plan, the center should open in the summer or fall of 2024.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
