Chicago
The New Art Examiner
Summer 1996
Art’s Chicago Public
Part Two: Culture in the Community
by Claire Wolf Krantz
This is the second of two articles exploring ways in which artists and artworId systems function, using the examples of Chicago-based artists, institutions, and Programs. Beginning in the first article (May 1996), which focused on the Chicago Mural movement, and continuing here in a discussion of several community-based arts organizations and exhibition venues, I have attempted to examine some of the different ways artists interact with a variety of publics, often on the neighborhood level, and rethink some of the new boundaries that are forming as the field of "public art" becomes institutionalized by the art world.
Chicago is home to at least 30 nonprofit, community-based arts organizations, often stemming from the Jane Addams settlement-house model, which have been established in neighborhoods to organize activities that integrate art with other life-sustaining programs.1 Other institutions receiving city and state support, such as the Chicago Cultural Center and the Illinois Art Gallery, offer non-commercial, mainstream exhibition opportunities for local artists to show their work and for diverse community interests to be aired to the general public. Their exhibitions attract visitors who may not frequent the more formal, expensive, and often intimidating museums and commercial galleries, partially because their downtown locations are easily accessible, they are free, and they routinely contextualize their displays with readable text. Chicago is also home to a number of exhibition-oriented arts organizations, such as the Peace Museum, Randolph Street Gallery, and Sculpture Chicago, which frequently focus their activities on the socially oriented concerns of their mainly artist-led boards and staffs. Searching for innovative ways for art to make a difference for ordinary people, such as sponsoring billboard projects, they have had mixed success in their various activities.
There are many ways in which artists meet audiences outside the traditional museum/gallery system in Chicago. Several city-sponsored programs, such as the Percent for Art program, bridge the gap between government-sponsored monuments and street art. According to Mike Lash, the program’s curator of public art, the city buys art from a variety of contemporary artists – either directly or through galleries – which is placed in newly built or renovated municipal buildings and public sites, thus enhancing and marking public places with a heightened sense of uniqueness and community. One highlight of the city’s vast collection is a collaborative piece by muralists Hector Duarte and Cynthia Weiss: the arresting and delightful mosaic Chic-Chac, installed at the Rudy Lozano Library in Pilsen, a largely Latino neighborhood. A semi-reclining figure reading a book, its form and pose are taken from the pre-Columbian chac-mool figurines of Mexico, which were originally used to hold sacrificial offerings. Here, the chac-mool is a general symbol of Mexican culture, and the artists’ addition of a book references an updated idea of culture – that of reading – and, of course, the work’s location in the library.
Selection committees for the Percent for Art program consist of both art-world "experts," whose approach to choosing art often favors complex, innovative, and sophisticated aesthetic and conceptual considerations, and neighborhood committees, who tend to endorse work that is germane to community issues, usually created in a relatively traditional form. This mixture of people is meant to promote a measure of both "quality control" and community involvement. Yet, while community members do participate in choosing the artworks, the artists are seldom indigenous to the community: typically, the pool of artists, as well as the proposed themes, are generated by the staff of the Percent for Art program and the arts professionals on the committee. This selection process has led to some uninspired placement of artworks and ambivalent reception and maintenance by the communities in which they are placed. By comparison, many of the muralists I spoke with noted that those murals which have the wholehearted support of their communities tend to remain undamaged for long periods of time. Tellingly, some of the haphazard placement and lack of meaningful connection to their sites of certain works commissioned by the Percent for Art programs – particularly in the Harold Washington Library, where the works are scattered and often barely visible – is a testament to the difficulties involved in linking art to community. In addition, this indifference on the part of the community may be shared by some of the architects commissioned to incorporate art into their designs, as well as those running the institutions themselves; i.e. librarians who may take little interest in the art.
Other Public venues for art include rented billboards, placards found on buses and "el" trains, and posters and signs plastered in the street in targeted spots. Usually generated by artists and supported by arts organizations who wish to communicate directly with the public, these approaches frequently incorporate established advertising techniques, sometimes to beautify, but often to provide information, provoke audiences, and promote dialogue about social issues.
Because they are less permanent than painted murals, billboards and signs are most effective when they address topical issues and use simple, easily understood texts and images. Some take the form of a concrete and immediate dispersal of information, such as the Peace Museum’s "Get Help" Signs Project, a particularly effective outreach program to address the problem of domestic violence. Signs and posters feature a design that utilizes a simple, direct drawing and text advising abused women where there is help available for those in need. These signs and posters are still being distributed around the city.
In 1992, the University of Illinois (UIC)’s Gallery 400 sponsored some impressive billboards, including John Greiner’s image of an auto license reading "Caution, WEAPON 2, Drive Responsibly," and Michael Glass’s "? Question Everything." A more evocative billboard by Bonnie Hughes featured black-and-white landscape elements framed in yellow and straddled by lettering reading "between opposites," which sought to simulate positive racial and ethnic relations. Veronika Romero’s piece for American Indian Heritage Month incorporated a particularly convincing pictorial image (the drawing of a Hopi shaman and flute player) with text asking, "whose voice was first sounded upon this land?"
Gallery 400 can be mentioned among a number of artist-led organizations committed to bringing art into the communities and expanding artistic dialogue. As part of UIC, this gallery devotes a number of exhibitions to community-oriented issues with the intention of augmenting the work of the university’s teachers, students, and alumni, many of whom are involved in community projects as well. One recent example, Catalyst, featured artworks made in connection with projects in five different institutions serving both adults and children. One intriguing installation involving an ongoing project dealing with the construction of identity revealed disquieting images in children’s’ self-portraits. These images exposed skewed perceptions of self in relation to surroundings, which recapitulate many environmental and physical factors that the artists working in these agencies are striving to help ameliorate. Gallery director Karen Indeck states that her desire to exhibit such work stems from wishing to validate the artwork, and thus the very existence, of people who generally are invisible to the world at large.
Another highly innovative and active organization is Randolph Street Gallery (RSG). Among its diverse programs, RSG offers funding and organizational support to selected artists who wish to develop projects in various communities. In addition, exhibition space is allocated in the gallery to augment some projects. One complex venture included a symposium about the homeless and an accompanying exhibition, during which the "Mad Housers’ Hut" project was inaugurated. This project, which had been initiated in Atlanta, was a creative but problematic solution to the lack of affordable urban housing. For a time, participants used donated materials to build simplified huts for some homeless people who expressed interest in them. However, RSG’s desire to address the serious problem of homelessness in an activist way met with mixed success. The gallery did what galleries do best: it brought an important issue to the attention of a variety of people who may have been concerned, but were not necessarily knowledgeable about its complexities. However, while its sponsorship of artist-built shelters for homeless people sounds like a reasonable solution, the program’s short-term gains did little to alleviate the problem. A few homeless people were minimally and temporarily housed, and the city bureaucracy was effectively embarrassed by the media attention. But short-term and simple solutions to complex problems must also be measured in terms of their cost. Could the participants’ time and energy have been put to better use? Would a long-term commitment to working with agencies already in place have been more beneficial to the homeless?3
In another of RSG’s programs, which better suits the gallery’s desire to be connected and helpful to others and to put artists’ creative thinking to good use, its staff works with social-service agencies to develop programs needed by their communities. Particularly in West Town, where many artists live, arts organizations such as the Near Northwest Arts Council, sometimes with RSG, develop arts programming that will facilitate the integration of artists as active participants in mixed communities and promote community appreciation of the benefits that artists and their art can provide, including stimulating and validating creativity, developing leadership skills, and strengthening relationships within the community.
Since 1983, another not-for-profit organization, Sculpture Chicago, has sponsored biennial events featuring largely international, state of-the-art sculptural and installation works in locations outside the museum. Aiming to demystify art for a general public, its initial projects replaced the museum’s traditional educational tools, such as wall labels, explanatory texts, and docent or audio tours, with the actual production of monumental sculptures in public sites, so viewers could watch and learn from the sculptors themselves. Although local sculptors were initially featured, the overall thrust of all of Sculpture Chicago’s projects has been identical to that of museum culture: to bring internationally validated art (presumably the best) to Chicago; thus, the artists and their subject matter were chosen by art-world professionals.
Under the direction of curator Mary Jane Jacob, Sculpture Chicago’s 1992-93 incarnation, Culture in Action, attempted to redefine art as a more interactive process with an expanded audience by locating its projects in communities such as schools, neighborhood storefronts, and low-income housing projects. Ambitious to promote this new content and process as the next avant-garde, its planners brought to the project an art-world-derived point of view and experience that far overshadowed their expertise in community service. The program’s often costly ventures were generated by artists who, for the most part, designed projects for their community recipients rather than truly involving them in the process of the projects’ formation. In fact, the artists were generally chosen for their reputations as public artists, and seldom on the basis of any articulated engagement with the issues or cultures of the particular community. Most of Sculpture Chicago’s projects were conceptually finished before they ever reached the neighborhood; the recipients merely supplied the data and the audience.5 Consequently, a great deal of public and private moneys were spent on projects which, with a few exceptions, were more successful in benefiting the art world as a discursive field and as loci attracting media attention for the artists and curator than in providing any long-term benefit to the communities.
Moreover, some projects were, in my opinion, actually harmful. For example, for Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio’s "We Got It! The Workforce Makes the Candy of Their Drearns," the artists worked with members of the labor union in a candy factory to design a candy bar, attempting to use advertising strategies for the purposes of community-based art. Businesses using focus groups to package their images in order to generate optimal sales however, are vastly different from community workers developing strategies for helping groups of people to conceptualize images of themselves in terms of their own needs and desires, for their own empowerment and use, an important difference this project failed to address.
Many public-art projects initiated by art institutions suffer from such contradictions inherent in their structures. For the most part, the power and money generated by and for the projects rest with the arts organizations themselves. Thus, the high cost of many of these ambitious programs is seldom analyzed in terms of long-term gains for the community, or whether – if given the choice – community leaders would spend the money differently, even assuming it would still be spent on contemporary art. Since this structure determines that the artists and sponsoring institutions derive a good portion of the benefits, in terms of monetary reward and/or career development, it is important to be clear about what other kinds of value the art will bring to the community.
A related issue has been raised by Jon Pounds, who is troubled by what he calls the "teenagerization of community art": our tendency to regard the value of public art, particularly murals, as only a process for employing or educating teenagers. Art that is reduced to being a device for teaching or for keeping the lid on potentially troublesome groups of people is ultimately rendered impotent in terms of other, life-enhancing values. Moreover, when mature artists are put into competition with teenagers (as is happening with increasing frequency as sources for funding and exhibition opportunities shift their scopes), those who are the ongoing creators of culture are rendered invisible. Similarly, when art is measured in tourist dollars, it often loses in potency what it has gained in entertainment value.
Arts institutions also tend to perpetuate themselves by validating and universalizing mainstream standards of significance and quality, although the standards may be variable and hidden. (Contemporary standards usually have to do with innovation in approach.) An additional, too often unexamined belief held by many artists is that their ability to think creatively extends to all fields and can substitute for the acquisition of specific knowledge, skills, understanding, and experience needed in community-based work.
Virtually all recognized public art adheres to a time frame and conceptual and spatial schema similar to that of museums and galleries – short-term installation and accommodation to a specific site. In order to qualify for funding from most public and private sources, tight conceptual structures must be planned ahead of time that are within guidelines that fulfill the requirements of granting bodies, and which can later be validated tautologically in catalogues and publications. These factors almost necessarily leave out the community members’ participation in initial planning or decision making; they remain subjects, peripheral contributors, and spectators within their own domains. One strategy some artists are using to overcome these difficulties is to plan projects involving already existing organizations that serve to fill in gaps in expertise, provide access to local dialogue, and take charge of the projects’ continuation over time. Others are willing to modify their initial plans to accommodate their evolving understanding of the community’s situations.
Currently, Sculpture Chicago’s new project director, Joyce Fernandes, is continuing the process of stretching avant-garde parameters for art, but she has shifted her goals to explore ways in which the artists’ processes can be opened up to involve the community. "Re-inventing the Garden City", which opens June 8 and will remain on view through September 7, utilizes city parks as sites for three projects that investigate and document the history of Chicago’s neighborhoods and parks in an attempt to project those histories into the present. For the most part, the artists (Ellen Rothenberg and Miroslaw Rogala, who are Chicago residents but not members of the communities in which their projects are sited, and Pepon Osorio, who resides in New York) are involving community members in research and documentation about the changing appearance, history, philosophy, mores, and problems of their communities, which will then be translated into parameters defined by each artist’s project. One hopes that these projects will engage the communities’ discourses, not merely those of the artists, and that the outcomes will focus and strengthen their inhabitants’ images of self and community, rather than serve to exoticize them as people and aestheticize their concerns. Indeed, a fourth scheduled project, by New York artist Dennis Adams, was axed after the artist’s initial proposal, which Adams refused to alter, was voted down by the Garfield Park community organization designated by Fernandes as the project’s collaborative community group.
Meanwhile, little noticed in the art world and with minimal funding or publicity, some artists work in community centers, many of whose paradigms stem from that of the Jane Addams Hull House. For them, culture is regarded as an integral part of human endeavor that is vital to the life of all individuals and is a source of strength to the community. These institutions’ missions are to promote art as both a process and a product; as creative accomplishment that is directed and judged within its own context.
Many of these centers cultivate the local and indigenous arts of their communities, of which the fine arts are only a part, by helping to provide the facilities, education, and funding to enable their continued production and display. This safe and creditable context is sometimes crucial for members of ethnic groups who are under stress to preserve, reproduce, and extend their cultural traditions outside of their original settings. At Beacon Street Gallery, in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, the community’s diverse inhabitants find themselves represented to themselves and each other in a variety of exhibits. For example, Hmong artists have exhibited their rapidly evolving, stylistically changing needlework alongside that of Native-American and African-American artists.
Perhaps the most important and least understood aspects of community centers’ programming are those which integrate art with other aspects of community life. Beacon Street’s art gallery, in particular, was well situated in a central space through which people from the community passed as they used the building’s other functions. In June, the gallery moves to a new space on the campus of Truman College, a city-run community college, a few blocks from the previous site. The two new gallery spaces are also centrally located, with viewers passing through on their way to classes and other activities. By striving to tie local art into a larger art scene, Beacon Street makes a strong case for the premise that many of the concerns of the immediate neighborhood are related to global concerns and aesthetics. This position is further amplified by Visual Arts Director Pat Murphy, who believes that input from both realms is necessary for significant art to occur. Therefore, she plans a few shows each year devoted to mainstream artists, but this work still addresses issues that may add to or illuminate community dialogue rather than trying solely to interest her constituency in art-world concerns.
Sometimes community-based organizations work together on projects which will extend their benefits to more neighborhoods. One particularly good program was Chicago Portraits, which was planned by representatives of several communities under the auspices of the Chicago Coalition of Community Cultural Centers, and curated by Joyce Fernandes. Representatives planned how to implement their goals of commissioning and exhibiting portraits of citizens whom the communities selected as having made important contributions. Local writers documented short life histories to be used by photographer Lewis Toby. Part of the program’s intent was didactic: in the process of choosing a photographer, the working group was led by Fernandes to consider the implications of different aesthetic choices. For instance, they eschewed the seemingly casual style of street photography in favor of formal, aesthetically refined portraits in keeping with their goal of representing the dignity and importance of their citizens’ accomplishments. The resulting portraits were exhibited recently at the Chicago Cultural Center, as well as in neighborhood community centers.
With similar goals, Pat Devine, director of the Boulevard Arts Center, works intensively in the largely black community of Englewood. This neighborhood is engulfed with endemic poverty, illness, gang violence, and under-education. Residents are often isolated in small territories and homes that may seem safer and more comprehensible than the outside world. Here, the production and display of art in a secure place represents a new process of growth for people of all ages: of learning about a larger world, and of stimulating intellectual engagement and imaginative achievement. The community’s slowly growing involvement in attending programs and participating, even only as viewers, in the sculptures and murals surrounding the center and in the artwork exhibited in its attached gallery, speaks to this center’s hard-won achievements in building creative structures within which individual and communal growth can occur.
Although community based, The Mexican Fine Arts Center is a museum, not a social-service organization. It is oriented toward displaying Chicano and Mexican art within a contemporary and locally meaningful context. While it has sponsored a few murals, its identity is that of a site in which cultural activities take place and can be viewed without charge; where people can meet and feel that they belong; where their voices are heard and developed; and, most importantly, to assert that they have a right to such things. Small, ethnic museums such as this one are resources for defining, documenting, and displaying what the community (or at least its leaders) decide is important. They are not only important for their community’s use, but they are means for outsiders to learn about the culture represented by these institutions.
In all these community organizations, local artists can speak for and to the community in a more direct and acceptable way than outsiders ever could because they already participate in the local discourse. At this grassroots level, much of the innovation in public art has been taking place for years. Here, various decision-making processes, definitions of self, terms of collaboration, and redefinitions of art evolve and shift: Such gains could benefit larger institutions who are now beginning to address these issues, just as the grassroots organizations could benefit from the more generous sources for funding, administrative support, technological resources, and other theoretical perspectives at the disposal of the larger institutions. And, as individual artists justly believe that their work can help their colleagues learn to better focus their lenses to see and understand themselves more clearly, and to then refocus and create new and more useful images for themselves, they must also be sure that those lenses are focused on the communities, not just the artists.
Although public art may spring from artists’ genuine desire to be of service to others, some less well thought out projects smack of charitable and elitist contributions passed down from the informed to the uninformed: the art-world brings gifts of information, intellectual stimulation, appeals for action, and the like to people of lesser status who are presumably in need of such gifts. In planning their projects, artists might ask themselves what communities they identify as their own. How often do they mirror their own customs, and reveal their own community’s shadows, instead of those of the people they consider "the other"?
As artists and arts professionals, we must also examine our desire, in Suzanne Lacy’s words, to "push the envelope of art"6 unthinkingly, which may serve to expand the domain and power of the institutionalized art-world while further isolating, and sometimes thereby disrespecting, those who are our art’s supposed beneficiaries. We must face the consequences of remaining within established conceptual boundaries of vocabulary and point of view and continuing to promote art-world definitions and categories for evaluating art, even within the rubric of public art. If we see value in importing established artists to enrich the community, we must be certain that they are interested in and familiar with local discourses instead of merely extending mainstream concerns.
In the face of all the difficulties involved in shaping this new field, how can we encourage fresh thinking about art in relation to our society? I think some of the answers lie in breaking down and reshaping our institutional boundaries, moving away from the conceptual framework of art-world institutions and their goals of artistic progress and innovation. They lie in forming ongoing partnerships and collaborations between art institutions and community organizations. They lie in learning from the discourses of long-time community artists and activists. And they are also situated in ourselves: by questioning our discourse, our ambitions, our knowledge, and our skills, as we bring art of the highest order to the communities with which we identify, on their turf, and on their terms.
notes
1. Many of these organizations have recently joined to form the Chicago Coalition of Community Cultural Centers to extend their effectiveness city-wide.
2. The Percent for Arts program, which allocates a percentage of the construction/renovation costs of certain municipal buildings for public art, is administered by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
3. For instance, Community Ventures is a program of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs that has been active in this field. It provides seed money for projects such as the Lakefront SRO, in which prospective dwellers work with staff and volunteers to create new housing.
4. For a more thorough description and assessment of "Culture in Action," see Allison Gamble, "Reframing a Movement," and for an interview with its curator, Mary Jane Gablik, " Removing the Frame," both NAE, January, 1994.
5. Notable exceptions were projects by artists who addressed concerns of their own communities. These include Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video-mapping project, which enlisted members of street gangs in his West Town neighborhood to investigate and record the life histories of their neighbors, and Ha Ha's Flood, in which a hydroponic garden was both a locus for information-sharing and care-giving and a metaphor for the community's responsibility in dealing with HIV/AIDS.
6.. " Full Circle," Culture in Action, exhibition catalogue (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, guest curator, and a contributing editor to NAE. As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.