CAC’s Chicago Artist to Watch: Josue Pellot

Temporary Allegiance. Courtesy of Josue Pellot.

An interview with Josue Pellot, Chicago Artist To Watch

By Miguel Jimenez

Everyone meets at Humboldt Park’s Café Colao to have coffee on a Tuesday morning — from local politicians to the neighborhood’s elderly. I met with Chicago Artist to Watch Josue Pellot, and what began as an interview developed into another conversation among the many in Café Colao.

MJ: What do you usually order here?

JP: At the very least, I’ll always have Café con Leche.

MJ: Why did you choose this café for our interview?

JP: I was born in Puerto Rico but raised here [Humboldt Park], and a lot of my work comes from conversations I’ve had in this Café, from just hanging out and talking to people. Ideas for some work began here and turned into full projects. For instance, I was eating a sandwich one day and saw this machine in the corner.

Josue points to the “Boricuas,” a toy vending machine that sells stereotypical Puerto Rican toy figures for fifty cents.

Family Portrait of Boricuas Toys. Courtesy of Josue Pellot.

MJ: It seems like Puerto Rican stereotypes are packaged and sold back to the Puerto Rican community.

JP: Yeah. It sells an identity back to you — puts it in a capsule and sells it to you for fifty cents. I don’t think it was done purposefully. Irresponsibly, yes. But it wasn’t an evil plan. It does, however, set the “other” as a commodity. So then I thought of making my own Boricua figures out of my own family. I started with my Dad. I made my family into “Boricuas” to put it out to people too. Some stereotypes are true, but there are other things that are true too. In part, my family of “Boricuas” created a balance. A kid pulled out my dad after putting in his fifty cents. My dad’s Boricua figure was so normal that the kid seemed confused.

MJ:Is this work in your community that influenced your neon signs?

JP: A lot of my work is based on my community as well as the influence of post-colonialism, both here and on the island. Much of the conversation revolves around commerce. Nowadays, you colonize by invading and taking over the market. Then the people depend on the colonizer.

Josue opens his laptop and with a few clicks brings up an image of the Castillo de San Felipe del Morro, known simply as “El Morro,” a fortress built by Spaniards in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He clicks on another file and an image of a shopping plaza in Chicago with a food store and laundromat appears next to the image of El Morro. Josue points out the castle-like architectural similarity between both buildings.

JP: The neon signs tell a story of when the Spaniards came and conquered the Tainos [the indigenous people of Puerto Rico] and when the Tainos revolted to kill Saucedo [a Spanish Conquistador]. I did research and found images of those events and animated them as templates for neon signs. I just completed my first neon sign. The goal is to put it on these storefront windows. The neon signs in the context of the shopping plaza that resembles the Spanish fortress really drive the point home. At first glance, people may think they’re just ads for beer or whatever. Then they’ll realize they’re depicting events of our history. It’s also a shared history among other people.

Josue stretches out the images of his neon signs on his laptop screen. The Spanish Conquistadors are animated by the blinking of the lights. First blink: A conquistador aims his sword at the back of a Taino man. Second Blink: The sword pierces out through the chest. The second neon piece animates two Taino men drowning Saucedo.

MJ:What led you into this art form?
JP: It was through graffiti that I learned the basics of painting, and it also taught me about public intervention to some degree — it can be in your face, and just as appreciated or unappreciated.

Josue clicks on his laptop until he finds a photo of an installation he did on a highway in Puerto Rico. A flag designed by him, a variation of the Puerto Rican flag with 51 stars, waves in the sky on a streetlight pole. Below it, Josue is surrounded by a police squad.

Temporary Allegiance. Courtesy of Josue Pellot.

JP: I had a loophole permit to do this — I acquired a permit from the city to use a truck with a mechanical arm in the expressway for documentation. I left the part about the 15×25-foot flag out. When the cops showed up and saw the permit, they didn’t know what to make of the flag.

It was a site-specific installation. It was near the site of “Guerra de las Banderas,” [War of the flags], where during a period of time people took down each other’s flags, US and Puerto Rican, back and forth. And it was also near across from a mall, Plaza Las Americas, where a woman from the senate put up a big US flag. The flag I made gained stars — fifty. And I chose that location to put it in context with the “flag war” going on and the mall that happens to have a logo with the sails of the Spaniards Ships. So it comments on two things — the people who colonized Puerto Rico first, and those who colonized Puerto Rico for a second time, the United States.

It also brings back the idea of colonialism through the market. Plaza Las Americas has some of the best selling stores in the US and Puerto Ricans spend a lot of money there.

Boxes. Courtesy of Josue Pellot.

MJ: You have other pieces that seem to divert from your work on identity, like the boxes that resemble Malta logos.

JP: Those pieces are looser, more abstract. I’m also into minimalism and pop art. They lead into other conversations: object vs. painting. But there’s always a common thread throughout the work.

He points to a refrigerator in the corner of the café.

JP: You can buy “Malta” here. The colors from the box pieces came from the Malta labels. It’s a bottled malt beverage that, through our culturally conditioned taste buds, has become a symbol of identity among Latino consumers.

If you ask most Puerto Ricans in the states, “Do you drink Malta?” they’ll say, “Of course I do. I’m Puerto Rican!” They think, “I consume, therefore I am.” This form of identification is mass-produced and up for sale. Those bottles of Malta hold the standard for culture. These pieces and the Malta are both equally commercial and ideological, but they represent two different manifestations, two different scales and amounts of cultural power. Ironically, some Malta is made in the USA.

MJ:What are you working on now, and where are you going with your work?

JP: The neon project is in the works. Later on this year I will be in Bristol, England for a group show. I have a solo exhibition coming up at North Eastern University next year. And in 2010, I’ll have a solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center. This summer I’ll be giving a talk in Humboldt Park coordinated by the CAC and IPRAC. I always want feedback from people in the community. And public projects? They tend to happen randomly.

CAC: Fear and Curating in Chicago by John Brunetti

Fear and Curating in Chicago

An interview with and by John Brunetti, Director, Alfedena Gallery

What motivated you to become a curator?

JB: Fear.

Seriously?

JB: Yes, seriously. Fear can be a great motivator. It can either hold you back or set you free. I had never intended to be a curator, just as I had never intended to be an art critic. Those were two jobs that grew out of my desire to survive in the arts after I got my MFA in 1987. My original intention was to be a painter. But in the case of my painting career, fear kept me from making that happen, so I decided to start making fear work for me in other ways.

Sounds like the origin issue of a super hero comic.

JB: I lived and breathed Marvel comics as a kid, so I guess I am a student of Stan Lee as well. I always loved that line from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility.” My fear of being the subscription manager at the New Art Examiner for too many years was greater than the fear I had of the blank page, so that is how I started writing art reviews.

Let’s get back to curating. What was the first show you curated, and how did that come about?

JB: In 1999 I was asked to curate a group show for ARC Gallery. At that point I had been writing art criticism for about nine years. I accepted the offer to curate this show because I knew that I had to expand my skills to remain employable in the arts; I was getting older, and Mr. Fear was starting to make occasional visits in the middle of the night.

It doesn’t seem that it would have been that complicated for you to put on a show.

JB: Well, you have to remember that as a critic I had seen my share of poorly realized group shows, and I didn’t want to follow in that pattern. Moreover, writing by its nature is a very solitary endeavor, while curating — good curating — is a collaborative art that embraces artists, breathing people. The years of writing gave me access to many artists to consider for the show, so that taught me an invaluable lesson: See and be aware of as many artists as possible, and talk to these people, listen to these people, look these people in the eyes. Visit their studios not only to see what they are working on now, but the direction in which their work is going. Most shows are planned one or two years in advance, so it helps to anticipate where an artist is going with his or her work. From that point on I started to keep a little black book, not to get dates, but to be able to pick up the phone and make a show happen.

You mentioned earlier that you saw many poorly realized group shows. What did you mean by that, and how did you avoid that yourself?

JB: I was always seeing group shows through the lens of writing criticism. A success to me was when the show conveyed something more than the sum of its parts. This means, Do the works in the show communicate with each other as much as they do the viewer? Is there a compelling dialogue going on? A good group show should echo a good dinner party where overlapping conversations reveal more about the guests than they realize.

So who is your audience as a curator — the critics? the public? artists?

JB: When I worked for the Evanston Art Center, I was conscious of curating shows that provided many different entry points to diverse audiences that ranged from children to those more familiar with contemporary art. This was central to the art center’s mission. I found a way to strike a balance by showing work that could be interpreted through formal elements as well as conceptual ideas. A large part of making this happen was listening to the needs of their executive director, Alan Leder, and earlier Peter Gordon, and the exhibitions committee. To be successful as a curator you should have a strong sense of the institution you work for and its audience.

Any fears remaining?

JB: Until the next show goes up, I always fear the empty white cube of the gallery.

CAC’s Chicago Artist to Watch: Terry Dixon

The Chicago Artists To Watch program is an effort to showcase talented CAC members from communities who have been under-represented in the past. Our goal is to increase awareness of artists from a wide variety of backgrounds and support artists of any age, cultural or ethnic background, at any stage of their careers.

Terry Dixon shows us there’s something more to watch for in an artist than just artistic talent. Born in Washington, D.C., earning a BFA from Atlanta College of Arts, and receiving an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Terry is a traveler of cities and of the mind — always exploring the significance of his surroundings. Here we travel with Terry through his thoughts and over his canvases.

An Interview with Terry Dixon, Chicago Artist To Watch
By Miguel Jimenez

Terry Dixon. Courtesy of the artist.

You have a special awareness for our everyday surroundings. It comes across in your work through lines that move around images in your pieces. You refer to them as “abstract kinetic lines.”

I’ve always been conscious of visual surroundings in my life, and they’ve molded me into a complex sponge of visual ideas. Through those surroundings and continuous learning experiences, I find myself always changing and practicing different techniques.

Yes. Using lines in my work has a large impact on how I bring my photographic images to life, and this makes them move in a certain rhythm. I started creating lines within my work years ago as a child and as I became older I perfected them. My lines evolved, gaining their own energy during my undergraduate work in art school.

These lines seem to create a blueprint — a blueprint of emotions and feelings of a human experience. As a socially conscious artist, is this something you aim for?

The human experience regarding my artwork, and the lines that intertwine and flow across the surface, is a spontaneous, emotional, and an indescribable personal interaction. The lines bring my abstracted photographic imagery to life and bring motion and energy into each piece.

I also have a connection with jazz, and it has a large influence on my blueprint style of line flow. The concentrations of lines are rhythmic in their creation, in each stroke. I keep a very open ear to different tones, melodies and the mood of particular sounds of jazz. This plays a big part on setting the transition of my line control and intuitive executions of my line structure.

Neil. Courtesy of the artist.

Do you listen to jazz while you work? How does it accompany your creative process?

I listen to jazz as I create my work and I try to match a certain jazz artist with the piece that I am trying to create. If I am working on something with high energy and deep abstraction I might play Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. He’s an artist who has had a strong influence on the creation of my artwork. Listening to Miles Davis’ free-jazz period, I’m able to tap into a freestyle flow within my own work. The harsh and abrupt trumpet notes let me break loose from total structure within the creation of my art. Jazz has always been a part of my life as an artist. Being able to communicate with music within my art has opened my mind to various complex and creative ideas.

Some of that high energy in your work is visible in a painting style that has been described as “aggressive.” In contrast to that style, you have somber and melancholy images in your pieces. What are looking to convey?

The connection with subtle images and aggressive energy is a part of my intuitive interaction. Some of my work conveys a personal emotion or message that I’m trying to share with the viewer. That message, a lot of the time, is locked in the art piece in various ways. Sometimes the energy within the art piece is released, connecting with the viewer through my use of color, images and lines. My message to the viewer is never directed to anyone because the message within each art pieces evolves over time.

Man & Bicycle. Courtesy of the artist.

Back to the idea of the detail in your work as blueprints of humanity: Where are you in your own blueprint? Where are you going?

I would have to say that within the last seven years I have matured into my own identity as an artist. I am currently working on two bodies of work that focus on urban environments that are centered around social and political situations within the United States.

My work is always changing and where I am going is sometimes hard to predict. I’m always evolving. I do have plans to work on an interactive installation that will integrate sound and video within my future projects. I’m looking to create an installation with my style of work that will give the viewer an opportunity to explore more deeply and have a different experience within the context of creations.

CAC’s Chicago Artist To Watch: Stephanie Graham

The Chicago Artists To Watch program is an effort to showcase talented CAC members from communities who have been under-represented in the past. Our goal is to increase awareness of artists from a wide variety of backgrounds and support artists of any age, cultural or ethnic background, at any stage of their careers.

CAC sat down with February’s “Chicago Artist To Watch,” Stephanie Graham, to learn about this artist’s fresh eyes through a conversation about her photography and relationship with the city.

An Interview with Stephanie Graham, Chicago Artist to Watch
By Miguel Jimenez

Self Portrait. Courtesy of Stephanie Graham.

First, a little bit about your background: Where were you raised, and where did you do your undergraduate work?

I was raised in Schaumburg and went to Columbia College in Chicago. I graduated in 2005.

Your photographs are taken in both urban and suburban settings. Is that a reflection on the duality of living in the suburbs and studying in the city?

I was raised in the suburbs, and even while going to Columbia I still lived at home in Schaumburg. But there was always something about the city that intrigued me when I first started to go there — there was just a lot more diversity. During high school, my friends and I would take trips out to the city and go all over Chicago — just hanging out and exploring. It was an experience of freedom from the whole suburban life that was really routine. The city had lots of layers to it. There were lots of different things going on and people from different walks of life.

Untitled. Courtesy of Stephanie Graham.

In many of your photographs taken in the city, there seems to be a focus on the way women express themselves with their bodies and fashion. What do you look to capture in these photographs?

A lot of it is just off of my own observations of people. I just try to re-set them and exaggerate them a little. They are women who have attitudes and exude a confidence all the time that I’d never seen before. I am showing this confidence and making it grander than what it usually is.

Can you describe the process behind these photographs?

Everything is always set up. I have stylists, make-up artists, and models. I talk to the models about a character that I build up. I can see a lady sitting at the bus stop with her hands in her pockets, very voguish, but she can be tired waiting for the bus. I tell a model, “Picture the girl waiting for the bus, it’s really cold, and you have to get to work.” Models and people can relate to this because they’ve seen these characters. They know the person that I’m talking about and they know the emotion.

It seems like fashion brings something unique to these re-staged real-life scenarios. Fashion and photography really collide. Where did this idea come from?

I like fashion photography and I also like photo journalism. I take both things and put them together.

Logan @ Walmart. Courtesy of Stephanie Graham.

You have a project that seems to follow these ideas, entitled The Wal-Mart Project. Can you tell us about it?

A really good friend and I go to Wal-Mart and take pictures every year. We dress up alike and pretend we’re a couple, and we take pictures together. I just thought it would be fun to bring a model into Wal-Mart and take a picture. They have these crazy backdrops with sailboats and leaves and other stuff, and I thought it’d be interesting. That’s something that I’m working on now. It’s fun to see the portrait photographer get involved. I direct the model and after we take the picture, we all look at the picture. The model can look, the photographer can look, and we have to decide whether or not we want the picture. It’s just a fun project. I’m going to video tape the next one.

Is that what you’re currently working on?

I want to continue to work on my Wal-Mart project and do a little video with it. I’m also working on a documentary/mockumentary about black kids who are raised in predominantly white suburbs. I’ll be able to do a portrait project with that.

Finally, what keeps you going as an artist, specifically when something like the State arts budget cut occurs?

I hope that someday I can get to the point where I can be so successful that I can meet with someone and change his/her mind or be able to cut a check, because art is really important. If I hadn’t studied art I wouldn’t be here. It’s all that I’ve wanted to do. It’s important that other people get that opportunity to express themselves and know that careers are available in art and that you can make a living doing it. I can’t believe that they cut the budget. I just really hope that I can get to the point where I can make a difference.

CAC Perspectives: Can Modern Art and Religion Get Along?

The December issue of Chicago Artists’ News contains another installment of “Perspectives,” a column in which invited artists, critics, gallerists, and other art-world figures weigh in on an issue or phenomenon that has caught their attention.

This month, James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago addresses what he takes to be the “largest issue in art education”: the lack of dialogue between contemporary art and religion. We’d like to know what ArtStyle readers think about this issue. Is there space for genuine religious content in contemporary art? Or is contemporary art inimical to sincere religious expression? How might art writing accommodate religion? What exactly accounts for the gap between modern art and religion?

Jeremy Biles, Editor
Chicago Artists’ News

Bridging the Gap Between Modern Art and Religion
by James Elkins

As a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve noticed that art students who make work with religious or spiritual significance often can’t get interesting criticism. Their instructors will often shy away from religious or spiritual themes, and talk instead about safe things like color and form. At the professional level, if artists make work that is infused with religious themes, they typically cannot get shows in the main art galleries, or places in biennales or art fairs.

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987, Cibachrome, silicone, plexiglass, wood frame 60 x 40 inches (152.4 x 101.6 cm); framed: 65 x 45 1/8 inches (165.1 x 114.6 cm) ASE/N-42-A-PH. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery.

On the other hand, if their work is critical of religion, they often can participate in the international art market. Chris Ofili, Andres Serrano, and Maurizio Cattelan are only the most famous of a large number of artists whose work is seen as openly critical or skeptical of organized religion and therefore nominally acceptable in the art world. In general, if an artist practices a non-Western religion, or a tribal religion, or if the religion is private or otherwise hidden, it can be acceptable; otherwise, the work has to be critical of religion.

So I have become concerned that the very large number of student artists, throughout the world, who are exploring religious or spiritual themes are cut off from serious, engaged criticism; and when they become professional artists, they are marginalized by an art world intent on skepticism, hermeticism, ambiguity, and many other things — but not the direct expression of faith.

St. Sebastian by Baleison and Canavesio

I think this problem is at least in part attributable to a gulf of misunderstandings, or differences, between two groups of scholars. One group I’ll call the “religionists,” using the word that academics tend to use to identify practitioners of any sort. They would include not only scholars of religion and the history and philosophy of religion, but also scholars who write about religious themes in relation to art, such as Mark C. Taylor. They would also include art historians who work in religion departments, or theological unions; and they would definitely include art critics who are engaged with contemporary religion, spirituality, or “New Age” (NRM, New Religious Movement) art. The common ground of this first group is the sense that religion, or spirituality, has always been an accompaniment of modernism, and that modern art is, in many ways, a site of the partial recuperation of such themes.

Christ en Majeste, Isenheim Altarpiece, Grunewald

The second group includes art historians who believe more or less the opposite: that modernism is predicated on a secularism that often springs from political convictions, and often expresses itself in various formalisms. In that second point of view, an artist like Kandinsky is an exception, and an artist like Rothko who speaks openly about religious issues is fundamentally misguided about his or own work (which is valued for any number of non-religious reasons).

The differences between these two groups of scholars are encapsulated in a pair of quotes. One is from John Updike: “Modern art is a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life.” The other is from the art historian T. J. Clark: “[I will not have anything to do with] the self-satisfied Leftist clap-trap about ‘art as substitute religion.’” These quotes served as epigraphs to my book The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. After its publication, I started getting invitations from Christian colleges. Those experiences have been salutary. I’ve discovered that at least some Christian institutions are very open to discussion on these points. And in those same four years, I have gotten only one invitation from a secular institution. MIT held a conference called “Deus (ex) historia,” on religion and art, and I gave a paper there — but that conference had no “religionists,” and only a few artists, all of whom practice private or non-Western religions — ones acceptable in the art world, and in academia.

Flight and Failure of Saint Anthony, left panel, by Bosch

But I’d like to see both groups represented, and to find a way of speaking that can accommodate them. This past April, the SAIC hosted an event entitled “Re-Enchantment,” which was an attempt to work on these problems. I tried to invite people from both sides of that question. I failed. Several people (whom I won’t name) said that just sitting down at a table with people who will talk about religion and modernism would itself be too unpleasant.

Despite the disproportionate representation of people willing to talk about art and religion, we had a good conversation, which has been transcribed for the book Re-Enchantment (which I’m co-editing with David Morgan). Here we will try again to redress the problem by inviting some thirty people who were not at the April event to write comments on our conversation. Our hope is that the book will continue the attempt to speak across the gap, and to be of use to art students and artists who need ways of articulating their religious practices.

I think that the misunderstandings between “religionists” and others is the single largest issue in art education. It’s not like religious issues in the real world, which everyone knows are crucial: in the art world religion is belittled or hidden, and that makes these problems even harder to solve.

James Elkins is E. C. Chadbourne Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, and also professor of Visual and Critical Studies, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His most resent books (edited) are Visual Literacy and Visual Practices Across the University.

Re-Enchantment is forthcoming from Routledge Press in 2008. The transcript of the panel discussion is available on request from jameselkins@fastmail.fm.

CAC Perspectives: Chuck Thurow on the Death of Artists

The Chicago Artists' News, the CAC’s monthly paper, has a feature called “Perspectives,” in which established artists, critics, and other art-world figures pinpoint and analyze art-related practices and developments that have caught their attention, with the aim of eliciting discussion about those phenomena.

In this article, which appeared as a “Perspectives” column in the November issue of Chicago Artists’ News, Chuck raises the question of how to facilitate arts patronage in Chicago so that artists can flourish.

We want to hear from you with your thoughts about the state of arts patronage in Chicago. How can artist-patron relationships be established and maintained? How might the arts patronage community be democratized? And what role should critical art writing — in newspapers, journals, or blogs — play in all of this? As with all future contributions, we would look forward to your responses to the issues raised in this column, so please don’t hesitate to join in the conversation.

Jeremy Biles, Editor
Chicago Artists’ News

Roger Brown, Mothra At Inner Circle Drive, 1988, o/c, 48 x 72″. Courtesy of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brown family. © SAIC

The Death of Artists and Its Causes
By Chuck Thurow

My mother died at the beginning of September. At the time, I stated in the obituary that the cause was “old age” (even though she was only 96 and her mother had lived until 103). When I received the death certificates, I discovered I was wrong. According to the eminent gerontologist Dan Brauner, the cause was “failure to thrive.”

I had not realized that the result of the failure to thrive is death. It gives a new urgency to the Hyde Park Art Center’s mission, which includes “making Chicago a city in which artists can work and thrive.” The rotting corpses of artists scattered about the streets of Chicago is not a pretty sight to contemplate; consequently, I want to discuss how we can assure that artists thrive.

Death and the Standing Nude by Sebald Beham

When discussing this topic with artists the first item that comes up is individual artist’s grants, i.e. money. Money is good. There is no doubt about that — particularly if there is plenty of it and it is spread around among lots of artists. The phenomenal success of the Works Progress Administration in Chicago is to the point: paying artists to stay in their studios and produce art worked. The quality and innovation of the work is striking — especially with the African American artists that were in the orbit of the South Side Community Art Center. It’s also instructive how quickly many of these artists stopped producing when the money was turned off and they turned to other ways to support themselves. (The federal government, it also must be noted, did not realize the cultural treasury they had created, and much of the work was trashed at the end of the program.)

Such a system is still doable. New Zealand, for example, provides a financial safety net for all of its artists. It seems, however, a pipe dream in current U.S. culture in which money is being concentrated into fewer hands, not spread among the many. The Illinois Arts Council’s and the Department of Cultural Affairs’ individual artist’s grants do continue, and, although small, need to be applauded. I clap less enthusiastically for the foundation-based grants such as the MacArthur Fellows, United States Artists, Creative Capital, The Driehaus Awards, Artadia, and the soon-to-be Three Arts Foundation grants. These well-meaning efforts strive mightily for diversity and inclusion, but also end up reinforcing the random walk of artistic success. They do not introduce any true democratic character into the process.

Il Trionfo Della Morte by Già a Palazzo Sclafani

If artists are to thrive in Chicago, for better or for worse (I would argue for the better), we must build and expand the character and number of the individual patrons who support artists — not government, corporations, or foundations. In discussing the Hyde Park Art Center efforts to support artists, artist Ron Jones once told me: “If a city has a good patron community and good critical writing, you don’t have to worry about the artists. They will take care of themselves.”

Ron is the artist who created the now demolished Pritzker Park on the 300 block of South State Street. He is currently a professor of design in Stockholm. It was a fresh notion: the idea of not worrying about the artists, but instead of worrying about the patrons intrigued me. (We will have to discuss critical writing in Chicago another time.)

If artists are to thrive in Chicago, it is critical that we make the patronage community democratic — not a club that only includes Ken Griffin, Marilyn Alsdorf, and Fred McDougal. The developer who gives free space to Mess Hall in Rogers Park should be celebrated as heartily as those aforementioned, and he may be making as big an impact on Chicago art as they. To develop this community is not difficult, but it needs artists and others to focus on it as a goal. Patrick McCoy’s organization in Bronzeville, Diasporal Rhythms, is right to the point: it encourages a broad spectrum of the African American community to take responsibility for its artists.

Ben Gest, Chuck, Alice, & Dale, 2003. MCA Collection, gift of
the artist and Daiter Contemporary, Chicago. (This work was part
of Not Just Another Pretty Face at the Hyde Park Art Center.)

Likewise, the Hyde Park Art Center is starting up its Not Just Another Pretty Face project again. This successful effort links artists with individual patrons, and together they decide on a work for art. It turns out this type of patronage not only supports artists financially but stimulates their creativity. A number of the artists in the previous two rounds subsequently developed new bodies of work stimulated by the initial efforts. Others experimented with new techniques that led to major commissions later. And others produced quality work that has been exhibited in major museums. The record on the side of the patrons is similar: contemporary art became immediately relevant to their lives. As a consequence, they not only have continued as enthusiastic supporters of the artists with whom they worked, but a number of them have also developed into leaders within the contemporary art scene — joining boards and organizations.

We at the Center have discovered that once people realize that significant patronage is not just the purview of the rich, they want to be involved. They have fun. They bring enthusiasm and energy that actually keeps artists alive and working. I am not arguing the inappropriateness of advocacy groups such as the Arts and Business Council (focusing on corporations) or the Illinois Arts Alliance (on governmental budgets and policies) or even the Chicago Artists’ Coalition (on artists themselves), but instead I am arguing that we are missing an organized effort to make a broad spectrum of the population into active patrons of the artists rather than simply the consumers of art — the audience numbers that we as organizations report to foundations and government

So here is my plea: more patrons so there are fewer dead artists. I already know too many.

Chuck Thurow is Executive Director of the Hyde Park Art Center.

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