`This is `drive Isobel crazy day,` ” Isobel Neal says as she leads the way into the office of her Superior Street art gallery.
A mailing tube containing several pictures from an artist in Mexico has arrived opened, and two pictures are missing. Did the artist send those two in a separate package, or does the opened container mean they have been taken?
Neal is on the telephone, calling the post office, customs officials, the artist, trying to find out just what has happened.
Meanwhile, her calendar is filled with the to-dos of the day. She`s getting ready for a new exhibit featuring artists John Rozelle and Reese Bennett. She had an 8 o`clock board meeting that morning and is trying to find time to get up to a gallery at Northwestern University to see an African art show. Her mother is at home, in the midst of a two-week visit with her and her husband, Earl. And it`s holiday time, which isn`t easy for anyone.
Actually, it`s the sort of hectic schedule Neal thrives on. She is a doer.
Three years ago Neal started the Isobel Neal Gallery, one of the few galleries nationwide that is exclusively for black artists. Her days are consumed with this artistic pioneering. She juggles the long hours spent in the gallery with more long hours spent on various volunteer boards.
Her home, a loft apartment that overlooks the lake, reflects this incredibly busy life and schedule.
It reflects it in the sense that her home gives her the quiet and peace necessary to unwind after the hecticness of her days. In contrast to the sharp-edged, white-walled art gallery, the Neals` home is quiet-muted almost, in warm, earth colors-and speaks of comfort. The walls are exposed brick, and the high ceilings are beamed. One long wall is all bookcase, filled with well- used books on art, cooking and history as well as novels and biographies. There is art everywhere. Pictures hang on the walls, African artifacts are in corners.
But nothing overwhelms. The eye doesn`t jump from object to object. Instead, the overall effect is to soothe and comfort.
”When we are at home, I want a quiet haven, a place to wind down. I want security; I want comfort,” she says.
Small, dressed impeccably and stylishly in a soft blue suit draped with a vividly colored scarf, red-framed glasses accenting pretty facial features, Neal on this day is every inch a woman who appears comfortable about herself and her surroundings.
But that comfort-so important to her in home and in personal life-has not come easily, for her or her husband.
Spending long days running a business that has the peculiar dual demands of an aesthetic eye and an acumen for the bottom line was not an activity she or her husband would have predicted when they married 35 years ago.
And being immersed in the world of art is vastly different from immersion in the world of law, which occupies her husband. Earl Neal is a prominent Chicago attorney, the second generation head of Earl L. Neal & Associates, which specializes in municipal law. Their son, Langdon, is the third generation working for the firm.
Working is not an economic necessity in Isobel Neal`s life. She and her husband have an abundance of the nice things of life, including a boat they keep in Miami and a 50-foot boat being built for them.
Inner comfort
But material comfort isn`t what Neal was looking for. She wanted the comfort of knowing she was doing her full measure, and that is what she is doing now.
”I went through a long period feeling like I was a round peg trying to fit into a square hole,” she says bluntly. ”I`ve hit a high now; I`m doing something that really inspires me to work day and night.”
Her husband acknowledges that he has had trouble understanding her drive. ”When we got married, I had the simplistic notion that the husband supported and provided and the wife followed her husband`s goals and desires,” he says. ”I almost feel embarrassed now that I felt that way.
”And with the art . . . I just didn`t understand the contribution that art could make to the quality of life. . . . For Isobel to be as consumed with art as I was consumed pursuing the law was very difficult for me to accept.” A picture hanging in their living room symbolizes some of the transitions they have made in the course of their marriage and points also to Neal`s drive to provide black artists a showcase.
The painting, by New York artist Charles Alston, shows a group of five black people, men and women, all facing forward. They are dressed simply, and their faces appear almost expressionless until one looks more closely and notices different looks in the eyes, different ways the mouths are set.
Neal saw the picture eight or nine years ago in New York and knew immediately she wanted it. To her eye, the expressions on the faces reflected mixtures of expectation, apprehension, hope and disappointment.
”It`s not necessarily a happy piece, but it never depressed me. To me, it was a statement of promise. There`s a silence in that picture, of those people waiting for something. I came home and told Earl I wanted it.”
Earl:
”When the picture came, it reminded me of everything I thought I had escaped from. Isobel saw character and dignity in it; I saw poverty and projects. I didn`t want to share my life every day with that picture.”
Isobel hung the picture. Gradually-he says-he came to see it through her eyes.
The expectation and hope Neal saw in the painting tie directly with her gallery. ”Black artists are poised, waiting for recognition. They`re waiting for a chance to blossom, bloom. That`s what I`m trying to do with the gallery, give them a place to show.”
The Neals have been married since 1955-they met while she was a freshman in college and he was in law school-and Neal started working soon after marriage as a special education teacher in Chicago.
”My family always encouraged me to do something, to learn something, so I could be independent. The lesson (from her family) was, learn to take care of yourself. They wanted me to be prepared, they knew that life isn`t always easy.”
The unrepresented
She started collecting art, especially work by black artists. She bought art often at street fairs and at the South Side Community Art Center. ”I was always aware that black people just weren`t represented at galleries,” she says.
The major turning point that took her away from the special education teaching and would ultimately lead to her pioneering gallery, however, didn`t come until 1975, when son Langdon went to college.
Neal decided she too wanted to go back to school, to take graduate courses in anthropology. She was thinking University of Chicago; her husband thought differently.
”I felt she needed to escape from my life,” Earl says. ”My demands had placed a toll on her finding time to grow to her own stature. So I encouraged her to go away, to a setting where she could grow and live independently of me. It was probably the best thing I`ve ever done.”
She enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara and spent the next two years there, living first in a dormitory with students far younger than she, then in an apartment. Anthropology ”was a small department, and I was by far the oldest in my group. I was even older than my adviser. And it was wonderful; I was able to bury myself in what I was doing.”
”It was definitely a turning point. It was the first time I had a sense of doing something purely for me, something I really loved. From that point, I had an awareness of what I wanted.”
She returned in 1977 with her master`s degree in anthropology/archeology and started teaching adult courses at various places, including the Field Museum of Natural History and Northwestern University.
The idea of the art gallery crystallized in 1984.
She had chaired a juried art show on black creativity at the Museum of Science and Industry, spending weeks going through slides submitted by black artists throughout the country. ”I saw all this . . . work . . . and I thought, `What do these artists do the rest of the time? Where do they exhibit?` I knew they had an excellence that just was not being seen. Maybe five galleries had one (black artist) each, but that doesn`t service a community this large.
”Doing an art gallery had always been a dormant dream in my life, and the time came where I just had to do it. It was like everything I had done before prepared me for this.”
On Friday night, Sept. 19, 1986, the Isobel Neal Gallery opened with a show featuring octogenarian Chicago artist William Carter, many of whose works also hang in the Neals` home.
Since that first night, she has had about 30 shows and gone through a bit of money.
”I took all my savings . . . I had always saved part of my paychecks for 20 years . . . and invested that. And I walked through that money pretty fast; it got me through the first year.”
Starting a new venture is always risky business, especially so when the venture is in uncharted waters.
Good art is universal, she says-it cuts across lines of geography, race and sex-but black artists simply have never had many places to show their work. The world of galleries is a new one to most of them.
Likewise, the number of black art collectors has always been small. ”As a group, they are not used to going to galleries, and the number of blacks who have dollars expendable (for art) is not large. What we have today is the first solid group of young, professional (black) people who are interested and have the money.
”So this gallery is a unique niche. It`s definitely a very risky business. And a large part of my job is simply educating people.”
Educating people has included her husband.
”When I started talking about doing this, I don`t think he understood what I was about, and I think it`s still somewhat of a mystery to him. That`s not to say he hasn`t supported me all the way. He has, but I think men work so long and so hard, and I suppose they think, `If you don`t have to work, why?` ”
”Isobel says that at times I`m a slow learner, and she`s right,” Earl says. ”But my hesitancy has been completely overcome by seeing this contribution she`s making to the black community. It was difficult the first year (the gallery was open) to understand Isobel and what she was doing. Now I understand, and I`m very proud.”
Making it work
The tough end of the gallery is getting the work that is hung on the walls sold. ”I think other galleries have clientele without budgetary restrictions,” Isobel Neal says. ”We have a target (price) area, and once you get out of that, it`s tough. I understand fully why there have been no
(black) galleries. It`s going to be a long haul.”
Long hauls energize her, however. The challenge energizes her; she has a fierce pride in exhibiting talent that might not otherwise be shown.
She walks through the gallery, pointing out the power in one artwork, the subtlety of another. The hours spent on all this are long, she says, but she wouldn`t have it any other way. And if you don`t spend the time, you`re not going to make it, she adds.
The gallery is starting its fourth year now, ”and I would certainly do it again. I`d like to win the lottery so I could get out of my family`s pocket. This is almost a pioneering effort, and the market is difficult. But I wouldn`t do anything differently. This is something I had to do.”
12 ARTISTS TO WATCH These are the 12 black artists whose works Isobel Neal advises watching for:
– Phoebe Beasley of Los Angeles, who does collages.
– Carol Ann Carter of Ann Arbor, Mich., wall hangings and sculptures.
– Willie L. Carter of Chicago, paintings and drawings.
– Elizabeth Catlett of Cuernavaca, Mexico, sculptures and prints.
– Mary Reed Daniel of Chicago, hand-made paper and watercolors.
– Robert P. Dilworth of Chicago, oils on canvas.
– Juan Logan of Belmont, N.C., acrylics.
– Preston Jackson of Peoria, sculptures.
– Calvin B. Jones of Chicago, acrylics.
– Geraldine McCullough of Chicago, sculptures.
– John Rozelle of New York, sculptures.
– Milton Sherrill of New York, sculptures.
