Part of the glue that holds together every community is a shared locale. It gives a heritage that can be as strong as any other common interest. Even plants and animals are known as a community when they occupy a given area. Proximity in space is a 3-D equivalent of closeness in thought.
How well can a community exist when it’s fragmented? That question is relevant to every art scene, but it’s particularly important in Chicago, where since the early 1970s the number of galleries has increased fivefold, with additions always moving farther from the original center.
Even with uncertain times in the art market, the scene is now larger than ever before. However, the community that once was around Michigan Avenue and Ontario Street spread into other neighborhoods long ago, and by the beginning of the new season in September, it will again become more fragmented, as several established galleries relocate to a comparatively new area.
Will this make a difference to the showing and buying of art in Chicago? If so, whom will it affect, and how?
“There has never been much of a community here,” says Eva-Marie Worthington, who moved her gallery from Winnetka to Chicago in the mid-1970s. “But there was a semblance of one on Ontario Street, with Bud Holland, Phyllis Kind, Marianne Deson and Sonia Zaks all across the street from the (old) Museum of Contemporary Art. Then there was interest and a serious group of collectors.”
The community in question is the one that presents modern and contemporary work. Galleries showing art from other periods have been smaller in number and not grouped in any particular district. The same obviously has been true with showplaces attached to arts centers and colleges.
Twenty-five years ago Ontario Street east of Michigan Avenue was known as Gallery Row. The showplaces clustered around the Museum of Contemporary Art had the reputation for being daring. Those at the Breskin Building (620 N. Michigan Ave.) featured more “blue-chip” artists. Other galleries — on East Ohio Street, Ontario Street, Oak Street — exhibited some of each.
Worthington, who in May moved for the third time within the original gallery district (joining Richard Gray and Alan Koppel in the Hancock Building), says one condition affecting art dealers has never changed: The margin of profit on most artwork is such that dealers always have to look for the cheapest spaces. By 1979, rent around Michigan Avenue was for many dealers prohibitive. And so began the westward expansion to the area between Chicago Avenue and Erie Street and Wells and Sedgwick Streets: River North.
The Zolla-Lieberman Gallery opened on the second floor of 368 W. Huron St. in 1976. A decade later, co-owner Roberta Lieberman said, “We were very naive. On weekdays almost nobody would come. If people had only one day to see art, they went to North Michigan Avenue.” That began to change only after 1979, when Rhona Hoffman and Donald Young, Landfall Press and Roy Boyd expanded the contingent of galleries.u
By the mid-1980s, River North was the place to be, as its large, informal spaces could best accommodate the new large, informal kinds of art. Younger dealers frowned at the growing number of galleries, snidely calling the intersection of Superior and Huron Streets an “art mall,” but few considered opening a space anywhere else.
A community based on artists instead of dealers prompted Laura Weathered to found the Near Northwest Arts Council in 1985 near the intersection of Milwaukee, Damen and North Avenues in Wicker Park. Many artists lived and worked there, suggesting that art shown in the neighborhood stood a better chance of being more immediate, less about fashion or the marketplace. In 1989 this community generated Art around the Coyote, a huge interdisciplinary arts festival; by 1993 the WestSide Gallery District loosely represented 25 showplaces, the largest concentration outside of River North.
Other galleries continued to spring up elsewhere. Marilu Lannon opened a space on North Peoria Street. Paul Klein moved his home, then a gallery, to North Morgan Street. The feminist cooperatives ARC and Artemisia went to Carpenter Street. Each locale had its moment as a possible successor to River North, once rents there skyrocketed and entertainment — restaurants, clubs, boutiques — distracted from art. However, only now, more than a decade after the first stirrings, is one of the outposts about to grow significantly.
It’s called the West Loop Gate district, and the main activity will be south of the old Randolph Street market, on and around Washington Boulevard. In the mid-’80s, Lannon was there, but the area never caught on, and by the end of the decade only Klein was on the northernmost periphery of the district, near Grand Avenue.
“I was rehabbing a loft here to live in,” says Klein, “and had just signed a 17-year lease in River North when the building of galleries burned down. I thought I wasn’t interested in the place my gallery is now in, but I ended up loving it. I like being on my own. I like playing by my rules as opposed to anyone else’s. It has been a mixed blessing for me to see others come this way.”
Kavi Gupta, who in 1994 opened the Vedanta Gallery in Lannon’s old space on Peoria Street, recently bought his second building in the area and says Jan Cicero, Thomas McCormick and two others will be joining him on Washington Boulevard before fall.
“I knew the history of the scene,” Gupta says. “There’s always was a shift (away from the main gallery district) every 10 years or so, and I wanted to think long term. The West Loop Gate Community Organization does not want the River North formula to take over. They don’t want a big commercial development, a Gap or McDonald’s, to come in. They want the area to remain cultural and commercial. Buying property here was a way to have a hand in determining the future.”
When Donald Young recently returned to Chicago after seven years in Seattle, he looked for a large, flexible space in every existing area for galleries, checking out even the South Loop, where collector Lewis Manilow is beating a drum for an arts center in the Trailways building on Wabash Avenue and Roosevelt Road. Like Gupta, Young wanted to buy his space but ended up renting one at just under 6,000 square feet on — again — West Washington Boulevard.
“It has never been my role in life to be a Pied Piper,” Young says. “So my decision was really about the space and how it could make possible certain kinds of work for my artists. Chicago is not like New York. It doesn’t have the force of hundreds of millions of dollars poured into real estate for art galleries. It’s a little more like Los Angeles but easier to get around, and I don’t think it’s bad to go to different spots (to see art) in town.”
So is the idea of community a real, practical consideration in the selling of contemporary art?
Dealers agree that affluent visitors from out of town tend to stay around Michigan Avenue, making galleries there and in River North possible beneficiaries. But visiting collectors nearly always have an itinerary they stick to, attending galleries that feed immediate interests and, at most, dropping in on a few neighbors. The idea that the more galleries there are in an area, the more attention they will all receive is fallacious. Collections result from meaningful concentrated attention.
Casual purchases are, of course, something else. Galleries specializing in low-priced objects often benefit from street traffic that can come with a high density of showplaces. River North still has an edge in this, as most buildings, particularly on Superior Street, house several galleries whereas in Wicker Park they’re fewer in number and comparatively spread out.
“Galleries never really got a foothold in the (Wicker Park) area,” says Joel Leib, who was for a decade on North Damen Avenue before moving to Chelsea in New York this month. “In River North the galleries came before the restaurants. In Wicker Park galleries just nipped around the edges (of the neighborhood), so the restaurant-boutique scene is booming but there now are more bad galleries than good. The area needs a more concentrated effort by more serious galleries like the Chicago Project Room, Beret International and others in the Flatiron building.
“Chelsea is not dissimilar to the (West Loop Gate) area. You can walk around on a weekday and nobody’s there. The difference is that on weekends there’s a parade (of visitors). That’s not going to happen in Chicago. It’s not a grand observation. It’s reality. The climb for galleries is much slower here.”
Among those who have made the climb, the rise of a new gallery district is being watched intently. Most dealers say the ready availability of transportation puts all areas in easy reach; a minority insists that further fragmentation of the scene will have further consequences on overall strength.
“It’s a problem,” says William Lieberman, director of the Zolla-Lieberman Gallery. “It doesn’t look serious because there are quality galleries in all locations. But if you disperse people to several different areas, you’ll have smaller attendance in one or another. So it’s definitely going to be a challenge. We’ll have to do more interesting shows. We’ll all have to work harder.”
