The old dictum “follow the audience ” apparently has its city limits. Despite the sharp rise in the number of non-profit arts groups in Chicago’s sprawling suburbs in the last 15 years, it hasn’t outpaced such growth in the city, according to a recent report. The result: A regional arts scene more concentrated in Chicago than it was in prior decades.
“Whereas the number of new arts groups founded in the 1960s through the 1980s in the city and suburbs were roughly equal, well over half of the [more numerous] recent cohorts were established in Chicago,” states the study, “The Arts Scan Project,” from the Chicago-based Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.
The finding may seem counterintuitive to demographic data that show population leaving the city for its outlying areas. But it makes sense to urban sociologists who have observed how culture, tourism and other entertainment forms and amenities have become a leading, if not the chief, industry of Chicago since the 1990s.
University of Chicago sociologist Terry Nichols Clark, editor of and contributor to the 2004 book “The City as an Entertainment Machine,” cited a new economic model for major metropolises.
“Amenities attract smart people. Smart people create jobs,” he said. “The old model was people move where there are jobs.”
The Donnelley Foundation, a prominent funder of smaller non-profit arts organizations, decided it wanted hard data on such groups operating in a Chicago region that stretches into Wisconsin and Indiana. Paul Botts, who heads Donnelley’s Chicago program and wrote the study, said it had been assumed within the foundation that there might be “a few hundred” groups here. Instead, researchers counted 1,158 that were active here as of last summer, with 544 of them founded since 1997.
Of those 544, 325, or 60 percent, were based in the city. And more than half of all 638 groups in the city are within 10 ZIP codes between the Loop and the North Side lakefront. Botts noted that a redevelopment boom in that area and a big municipal investment in entertainment amenities, such as Millennium Park, has helped to draw young and old consumers of the arts. And more artists want to work and live among their colleagues within the orbit of this cultural activity, Botts observed.
Among other report findings:
– Nearly one-third of all arts organizations in the region are theater groups. Of those founded in the last decade, more than 66 percent are in the city. But more than half of all music groups founded in that period are based outside Chicago.
– Some promising clusters of arts group have emerged outside the city’s core, especially on the Far South Side, where there are 20 arts groups, 14 founded since 1996. In the suburbs, the largest are in Elgin, St. Charles-Geneva, and Willowbrook-Burr Ridge.
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NON-PROFIT ARTS GROUPS
Active as of summer 2006
DISCIPLINE CHICAGO REST OF REGION
Theater 239 140
Music 129 188
Visual arts 84 63
Dance 76 46
Film 26 10
Literature 15 10 Architecture 9 2
Multidisciplinary 47 51
Other 13 10
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