Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago 9780226305233

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Producing Local Color

Producing Local Color Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago

D i ane G r a m s

University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Diane Grams is assistant professor of sociology at Tulane University. She is the co-editor of Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10    1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30517-2 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-30517-1 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grams, Diane, 1957–   Producing local color: art networks in ethnic Chicago / Diane Grams.   p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30517-2 (cloth: alk. paper)  ISBN-10: 0-226-30517-1 (cloth: alk. paper)  1. Art and society—Illinois— Chicago.  2. Artists—Social networks—Illinois—Chicago.  3. Artists— Illinois—Chicago—Social conditions.  4. Ethnic art—Illinois—Chicago.  5. Marginality, Social—Illinois—Chicago.  6. Sociology, Urban—Illinois— Chicago.  7. Social sciences—Network analysis.  8. Pilsen (Chicago, Ill.)— Social life and customs.  9. Bronzeville (Chicago, Ill.)—Social life and customs.  10. Rogers Park (Chicago, Ill.)—Social life and customs. I. Title.   N72.S6G69 2010   306.4'70977311—dc22 2010005957 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables / ix Preface / xi

Introduction / 1 From the Blues to Black Chicago / 1 Art and Urban Places in the Twenty-First Century / 4 Design of the Study / 6 Finding a Research Method / 8 Structure of the Book / 12 ONE

/ Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 17 From Individual to Network Perspectives / 17

Production of Culture as a Research Perspective / 19 Types of Local Art Production Networks / 25 Conclusions / 29 TWO

/ Local Places / 31

Chicago as a Model of a City / 31 Revalorizing the City Center and Surrounding Locales / 35 Local People and Local Color / 36 Change after the Modern Industrial Era / 46 Conclusions / 51 THREE

/ Community-Based Art and Ideologies of Local Participation / 53

Mid-Century Arts Activism in Chicago / 53 A Museum to Represent “a Community” / 54

Community-Based as Activating a Community / 56 Formalization of the Community-Based Approach / 59 Pursuit of Institutional Legitimacy / 59 Intersection of Political and Cultural Capital / 64 Conclusions / 68 FOUR

/ Aesthetic Networks and Cultural Capital / 71 Sociology and Aesthetics / 71 Participants and Resources / 73 Distinction of the Black Middle Class / 81

How Collections Manage the Uncertainty of Subjective Judgment / 87 Men’s Work versus Women’s Work / 92 Formal Art Organizations and Art Markets in Bronzeville / 95 Conclusions / 96 FIVE

/ Autonomy Networks and Artistic Control / 99 Cutting-Edge Artists in Podville / 102 Transnational: Freedom from Ethnicity / 114 A Network of Museum-Quality Artists / 117 Conclusions / 123

SI X

/ Problem-Solving Networks and Social Stability / 127

A Context of Cultural Diversity and Progressive Politics / 127 Facing a Mile-Long Cement Wall / 133 Problem-Solving Ethos in Rogers Park / 139 Using Murals to Redefine Space / 144 Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group / 148 Conclusions / 153 SEVEN

/ Gentrification Networks and the Whitewashing of Culture / 157 Gentrification and Urban Transformation / 157 Theories of Gentrification / 158 Gentrification in Chicago / 159 Gentrification: Establishment of Arbitrary Privileges / 161 Exclusive Spaces for Elite-Culture Consumers / 170 The Ethnically Driven Stability Machine / 180 Conclusions / 183

EIGHT

/ Empowerment Networks and the Restoration of Local Culture / 187 A Place That History Passed By / 189 An Empowerment Network / 190

Contradiction and Innovation Surrounding the Bronzeville Landmarks / 192 Local Investment Circuit / 198 Advocates for a Fair Share of the Public Goods / 200 Circuit of Artists and Administrators / 202 Bronzeville as a Symbol of History and the Locale / 213 Conclusions / 216 NINE

/ Post-Urban Culture? / 221

Researching Art in the Twenty-First Century / 221 Importance of a New Framework / 222 The Future of Race and Ethnicity / 227 Unanswered Questions / 229 Interviews / 231 Notes / 235 References / 247 Index / 259

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES 1.

Bronzeville home of blues musician Muddy Waters, 1953–74 / xvi

2. Comparison of the racial composition of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park to Chicago / 6 3. Comparison of number of sites of publicized arts activities in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park / 9 4. Comparison of number of sites of publicized arts activities to sites for informal activities and public art in three locales / 10 5. Map of Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas district / 32 6. Comparison of number and size of nonprofit art organizations by location in Chicago (2007) / 34 7.

Comparison of income range in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park / 47

8.

Bronzeville household income 1989 and 1999 / 48 PLATES



Plates follow page 112.

1. Increibles Las Cosas Q’ Se Ven (2001) mural by Jeff Zimmerman and youth at Casa San Diego of St. Pius V Parish in Pilsen 2. Mosaic mural made of Venetian glass tile installed on the front of the Orozco Community Academy in Pilsen 3.

Collaborative drawing by the author and Gerald Sanders

4.

A gathering at the Wall of Respect, photograph by Robert Sengstacke (1967)

5.

Patric McCoy in his kitchen

6.

Daniel Texidor Parker’s living room

 / Figures and Tables 7.

Carol Briggs in her living room

8.

Collages by Kevin Lee

9.

Black Face paintings by Julian Williams

10. Dixon Elementary School principal Joan Dameron Crisler with Ye Ye Oba, a painting by Dayo 11. Sign placed in front of Kimberly Aubuchon’s Pilsen apartment building directing people to her monthly “production” 12. Life-Sized Mouse Trap Game at Drivethru Studios by Eric Medine and Thomas Waters 13. Halfway Home installation by Emily Counts (2003) at the Bucket Rider Gallery in Pilsen 14. Attendees and performers in Rogers Park at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival 15. Art Is for All mural on Glenwood Avenue in Rogers Park 16. Art Is for All as a backdrop for the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in Rogers Park 17. Monument to the Great Northern Migration by Alison Saar 18. Map of historic Bronzeville embedded in median of Martin Luther King Drive as part of the Public Art of Bronzeville 19. Time to Unite mural shown during restoration in 2003 TABLES 1.

Comparison of markets, institutions, and networks / 24

2.

Typology of local art production networks / 26

PREFACE

For more than three decades, sociologists interested in how culture is fabricated have produced a rich body of research that Richard Peterson coined “the production of culture perspective” (1976a, 672). This fruitful line of inquiry includes studies of artists’ careers, reputations, art worlds, genres, and occupations, while also investigating the organizational forms, industries, and networks through which art is produced. More recently, a cadre of books by urban sociologists focused on art and contested urban spaces through studies of gentrification, urban renewal, and tourism, among others. Little has been done to synthesize these two perspectives. This examination of the networks of art producers in urban racial and ethnic locales, who in the twenty-first century inhabit this increasingly contested urban space, does just that. By providing first a social history of three of Chicago’s once-segregated locales, then examining the development of the community-based art movement and of community-based cultural institutions, Producing Local Color provides the historical and contextual foundation to understand the fluid activities of urban art production networks operating outside the city center and its institutions of art. The processes discussed in this book demonstrate how networks of people at work in these places are reframing the center/margin dichotomy that once trivialized the processes that produced local culture while privileging art in a downtown institutional setting. These once-isolated producers are moving beyond the myths of the socially inept artists, and instead operating through networks of shared local interests, engaging politicians, community leaders, administrators, social servants, residents, students, and youth; and they are efficiently mobilizing local and extra-local resources for cultural enrichment and enfranchisement through

xii / Preface

art projects large and small. This in-depth ethnographic investigation provides a portal into local places, local cultures, and local identities that represent a future in which the symbol systems that produce locality are not invisible but, instead, assertively present both locally and within networks of global cultural production. The ideas contained in this book first began to emerge through “Leveraging Assets: How Small Budget Art Activities Benefit Neighborhoods” (Grams and Warr 2003), a survey of ten of Chicago’s seventy-seven community areas, in which Michael Warr and I investigated art produced outside the city center. With a focus on small nonprofit arts organizations, we outlined the ways that arts activities provide access to resources, enable problem solving, and build social relationships. This research led me to want to further investigate the evanescent character of art production in areas dominated by African Americans, Latinos, and other ethnic groups. I thank Sunny Fischer, executive director, and Peter Handler, program officer for the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, and Nick Rabkin and Susan Lloyd, former program officers for community development at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for funding the early research that led to the core ideas of this book. I also thank the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation for their additional support of the final publication of this book. And I thank Michael Warr—a poet, writer, and a valued research partner— for his insight, collaboration, and enduring friendship. Early guidance on how to frame an in-depth, comparative investigation came from my dissertation chair, Judith Wittner, who wisely helped me develop skill as an ethnographer. I also thank my other dissertation advisers, Peter Whalley, Fred Kniss, Lauren Langman, and Phil Nyden, who shared their knowledge about organizations, culture, theory, and urban sociology. They all provided insight and guidance necessary to complete the difficult task of writing a dissertation. I also thank the Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation for their support; the dissertation fellowship I received in the final year of writing the dissertation was integral to its completion. The dissertation told only part of the story, yet it formed the foundation for a larger research agenda that became the substance of this book. I am grateful to Carroll Joynes, executive director of the Cultural Policy Center (CPC) at the University of Chicago. Through my work with him at the center, I was immersed in an invigorating and intellectually challenging research environment that provided access to the many significant scholars working in the sociology of art. Among these great people, I thank Howard S. Becker, Diana Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Richard A. Peterson, Vera

Preface / xiii

Zolberg, Gary Alan Fine, Harrison C. White, Katherine A. Giuffre, David Halle, and Harvey Molotch for their questions and recommendations, as I developed my ideas about locality and art production networks. Among the faculty at the University of Chicago, Dean Danielle Allen, Saskia Sassen, Robert LaLonde, Omar McRoberts, Terry Nichols Clark, and Lawrence Rothfield challenged me in ways that not only helped me survive, but also to grow within the competitive Chicago environment. Others I met through CPC whose insights I valued included Steven Rathgeb Smith, Margaret J. Wyszomirski, Ann Markusen, Stephen J. Tepper, David Grazian, Richard Lloyd, Dorian Warren, and Rosemary Polanco. The friendship of two women, whom I also met at the University of Chicago, will always remain invaluable. Betty Farrell’s personal support provided the basis for our professional partnership as authors and coeditors of Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts (Grams and Farrell 2008). During the final phases of that project, I met Susan Allan, the managing editor of the American Journal of Sociology, whose knowledge and editing skill I valued, but not as much as the friendship that developed through our work together. These two women, who have become friends and valued colleagues, provided regular encouragement when it was needed most. I am also grateful to have worked with the University of Chicago Press and Douglas Mitchell, who provided valued support and unwavering interest in this project. Timothy McGovern and Perry Cartwright, also at the Press, provided advice and technical assistance when it was needed most. I also thank the faculty board of the Press for their support. Specifically, I thank Rebecca Zorach for her thoughtful and insightful comments during the final stages of the manuscript. And it was a pleasure to work with Erin DeWitt, whose skillful copyediting helped to move the project across the finish line. I thank the residents in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park—the three locales that became the focus of research for this book—who set aside time to speak with me. I deeply value their trust and the time they spent sharing details from their daily lives. Few researchers have the opportunity to present their work to their research subjects. But as word of mouth spread throughout Bronzeville of a public workshop hosted by the Cultural Policy Center in early 2004, to my surprise my interviewees turned out in force and dominated this University of Chicago event. This led to a second workshop held later that year as part of Chicago Artists’ Month, hosted by Diasporal Rhythms at the South Shore Cultural Center. These audience members listened, asked questions, and made insightful comments on my

xiv / Preface

interpreta­tions of their social worlds. Most rewarding were their thanks. One particular comment captured what many expressed: “I came ready to be pissed off at the University of Chicago all over again, but I really learned something about myself and my community.” Through sharing their stories and critiquing my interpretations, these people also became valued research partners. Our interaction at these events reinforced why I chose to do this work, which is that the myths of what art producers do are not nearly as interesting as the social reality in which they negotiate their work and their lives. Before I could turn in the final manuscript for this book, I left Chicago for a faculty position at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am sad to have left Chicago, a place that has been my home for more than two decades. Few places can claim to be more fertile ground for cultural creators than Chicago. Yet in New Orleans I have seen a glimpse of another such place, one providing the musical and literary foundation for artistic traditions everywhere. This move has led to new influences. Carl Bankston III, George Bernstein, Martha Huggins, Malcolm Willison, Joel Devine, Michele Adams, Shayne Lee, April Brayfield, Mimi Shippers, Kevin Gotham, and Richard Duque welcomed me as a colleague and helped me get my feet on the ground as I started a new life in a new city. I especially thank Dean Carole Haber and the executive committee of the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University for their financial support of this book. Several people read the complete manuscript and provided detailed notes and suggestions. Among these people were the two anonymous readers—whoever you are, thank you for your thoughtful and detailed comments. In addition to theses unknown commentators, I thank Diana Crane, Harvey L. Molotch, Malcolm Willison, Kevin Gotham, Susan Allan, Neil Versel, Vy Dao, Patric McCoy, Daniel Parker, Michael Warr, D. Carroll Joynes, Timothy Samuelson, Barbara Koenen, Lawrence McEnerney, and Rebecca Zorach, who each provided detailed comments on various versions of the manuscript. Their insights and corrections were invaluable to the writing process. Although my old and new colleagues and friends are important, none of these people have had done more than my partner and husband, Timothy D. Lace. Through our daily collaboration in life, we have shared a wonderful journey. For this book, he provided valuable insights from his daily interactions with artists in Chicago, where he worked as a craftsman producing displays and exhibitions for some of the city’s art stars. Moreover, he has also provided the loving personal support necessary to pursue an extended project such as this.

Preface / xv

The years of work that have led to this book, and the moments I shared with the people named and with those I may have inadvertently left out, have been the most insightful, interesting, and pleasurable experiences of my life. Once, I anxiously anticipated the moment when the revising and re-visioning of the contents of this book would be complete. I recognized my own growth when the urgency of completing the manuscript changed. I stopped feeling pressured to bring it to completion; rather, I became propelled by the desire to share its contents with others who may find it useful and even valuable. And, as one of my research subjects urged, “Get it done! I want a copy of this book in my hand next time this issue comes up!”

Figure 1.  Bronzeville home of blues musician Muddy Waters, 1953–74. Photograph by the author (2008).

Introduction

From the Blues to Black Chicago Just how much the local color of Chicago’s South Side was changing at the beginning of the twenty-first century was evident by the “Tribute Marker”1 perched between the vacant lot and the brick two-flat, once home to blues guitarist Muddy Waters (fig. 1). I had ventured this night into the heart of black Chicago to attend an art party at the invitation of a local collector. Patric McCoy lived in a newly constructed, four-story condominium complex across the street from Waters’s old house—a seemingly neglected landmark, which, according to the marker, “for twenty years was a gathering place for the greatest figures in the Chicago Blues and on warm summer evenings they would play on the front lawn.” The culture of the street was once defined by the wail of Waters’s blues guitar and by the music that flowed freely from some of the most famous figures in rhythm and blues: Junior Wells, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Koko Taylor, Pinetop Perkins, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and members of the Rolling Stones. But on this night, the street was quiet and dark. And a different sort of party was under way among a different set of art producers. Patric had invited me and a number of friends to his home on South Lake Park Avenue near Forty-Third Street to see his art collection. A University of Chicago graduate, the soft-spoken, middle-aged environmental engineer was “one of the bad guys,” as he described it, at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; it was his job to hold large corporations accountable for their pollutants. But as a Bronzeville art collector and a co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms—a network of collectors of art by artists of the African Diaspora— he was also at the center of art production on Chicago’s South Side. As I pulled up to the curb across from Patric’s place, three men stood talking on the sidewalk a few paces up the street. Although their calm

 / Introduction

interaction seemed intent on presenting little danger, I called Patric to alert him of my arrival. Unlike Muddy Waters, who is said to have brandished a gun on his own front porch to protect his friends and property, Patric waved from his second-story picture window, watching me as I pulled my com­ puter, camera, and recording equipment from the trunk of my rusty old 1995 Honda Civic. The grinding of pebbles into pavement as I walked down the center of the street drowned out the whispers of the threesome now thirty paces away. Before I reached the stoop, a piercing shriek unlatched the door, allowing me without pause to enter the building and climb to the top of two flights of stairs, where Patric waited. Tension from entering an unfamiliar world dissipated as my eyes were riveted to the lavish interior in which artworks covered every square inch of wall and table surface like a seamless tapestry adorning the inside of a life-size jewel box. It should have come as no surprise for me to enter such a private world. Throughout my twenty-year career as an artist and arts administrator in Chicago, I had gone to hundreds of art parties. I went to fulfill social obligations to friends and to find out about professional opportunities for myself and for the nonprofit art organizations I cared about. But the activities of the art producers I investigated over nearly a decade of research existed outside the familiar contexts of institutionalized and commercialized culture; they challenged not only the practices of elite art networks that structured the activity of nonprofit art organizations, but also conceptions of race and ethnicity as an inherent human quality that produced cultural difference. And they were redefining the character and sense of place­­ of the areas in which they lived. This “local color” was central to local claims of ownership of the increasingly contested urban space they inhabited. As I relinquished my coat and bags, I heard conversations buzzing in the living room among a group of men who were talking and occasionally laughing in a party-like atmosphere. Their animated chatter stopped momentarily as they acknowledged my presence with a wave or a nod. Patric skipped the typical introductions among people who have never met, inviting me instead to wander freely though his home to look at the hundreds of art pieces he owned. I proceeded down a hall, away from the living-room crowd, past a menagerie of black faces, Afros, dancing figures, saxophone players, singers, trumpeters, and even a collage of O.J. Simpson splitting in two; they were all images mounted on the walls, set on tables, or arranged neatly along the baseboard to represent Patric’s vision of black2 art at the end of the twentieth century. The middle-class art collectors whom I met through Patric were unlike Frazier’s “black bourgeois” (1957) and Moulin’s “magnificent millionaires”

Introduction / 

or “prestige purchasers” ([1967] 1987). These collectors—each of whom shared Patric’s taste for overabundance—were part of a new category of middle class and of art collector. Their excessive accumulation was an extension of the movement politics that pervaded black professional life in Chicago. As art collectors, theirs was not the “disinterested pleasure” that aestheticians (Kant [1790] 1963) and sociologists (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Zolberg 1994; Crane 1992) maintained was typical of fine art appreciators. Rather, theirs was a passionate pursuit, explained by Patric and others, as “necessary” to counteract what they saw as “the negativity of images of black culture” that proliferated in public. As their activities happened almost entirely through informal networks, little was known of their existence outside their own social worlds. But as a result of activities such as these, localized art production became a source of power for black Chicagoans, just as it had for others throughout the city; moreover, it was redefining culture in the twenty-first century. When Patric invited me to his home where his art collection was on display, I went apprehensively into this historically black part of Chicago, where I had never before gone, armed with only a sense of social obligation and professional interest. I was taken aback by Patric’s sumptuous art collection and by the vigorous conversation of these aesthetes, but I was even more surprised by the contrast of this interior landscape to what was outside. Vacant land was everywhere. Yes, there were some high-rise apartment buildings to the north, a stable and wealthy section to the south, and some rehabbed mansions lining the historic boulevards between the two. But beyond them, on block after block throughout the center of Bronzeville, there was more vacant land than anything else. There were no boarded-up buildings, no groups of kids or unemployed men hanging out on street corners. From its heyday as a segregated “city within a city” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962) to a place abandoned by anyone with the means to escape, Bronzeville was the kind of place found on the fringe of an urban center; it was what once distinguished “the urban” from other municipal forms. And as Patric recalled, until the 1990s few people he knew “would have been caught dead anywhere near here” (McCoy interview 2003). With all of the neglected properties torn down—including nearly every one of the federal housing projects—emptiness distinguished this place from others equally distant to the north and west of the city center. How did so much vacant urban land—a valuable commodity nearly anywhere else—remain vacant during the land grab and building boom under way

 / Introduction

in Chicago since the 1980s? The emptiness was not the result of an act of terrorism, a natural disaster, or a toxic waste dump. Was it the stigma of a place? The stain of the locale’s history as one of Chicago’s most neglected and segregated urban ghettos? Or was this how the century of disinvestment ended? In spite of the desolation of the public landscape, local claims of Bronzeville as the heart and soul of black culture persisted. Since the early 1980s, black middle-class professionals had been moving back to the South Side of Chicago just as their white counterparts did to the north. But as the swaths of vacant land throughout Bronzeville remained undeveloped, urban areas north and northwest of the city center completed a full-scale transition from poor and working-class white ethnics to middle- and upperclass gentry. The disparity of development in this historically black locale warranted at least some reconsideration of the definition of gentrification as a class-based transition (Zukin 1982). Following in the footsteps of sociologists working within “the production of culture perspective” (Peterson 1976a, 672), I sought to better understand how the symbol systems that marked a place as black, Latino, diverse, or white were fabricated, and what were the consequences of these symbols in local life.

Art and Urban Places in the Twenty-First Century This study begins with a longitudinal view of three places that are both geographically and historically situated within a larger urban area. Building off a century of research on cities and the construction of places (Gotham 2007; Hayden 1995; Zukin 1991; Logan and Molotch 1987; Wirth and Furez 1938; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925), I investigated how these three places came to be what they were at the beginning of the new millennium. I then take an in-depth look at the kinds of networks of art producers in exis­ tence at this pinnacle time. While a number of recent books (Lloyd 2005; Hyra 2008; Boyd 2008) extend key principals of class transition in the urban gentrification literature and others have focused on urban tourism (Clark 2003; Grazian 2003; Gotham 2007), this study—like Dávila’s (2004) study of the Puerto Rican barrio of East Harlem—seeks to move beyond the dominant thinking in urban research that frames race and ethnicity as a black/white issue to reveal the complexity of interests at work in multiracial, pan-ethnic cities today. The result is both historical sociology and contemporary ethnography. I use the strategy of comparing art from three places that have been historically segregated as “black” or “ethnic” in an effort to understand cultural change in an era when the boundaries that have divided people

Introduction / 

into racial and ethnic categories are increasingly blurred, but the boundaries producing the segregated places of where they live are not (Lee and Bean 2003; Grieco and Cassidy 2001; Massey and Denton 1993). Among the three urban places explored in this study, Bronzeville is located on Chicago’s South Side between Hyde Park (home of the University of Chicago) and the downtown Loop business district. When this research began, Barack Obama was still an Illinois state senator representing Bronzeville and the other South Side lakefront community areas.3 The majority of Bronzeville’s residents, long identified with the racial category “black,” have increasingly asserted ethnic identities linked to a variety of African countries and cultural groups that together constitute a panethnic identity of African American. Through comparison of art production networks in Bronzeville to those in Pilsen (a place in which the majority of its residents are of Mexican ethnicity but embrace a pan-ethnic identity of Latino) and to Rogers Park (claimed by residents to be home to the greatest diversity of races and ethnicities anywhere), this is a study of the changing meaning of “local color,” as is evident by how it is produced. Comparison of these three places situated on the margins of an urban cultural center provides the opportunity to develop a new theory of urban art networks. These three places exist within the larger context of a city, Chicago,4 having a population that in 20005 was divided nearly in thirds between blacks (36%), whites (31%), and Latinos6 (26%) (fig. 2). Across these categories, 22 percent of Chicago’s population was foreign born. Although race has long been conceptualized as physical characteristics and ethnicity as nation of origin, in a postmodern7 cultural context, racial and ethnic boundaries are blurred and categories overlap into pan-ethnic multiracial categories. Still, as the vast majority of people (98%) self-report to the U.S. Census as being of a single race, the concepts of “a race” or “an ethnicity” remain as powerful vestiges of a past social and cultural order; moreover, they are significant of a historically situated but contemporaneously outmoded subordinate cultural status (King 1996; Hall 1997). Chicago’s cultural context in the twenty-first century can be understood by looking at the changes that have taken place as Chicago transformed from a modern, industrial city in which the hierarchies of race and ethnicity were structured as ascribed, subordinate statuses and maintained through industrial labor practices, to a postmodern, post-industrial one, in which identity and cultural meanings are no longer “fixed,” but are instead selfidentifications that are asserted and then mobilized as a collective resource. In this context, where culture can be understood as “strategies of action”8

 / Introduction Black (non-Hisp.)

White (non-Hisp.)

Hispanic

Asian/ Pac. Is.

Other Races

100% 90%

89%

88%

80% 70% 60% 50% 36%

40% 30%

30%

32%

31% 28%

26%

20% 10% 0%

6%

8% 1% 3% 2%

Bronzeville

2%

7% 0.3%0.7%

Pilsen

4%

4%

Rogers Park

2%

Chicago

Figure 2.  Comparison of the racial composition of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park to Chicago. Source: U.S. Census 2000.

(Swidler 1986, 1), race and ethnicity are collective resources for financial, political, and now cultural enfranchisement. The asserting, tabulating, and mobilizing of race and ethnic identity as a resource have produced an environment of cultural competition within a city in which there is relatively equal proportions of blacks, Latinos, and whites; this competition has produced robust local, ethnic cultures9 that are recasting traditional dichotomous understandings of black versus white, citizen versus immigrant, culture versus art, public versus private, center versus margins, dominant versus subordinate, and global versus local. As an investigation of local art production, this study enables further consideration of why “places” continue to be constructed within a global society rather than abandoned as relics of a past gemeinschaft social order (Tonnies [1887] 1957). Just as Sassen ([1991] 2001, [1994] 2006) considers a city as an intersection of the local and global networks, this investigation offers a vision in which urban culture might be best understood through the networks of local art producers living in places that are rich in local cultures.

Design of the Study This study was designed to look beyond the typical subjects of sociological studies of art—that is, the relatively small group of centralized producers that have dominated the urban arts for most of the last century—to develop

Introduction / 

a theory of art that includes a wider array of people than is usually considered in its production and deployment. In large cities such as Chicago, the business of art—its production, distribution, and presentation—has been centralized through the efforts of a small group of people whose interaction has produced a powerful institutional field involving both nonprofit and commercial businesses (DiMaggio [1982] 1991; Bourdieu 1983; Crane 1992; Zolberg 1994; Fine 2004). And in Chicago, this centralization is also geographic (Zukin 1991): it is centered in the downtown Loop10 business district, through the city’s dominant organizations, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Their influence extends into parts of the city’s North Side and wealthy northern suburbs11 through the direct patronage of residents from these distant areas, but also through an array of smaller but well-funded nonprofit organizations that operate according to the same institutional model (DiMaggio [1982] 1991; Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Kriedler 1996; LaLonde et al. 2006). In Chicago this institutionalized form of culture functions as a cultural core12 with its satellites; it focuses on a very select subset of all the artworks available, and pretty much ignores the others. Among those others are works produced in the context of local urban places by people having social and cultural histories distinct from that of wealthy elites (Hayden 1995). And they are produced through social networks involving black, Latino, or bohemian artists of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds who have rejected or have been rejected by the cultural core. This book tells the stories of how in several such other places in Chicago people, such as the Bronzeville art collectors discussed in the opening pages of this book, got together and cooperated to create alternatives to this cultural core—alternative museums, collections, events, distribution systems, communities of meaning, taste, and appreciation—and did for artists in such contexts what the cultural core did for those whom it incorporated. In so doing, they created alternate art worlds. More importantly, these alternate art worlds functioned according to different rules and for distinctly different—and locally relevant—purposes than those of the cultural core. This book describes art in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park, and uses these examples to present and analyze several kinds of networks that support the making of art while seeking localized purposes that are often contrary to downtown pursuits. Among these are aesthetic networks that focus on meanings, preferences, and evaluation of the arts; autonomy networks that are intent on limiting any form of social or economic control of artistic production; problem-solving networks that use art to maintain social stability; gentrification networks that seek to increase the value of local resources;

 / Introduction

and empowerment networks that seek to replenish the cultural reserves of particular ethnic or racial groups. What is distinct about this approach is that I have explored networks occurring in local places that are dominated by African Americans, Mexican Americans, and other ethnic minorities. And I investigate how these networks operate in ways similar to or different from global markets or institutional networks centered in the urban core. What is consistent across all places, though, is that artists of all kinds need to be part of networks of interest and support to get their work done and to help them with all the tasks an artist needs to do in order to be able to make art. These networks are formed out of local conditions that give rise to and support them, each resulting in different consequences for the artist, the locale, and the art itself. As “networks,” these are not bounded entities with explicitly stated goals or purposes, as formally organized nonprofits or commercial businesses might be. Rather, they exist through connections among individuals and can be understood by the shared interests that produce these connections. These networks of shared interest are presented through a typology similar to what Weber ([1915] 1958) might have considered to be “ideal types”13 because they are a constructed analytical scheme that offers a means of orientation and makes it possible to provide a sociological analysis of such historically and geographically situated phenomena.

Finding a Research Method To undertake a study of local art producers in places as different as Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park presents particular problems: like other forms of private social activity, it was difficult at first to find out if and where this activity might exist. I defined the boundaries of my study to be three places and sought to understand how art was produced in each of them. As an outsider in these locales, I searched available public records and publications to identify sites where art producers might gather, including nonprofit art organizations, art businesses, art programs in parks or social service agencies, and university sites. Through this process, Rogers Park appeared to have substantially more of the traditional arts venues, that is, the nonprofit art organizations and businesses featuring art (fig. 3). However, as I drove around and hung out, I identified substantially more sites of “informal” art activities and public art, which changed my overall impression of art in a locale (fig. 4). In Pilsen particularly, there were many regular events held in artists’ apartments or studios that were highly publicized and open to the public, but were not listed in nonprofit or commercial listings; and in both

Introduction /  Nonprofit Art Organization

Art Businesses

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Figure 3.  Comparison of number of sites of publicized arts activities in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park (2003).

Bronzeville and Pilsen, there was a substantial number of public murals, more than in any other Chicago locale. This variation in the public presence of art in these three locales led me to want to investigate further how this difference came to be. I undertook a research process typical of urban ethnography and chose a site in each locale where art producers seemed to regularly gather. In Bronzeville, I began at the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), a nonprofit art center founded in 1941 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project; in Pilsen, I began at Pros Arts Studio, a nonprofit art organization founded in 1978; in Rogers Park, I started at the Heartland Café, a commercial restaurant established in 1976, which sponsored music, poetry, and exhibitions in its facility. And I investigated a single research question: How do art producers pursue their work in local places? In my early interactions with people at these three sites, I sought to understand what types of art activities were under way, how people were involved, and what they did. Yet neither the sites nor the specific activities taking place at the sites became the primary subject of the ethnography. Because I was interested in identifying the full range of activity under way in a locale, I followed referrals beyond these sites. The resulting sample of interviews conducted and events observed was built through snowball sampling, in which one research subject gave referrals leading to the next. As I proceeded,

10 / Introduction Bronzeville

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Figure 4. Comparison of number of sites of publicized arts activities to sites for informal activities and public art in three locales (2003).

each subject helped to build the theory of how art producers pursued their work in local places. My initial involvement in these organizational activities provided access to broad networks of people involved in the arts, many of whom were not part of or directly accessed through these sites. Once I had entered into what I now refer to as a “local art production network,” the topic of the research became the relationships among people, what brought them together to produce and support art, their roles in art production processes, and the contrasting networks of connections that existed among them. As “production of culture” researchers before me have found (Peterson 1976a; Becker [1982] 2008; Crane 1992; Fine 2004), the range of people whose involvement was of consequence to art production transcended the common categories of artist, actor, performer, arts administrator, apprentice, assistant, technician, curator, or director to include a wide range of local residents, business owners, social service agency administrators, and workers. Through in-depth interviews with sixty-eight key informants, participant observation at hundreds of private parties and public events, and exploration of public art, I learned the local definitions of art and of the social networks responsible for production. I came to understand a person’s role not only through informative conversations, but also by his or her presence at both

Introduction / 11

private and public events. Many of my informants were known to other art producers and also knew other people I had interviewed. As such, they were what network theorists considered to be “strategically located” people in a network since they provided bridges among people and between multiple networks of art production; they even acted at times as brokers for the flow of information between people (Burt 1992, 2000). Moreover, they freely moved among various networks of interest, as one might expect someone to do who is skilled in impression management (Goffman 1959) or who enjoys art through a variety of cultural tastes as cultural omnivores might do (Peterson and Rossman 2005). But what I observed was how their interaction bespoke of the differing local interests embedded in the relationships of producers. These contrasting interests created small social worlds that became visible through private art parties or public art events or in the larger territorial places of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park. The characteristics distinguishing these networks provided the conceptual framework for study: networks were formed by people brought together through local shared interests; territorial places were created when art and local places were consciously linked by art producers and their work; and the variety of local purposes that brought people together created an opportunity to understand art production as types of networks that might exist anywhere. Some of my informants are quoted using the word “community” to describe a group of people, a place, as well as the affective meanings of what it is they value in local art and in their everyday lives. Yet in an analysis that crosses group boundaries and the boundaries that define local places, the changing meaning of the word can be confusing. Therefore, I use the word for limited purposes. For example, “community area” is used to refer to one of the seventy-seven designated geographic units of local places in Chicago. When I am referring to some other geographic urban space, such as the five-square-mile area of Bronzeville, comprised of four “community areas,” I use the word “place” or “locale.” I use the word “people” or “population” to refer to a group of African Americans, Latinos, or other ethnic group; and I use the word “network” to refer to the kind of social organization formed by the shared interests of its participants. The topics of “communityoriented” action in Chicago and art created as “community-based art” are discussed in terms of their important history as the work of local art production networks. I discuss the activities of “community improvers,” who are a particular type of network participant, and “community-building” activities intended to bridge differences among different kinds of people.

12 / Introduction

Evident through this study is that local environments encourage artistic innovation without applying ideologies of labor, professionalism, or capitalism to control its development, but they may employ other controls. In such local sites, art production is an important vehicle for people to build satisfying social lives and to assert cultural ownership of space. This book provides a glimpse of how much and what kind of activity exist outside the cultural core of the city. And these activities of art production networks are asserting themselves into the global organization of cultural production as an alternative to the kind of homogenization that is often a by-product of global art markets and institutions.

Structure of the Book “Producing local color” is not about handmade tchotchkes available in tourist resort towns, but about art produced outside of the cultural core of an urban metropolis and its increasing importance as twenty-first-century urban areas seek to distinguish themselves within a globally networked society. Through examination of how local art is produced and organized, this study bears witness to the fact that art exists in local settings where the entry is not as clear as a sign for an admission fee at the front desk of a museum, concert hall, or art center. Chapter 1 develops the theoretical basis of local art production by examining a number of network theories and their relevance for cultural production. I move from an individual to a network perspective of art production, first exploring networks of individual artists, and then how such networks are formed. Networks are not bounded entities but structured through exchanges between participants; shared interests give shape to the relationships that produce contrasting types of networks. By approaching art through an analysis of the shared interests embedded in the networks, one can also see the intersection of traditional aesthetic preferences and more contemporary instrumental uses of local art to stimulate and/or control urban development. Local networks exist in contrast to global networks, which are structured through institutions or markets; they exist among people who know each other and are often directly relevant to the geographic place in which they exist. The structuring of networks by shared local interests yields this typology of local art production introduced in this book. Chapter 2 provides a snapshot of each of the three places studied and locates them within Chicago’s history and their own development as urban places for artistic production. These places—once considered ghettos, settlements, enclaves, or havens for the poor, new immigrants, and racial

Introduction / 13

and ethnic minorities (Addams [1910] 1938; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1925)—have local histories and cultural practices that have been shaped in part by segregation and isolation. Mid-twentieth-century urban renewal programs further isolated two of these locales: Bronzeville and Pilsen were set apart and circumscribed by expressways, industrial train tracks, and canals, which all provided limited entry and exit points via bridges and underpasses. More significantly, these places were isolated by the stigma of local cultural difference evident among the segregated blacks and immi­ grants who lived there. By contrast, Rogers Park, the community area farthest north but still in Chicago, was not partitioned off from its neighbors by such rigid barriers and has been well served by public rail transportation since the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, its distance from the city center enabled its growth as place for middle-class leisure and entertainment and as a haven for congregations of religious minorities. By the end of the century, this distance produced the kind of relative isolation characteristic of mid-century suburbs; it exists in a liminal urban space on the fringes of the city, far from the increasingly attractive urban core, yet not among the wealthy northern suburbs. Through this study, one can see how the cultures of such places—often characterized as ethnocentric and lacking cultural development—were as much or more products of the built environment (Lefebvre [1974] 1991) and the politically influenced distribution of resources as they were of distinct cultural practices of a particular group (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990). Although the identities of these places emerged from their characterizations as the ghettos or ethnic enclaves that surround an urban core, they have come to represent vast ethnic populations within a global city14 in the twenty-first century. As a result, “local color” represents a synthesis of literature on art production, race, ethnicity, and place-making. Chapter 3 examines the history of community-based art as a precursor to the variety of networks examined later in this book. Significantly, since its incorporation as a city in 1835, Chicago has been known for its community-oriented activism. From the labor movements of the later nineteenth century, through research conducted by the Chicago School of Social Science Research in the early twentieth century, and then the political activism of the 1960s, including protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. and clashes at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and, most recently, for the election of a local resident, Barack Obama, as president of the United States, involvement and mobilization of people in local places has counter­ balanced the domination of elite interests represented by the institutions of the downtown city center.

14 / Introduction

Community-based art emerged around various ideologies of local participation, and it called for recognition and support for art that took place in a community, represented a community, or engaged a community. Accounts of the creation of murals, of performances, and of ethnic cultural facilities over the period 1961 to 1986 show how spaces and places for local culture were first established in areas of urban poverty by extending civil rights advocacy into the realm of institutional culture. Art producers have shaped the cultural identities of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park as places whose art contrasted with the elitist and often predictable market-driven offerings of the downtown city center and its cultural institutions. A primary argument throughout this book is that art producers participating in localized networks have developed and used this communityoriented strategy to establish the cultural significance of the “local” within a global context. Their efforts have aided development of locally based, publicly supported art infrastructures, while abating the re-segregation of these increasingly valued places into white middle- or upper-middle-class locales. My approach to studying localized art production offers a theory as to why this might be so. The heart of the book, then, is the following five chapters, each devoted to one particular kind of network, and consisting of a detailed analysis of just what each of these contemporary networks do, what activities are undertaken, who is involved, and the meanings of their activities. The stories are built around detailed accounts of people who were interviewed and whose activities I witnessed and joined over the seven-year period of this study (2001–2008). Comparing smaller and more private activities with large-scale public projects, this study shows how art can be the product of non-elite, locally based networks that can exist in places found outside the urban cultural core. Public activity can involve a host of groups and individuals, each with their own interests to satisfy, who out of necessity find ways to work together to complete some sizable projects, whereas private activity may seek to develop a relevant and meaningful context through which local culture can be created, nurtured, experienced, owned, and preserved—all with the aim of creating a world of art in no way dependent upon or related to the white-dominated downtown cultural core. These chapters provide in-depth investigations of five different types of networks—aesthetic, autonomy, problem-solving, gentrification, and empowerment networks—distinguished by the fact that they operate outside the mechanisms of the urban cultural core and are defined by nuanced differences in the shared interests they represent. These networks become repositories of information and resources relevant to the production of art. I

Introduction / 15

use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital”15 to refer to this reserve of information and resources drawn upon as needed by network participants to carry out projects and ideas. These networks involved black, Latino, and white ethnic art producers who gained access to resources—outside the traditional institutional and market systems—for art that defined local culture and local places. Each of these chapters tells how people in one or another of these places mobilized and deployed its resources, whatever they were, to make something artistic happen that would not otherwise have happened. The products, including the racial and ethnic distinction (Bourdieu [1979] 1984),16 are evidence of the artistic range that might exist in settings of all kinds. Although a number of scholars have focused on the construction of “place” or place-making as the object of study (Zukin 1991; Hayden 1995), the lens of this book is focused on networks of producers to better understand this as a contemporary organizational form. Indeed, in some cases, what they did resulted in the construction of a place; in others cases, there were other results, including the production of knowledge and cultural capital, or the production of transitory spaces within which autonomous artworks could exist. With this variety of results, the accounts assembled are as important for social historians and urban sociologists as they are for sociologists interested in artistic or cultural practice. The final chapter revisits the theory of local art production developed in this book. The framework constructed by network types found within urban locales yields a comprehensive picture of cultural variation beyond the limits of art markets or institutional culture. This study shows the array of activities that can take place within urban locales and make them attractive places to live for a variety of people with a variety of shared interests. Moreover, this study—located at the intersection of sociology of art, cultural sociology, historical sociology, and urban sociology—offers new insight into formerly uncharted ethnic and racial cultural production. It shows how, in a post-industrial society, art producers are challenging the historic processes through which a dominant culture has secured a disproportionate share of cultural power. As such, art production is playing an increasingly important role in efforts for cultural equity, to establish collective ownership of a place, and to create new meanings and histories in the twenty-first century. As an exploration of the social worlds located outside the cultural centers of global cities (Sassen [1991] 2001; King 1996), this study reveals the increasing importance of locality and ethnicity—local color—in the twenty-first century.

ONE

Theory of Local Art Production Networks

From Individual to Network Perspectives I am kind of like a cowboy, riding the Wild West in my car, hustling for work. Sometimes my pockets are fat. Sometimes they are slim. (Jess interview 2002)

Myths and metaphors are often used to explain how artists survive as people and as artists. These literary devices give a sense of what goes on, but they exclude the underlying mechanisms that help to explain how a life is maintained and art is produced. When I asked the poet Tyehimba Jess how he gets work, he turned to the metaphor of the cowboy to explain the lack of stability yet the excitement he has had for nearly a decade of rustling up paying gigs as a poet. The metaphor of the cowboy explains one thing for sure: Jess was not sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. Yet the detail of a poet’s hustle revealed a more vivid picture: A lot of people do it better than I do. But I am pretty good. I always have business cards. At every event there is a potential for business. You know, up front near the stage is where the poetry happens. But in back there is a group of people making connections, finding out what’s happening, finding out about opportunities—what organizations have grants and need artists, who is looking for teaching artists, what deadlines are coming up, who is editing a publication. That’s not cynical. It’s just the way it is. I learned that many artists go to events to make connections. There might be a teacher there who is looking for someone to work with their class or someone from an organization. (Jess interview 2002)

Just as Jess explained how he got gigs, he told me the expectations artists have for each other and for the organizations they encounter. According to

18 / Chapter One

Jess, working for free was not necessarily the antithesis of paid employment. “There are all types of intangibles attached,” he said, including “good vibes.” To explain the meaning of “good vibes,” he rhetorically asked: “What’s the difference between an organization that pays $100 and does not give good vibes and one that pays $50 and gives good vibes? Good vibes might mean they provide a community, a network for me. They might also provide respect” (2002). Jess pointed out that sometimes, for some organizations, he will work for free because he knows that he is high on the list of artists when paid work is available. At the same time, he has ended relationships with paying organizations that do not offer “good vibes.” These vibes represent the reciprocity between the artist and the organization; the exchange includes more than money paid for services rendered. Among the kind of intangibles are making and giving referrals, the promotion of the artist’s work, and recruiting those who show up to the artist’s events. One incident recounted by Jess exemplified the difference between an organization with good vibes and one with not-so-good vibes: I invited people to my last gig in Chicago before heading for New York. This gig was also [where I award] a poetry prize to a teenage poet. This is important to me. Four people from one of my summer gigs showed up . . . and no one showed up from the other one. I wondered why no one came and no one even mentioned it. It occurred to me, do they fucking respect what I do? I’ve supported that organization. I’ve gone to their gigs for years. So I said to [the staff ], “I want you to be hip to the fact that this concerns me—that no one came to the event, that no one said anything, and no one recruited kids to apply for the contest.” They said, “Oh, OK ” [pause]. No apologies, no promises, nothing. It made me think about the relationship. It’s a kind of quid pro quo. Missing the event is one thing; not mentioning it is another thing. (2002)

In this excerpt, Jess articulated how “showing up”—or at least apologizing for not showing up—was part of the bundle of goods and services that are exchanged in the reciprocal relationships among artists and art organizations. The reputations of both artists and organizations are stored within these networks and accessed when needed, as Becker has pointed out (1982 [2008], 86–87). Moreover, when work is plentiful, artists can choose which organization has the most tangibles and intangibles to offer for their work. Without the kind of control exerted by the institution of culture or access to the more consistent resources of national or global art markets, art producers rely on reciprocal exchange in order to attract participants and

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 19

sustain art production activity. Through what appear as friendships and cliques, art producers engage in a variety of exchanges for carrying out art production, giving legitimacy to their activities, and gaining access to resources. This begins to paint the picture from an artist’s perspective of how artists function within networks. By weaving themselves into a network, artists maximize their access to information and opportunity with minimal effort. But what exactly is a network, and how do different networks lead to different kinds of results for artists?

Production of Culture as a Research Perspective The idea of an art production network first entered into research on culture in 1976 through what Richard A. Peterson called “the production of culture perspective” (1976a, 672). Sociologists set a research agenda to examine “the processes by which elements of culture are fabricated” (672). Expanding upon research of artists’ careers (Becker 1963b; White and White 1965), they explored art worlds and social types (Becker 1976), reward systems (Crane 1976), organizations (DiMaggio and Hirsh 1976), networks and circles (Kadushin 1976), and government patronage (Useem 1976), with each of these elements addressing an aspect of the multi-directional flow of information, materials, and resources through the networks of production and consumption of culture and its objects. These ideas were expanded upon by Crane (1992), who examined the dichotomy between recorded and urban cultures,1 drawing important distinctions among various culture industries and a range of urban cultures; in an edited volume on cultureproducing occupations (Zollars and Goldsman Cantor 1993); and by Peterson (1997), who demonstrated the social construction of “authenticity” as a product of the culture industries. In Art Worlds ([1982] 2008), Howard S. Becker provided a definitive exploration of art production as an occupational field in which participants were linked through network relationships. By viewing the basic social arrangement of art production as a network, Becker showed the creation and distribution of an artwork as the work of a collectivity of producers, each integral to a process leading to the creation of something understood by network participants to be “art.” His view throws a broad net, which includes everyone whose participation in the occupation is consequential for the existence of an artwork. For example, Becker included guards and janitors in museums and other art production facilities as among the producers of what was understood to be “art.” He provides a useful perspective because

20 / Chapter One

he located and localized the knowledge and material resources necessary to produce art within the network of participants involved in that activity. Although he did not examine art production in local places, or how race and ethnicity allow and even require different sorts of resource mobilization to produce art than do national and international systems, his focus on the limits imposed on materials and personnel available through a distribution system sheds light on the resources that are mobilized through the production process. Shared Knowledge versus Shared Acquaintances Becker’s ([1982] 2008) use of the term “network” makes evident that art production is not the same type of production found in an automobile production plant, nor is it like a textbook flow chart of institutional order within a museum, nor does it follow a logical progression of time as presented in art history. If art production is not explained in these ways, what does it mean to say that art is produced through a network? Becker provided at least two images of what networks are and how they operate. On the one hand, he used the term to describe how people are linked through shared knowledge. He proposed that an art world is “the network of people whose cooperative activity organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things produced the kind of art works that the art world is noted for” ([1982] 2008, x). In art worlds constructed by networks of shared knowledge, participants may or may not know each other. They are not necessarily in the same locality, city, region, or nation; they just know how to do things in the same way. Similar to the account by Jess of the exchanges and expectations among artists, in Becker’s second image, networks accomplish instrumental purposes, such as providing access to jobs, gigs, money, respect, and other resources. These networks are built through interpersonal “connections.” According to Becker, in addition to ability, successful free-lancers also need a network of connections, so that a large number of people who might need their services have them in mind, and in their telephone book, to be called when the occasion arises. . . . A network of connections consists of a number of people who know you and your work well enough to trust the well-being of some portion of their project to you. The key element of the network is trust. . . . Through interlocking trust and recommendations, workers develop stable networks, which furnish them with more or less steady work. ([1982] 2008, 86–87)

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 21

In this image, network participants must at least know one another: there are specific connections between people, but it is left unclear how these connections occur. And of course, there is also something accomplished through the network—in this case, income without the formal arrangements of employment. Moreover, “trust” is a key element in the creation of network connections. Becker’s two images of networks are potentially confusing because they lead to contradictory definitions of a network: in the first, a network of connections is produced through shared knowledge, no matter how tightly contained, regulated, or distantly diffused; in the other, the network is produced through shared acquaintances who exchange labor, money, and trust. These two images can lead to divergent methods of study and even reliance upon different academic disciplines. First is the study of culture as knowledge networks and the production of symbols and shared meanings. This is an approach typical of cultural studies, anthropology, and the sociology of culture. Symbols are produced through shared values, beliefs, and ways of doing things. Individuals who belong to the same group or classification reproduce the understandings that perpetuate the existence of that group. Thus, a researcher can identify members and classify them in the same group based on how they create and use knowledge and therefore are part of or reproduce the same social and cultural practices. Members can identify others of the same group by recognizing common sets of practices and ideas. Such groups may be occupational, such as illustrated in Kadushin’s 1974 study of American intellectuals. They may also be classbased, as illustrated by three studies: Rosenzweig’s ([1983] 1991) study of the emergence of the saloon as the center of working-class men’s social life; Radway’s (1984) study of working-class women who read romance novels to escape and resist their ascribed roles; and Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984) study of status and mobility among middle- and upper-class museum-goers. Such studies show how shared cultural practices create aspects of an art world, a social world, and a worldview while expressing a class-based group identity. In Becker’s second image, acquaintance networks involve participants in instrumental activities. This image links Becker’s work to business school analysts studying the functions and purposes of business and technology networks and their connections to formal organizations. This may include, for example, job seekers’ networks (Granovetter 1973, 1974), the network form of management in technology businesses (Burns and Stalker 1961), networks of nonprofit organizations within a discipline or with a shared purpose (Galaskiewicz and Bielefeld 1998), and network relationships

22 / Chapter One

among businesses (Podolny and Page 1998). Such studies show how network structures can be functional and effective in situations where hierarchical, rational structures of formal organizations or the competitive structures of market competition would both fail. For example, researchers studying business innovation (Burns and Stalker 1961) and cultural trends (Fine and Kleinman 1979) have shown that networks are the most effective structures in changing unstable conditions or where rapid transmission of information is necessary for problem solving and creativity. And as Podolny and Page argue: “Network forms of organization foster learning, represent a mechanism for the attainment of status or legitimacy, provide a variety of economic benefits, facilitate the management of resource dependencies, and provide considerable autonomy for employees” (1998, 57). Applying this approach to the study of art production, Gilmore (1993) and Giuffre (1999) both showed how a producer’s reliance on network relationships is functional because it provides stability in an unstable work environment and provides access to opportunities necessary for success. Although Kadushin (1976) likened networks to informal organizations, because they often represent micro-social systems that are invisible in their totality and are often “draped over” other more formal relationships (172), scholars of business practice have begun to recognize the network within post-industrial economies as a form of organization and as a legitimate business arrangement. Podolny and Page (1998) examine how global business networks function on a variety of levels to facilitate and enhance business practice. They define a network as the unit from which the other forms of organization emerge and have thereby replaced the evolutionary theory of the relationship between networks, organizations, and markets with one in which a network is a broader form of the other two, distinguished by their form of governance. [From] a structural perspective, every form of organization is a network, and market and hierarchy are simply two manifestations of the broader type. However, when considered as a form of governance, the network form can be distinctly characterized. We define a network form of organization as any _ 2) that pursue repeated, enduring exchange relacollection of actors (N > tions with one another and, at the same time, lack a legitimate organizational authority to arbitrate and resolve disputes that may arise during the exchange.(Podolny and Page 1998, 59)

This definition is useful because it offers the theory of “network” as the broad type and organization and market as narrower forms of this broad type,

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 23

and helps to explain how networks can be understood in post-industrial society as a legitimate social arrangement operating without the hierarchical structure of authority or the ideologies of profit to resolve disputes. Through existing theory, we can understand much about this form of social arrangement. First, interactions that produce networks occur more often than chance meetings; they are repeated and enduring relationships. Network relationships exist as horizontal relationships characterized as equitable and reciprocal (Karraker and Grams 2008), rather than either the vertically arranged authority relationships typical of formal organizations or the competitive relationships typical of markets. For order and predictability, then, networks must rely on something other than authority or competition: some network researchers, including Becker, have focused the governing principle on trust (Becker [1982] 2008; Powell 1990; Schuler 1996): that is, people enter into network relationships and maintain equanimity because the relationship is based upon the trust that others will do what is right and expected. Others have focused on acts of reciprocity; that is, that networks exist when there is a give-and-take involved in an exchange (Powell 1990; Putnam 2000), often giving more than taking so that the network becomes a repository of abundance (Putnam 2000). Still others have focused on the potential for mutual benefits, as opposed to desire for individual gain, as the attraction of network relationships (Burns and Stalker 1961; Putnam 2000). Each of these principals—trust, reciprocity, mutual gain—represents the “glue” that binds people together. That researchers have identified governing principles of networks is evidence that networks are social facts that can be understood in and of themselves. Yet further investigation of the context and content of exchanges among art producers is necessary to understand how and why people are brought together. Art Networks, Art Markets, Art Institutions By adopting the theory that art networks, art markets, and art institutions are distinguished by the differing form of their governing principles, one can begin to better understand the full range of interactions typical in an art world (table 1). Art networks exist when people or organizations are linked in an art activity. A network becomes an art market when the purpose of its members’ activities is to set in motion economic interactions, that is, an exchange of money for artworks or art experiences (Grams 2008). At the most basic level, markets are governed by competition over supply and demand. Producers distinguish and align themselves by their particular claims to value, yet market value is established only when there is an exchange of

24 / Chapter One Table 1. Comparison of markets, institutions, and networks Type

Purpose

Governance

Market

To establish and increase financial values

Competition

Institution

To establish and maintain legitimate authority over aesthetic values

Authority

Network

To pursue shared interests through repeated activities

Reciprocity/trust/ mutual benefit

money for goods. Within a market, businesses such as galleries, art schools, or supply manufacturers align themselves, and each makes claims to the distinct values of its goods (Velthuis 2003; White 2005).2 What kinds of businesses dominate and profit can be understood by either cyclical accounts or open-system accounts in which production is either centralized or decentralized (Dowd 2004). Market activity is geared toward establishing values that can be repeatedly recognized with the market not only by documented sales but also by comparison of similar products. Once market values are established, the task then is to increase those values. Conversely, art institutions are hierarchically organized around experts whose authority governs their activity (Grams 2008). This activity is geared toward setting in motion aesthetic interaction, which is, on the most basic level, an exchange of appreciation for an art object. Within the art institutional sector, people and organizations are linked in a broad network of activities geared toward increasing the appreciation or aesthetic value of an art object. Aesthetic value is not equal to or one in the same as financial value. Aesthetic value is established through debates over quality, materials, and rarity, all characteristics used to categorize art. Borders between categories have been constructed over time to classify objects into genres (DiMaggio 1987) and canons (Dowd et al. 2002). As border debates ensue—not the least of these is a debate over what is and what is not art—judgments of quality by institutional experts, however subjective they may be, are the basis of this value. Institutional arrangements further produce ideologies of labor, professionalism, and even aesthetic quality; they also enable salaried careers dependent upon a labor market in which most participants—including artists, nonprofit staff, volunteers, and board members—work for free or for a fraction of the compensation of their peers in other fields (Grams 2005). Markets and institutions are both forms of networks, and they may interact yet are not one and the same. And although there is pressure for a network to align itself with either market or institutional activity, some never

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 25

do, as is shown in this study. Both markets and institutions consolidate resources from those available through their respective activities. For example, as Simpson (1981) has argued, museum collections represent a consolidation of the objects available to the institution and relevant to the expertise of the curators. Gallery owners, as operators in art markets, are directly linked to and even serve as “gate keepers” or “pickers” (Simpson 1981, 33) for the art world, at large, and for institutional experts, in particular. Because consolidation means choosing from that which is available, both markets and institutions exclude much artistic activity. If networks exist that are not part of this process, what do they look like? By framing a study of art networks found within geographically defined places rather within specific markets or institutions, I sought to create a framework incorporating the full range of art activity that can exist within an urban city. Furthermore, by beginning with place-based urban networks, there was an added benefit of such a study for urban sociology: this study provides insight into the dynamic role of art production to the construction of local places and local economies.

Types of Local Art Production Networks Like Howard Becker, I argue that an art production network is a set of social relationships involved in producing art. Accounts from participants in local art production networks provide insight into how and why networks were formed. Shared local interests bring different types of people together, providing differing access to the resources necessary to produce art. This variation in who is involved and what is made can be understood as a typology of local art production networks (table 2). Like Max Weber, I define “ideal types” of networks as analytic categories to orient organizational forms within social contexts; similarly, “ideal types” of participants are not presented to evaluate one lifestyle over another, but to orient individual action within local events. The kinds of shared interests that produce network activity include participants interested in (1) developing shared preferences, values, and meaning about cultural objects; (2) limiting social or economic control of artistic production; (3) maintaining social stability; (4) increasing the value of local resources; (5) replenishing cultural reserves of racial or ethnic groups. Among the resources accessed and mobilized were financial resources, which ranged from large grants from federal, state, and municipal agencies for economic and infrastructure development, to small grants from art agencies for art programs and the subsidies, purchases, and donations from

To limit social or economic control of artistic production

Cutting-edge artists, trans­ national artists, museumquality artists

Social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs

City bureaucrats, real estate developers and agents, business owners, property owners, artists

Elected and appointed political officials, arts administrators and artists, citizen volunteers, and contracted workers of all types

Autonomy

Problem Solving

Gentrification

Empowerment To replenish cultural reserves of racial or ethnic groups

To increase value of local resources

To maintain social stability

To develop shared meanings, preferences, and evaluation of art

Collectors and artists

Aesthetic

Shared Interest

Participant Type

Network Type

Table 2. Typology of local art production networks

Public funds through large and small grants for economic development, facilities, and public art

Personal and external capital investments, public infrastructure funds

Donations, small social service grants

Personal funds of entrepreneurs, public funds administered through arts granting programs and agencies

Personal funds of middle- and upper-class art buyers

Financial Resources

Tools and machinery available to city, state, and federal agencies for large-scale construc­ tion and infrastructure development

Private property and businesses, construction, equipment, and personnel to manage and improve capital assets

Public spaces for people to gather or that can be improved with art or events; access to communication technology to distribute information

Computer Listservs, websites, graphic layout and production; live/work spaces for making art; spaces suitable for events and exhibitions

Private space to host events, display, and discuss art; writing and production skills to disseminate information

Technical Resources

Skills for both large- and smallscale construction, creation and negotiation of contracts and permits, property management, business development, knowledge of ethnic art forms and practices

Skills for large- and small-scale construction, creation and negotiation of contracts and permits, property management, business development, knowledge of elite art forms and practices

Skills for organizing volunteers, staging public events, conflict resolution, designing publicity materials, maintaining websites and Listservs

Skills to design publicity materials, manage Listservs, run small businesses, write grants, maintain records, write art criticism; knowledge of contemporary art and culture

Knowledge about art materials, styles, and historical movements

Human Resources

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 27

personal income of people involved in art production; technical resources, including varied access to technical infrastructures and communications hardware and software for communication, office and meeting space for administering grants and programs, live/work space for making art, and public, cultural facilities or private, commercial, or public space appropriate for art presentations such as exhibitions, festivals, plays, concerts, parades, and murals; and human resources, including the skills, knowledge, and individual histories of people from varied training and backgrounds, such as artists, administrators, political and local leaders, adults, families, and children, and their varied levels of involvement. Training of artists in each of the locales ranged from those who were self-taught or were skilled crafts­ people of working-class trades, to those trained through academic or fine art trade schools having bachelor of fine arts (BFA) and master of fine arts (MFA) programs. The typology of local art production networks enumerates the kinds of interests shared by participants and the kinds of resources mobilized. Ideal types of networks become visible through comparing and contrasting these interests and resources. (1) Aesthetic networks sought to cultivate shared preferences, values, and meanings about cultural objects. These networks were constituted through social events, parties, and private exhibitions in collectors’ or artists’ homes. Among the three locales in this study, aesthetic networks were most visible in Bronzeville and involved middle-class black professionals actively constructing knowledge and reserving it within the network of activity to constitute black cultural capital. Investigation of activities of these art collectors revealed their shared interest in creating a social environment in which black culture and locally made and locally owned art objects were at the center of this activity. These networks created links between collectors, artists, and a limited number of local nonprofit and commercial art galleries. By comparison, art purchases in Rogers Park and Pilsen were often intended to remove the artwork from any local context and relocate it into the market in which the gallery, art consultant, or collector operated, or into the extended network of nonprofit institutions through display first at small, localized nonprofit organizations, then at larger nonprofit institutions of culture. (2) Autonomy networks provided a contemporary snapshot of what living artists do to sustain and create visibility for their work while maintaining a commitment to the traditional aesthetic ideal of artistic autonomy. The artists involved in such networks in Pilsen are further distinguished as cuttingedge artists, transnational artists, and museum-quality artists; all are highly educated as it was their academic training that seeded the intentions and

28 / Chapter One

language of artistic autonomy in their activities. Such networks exist as practical activity necessary for artists to pursue artistic goals. The interpersonal interactions and their connections to local places were short term and even transitory. Through such networks, producers cooperated with each other to assert and support what these individual artists perceived as artistic autonomy over what was produced. Such producers sought circumstances that increased their own artistic control over their work. Their cooperation was geared to increase the visibility of their artworks and to access professional opportunities. Meaning construction in these networks is limited to the meaning of activities that supported artistic autonomy, such as with the collaborative opening nights of Pilsen’s independent local galleries. In contrast to aesthetic networks, the activities of these networks were not constructed to shape or critique the meaning in the artworks themselves. Autonomy networks existed through the work of highly motivated artists, yet also required the complicity of an extended network of family and friends, landlords, administrators, and small business suppliers and technicians for their survival. (3) Problem-solving networks involved social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs who were not concerned with particular meanings of artworks or cultural meanings, but instead used art production as a way to act on specific problems, such as neighborhood deterioration and vandalism and other criminal activity prevalent in vacant lots, abandoned buildings, or low-traffic areas, as well as to attract business to restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses. Their activities sought to replace symbols of structural decay, social disorder, and local destabilization with symbols of creativity, harmony, and stability. In Rogers Park, local activists, residents, and artists all cooperated in instrumental activities designed to address problems within the community area. Their activities resulted in, for example, the creation of parks or gardens in vacant lots; murals on walls that had been tagged by gang members or sprayed by graffiti artists; revitalization of obsolete and abandoned buildings for use as artist studios; and conversion of vacant storefronts for art activities such as exhibitions, classes, or events. In most places, problem-solving networks were short-lived; they were either dismantled after a specific event or when a formal organization or market took over their functions. Yet in Rogers Park, such activity has existed for nearly three decades and has been a mechanism to address post-industrial change in this racially changing but stable locale. (4) Gentrification networks sought to increase the value of local resources by homogenizing local culture and creating exclusive spaces through sponsorship of exclusive forms of art. These networks involved a range of actors,

Theory of Local Art Production Networks / 29

including property owners interested in seeing property values increase and local business owners interested in attracting higher-paying customers. The rhetoric used by these participants revealed how local values were increased but also the mechanisms that have for years led to the devaluation of property in black and ethnic locales. Participants in gentrification networks could act at times against and at times in consort with artistic autonomy and problem-solving networks, but are distinguished by their privileging of exclusive, institutional practices that I label as the “whitewashing” of culture. While local ethnic residents, who wanted to see their own property values increase, supported a variety of investment interests, they also stood against efforts to whitewash or homogenize culture and resisted the piling up of the largely white gentry that had the potential to displace ethnic culture and ethnic residents of their locale. (5) Empowerment networks mobilized resources to invest in public art and cultural facilities following traditional civil rights activism calling for “our fair share of the public resources and public goods.” Activities of these networks represented a break from the institutional practices of the cultural core that empowered sanctioned experts with decision-making power. In this case, the public good was ownership of its institutions and its geographic space, as well as ownership of culture and its associated status attainment. By the end of the twentieth century, these networks had accessed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state, and municipal funds earmarked for social services and economic development, and deployed these funds toward cultural restoration, revitalization, and development. The result of their work was also seen in numerous physical improvements to the neighborhoods and through production of public art, historic monuments, and cultural facilities that identified and marked local territory. Empowerment networks addressed the long-term cultural processes that devalued property and other resources in black and ethnic locales by accessing resources that led to legitimate financial and aesthetic valuation of culture. These networks involved political figures and citizens who sought investments into the culture of a racial or ethnic group to increase its reserve of information and resources that represent the history and practices of the group.

Conclusions This typology provides a framework for the network-based theory of art production in locales outside the city center. It shows that the shared interests occurring in localized networks are distinct from assertions of artistic authority maintained through formal institutions (DiMaggio [1982] 1991) or

30 / Chapter One

the competition that defines art markets (White 2005). The explanation of art production as network-based resource mobilization also runs contrary to the art-historical approach, which focuses on analysis of artistic form and symbols, with innovation explained by seminal figures of genius (Panofsky 1939; Shapiro [1952] 1953; Panofsky [1955] 1974; Danto 1967; Chipp 1968; Panofsky 1991). A by-product of the art-historical approach has been a hierarchical categorization of art production types in which “culture” is the subordinated product of ethnic and other minority groups, and “art” is the privileged product of the refined, pristine, dominant groups of a city, region, or nation (Bourdieu [1979] 1984). Instead, this study focuses on local art production networks as the social arrangement that enables art producers to pursue their work by establishing a shared interest in the local place and by mobilizing available resources. These shared interests produce distinctions among networks types and have the variety of “cultural” effects that create local places. My emphasis on the “shared interest” of art producers, rather than the “shared meanings” of artworks, places art producers in an active position capable of producing social and political results for the locality. Efforts ignited through shared interests follow the logic of the consensus model of the elite-driven “growth machine” (Molotch 1976) that drove change in many urban areas during the last half of the twentieth century. The “growth machine” operated upon an often unspoken consensus that growth was good. Yet the cases featured in this book could be better understood as part of an “ethnically driven stability machine” composed of networks of people who mobilized resources to secure cultural representation and ownership while thwarting gentrification and appropriation by the white elite. This “stability machine” was powered by historically subordinate groups that had gained political power and social influence but had yet to secure ownership of local space or recognition for their cultural production in the broader meaningmaking structures of society. As an investigation of such effort, this study offers a contemporary explanation as to why and how urban cultures (Crane 1992) vary by locality—particularly those inhabited by racial and ethnic middle classes—and how culture became a tool to stake claim to local space and secure cultural equity within a global context.

TWO

Local Places

Chicago as a Model of a City Chicago provides a convenient exemplar to study how the shifts in physical and social orders that came with post-industrial society (Clark 2004; Lloyd 2005; Pattillo 2007) occurred in tandem with shifts in cultural order. Located in a city in which cultural power and status has been concentrated within the city center, Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park are places rich with ethnic cultures having qualities that have been both stigmatized and romanticized; their local cultures have been structured around the historic and cultural identities of its people rather than by the policies and the cultural focus of art institutions. Ethnic art producers in this context stood against demographic, economic, and cultural change that have often been characterized as “gentrification,” but were the result of a revalorization pro­ cess implemented as a policy direction long before there was any “gentry” moving in. Dominated by blacks, Latinos, and white ethnics, these places were once relegated to the status of ghettos or ethnic enclaves where segments of Chicago’s poor, minority, and immigrant populations lived, yet they have come to represent population groups that have grown to sizes equal to or surpassing the size of the dominant culture group, and now span beyond the city borders. Historic Construction of Local Places in Chicago Since the early twentieth century, when sociologist Robert E. Park ([1925] 1952) used the case of Chicago to develop a theory of a city organized as concentric circles around a central core, Chicago’s downtown “Loop” has been the city’s physical and cultural center amid seventy-seven “community areas” (fig. 5). Park saw the industrial city as a social entity organized

32 / Chapter Two

Figure 5. Map of Chicago’s seventyseven community areas with shaded areas illustrating the geographic proximity of Rogers Park, Pilsen, and Bronzeville to Chicago’s downtown Loop business district. Map created by the author (2003).

around an urban center that was surrounded first by slums and then by succeeding concentric circles of increasing social integration and order. This image captured the reality that wealth from the city’s industrial production was consolidated in the city center, then exported, in the form of salaries, benefits, and profits, to the outlying areas: Within the area bounded on the one hand by the central business district and on the other hand by the suburbs, the city tends to take the form of a series of concentric circles. These different regions, located at different relative distances from the center, are characterized by different degrees of mobility of the population. . . .

Local Places / 33 The area of greatest mobility, i.e., of movement and change of population, is naturally the business center itself. Here are the hotels, the dwelling-places of the transients. Except for the few permanent dwellers in these hotels, the business center, which is the city par excellence, empties itself every night and fills itself every morning. Outside the city center, in this narrower sense of the term, are the slums, the dwelling places of the casuals. On the edge of the slums there are likely to be regions already in the process of being submerged, characterized as the “rooming-house areas,” the dwelling-places of bohemians, transient adventurers of all sorts, and the unsettled young of both sexes. Beyond these are the apartment-house areas, the region of small families and delicatessen shops. Finally, out beyond all else, are the regions of duplex apartments and of single dwellings where people still own their homes and raise children, as they do, to be sure, in the slums. (Park [1925] 1952, 171–72)

For Park and other Chicago school sociologists, local places existed between the city center and wealthier periphery. These were industrial and manufacturing sites as well as places to live. And, according to Park, the character of these places was one of social and cultural difference determined by the mobility of its residents. Although a number of scholars have disputed the neat geometry of Park’s concentric circles (Logan and Molotch 1 987)—particularly when they are applied to other urban areas (Zukin 1991; Massy and Denton 1993) or when considered in light of the suburban growth and sprawl that transformed cities into metropolitan areas (Teaford 2006)—in Chicago the dichotomy of cultural power and status between the city center and local places remained intact for much of the twentieth century. By 2008, with its substantial decline of manufacturing and increases in post-industrial finance, communication, and tourist economies (Sassen [1991] 2001, [1994] 2006; Clark 2004), Chicago’s city center was still the lo­ cation of the city’s largest and most powerful institutions: City Hall, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and its Civic Opera House, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Hall, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Loop was therefore still an important reference point for understanding nearly all activity of the city’s wealthy elites and for understanding the physical and symbolic locations of its surrounding community areas. With this physical location of elite cultural production in the downtown Loop mirroring the symbolic location of the elites at the center of cultural production, the physical and the symbolic order of cultural production in Chicago was one and the same. The tension between the cultural core and its margins continued to be

34 / Chapter Two $1-1M

$1M-10M

$10M-20M

$over 20M

180

Number of Nonprofit Organizations

160

162

140 120 100 75

80 60

51 27

40 20 0

11

11 1 0

North

4

1

N. Loop

4 3

Loop

8

14 2 1 1

S. Loop

14 2 0 0

W. Loop

0 1 0 0

2 2 0 0

0 0 0

Pilsen Bronzeville Rogers Park

Figure 6.  Comparison of number and size of nonprofit art organizations (budget in millions) by location in Chicago (2007). Data source: Guidestar.org.

concretely manifested through the unequal distribution of nonprofit cultural facilities—as is evident in both the number of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and their budget sizes (fig. 6)—and in the unequal participation in the downtown arts by residents throughout the city (LaLonde et al. 2006). For urban theorists, the center/place dichotomy exemplifies one type of urban power structure (Zukin 1991). Within the urban cultural center, elites control cultural resources and the production of symbols through its institutions of culture (DiMaggio [1982] 1991; Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Zolberg 1994). Through consolidation from all of the artworks available, a small group of elites have overseen the production of canons, repertoires, and masterpieces; their power is sustained and reified through their control of the institutions of culture (Simpson 1981; DiMaggio [1982] 1991; Zukin 1982; Dowd et al. 2002). Within this center-dominant ordering, local and ethnic cultures are considered parochial and vernacular (Hayden 1995) and left outside the institutional framework or subordinated within; moreover, local places have been left with limited resources to carry out the kind of valuation of cultural objects and activities that have empowered elite groups.

Local Places / 35

Revalorizing the City Center and Surrounding Locales They tell us that Dearborn Park will not displace people or disrupt neighborhoods because it is to be built on vacant land. But the truth about Dearborn Park is that it is a part of the Chicago 21 plan to drive blacks, Latinos, and poor people from the cities. If it is built, it will begin displacement of poor communities throughout Chicago—first the construction of Dearborn Park, and then revitalization of downtown—Chinatown, Pilsen, the Near West Side. . . . It’s like a big stone thrown into the middle of the pond, the waves spread quickly. (Marion Stamps, spokesperson for the Coalition to Stop the Chicago 21 Plan, on May 7, 1977; quoted in Adelman [1979] 1983, 54)

In Chicago as early as 1973, with their Chicago 21 Plan to redevelop the inner city (City of Chicago 1973; Gapp 1973; Rast 2001), Chicago’s wealthy elites envisioned the post-industrial city transformed from an industrial one in which the city center was an island surrounded by a moat of poverty and squalor, to one in which the center would rise like a summit amidst a mountain range of economic, cultural, political, and social activity. Although the Chicago 21 Plan initially focused on the redevelopment of the South Loop into “a suburb within the city” (Gapp 1973), it recommended a number of policy changes necessary for the city’s survival into the twenty-first century. Among these policy recommendations was the end of inner-city high-rise public housing. Activists in Bronzeville, Pilsen, Rogers Park, and elsewhere condemned the plan before any funding or implementation began. Marion Stamps—an activist then in her late twenties, a public housing resident, and a spokesperson for the Coalition to Stop the Chicago 21 Plan—fought efforts to dismantle public housing until her death in 1995. 1 Yet by 2000, although both the goals of redevelopment of the South Loop and the end of inner-city high-rise public housing had been realized, blacks and Latinos had not been removed from the neighborhoods surrounding the city core. This was in part because behind the highly visible efforts of the elite to redefine the city center, Chicago’s substantial black and Latino population began to focus on securing what Bourdieu termed “legitimate” forms of political and cultural power (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990) through establishment of ethnic cultural institutions and ethnic accounts of history. In effect, Chicago 21 provided a call to action for African Americans, Latinos, and the white ethnic working classes in the areas surrounding the city center. As the policy direction that would be labeled “gentrification” came to light, residents of the three locales mobilized resources to resist

36 / Chapter Two

this new urban succession pattern: one in which a white urban elite sought to reclaim urban space by displacing long-present racial and ethnic groups. Although each locale initially had relatively limited arts infrastructures, local art producers mobilized resources to build locally based cultural institutions, and they were increasingly vocal and visible, claiming these locales to be culturally significant places existing as an important contrast to the elitist downtown city center and its cultural institutions. As the vision behind Chicago 21 was becoming a reality, the city’s transformation was characterized by a redistribution of wealth into the central business district and its adjoining concentric circles rather than out of the center city into the wealthy suburban areas as it had been for most of the twentieth century. The consequence of Bronzeville’s and Pilsen’s proximity to the city center became nearly inverted from what it was in the beginning of the previous century. Once considered to be a liability because of the slums and transient populations that encircled the city center (Park [1925] 1952), this proximity to the city center had come to be viewed as attractive to growth machine coalitions (Molotch 1976) of downtown business owners, investors, developers, city planners, and government officials seeking not only to revalorize property and re-energize the downtown economy, but to expand its growth to much of the inner city (Rast 2001). In contrast, the distance from the city center for once-exclusive, middle-class places such as Rogers Park was increasingly viewed as a liability. In the three locales under investigation here, art production became the instrument of choice to both promote and stand against the revalorization of property, to promote and resist cultural change, and to solve local problems.

Local People and Local Color Bronzeville: The Soul of Black Chicago Bronzeville2 begins just three miles south of the Loop at Twenty-Sixth Street, extending south to Hyde Park at Fifty-First Street. It is set apart from the South Loop and from Pilsen by a complex web of industrial and commercial transportation lines, including the Chicago River, the Dan Ryan and Adlai E. Stevenson expressways, and multiple train lines, all of which have served to isolate the locale for most of the century. Bronzeville includes much of the historic Black Belt, the port of entry for southern blacks migrating to Chicago in the early twentieth century via rail lines from the southern United States. Once considered the “Black Metropolis” and a thriving “city within a city” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962), the area was the center of

Local Places / 37

black commerce and black life in the Midwest. With the concentration of poverty that came with the mid-century construction of high-rise public housing, it became one of Chicago’s most neglected ghettos. Contemporary Bronzeville was conceived as a redevelopment project in the early 1990s with the intention of restoring the historic early twentiethcentury metropolis that once dominated Chicago’s Mid-South region. The name is derived from the term “bronzeville,” a generic reference to any segregated, predominantly black town or place in the post–Civil War United States. Yet it frames the narrative driving redevelopment: Chicago’s Bronzeville was the place where a racially segregated, clearly circumscribed, but economically diverse and culturally rich black population was contained; it was a place where poor blacks, middle-class blacks, black professionals, and black entrepreneurs all lived together because restrictive covenants barred them from living anywhere else in Chicago; in the twentyfirst century, Bronzeville would be restored as a culturally rich, economically diverse, and primarily black Chicago locale. The historic Bronzeville narrative is drawn predominantly from two sources: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s sociological study, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, ([1945] 1962), and Blacks ([1945] 1987), a book of poetry by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and past Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. According to Drake and Cayton, in the mid-nineteenth century the Negro community in Chicago began as a haven or refuge for escaped slaves. It emerged a century later as Black Metropolis inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves. In the years between, it had become a citadel of economic and political power in the midst of Midwest Metropolis—an integral part of the city political machine and a reservoir for industrial labor and personal and domestic servants. (755)

Bronzeville never was a city with corporate boundaries but was referred to as “a city within a city” that functioned almost autonomously from the rest of Chicago. It was a place on Chicago’s South Side created from two Great Migrations of blacks from the southern United States. The first wave came during World War I, from 1914 to 1918, to fill industrial jobs available in part due to limits on foreign immigration during the war. A second migration took place during and after World War II. Over a forty-four-year period (1900–1944), Chicago’s black population, then contained largely in Bronzeville, increased elevenfold from 30,150 to 337,000 (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962, 8). Availability of all sorts of jobs meant economic

38 / Chapter Two

and educational opportunities, expansion of a black middle class, and creation of the cultural consciousness that would symbolize Bronzeville beginning in the early twentieth century. According to Drake and Cayton, “The middle class way of life is perhaps the most significant pattern of living in Bronzeville. . . . [A middle-class black person is] usually a fairly welleducated working man or woman who knows the ropes of the urban world, wants to get ahead, and is determined to be ‘decent’ ” (714–15). In a series of poems in Blacks ([1945] 1987) titled “A Street in Bronzeville,” Gwendolyn Brooks described the lives of everyday people living in Bronzeville. Through subjects such as “Bessie of Bronzeville Visits Mary and Norman at a Beach-House in New Buffalo,” the old marrieds, kitchenettes, domestic workers, murderers, a Negro hero, and Sadie and Maud, she subtly distinguished black life and culture from that of the white elite through the everyday lives and aspirations of her characters. Of Maud Martha, she wrote: She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies—yes, she would have like meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower. (143–44)

Just as “China asters” and “Japanese Iris” might be a specific reference to the exotic or to Chicago’s North Side elite on Aster Street, “meadow lilies” and “dandelions” capture the working-class, practical, yet distinctive character of a life in historic Bronzeville. The heyday of Black Metropolis in the 1920s was followed by disaster that hit during the Depression and years of decline as the Chicago Housing Authority built high-rise public housing along South State Street and South Lake Shore Drive. Although the public housing policy intended to provide quality housing, its effect, according to historian Timuel Black (1999), was to “warehouse the poor,” surrounding the commercial businesses and middle-class residential districts of a black metropolis with poverty. An editorial from a black traveler website highlights how the oncecontroversial idea of dismantling public housing became commonplace: The 6-mile-long Godzilla of [high-rise public housing], Robert Taylor Homes, was built adjacent to the west side of Bronzeville. A few years later, more high-

Local Places / 39 rise housing projects [the Clarence Darrow projects] were built on the eastern side of Bronzeville. This sandwiching effect devastated a community that previously had a well-functioning mix of working poor to middle-class residents. The super-warehousing of poor people triggered Black middle-class flight out of Bronzeville, thereby crippling businesses, schools and churches. . . . Even though the region has many years ahead to reabsorb thousands of people from the Godzilla-like housing projects being torn down, entrepreneurial activity and sensible public works are yielding numerous visible results in Bronzeville. Assuming the pace of renovation increases over this decade, Bronzeville will likely experience a second Black Renaissance. (Dorsey 2004)

Like the Emerald City or Mecca, the name “Bronzeville” became a symbol of a place; it referred to a specific place where black life, culture, business, and politics thrived as if it were its own city; and it represented black cultural distinction. In 2000 Bronzeville was still predominantly black/African American ethnicity (86%) as it had been for much of the previous century, with only a small population (4%) being foreign-born. Although households living in extreme poverty still predominated in 2000, household incomes began shifting upward. The demolition of public housing and the voucher-based redistribution of its residents led to a reduction in the number and concentration of those living in extreme poverty and a return of middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans to the area. The influx of higherincome and highly educated African Americans fueled hopes for a local Black Renaissance. Yet the large tracts of vacant land—although intermingled with stately brick and gray stone mansions, two-flats, occasional multi-unit apartments, and condominium complexes—required substantial building to transform Bronzeville from one of low population density (78,959 people lived in the 5.1-square-mile area) back to a thriving black metropolis. Pilsen: A Center of Mexican Culture Pilsen3 is located south and west of the downtown Loop and among the three locales studied is closest to the city center. Although not included in the earliest plans for the city, the floodplain that made up much of Pilsen was included in the platting for Chicago when the city was incorporated in 1837. Planners and industrialists anticipated benefits once the Illinois and Michigan Canal was complete, making the South Branch of the Chicago River navigable to the Mississippi River. Although flooding and bad drainage has plagued Pilsen since its earliest settlements, the waterway attracted

40 / Chapter Two

both the nineteenth-century industrialists who built factories and the labor­ ers who built the canal and then manned the factories spawned by the waterway. Its first settlement in 1857 established Pilsen as port of entry for foreign-born; first among these were Eastern Europeans. The name “Pilsen” was adopted by the Eastern European immigrants from Bohemia,4 Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Austria who settled in the area. “Pilsen” refers to Plzenˇ, the capital city of West Bohemia, a western region of the present-day Czech Republic. The place on Chicago’s Lower West Side acquired its name when a Bohemian immigrant opened the Pilsen Café at 2110 South Halsted Street in 1871. Although the surrounding areas at the time were rich with European ethnic diversity, Bohemians were the largest group in Pilsen and in “Praha,” the neighboring settlement named for Prague and located just north of Pilsen in the area now dominated by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus. Jane Addams ([1910] 1938) described the Bohemian settlement as “so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world” (98–99).5 The area would remain predominantly Bohemian ethnic through World War I, while just south and east across the river bend was the settlement of Chinese businessmen and laborers that would become Chicago’s Chinatown. Pilsen prospered after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as industrialists and businesses relocated lumber yards, factories, and suppliers to this area left untouched by the fire. Among them, Cyrus McCormick built a reaper plant on a 24-acre plot on the South Branch of the Chicago River at Western Avenue, for the company that would become International Harvester. When it opened in 1873, McCormick’s reaper plant was one of the largest factories in the United States and would be the only International Harvester factory until 1910 (Adelman [1979] 1983, 6). The prosperity of local industry, coupled with the relative deprivation in the lives of workers, stimulated unionization. Newspaper reports on the violent clashes between police and laborers branded Pilsen as “a hot-bed of Communism” and its militant Bohemians as “mean . . . rash . . . bigoted” (Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1877, in Adelman [1979] 1983, 55). Implication of the police in the violence came after a series of events begun when 1,482 workers, who were locked out of the McCormick plant in February 1886, clashed with officers. Violence came to a head in the infamous May 1886 riot at Haymarket Square. Union halls, ethnic churches, and the eight-hour workday are all testaments to the powerful labor movement that emerged from nineteenth-century Pilsen, but few of these labor activists would could have foreseen its transformation a century later.

Local Places / 41 Pilsen is to [its western neighbor] Little Village as Chicago is to the suburbs. Pilsen is the downtown; it represents the community, the Mexican people. It is where the art is; it’s where you want to be. Little Village is the suburb; it’s where the people live. There are a lot of parents and students [out] there. Things close up early. People don’t go out at night. Buses end at 6 or 7 p.m. (Estrada interview 2001)

As a twenty-first-century place, Pilsen has many of the nineteenth-century characteristics of a historic working-class, ethnic enclave. Among these: multiple generations of working-class families can be seen gathering around the one- and two-flat wood-frame homes; delivery trucks block streets as workers load and unload merchandise for the many ethnic small businesses; foreign language and iconography predominate on murals and signage for ethnic restaurants, stores, social service agencies, and churches (plates 1 and 2); and, on a limited number of highly publicized dates, parades celebrate ethnic heritage and empowerment, with festivals around churches, parks, schools, and art centers. Yet in the twenty-first century, the ethnicity is no longer European, but predominantly Latino, of Mexican descent. The name “Pilsen” was retained by Mexican Americans, who became the dominant demographic category there by the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 2000, within twelve of fifteen census tracts that make up Pilsen, 90 percent or more of the residents were of Mexican ethnicity. Residential uses have not overtaken areas zoned as industrial along the southern border of Pilsen, but in its easternmost census tracts, obsolete industrial structures along the river provide studio and living spaces for artists. Within the artists’ section in eastern Pilsen was the greatest concentration of non-Latinos in Pilsen, yet they represented only a third of the population in these census tracts in 2000. In spite of its historic characteristics as an industrial and residential locale for ethnic immigrants, a number of facts challenged the notion of Pilsen as an ethnic enclave in this century. First and foremost, Pilsen was not the only place in Chicago where Mexican ethnics live; Chicago’s Mexican population extends far beyond the community area of Pilsen. In 2000 Pilsen’s population of 39,144 represented only 5 percent of Chicago’s 753,644 Latinos. Other concentrations of Latino ethnics are found in adjoining areas west of Pilsen, including Heart of Chicago and in La Villita, otherwise known as Little Village, a residential section of South Lawndale; in Clearing and Back of the Yards, both near Midway Airport; in the western areas of Humboldt Park and Logan Square; in the far northern community areas of Edgewater and Rogers Park; and in the near western suburbs of Cicero and Berwyn. Whereas

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Pilsen, Little Village, and the adjoining suburbs are predominantly Mexican American, other community areas that have substantial Latino populations are less homogenously Mexican. They include or are dominated by Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Spaniards, and Central and South Americans. Although Mexican ethnics have a long history in Chicago, they have more recently benefited from the 1965 federal law the Hart-Cellar Act, which removed the quota preference for European immigrants and opened the door for increased immigration from elsewhere including Latin America. For Mexican Americans like William Estrada, quoted earlier, the symbolic order of Pilsen mirrors the center/place dichotomy, except that a local place like Pilsen is the cultural center for a large population of Mexicans and Mexican Americans that spans the city and suburbs. It functions as the cultural center, not only because Pilsen was one of the most culturally active of the Mexican locales, but because it is also home to the largest ethnic cultural institution in the city dedicated to a Latino culture, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM), which opened in 1986 and was renamed the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) in 2006. With the emergence of an institutional core of Latino culture, Pilsen was becoming a pan-ethnic cultural center for the variety of Latino ethnicities that live throughout the city and the Midwest. Further challenging the notion of Pilsen as an ethnic enclave is the variety of ways that art producers pursued artistic autonomy from not only institutional and market controls, but also from expectations of ethnic culture. Networks of cutting-edge, transnational, and museum-quality artists exist between two competing local interests: one interested in the institutional legitimacy of Mexican culture and another interested in homogenizing local culture as part of a gentrification process. Finally, there is the cultural competition from non-Latinos, including descendants of Bohemian, Polish, and other Eastern European immigrants whose families settled in Pilsen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them was the Podmajersky family, whose early descendants first moved to the area in 1917. John Podmajersky II began purchasing property in the eastern section of Pilsen in the 1950s. The family owns much of the property in “Pilsen East,” as the family called the area until the Podmajersky real estate corporation rebranded the area in 2002 the “Chicago Arts District.” Other independent artists also purchased property and were accompanied by renters who were attracted by the increasingly cutting-edge, hyperprogressive, chic aura found among within this easternmost industrial edge of Pilsen.

Local Places / 43

Rogers Park: The Most Culturally Diverse Place in Chicago Rogers Park,6 located ten miles north of the Loop, is the farthest north of any of Chicago’s community areas and is adjacent to the northern suburb of Evanston. Established on land first owned by an Irish settler, Phillip Rogers, Rogers Park was incorporated as a village in 1878, then annexed by Chicago in 1893 (Mooney-Melvin 1993). Among the factors that established Rogers Park as a middle-class place predating mid-century suburbs were access by rail lines such as those connecting Chicago to Milwaukee (1860) and the Northwestern Elevated commuter line (1908); influence of religious and scholarly elites through the establishment of Loyola University (1906) and Mundelein College (1930); and construction of middle-class amenities such as lakefront beaches, entertainment centers such as the Marx Brothers’ flagship theater—the Granada Theatre—and high-quality brick-and-stone multi-unit dwellings. Its population grew as immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Luxembourg settled in Rogers Park and the surrounding locales, bringing with them distinct ethnic cultural practices of Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant faiths. The foundation for the cultural diversity of present-day Rogers Park was established upon the principal of religious tolerance by the religious institutions and organizations built there after World War I. Among the wide range of religious organizations still existing in Rogers Park and its neighboring West Ridge (often referred to as West Rogers Park) in 2001 were thirty Jewish congregations, twenty-seven Protestant churches, six mosques, five Roman Catholic parishes, the Croatian Catholic Mission, an Assyrian Catholic church, four Buddhist temples or meditation centers, a Hindu temple, a Sikh gurdwa¯ra¯ and five or more New Age meditation and worship centers. Of the Jewish congregations, twenty-one were Orthodox, three Traditional, four Conservative, one Reform, and one Lubavitcher. Of the Protestant churches, five were mainline denominations, the remaining seventeen included Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various pentecostal, evangelical, and sectarian groups—many with names indicating an ethnic or national identity. (Livezey 2001, 48)

Equally significant to the concentration of traditional and Orthodox religious centers was the hundreds of Indian and Pakistani restaurants and businesses along Devon Avenue, a commercial corridor bordering several community areas.

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Religious diversity planted the seeds for tolerance of cultural diversity today. With the in-migration of Latino and Asian groups in the last half of the twentieth century, this historically white, ethnic, working-/middle-class place became linguistically and racially diverse. In 2000 Rogers Park was home to nearly equal proportions of people who self-identified as white (32%), black (30%), or Latino (28%), with lower percentages of Asian/Pacific islanders (6%) or other races (4%). As 34 percent of its population was foreign-born— including an array of Eastern Europeans, North, Central, and South Africans, South and Central Americans, and South and East Asians—the traditional classifications of ethnics as Americans, such as African Americans, Mexican Americans, or Asian Americans, could not be readily applied. By the end of the twentieth century, Rogers Park was known for its diversity; and it was promoted as a neighborhood asset, as is seen in this statement by the local city council representative Alderman Joe Moore: The 49th Ward is one of the most diverse and vibrant communities to be found anywhere in the world. Our community is a model for the rest of the city and nation, truly showing that a racially and economically diverse community can thrive and grow. (Moore 2007)

This description of Rogers Park pervaded accounts of the locale on websites and flyers. And just as the identities of “black” or “Latino” were constructed and reproduced through localized cultural representations in Pilsen and Bronzeville, so was this concept of “diversity.” In Rogers Park, diversity was represented as a collective cultural identity of the total variety of residents. Diversity meant a multiplicity of identities; it was an identity in which no single group of a particular racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, income, or status was to dominate. For individuals, this meant people like Al Goldberg, a real estate broker of Jewish ancestry, could organize public drumming circles that included both men and women from an array of racial, ethnic, social, or economic backgrounds, who all joined the circle with drums from a variety of cultural traditions. This contrasted with some Afrocentric traditions in which only men are allowed to drum and the instruments have to appear handmade and of African origin. With its 2000 population of more than 60,000 within a 1.8-square-mile area, Rogers Park had the highest population density of the three locales in this study. In Rogers Park—more than in Pilsen or Bronzeville—there were families that had lived in the neighborhood for nearly a hundred years in the brick-and-gray-stone two-flats and single-family homes whose values

Local Places / 45

had appreciated at a pace slower than those farther south near the Loop or farther north in the suburbs. But high-rise apartment buildings with studio and one-bedroom apartments built before the mid-century had more than half of the rental units available in Rogers Park, and these attracted a more transient population, including students at Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University in the bordering suburb of Evanston. Although larger rental units were still available, between 1997 and 2000 more than a thousand of those units were converted to condominiums. Long-term residency, more so than membership in a particular racial or ethnic group or class, was a marker of local status. Tom Peterson (pseudonym), a voter registrar, explained this to me as he filled out my registration form. “Did you just move to the neighborhood?” he asked. “No, I’ve been here for some time,” I responded. “Oh, how long?” he inquired. “A year and a half,” I said. He laughed. “At Community Council meetings, when residents stand to speak, they preface what they are to say by stating how long they have been in the neighborhood. I have been here eleven years and people look at me like I am a newcomer,” he said. (Peterson interview 2002)

This helped to explain, for example, why Peter Wolf, the host of the “In One Ear” weekly open-mic poetry event at the Heartland Café, each week introduced himself as a “third-generation resident of Rogers Park.” Such claims were regularly asserted to bolster an individual’s status. Long-term residency in Rogers Park provided a marker of a trusted voice in public debate about the future of the locale and of the political issues of the day, and residents were expected to be part of these debates through the many local activist networks. Within the political environment in Rogers Park, it was difficult to be too committed to a cause. Residents of the Far North Side community area openly criticized their city council representative, Alderman Joe Moore, for his generally weak stance on just about everything. “Less is Moore” was the dismissive phrase regularly used to condemn his general lack of effectiveness and conviction, according to just about any standard held by his constituents. But a change occurred in 2006 when he authored a citywide ordinance banning all Chicago restaurants from serving foie gras (or “fatty liver” pâté). When the ban passed, he became endeared to his constituents who were

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morally opposed to the animal cruelty involved in force-feeding ducks and geese for foie gras and who regularly stood to the political left of both the downtown and global elitist interests on just about every issue, including world peace, worker rights, farmer rights, gay rights, animal rights, and the environment. With the city’s political history as a working-class city, it’s not hard to imag­ine how a ban on selling foie gras passed the Chicago City Council. Mayor Richard M. Daley was elected in 1989 as a representative of Chicago’s white “dees, dem, and does” working class. And, as the son of the mythic midcentury “Boss,” Richard J. Daley, it’s not hard to imagine the mayor steamrolling over his political opposition. But it is hard to imagine this mayor steamrolling over his opposition for the right to buy foie gras in a Chicago restaurant. But that is exactly what he did two years after the ban took effect. He claimed the ordinance “made Chicago an international laughingstock” (Spielman 2008). His actions are described as “a legislative end-run that set a new standard for violating protocol and rolling over the opposition” (Spielman 2008). As Alderman Moore shouted to be heard in the city council chambers, Mayor Daley slammed the gavel on a 37–6 vote to repeal the ban, declaring, “Thank you, Joe ‘foie gras’ Moore” (Spielman 2008). In spite of the repeal, it was a moral victory for the alderman and for Rogers Park. The ban represented Rogers Park as a place of compassionate activism and Alderman Moore as a committed, proactive, and forward-thinking leader. This was the cultural, social, and political context in which Rogers Park residents claimed a place in Chicago. The northern fringe of the city was not a place for middle-of-the-road, mainstream, conservative political views; it was assertively, if not radically, left-leaning. And just as preserving ethnic and racial presence and ownership has been a rallying point for residents in Pilsen and Bronzeville, preserving diversity in what some local advocates refer to as “the most diverse place in the world” had been a rallying point for nearly forty years. Diversity advocates operated through a problem-solving network involving both civic and cultural interests to maintain diversity as a steady state, rather than a transitional phase in an urban succession pattern headed for either decline or gentrification.

Change after the Modern Industrial Era In spite of the persistence of some historical characteristics, each of these three places was a site of change resulting in part from larger economic and cultural forces operating well beyond these locales and out of the control of local leaders and residents.

Local Places / 47 Bronzeville

Pilsen

Rogers Park

40% 34%

35%

32%

31%

30% 25% 21%

20% 15%

14% 14%

16%

19% 17%

19% 16% 13%

12%10%12%

10% 5% 4% 5%

5%

2%

1% 1%

0% < $10,000

$10,000 $19,999

$20,000 $39,999

$40,000 $59,999

$60,000 $99,999

$100,000 $199,999

$200,000 >

Figure 7.  Comparison of income range in Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park. Source: U.S. Census 2000.

Their economic location as working-class places was at first evident by median household income (in 2000), which in each of the three locales was below the median of $38,625 for Chicago (Bronzeville $22,021, Pilsen $26,975, Rogers Park $32,444). Yet their ranges of local household income provided a more nuanced picture of their contemporary socioeconomic location (fig. 7). The dominant income category in Pilsen (38%) and Rogers Park (32%) was comprised of households with incomes between $20,000 and $39,999, providing a picture consistent with their median figures and representing working-class to lower-middle-class majorities. Yet Bronzeville in 2000 still had a “double peak” even after much of the public housing had been dismantled; the dominant group (31%) was with households living in extreme poverty (under $10,000 annually), and a second group (19%) of its households had incomes between $20,000 and $39,000. Its median income ($22,021) trended toward poverty but was counterbalanced by the proportion of upper-middle- and upper-income households. Each of the three locales had about 5 percent of their population in the category of the upper-middle class (household income $100,000–$199,999), yet Bronzeville had a greater proportion of wealthy households, with 559 (2%) of its households earning more than $200,000, compared to 57 (0.45%) in Pilsen and 261 (1%) in Rogers Park.

48 / Chapter Two 1989 (1990 U.S. Census)

1999 (2000 U.S. Census)

60%

50%

48%

40% 31%

30%

20%

17% 16%

19% 19% 13%

12%

9%

10%

7% 4%

2%

0% Less than $10,000

$10,000$19,999

$20,000$39,999

$40,000$59,999

$60,000$99,999

$100,000 or more

Figure 8.  Bronzeville household income 1989 and 1999. Source: U.S. Census 1990 and 2000.

The dramatic change seen in the physical, social, and cultural aspects of Bronzeville was also visible in its economic statistics. In the 1970s, nearly threequarters of Bronzeville’s population were living in extreme poverty, a figure that had diminished to 48 percent by 1990 and 31 percent by 2000 (fig. 8). The reduction was the direct result of the dismantling of high-rise public housing. The more recent poverty rates will likely be reduced even more by the 2010 census, as the dismantling of public housing continued. In 2000 poverty still engulfed the largest proportion of people in Bronzeville, and it was in fact double that of either Pilsen or Rogers Park. Although the proportion of people in the working/middle class (household income $20,000–$39,000) in Bronzeville showed little change from 1990 to 2000, the remaining uppermiddle- to upper-class categories showed substantial increases, as black professionals began to move back to the area beginning in the 1980s. By comparison, median income groups in both Pilsen and Rogers Park showed small changes. Race and Ethnicity as a Collective Resource These three places under discussion are all in a former industrial city in which the hierarchies of race and ethnicity were once structured as ascribed, subordinate statuses and maintained largely through the structure of labor

Local Places / 49

production practices. Yet within a post-industrial economy in a postmodern culture, identity and cultural meanings are no longer “fixed” but can shift within different contexts. Racial and ethnic identities were no longer informal, casually performed reinforcements of hierarchical social structures of inequality—in effect, “doing” race and ethnicity, as West and Zimmerman argued, we might “do gender” (1987); nor were they unconscious moni­ kers of elite or subordinate cultural status (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Halle 1993); nor was racial and ethnic identity abandoned as members of minority populations attained middle-class status (Frazier 1957; Evans [1992] 1995; Schwartzman 2007). Rather, as this study demonstrates, race and ethnicity were self-identifications that were individually asserted and then mobilized as a collective resource for financial, political, and now cultural enfranchisement. This relationship between individual and collective identity and its importance to the empowerment of historically “minority” groups became apparent as I conducted research simultaneously in black, Mexican, and multi-ethnic locales. My relatively dark complexion and curly hair allowed me to “pass” as any number of racial or ethnic identities. This confounded some efforts by onlookers to categorize my race or ethnicity by my appearance alone. The first time I was directly confronted with the topic was with Handley (pseudonym), an older black man with whom I had casually conversed on several occasions. One day when no one was around, he politely said, “May I ask you what race you identify with?” My response was a lengthy account of ancestors whose race was not documented. Some relatives were from Canada, and there were family rumors of black and Native American ancestry in that lineage; however, racial identification was not on any official documents such as my family members’ birth certificates nor in census records from the area in Canada where at least some of my relatives once lived. So I explained to him that because I could not claim a racial or an ethnic ancestry for certain, I didn’t. This was not what Handley wanted to hear. In fact, it was an unaccept­ able response. Rather than pursuing the issue by asking what other members of my family looked like or where else they lived besides Canada—as some other people had responded to my story—he became angry. He abruptly retorted, “Stupid little bitch,” as he turned to walk away. On a separate occasion, Paula Robinson was more insistent. After speaking to my students at the University of Chicago about her leadership and activism in Bronzeville, she accepted an invitation for a soda in my office. She sat down and firmly placed her hands on the armrests of the chair and said, “A few of us have been talking. And well, Tyrone [pseudonym] is

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convinced you are biracial and from South Africa. Others have thought [abrupt pause], well, I am not leaving until you tell me what race you are.” Unlike Handley, Paula smiled and accepted the ambiguity of my response and said, “Oh, I see, this is about searching for your roots.” When I shared these experiences with Gregg Spears, an artist from Bronze­ ville, he admitted that he too had wondered. He further questioned what I knew about my family tree and then affirmed “a lot of slaves escaped to Canada. It was a haven for blacks seeking freedom.” What these and other experiences highlighted was that I was expected to assert an identity as white, black, biracial, French, German, Polish, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, South African—all interpretations of my identity offered directly or indirectly to me during this study. Furthermore, I was expected to assert a status position, referring to the wealth, education, and social standing of my family within a racial and ethnic group. This was something I sought not to do as I straddled these multiple groups in multiple places. Rather, the ambiguity of my identity served my purposes as an ethnographer as I straddled the kind of insider and outsider status that is necessary for ethnographic research. My appearance and my ancestry were not the only aspects of my identity that were challenged as part of this research. Gerald Sanders, an artist who taught art out of a home/studio publicized as “Studio Bronzeville,” permitted me to observe an art class if I agreed to participate, by drawing along with the rest of the class. He gave me a magazine clipping of a white woman and required me to draw the left half of her face, while indicating he would draw the right half. Although his side of the drawing demonstrated more finesse as a portrait artist and illustrator than my side of the drawing, both he and the class were mildly impressed that I actually could draw a relatively accurate reproduction of the photograph. But what was more surprising to all of us was that on Sanders’s side of the picture the woman looked black, while on my side she looked white. We figured out that it was minor adjustments of contrast between highlights and shadows that we both intuitively employed in our drawing technique. These contrasts, between the whites of the eye and the surrounding skin, between the edge of the nose and the face, and between strands of hair gave the impression of black or white (plate 3). Postmodern Places Within each of these locales, race and ethnicity were collective resources useful for attracting both public and private investment and for building locally based cultures. In Bronzeville and Pilsen, “black” and “Latino” iden-

Local Places / 51

tities were linked to voting blocs and to people, places, and events in the United States, as well as various national cultures in Africa, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Ethnic cultural identity was expressed through ethnic hair and clothing style, art objects, and events. In Rogers Park, diversity was expressed through representation of the full variety of cultures living in the place; to be a member of a “diverse community” meant one was literate about cultural differences, but not bound by allegiance to a single national, historical, sexual, or economic status. Rather than experiencing aesthetic pleasure through the limits of cultural refinement, pleasure was experienced through what Herb Gans described as “taste cultures” ([1974] 1999) allowing people to experience many cultures. “Cultural omnivores” (Peterson and Rossman 2005) living in a diverse place moved freely among and across such culturally defined borders without swearing allegiance to any. Yet just like race in Bronzeville and ethnicity in Pilsen, diversity in Rogers Park was an identity of a place that was expected to be asserted and was also used to mobilize resources. As a result, these three locales distinguished themselves by their claims to the cultural significance of racial or ethnic identity and their diversity. Within the competition for local ownership and control, individuals were expected to assert a cultural identity that was in line with the dominant group of that locale. In Bronzeville, where blacks were dominant, lightskinned blacks, who looked white but self-identified as black or African American, were regularly defended as being “black” by other local residents. In Pilsen, “Latino” rather than “Hispanic” (a Eurocentric reference to Spain) was the generalized self-referent. Latinos who were not of Mexican ancestry but were from Venezuela, Panama, or Puerto Rico, for example, were included as members of the dominant ethnicity in Pilsen—a pan-ethnic category of Latino—but their different national origins were not. And in Rogers Park, where diversity was the dominant ethnicity, one was expected to participate in a range of cultural and ethnic heritages as an important part of the local cultural mix.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have provided snapshots of the historic and contemporary contexts of three local places—Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park—to demonstrate that locality was not only socially situated but had geographic and historic components. Both the historic and the physical placement of these locales within the city have distinct consequences for the lives of residents and for the knowledge and the art they produce.

52 / Chapter Two

For the cases of Bronzeville, an economic and cultural center for black Chicagoans, and Pilsen, once home to a large Bohemian population and today a cultural center for Mexican Americans in Chicago, the terms “ghetto” or “enclave” do not describe the locales or their culture. Rather, these are concepts that locate race and ethnicity in places removed from the cultural core. The histories and demographics of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park might predict particular forms of class-based aesthetics and art production. The predominance of working-class residents in both Pilsen and Rogers Park hints at a predominance of family- and education-based art production within these locales. By contrast, the presence of a substantial population living in extreme poverty in Bronzeville coupled with the population increases in the upper-middle classes provide clues to why elite forms of art production were, until recently, confined to private interaction. In contemporary Chicago, the relatively balanced proportion of blacks, whites, and Latinos, the increasing size of their populations, and the relatively recent political empowerment of blacks and Latinos have created a context for challenging the disproportionate distribution of cultural power. Further exploration of the activities of local art production networks provides insight into how such groups sought cultural power proportionate to the size of their population and political influence.

THREE

Community-Based Art and Ideologies of Local Participation

Mid-Century Arts Activism in Chicago The local art networks as discussed in this book emerged through a community-oriented form of art production in mid-century Chicago. Blacks, Latinos, and other white ethnics found ways to validate and legitimize local cultural practices in ways that would ultimately position their work and local places within the struggle and competition over urban space. Art that was “made in a community,” “represented a community,” or was “communitybased” distinguished local art from the downtown institutional culture and expanded the range of participants who would be involved or likely to be involved in art activity. Expanded involvement in local art production networks, along with newly formed ethnic institutions, provided members of racial and ethnic minority groups with opportunities to align their interests and assert rights to representation in both public and private space. The accounts in this chapter contribute to the development of a theory of local art networks by showing how cultural empowerment efforts emerged through two distinct groups of art producers: one that sought institutionalization of ethnic culture as a means to represent a minority group as “a community,” the other that incorporated the ideas of local residents into the production process of art as a way to redefine the territory of local cultural production. Together they created a dialogue critical of exclusive forms of production and changed who was involved and how they were involved or expected to be involved in the making and preserving of art. Both of these developments—of institutions representing racially and ethnically defined cultures and of the “community-based” approach involving black, Latino, and other residents of ethnic locales in mural making— challenged commonly held theories of culture as a broadly shared “human

54 / Chapter Three

trait” (Park ([1931] 1964, 4). Even though theories attributing social or cultural order to natural causes have been debunked by contemporary social theorists, they remain within the commonsense explanations for local cultural differences. These accounts of the creation of institutions for ethnic culture and of the emergence of the community-based art-making practices provide further contemporary evidence of how cultural differences are constructed. As two separate efforts, they are both important to understanding the networks of local art production discussed in later chapters. By mobilizing the resources to embed knowledge within legitimate forms of political and cultural power, these art producers provided the foundation for locally based knowledge to become what Bourdieu considered to be a form of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990).

A Museum to Represent “a Community” The process to establish formally organized ethnic institutions outside the city center relied on a community-oriented programming framework by which nonprofit organizations directed their service and cultural programming to racially or ethnically defined populations. This process—beginning with the founding of the Ebony Museum in 1961 (becoming the DuSable Museum of African American History in 1973) and followed by the establishment of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in 1986 (becoming the National Museum of Mexican Art in 2006)—led to recognition of the institutional status of racially and ethnically defined culture in Chicago. It was part of a larger civil rights strategy calling for representation and inclusion of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups in the city’s institutions, and for equitable access to the services in locales throughout the city. Margaret Burroughs’s account of the 1961 founding of a museum in her Bronzeville home highlights how a network of teachers, artists, and activists with a shared interest in black accounts of history used a combination of entrepreneurial and social movement tactics to gain legitimacy of these accounts and establish the first major cultural institution of black history in Chicago. In this context, “community” referred to a large demographic group in Chicago comprised of people who shared an identity—whether it was ascribed or self-asserted—within the fixed racial category of “black” or “African American.” Burroughs envisioned a museum from the standpoint of a teacher, artist, and a self-described “Griot,” or tribal elder in African life, whose job it was to “preserve the achievements, exploits, and legends of a tribe and pass them down from one generation to the next” (Burroughs 1991, 1). She

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viewed the museum as necessary to connect contemporary blacks to their history and heritage: The other museums did not put any emphasis on African American history, Africa, or anything like that. There wasn’t anything existing. Being a teacher, I just felt there should be something. Then of course when I got to the point of realizing that it was purposely kept away from you—“to know where you are going you must know from whence you came.” History books did not have anything positive about the accomplishments of black people. Pick up your dictionary and look up the word “white” and look up the word “black.” You’ll see. (Burroughs interview 2003)

Participants in Burroughs’s network were predominantly middle-class activist educators who sought to build upon and institutionalize black consciousness by constructing alternative accounts of history. An artist, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools and at a local community college, a founding member of the South Side Community Art Center, and a founder of the Lake Meadows Art Fair, Burroughs was in a strategic network position to access the people and resources necessary to establish a museum. In addition to her master’s degree in art education, she was awarded an honorary PhD from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the course of her thirty-year career as a teacher, she had network connections to literally thousands of students, teachers, and artists: Some of us were developing this interest in black history. I think I had read a book by Booker T. Washington in which he said, setting up Tuskegee Institute, “Put down your buckets where you are.” We were sitting up in the living room in 3806 South Michigan Avenue [in Bronzeville]. “Put your buckets where you are.” We were in the living room. Good advice. We decided to take his advice. We didn’t have anybody to build any building or anything like that. [This was in] 1961. And so we took the foyer [and it became] the entrance hall, the first room, which was the parlor; the second room, which is generally the library; the third room, which is the dining room; and we cleared any furniture out of there. And we put whatever we had up on the walls. We put a sign up, “Ebony Museum. Admission Free.” (Burroughs interview 2003)

As the first step toward institutional legitimization, Burroughs filed for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, forming a nonprofit organization with an

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educational focus on black history by 1963. The nonprofit formalization of this home-based museum further supported a black cultural network by creating a recognized public space for imagery representing the history of black accomplishment. For Margaret Burroughs the artist, this meant that she created artwork on the topic of black leadership. “I was particularly interested in doing the historical figures because we were developing the museum and [because of] the fact that there was very little illustrative material like that,” she said. In the 1960s, she produced a series of linocuts on women leaders, including Harriet Tubman and Emma Lazarus. Burroughs and other artists produced print editions depicting Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois. Early exhibitions in the museum included prints and artworks produced by Burroughs and the network of teachers involved in the museum.

Community-Based as Activating a Community As Burroughs built support for the museum, in 1967 she met William Walker, a muralist working on what she described as “an outdoor museum” (Huebner 1997). Walker and a network of black artists, intellectuals, and activists changed how artists and non-artists interacted through the production of a mural in the heart of Chicago’s South Side black ghetto. Their activation of “a community” meant involvement of a broader network of participants beyond artists, administrators, and traditional patrons in the art-making process. This process would become an indelible part of black aesthetics. This kind of exchange between artists and non-artists became recognized as a form of knowledge, or cultural capital, important and necessary to the production of art among black art producers; it is a foundation for black aesthetic production as it represents art production “from the ground up, rather than the top down” (McCoy interview 2008). In the mid-1960s, Walker, a sign painter and trained muralist, had the idea of mural painting in public with local residents as a way to address the inhumane conditions of black life in this urban ghetto.1 By 1967 Walker identified a wall on a building at the corner of Forty-Third Street and Langley Avenue, just blocks from where Patric McCoy would move forty years later. He brought the idea to one of the first meetings of the Visual Artists Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective of writers, artists, and musicians forming on Chicago’s Far South Side. In agreeing to produce a two-story mural honoring black heroes, naming it the Wall of Respect, and planning it with the involvement of local residents, neighborhood organizations, political representatives, and gangs, Walker

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and fourteen other artists of OBAC initiated the process that became associated with community-based murals. In short, this meant the artwork was developed with input and involvement from local residents, before, during, and after the project; in effect, local residents became part of the network of producers who created and shared ownership of the work. Walker secured the permission and involvement from the 43rd Street Community Organization, the business owners in the building, and local gangs. Not among the consenting parties were the building’s absentee landlords (Huebner 1997). The network of artists pooled their own money to rent scaffolding and buy paint. Their interaction with local residents included both formal and informal exchanges to plan and create the imagery; hands-on participation by artists and non-artists in the painting process; protection of the mural by local residents and gangs; and ongoing use of the mural site for educational purposes and as a meeting place for local organizing (plate 4). The subject of the Wall of Respect was “black heroes,” as defined by the OBAC artists: . . . any Black person who: 1. Honestly reflects the beauty of Black life and genius in his or her style. 2. Does not forget his Black brothers and sisters who are less fortunate. 3. Does what he does in such an outstanding manner that he or she cannot be imitated or replaced.2

The mural features fifty images of notable African Americans who were not recognized as heroes or leaders within the Chicago Public School curriculum, nor were they part of official accounts of accomplishment in mainstream history. Among the heroes represented are slave revolt leader Nat Turner; activists H. Rap Brown (later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Marcus Garvey; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; athletes Muhammad Ali, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Brown, and Bill Russell; dancer Darlene Blackburn; actors Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, and Dick Gregory; religious leaders Wyatt Tee Walker and Elijah Muhammad; musicians Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Oscar Brown Jr., and Thelonious Monk; and writers Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), and W. E. B. DuBois. The spectacle of larger-than-life black heroes reportedly generated more interaction and exchange between the artists and local residents than anticipated. Although the process enabled local residents to assert cultural

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ownership of the mural in their neighborhood, “community-based” did not mean arising from within the local place. In fact, this collective of intellectuals, artists, and activists were outsiders to the ghetto neighborhood where they painted the mural. OBAC was co-founded by three artists: Jeff Donaldson, a teacher at Northeastern Illinois University and a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who would later become an art professor and dean at Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Gerald McWorter, a University of Chicago sociologist; and Hoyt Fuller, Negro Digest editor (Huebner 1997). Also involved was Robert Sengstacke, a photographer whose family founded Bronzeville’s most prominent newspaper, the Chicago Defender. They were the offspring of a generation of the black working and middle class that had left Bronzeville as segregation laws were dismantled and the area’s concentration of poor increased due to the construction of public housing projects. Yet they saw it as their responsibility to return to the ghetto “as average people relating to the masses,” according to Eugene Wade (2000). But they brought with them the critical insight to the problems that created the ghetto. They used art as a means to be reengaged in the area and to reengage the neighborhood population in black culture. The idea that artists should talk to and interact with local residents and leaders was both revolutionary and innovative, particularly in the context of the then-current academic production of art that privileged the artist and the artist’s perspective.3 Production of the mural was part of growing interest among black intellectuals to affirm black accomplishments and the intrinsic beauty of blackness while producing art that spoke to the needs and aspirations of black Americans. The mural process and the final product were seen and intended as tools for social change and local empowerment. Moreover, according to Donaldson, the mural was an “aesthetic extension of the turf-identifying graffiti scrawled on neighborhood buildings. . . . [It was an] instantaneous shrine to black creativity, a rallying point for revolutionary rhetoric and calls to action, and a national symbol of the heroic black struggle for liberation in America” (Huebner 1997). Yet several conflicts led to the disbanding of the Visual Artists Workshop after completion of the mural. Among these were ideological conflict over civil rights versus black power and disagreements about permanent versus changing imagery, whether non-black artists could be part of the art-making collaboration, and even what constituted “a community.” Their reputation for activating local residents through the production of art led to invitations and commissions in other cities and to recognition

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by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), a then-young museum established among the downtown institutions in 1967, around the same time as the Wall of Respect was painted on the South Side. Murals for the People, an exhibition that opened in February 1971 at the MCA, declared that the growing number of murals represented a “movement.”

Formalization of the Community-Based Approach The community-based process led to innovation in art making and expansion of who was involved in a network of producers; local residents increasingly expected to be included in art projects in their locales. The process that began with the Wall of Respect led to the further development of the idea and its recognition as a legitimate artistic approach among black, white, and Latino muralists and among locals residents throughout Chicago. As an approach to art making, it was framed by an expectation of a dialogue between the artist and a broader network of participants; the pro­cess decentralized the primacy of artists to favor exchange and interaction between artists and “a community,” which the art producers themselves constituted through inviting and allowing involvement in the production process and in the selection of imagery. This approach, initiated by Walker and other activist muralists operating on Chicago’s South Side, provided the procedural foundation for art produced outside of the cultural core and representing the interests of people other than those of the cultural core. For black art producers in particular, it provided the representational foundation for further development of black aesthetics and black cultural capital, as discussed more fully in chapter 4.

Pursuit of Institutional Legitimacy Margaret Burroughs saw the mural movement and specifically the Wall of Respect as part of a vibrant cultural world that “encouraged development and interest” in her black history museum (Huebner 1997). These shared interests could have remained in relative obscurity within the small, homebased museum. What the next part of the story shows is how the museum’s legitimacy as an institution was not the climax of a broad-based movement, nor was it earned through gradual growth of its member roster or through visitation; instead, its legitimacy as a cultural institution was conferred through its eventual location on public parkland, among other private cultural institutions similarly situated on public property. Burroughs gained

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knowledge and access to this public support through an internship at one of the downtown institutions, and then won a place among these institutions through issue-focused, movement-style politics. Through her work as an intern at the Field Museum of Natural History, Burroughs learned of a state law granting park districts the authority to levy taxes for funding capital expenditures and general operations of park-based museums and aquariums: A good white person told me this. I was an intern at the Field Museum in 1968 and this person told me. He said, “Go down to the state building and look up the statutes related to museums,” which I did. [It said], “Any group of Illinois citizens who start a museum, which is located on state [park] land, is entitled to support from the tax levy that is for capital expansion and operational expenses” [Illinois Statute 70 ILS 1290]. So I found that all our museums on parkland—the Art Institute, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, and so forth, so on, so on, all share in this money. And so that’s why when we got in that particular site [in Washington Park], we were able share in that too. (Burroughs interview 2003)

Through the internship, Burroughs got access to valuable information that had the potential to expand her network to museum professionals, government officials, and park commissioners who had access to public financial resources. In Illinois, parks are considered “special districts” as are counties or municipalities. Special districts include airports and civic cen­ ters, including, for example, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (McPier) referred to later in this book. According to the Illinois statute, tax was levied by the Chicago Park District as property taxes on Chicago property and collected by Cook County (Illinois Statute 70 ILS 1205). Each of the museums on parkland in Chicago—the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, the Museum of Science and Industry, Adler Planetarium, and the Chicago History Museum—received between 5 and 25 per­ cent of their general operating budgets from the Chicago Park District. The museums could tap additional tax funds for capital improvements. This knowledge of how the downtown museums sustained their core funding did not mean Burroughs and the Ebony Museum were simply invited to join this exclusive group. Rather, Burroughs used issue-focused social movement tactics to exert political pressure on then-mayor Richard J. Daley. They identified the problem: lack of equitable and appropriate representation of black contributions to the history of Chicago. Burroughs explained:

Community-Based Art and Ideologies of Local Participation / 61 Every so often the black people in Chicago would contact Mayor Daley, the first Mayor Daley, asking that we have a proper memorial to Jean Bapiste Point DuSable, who was the first permanent settler in the area that became Chicago. Every so often, he would be deluged with letters [her emphasis], so that at one point the mayor called a meeting of people who were interested in this—corporations and people like that—to a breakfast meeting to discuss the matter of a proper monument to DuSable. I was on the site committee. [He] invited me, Daley did. So [we] had the meeting and talked. People talked and gave suggestions and all that, and nothing happened. (Burroughs interview 2003)

Even though “nothing happened” as a result of the breakfast meeting, Burroughs and her network of teachers and artists found themselves among high-ranking bureaucrats from public agencies and businessmen from area corporations all sitting together with the mayor of Chicago discussing “the problem” of a proper memorial to DuSable. The call for a DuSable memorial was not a new idea. It had actually begun in 1928, when two educators founded the DuSable League. The league succeeded in having a Chicago public school renamed for DuSable in 1935—the school where Burroughs taught art for twenty-eight years. The founding of the museum in Burroughs’s home by teachers from the DuSable High School was a separate effort directed toward the creation of an institution to legitimize black accomplishment as history; the need for a proper memorial to DuSable was adopted when it proved to be effective for mobilizing the range of resources needed for the museum. With the knowledge of a potential funding mechanism available through the Park District, it took the network just five more years to secure a building on park property. Burroughs credited one of her students with identifying the Washington Park Administration Building as a possible site for the expansion of the museum out of her home: At one point, the building in Washington Park, where we are now, was originally an administration building for Washington Park. . . . My students at Wilson Junior College, where I was teaching at the time, noticed that it was boarded up, empty. The idea occurred to some of them, one of them, why don’t we ask the city, since we have outgrown the space here at the house where we were, why don’t we ask the city or the Park District to let us have the building and move into this building? It would be an educational institution in Washington Park, which Washington Park did not have anything like that. All they had was baseball and basketball, stuff like that. So not only did we think about it; we did a campaign on it. (Burroughs interview 2003)

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The brilliant focus on a need for a proper memorial to DuSable provided the momentum necessary to mobilize a constituency that could exert political pressure on the white political machine by advocating for greater recognition of historic accomplishments of blacks. In order to secure a park building, the effort expanded to include the equitable provision of educational activities in the park. A political constituency skilled at leveraging pressure mobilized to back the proposal. Burroughs explained: We got together letters and petitions to the mayor and to the super-men [superintendents] of the Park District, asking that we be given this building to expand the museum into. I guess, happily, election time was coming up. The mayor, getting all these letters and all, probably saw the wisdom of presenting—having his picture in the Defender—presenting me the key to the building. [This was in] 1973. So in our petition to the mayor, we said that if given the building, it would be named as a memorial and monument to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, so it sort of solved this other problem where he was always getting pressure from people to have the proper memorial to DuSable. And so apparently he must have called up the superintendent of the Park District and said, “OK, let ’em have it.” (Burroughs interview 2003)

Burroughs chuckled as she recounted this moment, more than thirty years ago—when she imagined Richard J. Daley saying, “OK, let ’em have it”—an account that amounts to outmaneuvering “The Boss” of Chicago’s machine politics. The exchange was one between a broad, powerful network of property-owning, middle-class black voters and Chicago’s political machine—exchanging an institution for the support of a political constituency. And it was Burroughs who was instrumental in identifying the problem: the absence of a proper memorial to the city’s first settler, DuSable, which was significant of the larger problem of appropriate representation of blacks in the city’s history. It was Burroughs who was also instrumental in finding a solution to the problem: establishment of a black history museum on public property to be named in his memory. As the museum site would also be a monument to DuSable, the move from Burroughs’s South Michigan Avenue home to Washington Park—which was just west of the University of Chicago—would at least temporarily neutralize the pressure tactics used against the mayor by the network of people mobilized around Burroughs who had been at him for more than a decade. Burroughs sealed the deal in a presentation to the Park District Board of Commissioners by demonstrating that she had access to professional expertise, financial resources, and a grassroots constituency, long associated

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with Chicago’s community-based form of activism, but now applied to the issue of cultural equity. As she told it: They invited me down to the park commissioner meeting . . . to make a pre­ sentation. So I was able to get an architect over there to figure out how the space would be arranged, and so forth and so on. I was able to get pledges, pledge forms. I had a stack of them. People saying they would give $5, $10, whatever, to help pay for the renovations, and so forth and so on. So when I came before the park board, I presented these pledge forms—they came up to over $100,000. I made my presentation. The architect had slides showing how this would be this and that would be that, and so forth and so on. The commis­sion, this very commission I sit on now, said it was one of the best presentations ever made, and we were the first community group they ever gave a facility to when they gave us the administration building in Washington Park. So we moved on in with whatever we had. We renovated room by room by room. We got through with one and we’d go to the other. Our program never ceased. Kids were still coming in, and so forth and so on. (Burroughs interview 2003)

The move from Burroughs’s home into the Washington Park building in 1973 in effect created a new museum, the DuSable Museum of African American History,4 and it was on public parkland, which provided access to permanent sources of funds for both general operations and capital expenditures. Such large caches of public funding were accessed through a grassroots campaign, described by Burroughs as involving thousands of small donations. Such grassroots approaches prove to be not only a significant form of fund-raising among Chicago’s African American institutions, but significant to the legitimacy of such institutions among black people. Similar to the “milk pail campaign” described by Charles Bowen in the establishment of the first Armory for the Illinois Black National Guard (Bowen interview 2005), or the broad network of small donations mobilized by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, it is significant of the way African Americans demonstrate their support for a person or cause. It is unclear exactly when the museum secured a portion of the Park District tax levy to fund its general operations, although from Burroughs’s recollection, there was little delay. In addition, the museum staff wrote grants and its board members hosted traditional charity fund-raisers to engage the black elite as museum benefactors. Among these was Linda Johnson Rice, vice president of Johnson Publishing Company, who, among other events, sponsored a polo outing at the suburban Oak Brook Polo Club with Jamaican

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polo players (Tucker 1985). However, the museum’s annual budget remained under $1 million until the late 1980s; its membership roster was estimated at approximately 2,000 members in 2005, a number substantially less than that of the Art Institute of Chicago, estimated to be over 100,000.

Intersection of Political and Cultural Capital Establishment of the black history museum demonstrated Burroughs’s cultural and political finesse; the museum exists through the political and cultural capital embedded in art networks in black Chicago. Burroughs stepped down as director of the museum in 1984 when Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, who was elected April 1983, named her to the Park District Board of Commissioners, the very board that just ten years earlier granted her use of the Park District building for the DuSable Museum. Her appointment followed the mayoral victory, but also settlement of a landmark discrimination case filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against the Chicago Park District for operating inferior facilities in black and Latino neighborhoods (New York Times 1982; Malcolm 1983). The appointment came during the infamous council wars in the Chicago City Council that gridlocked Mayor Washington’s administration. The wars placed Burroughs among forty-five appointees barred from their seats for nearly two years because the city council aldermen refused to act on their nominations. Burroughs unsuccessfully sued the Chicago City Council to act upon her appointment (Merriner 1985). She was at the center of a political firestorm over control of the Park District, one that pitted a 1973 Daley appointee, Superintendent Edmund Kelly, against mayoral appointees for control over the “$320 million fiefdom” (Talbott 1986; Cronin and Spielman 1986; Spielman 1986a, 1986b; Klose 1986). Burroughs finally was seated in her Park District post more than two years after her nomination (Chicago Sun-Times 1986b), casting her first vote on the board on May 29, 1986 (Spielman 1986b). On June 17, 1986, she was elected vice president of the Chicago Park District board, as Walter Netsch, another controversial appointment by Mayor Washington, was elected board president (Cronin and Spielman 1986). Within two days of taking office, the pair initiated a review of progress in the settlement for the federal discrimination case against the Park District. Burroughs argued that racism was behind the broken bottles, litter, and poor maintenance of the parks in minority neighborhoods. “When blacks and Hispanics move into a neighborhood the services are cut down. They don’t say it, but that’s what is done,” she said (Cronin 1986). In their tour of

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parks, Burroughs and Netsch invited local leaders to attend a meeting of the board to confront the previous Park District board’s shortcomings. At some point during these first days in office, another network of Chicago Public School teachers—this one associated with Bowen High School in the Far South community area of South Chicago and represented by Carlos Tortolero and Helen Valdez—won park board approval to convert another park facility for a museum in Pilsen (Chicago Sun-Times 1986a). A Museum for Mexican Americans in Pilsen A comparison of the processes involved in founding the DuSable Museum of African American History to those in the establishment of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM) illustrates the varied access to resources for African Americans and Mexican Americans. Both the DuSable and the MFACM were similarly focused on service to and representation of an ethnically defined community; both museums displayed historical artifacts and art while providing direct educational services to area residents; both advocated for the legitimacy of the ethnic accounts of history—the DuSable focused on the legitimacy of accounts of black history, and the MFACM focused on “first voice” narratives, that is, narratives of Mexican American history and art as told by Mexicans and their descendants. While initial success of the DuSable was achieved through mobilizing a relatively large grassroots campaign, establishment of the MFACM was enabled by opportune political timing and a growing political constituency of Mexican Americans. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum was first established twenty years after Burroughs opened the Ebony Museum in her home, yet it operated in a “nomadic phase” from 1982 to 1986, according to newspaper accounts citing Helen Valdez. It sponsored exhibitions through other institutions until it signed an agreement with the Chicago Park District to convert the Harrison Park Boat Craft Shop into a museum in 1986 (Rotenberk 1992). Although Tortolero recalled that discussions began with Park District Superintendent Edmund Kelly as early as 1984, the combination of the federal discrimination lawsuit, Burroughs’s appointment to the Park District board, and the political environment resulting from the election of Harold Washington as mayor facilitated efforts by Carlos Tortolero and Helen Valdez to secure the Park District facility. When he and Valdez went before the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners to present their case in 1986 for the establishment of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Harrison Park, Burroughs had just

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become a park commissioner. “The building was used by thirty-five men who used it to store their boats. We called them ‘the boat people.’ We used to say, ‘The boat people must go!’ ” And, Tortolero recalled, that unlike the mobilization process employed by Burroughs, the founding of the MFACM was “not a grassroots thing.” We did not do petitions or anything like that. It was not grassroots. . . . We had met with every alderman and every politician. We had letters of their support [to bring before the park board]. But it was [park board president] Walter Netsch who supported the idea from the start. (Tortolero interview 2003)

At the meeting with the commissioners, Burroughs recalled clarifying that the word “museum” was also part of the name, the Mexican Fine Arts Center, to ensure the group would qualify for public Park District funding allotted to museums. According to Tortolero, its identity as a “center” reinforced its mission involving and serving a geographically defined ethnic population. Left unsaid by Tortolero, however, was that a “community center” was freed from the more stringent zoning requirements, particularly in regard to parking, required for a museum’s business license. The MFACM opened its doors on March 27, 1987, more than a decade after the DuSable opened in Washington Park. The Park District provided little of the original redevelopment funds, and the museum did not secure a portion of the Park District operational funds for museums in its first years (Chicago Sun-Times 1986b). Although Tortolero and others involved in the founding of the museum were from a Mexican ethnic locale on the Far South Side of Chicago, their establishment of the museum in Pilsen near the downtown Loop city center was strategic for its long-term survival and expansion. Moreover, the visibly dense population of first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican American property owners and families living in Pilsen was important as a symbol of Chicago’s Mexican ethnics. Ethnic art events already sponsored by nonprofit organizations such as Pros Arts Studio (est. 1978) and an array of social service organizations including Casa Aztlán (est. 1970 in a Bohemian Settlement house originally built in 1896) and Instituto del Progreso Latino (est. 1977) laid the foundation for expansion of youth-centered art classes and productions, family-based block parties, ethnic processions or parades, and festivals celebrating a Mexican ethnic heritage, all designed to engage local youth and their families. The museum was able to bring more permanent, high-status jobs and contract work to the locale; a workforce of nearly one hundred Mexican American artists and educators are employed in its mu-

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seum facility, its satellite museum and youth-run radio station, performance series, and the various festivals and school-based programs it sponsors. “The community” as a place where art should exist was always central to the case for the museum, according to Tortolero. “Art doesn’t just belong downtown; it, too, belongs in the community” (Rotenberk 1992). Critical of some downtown institutions trying to reframe their educational activities as “community-based,” Tortolero argued, “You can’t be community-based and be located downtown” (Tortolero interview 2003). “Community” was also the social and cultural activity that should involve the museum. As he put it, a museum should be “a part of the community, not apart from it” (Grams and Farrell 2008, 2). Although in its early days the MFACM’s approach was consistent with a community-based, anti-elitist approach developed by activists in Bronzeville and other ethnic locales, Tortolero and others at the MFACM sought to transform these activist foundations into recognition and success in the realm of museum institution. For Tortolero, gaining institutional legitimacy as a formally accredited museum meant the art center would be taken seriously as a museum. “We’re like the girl you don’t take home, the one-night stand. We’re called when someone wants an ethnic touch. But I insist on more,” Tortolero said. He recalled the time when Henry Fogel, longtime director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, invited the MFACM members to Orchestra Hall. “I wanted more,” Tortolero said. “I said, ‘Yes, but you have to come here and play in our park.’ And they did, and it was great!” (Tortolero inter­ view 2006). In spite of their success among cultural institutions, the museum has been criticized by both local residents and institutional experts: We always tried to do things right. We didn’t want people to think we couldn’t do it. We always got printing in color, you know. We are not a gallery; we are about education. We have to present the history of Mexican culture, from the Aztecs to today. But from day one, in spite of our efforts, you know what it was that people questioned? They question the management and they question the quality of art. (Tortolero interview 2003)

Its successful accreditation by the American Association of Museums in 1997 made the MFACM the first Latino museum in the United States to demonstrate mastery of institutional procedures in collections documentation, management, educational and programmatic methods, and its board and membership recruitment. Accreditation has been a marker of institutional legitimacy that the DuSable has yet to achieve. And from its earliest years,

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the Pilsen museum has been able to raise more funds than the DuSable Museum and attract such high-profile figures as Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox and audiences of more than fifty thousand with exhibitions of international icons such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Effective fundraising from Latino businesses and corporations has built a budget averaging 15 to 25 percent higher than the DuSable’s. The initial $300,000 renovation of the park building was completed with a $140,000 community development block grant from the Chicago Department of Public Works, the rest reportedly from corporate and private donations (Chicago SunTimes 1986a). Ten years later in 1996, the museum secured $2 million in Empowerment Zone funding to purchase another building and expand its operations to an additional building to house the Yollocalli Youth Museum and to purchase the broadcasting license and construct facilities for Radio Arte, a youth-run radio station (Tortolero interview 2003). Its 2003 budget was $5.5 million. In 2006, the year of its twentieth anniversary, it launched a $25 million capital campaign and established national ambitions as a preeminent Latino cultural institution by repackaging itself within a national context as the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA). Although institutional criticism has waned since its accreditation, criticism from local artists has not. Both Tortolero and the museum have been criticized by local artists for dominating cultural resources without providing more substantial support for the large number of independent Mexican American artists living in Pilsen. Recalling one artist he ran into in the museum who expressed this complaint to him personally, Tortolero recalled asking the artist how many times his art has been exhibited at the museum. “Four times,” the artist responded. “What other artists can say that [about their museums]?” Tortolero asked. Nonetheless, Tortolero acknowledged that the museum’s advocacy for representation of Mexican history, art, and culture and its recognition for excellence within this institutional realm have not stimulated an increase in the value of Latino artists’ works, an increase in number of collectors to buy local artists’ works, or helped to build the museum’s own collections, nor have they led to an increase in the establishment of other nonprofit art organizations to support the work of local Mexican and Mexican American artists, all examples of results attributed to the institutionalization of high culture (DiMaggio [1982] 1991).

Conclusions Early activism and advocacy for community-based art in the 1960s and 1970s arose out of the exclusion and subordination of artists whose training

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in professional art schools and art departments of universities provided them with insight into the centralization of cultural power in downtown elite institutions. Through community-based art and advocacy for its public support, local art producers contested not only inhuman conditions and poor public services, but also laid the groundwork to contest the concentration of cultural resources and power within the downtown cultural core. Their advocacy laid the foundation for broader resource mobilization tactics to attract the public and private investment necessary for the expansion of local access to art activities and local art infrastructures. Among the results were the establishment of the first museum of black history in Chicago, the first Latino art museum to be accredited by the American Association of Museums, and the community-based mural movement, all discussed in this chapter. Activist muralists in Bronzeville began producing murals as a way to be engaged with and to involve poor residents in cultural production. Blending localized advocacy with cultural production, these artists engaged local residents in the production of art that was interwoven with local life. A similar interest in representation of blacks in history led a group of activist educators with access to the right information and the ability to exert pressure on public officials to mobilize a political constituency to advocate for a museum facility that located black history in time and space in the center of Chicago’s South Side. These educators adopted the institutional structure long employed by the dominant culture, yet they presented art exhibitions and events in their institutions as a form of cultural enfranchisement to the people they served. Moreover, producers created local identities for places where authentic cultures could flourish as something distinct from the elitist and often predicable offerings of the downtown city center and its cultural institutions. These efforts pioneered in Chicago’s black South Side were followed by the National Museum of Mexican Art, an institution that has since surpassed the DuSable Museum in budget size and national stature. For some Chicago art organizations, the community-based approach signified the active engagement, involvement, and representation of people who were also participants in the making of art rather than as passive audiences for a finished product; for others, this approach meant cultural representation and enfranchisement within the institutional model. Although efforts to involve or represent “a community” was a source for artistic and institutional innovation that also expanded the range of participation in the arts, it did so without the far-reaching networks of shared interest in aesthetic meaning-making necessary for it to assert authority over aesthetic values. The variety of processes, makers, audiences, and meanings of

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community-based art begins to demonstrate the fuzziness of the concept; the range of interpretations at times undermined the very principle of shared interests, which a community often seeks to promote. The ongoing controversial practice of whitewashing some murals while others are preserved and restored reveals that community is not so much about being a resident of a locale, but being included in (or excluded from) the shared local interest that was established among a network of people, and how a network can exert power on a local level. Through this chapter we can now begin to see the networks of producers operating behind the magical curtain of community. These producers strategically used the concept of community to redefine the art-making process and to mobilize resources in terms of people, votes, funds, space, and cultural symbols. These were initiated through small social worlds that could mobilize whatever was necessary to carry out their projects. These small social worlds were linked into broader networks that were effective at exerting political pressure and could access the information and financial resources necessary to create and maintain a cultural institution, but still had limited power to claim aesthetic values—that is, value freed from any other purpose but artistic expression—for the cultural objects they represent. Nonetheless, the network processes of local art production that led to representation of a community and engagement of a community through community-based practices laid the foundation for both aesthetic and empowerment networks in subsequent years. In addition to placing art in local neighborhoods, these new efforts would nurture the building of local art collections as they challenged the exclusive operations of the cultural core, while laying the foundations for cultural knowledge and cultural capital tied to and a product of local territory and local cultural values.

FOUR

Aesthetic Networks and Cultural Capital

I see this thing as interaction with other people. It’s very similar to an artist showing work. Artists get the joy out of the creation. I get the joy out of recognizing that my eye saw something in the piece, that I enjoyed it, and it had meaning and an effect on me. When people are at my house looking at artwork, I like to watch how they react to different pieces. I like to talk with them about the art. When I see it had the same effect, that they are attracted to one over another, it reinforced what I saw and the feelings I had about it when I bought it. It is really, it’s very satisfying. It’s very satisfying. It makes me look at the pieces again and again. You see things that you didn’t see before. It will be something new. So it opens up new ideas and experiences. (McCoy interview 2003)

Sociology and Aesthetics When I first visited Patric McCoy’s house, I was enchanted by the sheer abundance of art that covered every square inch of wall and table surface. Yet it was the party—who was there and how they interacted—that captured my sociological imagination. Through his parties, McCoy had developed a network of friends interested in art collecting. At such parties, his guests exchanged accounts of the kind of sensory and intellectual experience that characterized aesthetic pleasure and informed the development of knowledge and access to resources that produce cultural capital, but rarely have been included in contemporary aesthetic discourse. The problem of exploring and discussing aesthetic preferences in a place like Bronzeville is multifaceted. Although there are several narratives that connect art and social theory (Harrington 2004), the aesthetic grand narrative is one that considers art in terms of “timeless norms of communication

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valid for all history, for all societies” (Harrington 2004, 9). Marginalized cultures in marginalized places such as those explored in this study are marginalized not only because of the structure of cities (Lefebvre [1974] 1991), of institutions of culture (Danto 1967; DiMaggio [1982] 1991; Bourdieu [1976] 1984; Danto 1987), but also because of the underlying construction of knowledge in which distinctions of subjective judgment are what have structured aesthetic theory from Kant ([1790] 1963) to the present.1 Even with the emergence of the institutional foundations for black culture in academia and in the nonprofit cultural sector, the problem remained. For a black artist, collector, or curator to declare an artwork as “beautiful” would be to make a subjective judgment that claimed a decisive place within both the urban and institutional processes from which blacks have been excluded. This chapter examines how a network of black art collectors mobilized and deployed social movement narratives to assert cultural authority from outside of the institution of culture, and to claim such a place from twenty-first-century Bronzeville. Black Cultural Capital and the Aesthetics of Beauty Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital provides the theoretical basis for understanding the intersection of culture and power. Bourdieu appropriated the Marxist concept of capital to objectify power in all social relationships. Capital for Marx described property and the associated power relationships of property ownership. Bourdieu used it to describe all forms of power contained in and associated with access to and possession of resources; capital was both tangible and intangible goods; cultural capital was the possession of forms of knowledge and the associated resources, such as money, institutional credentials, and network of relationships that legitimated this knowledge. The decisions and endorsements of values and meanings that produced this legitimacy were made by cultural arbiters, whose judgments Bourdieu considered to be arbitrary as they were not derived from sources inherent to the object, but were assigned through practices of groups or classes2 (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990). The aesthetic networks of Bronzeville established regular activities to judge artworks and to legitimate these judgments. Responding to what they perceived as institutionalized racism, these art collectors engaged in a postcolonial critique of Western artistic canons and formed localized networks of people interested in art objects representing African American culture, values, and history. Of particular concern was the history of dismissive judgments that decategorized the work of black artists as art. Relationships

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among these collectors made up an aesthetic network because they were concerned with the judgments of art produced by black artists. More specifically, they sought to create a cultural context through which the work of black artists could first be judged fairly and critically by other black people and, second, be seen in relation to a larger context of African American life, all without the interest of institutions of the cultural core. I adapt Bourdieu’s concept as “black cultural capital” to represent the knowledge, experiences, and practices that produce cultural power relevant to black people, their experiences, and to their social location in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side. What distinguished black cultural capital from that of Western or European culture was that it represented knowledge, objects, and practices of black people who did not view themselves or their life objects as subordinate in a cultural hierarchy to objects created by non-blacks. In Bronzeville, this group of art collectors began to reify knowledge though their private art collections, their regular private parties, and an increasing number of public activities. Passionate interest in art ownership distinguished these collectors from the grand narrative of disinterested pleasure.3 The content within the artworks they collected spoke to the history of black culture while placing it at the center of strategies of action (Swidler 1987) for survival of a culture that was distinct by virtue of being African American— that is, derived from the traditions and cultures of dark-skinned people from the continents of both Africa and the Americas. These networks sought to activate shared interests that fostered increased knowledge and ownership of art objects. Informal activities, such as private parties and private tours of collectors’ homes, provided the core interaction that stimulated art collecting while fostering the creation of cultural knowledge directed by and for its members. Through their network activities, these collectors sought to create a permanent local place symbolic of the connection of art and life, history and the present; they in turn extended historic narratives of the place into the private sphere through their art collections.

Participants and Resources The primary resource in Bronzeville’s aesthetic networks was the growing population of educated, middle-class professional men and women who attended parties and events built around the activity of collecting art. Among the collectors to whom I was introduced, most had relatively stable, wellpaying positions in local, state, or federal government offices or in social service agencies, or were administrators or teachers within the Chicago

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Public School system, at area colleges, or at universities. A few were small business entrepreneurs. I estimated their household income in 2000 to be in the range of $60,000–$150,000 a year; that is, they were firmly lodged in the middle classes but not at the highest income range found in this locale (see figs. 7 and 8 in chapter 2). Whereas a number of people interviewed made reference to several wealthier local collectors “who make a million dollars a year” (Bowen interview 2005), I did not meet these people or see such collections. No one I interviewed worked for national or international corporations. Artists from whom they purchased works were both men and women from twenty to seventy years of age, many of whom had college degrees in art, art education, or graphic design, or a BFA or MFA from an art institute or college. These aesthetic networks involved predominantly African American participants who were typically divided into two categories of participants: artists or collectors. Collectors often purchased artworks directly from artists as well as from the few galleries locally or nationally specializing in the work of black artists. They purchased small, portable objects for display in their private residences. Artists worked out of home-based workspaces and typically sold their works also out of their home galleries. Network participants were interested in nurturing a social environment in which art objects created by black artists were owned by black collectors. Largely absent from these networks were the gallery owners, critics, art historians, art reporters, and arts administrators who predominated in mainstream institutionally based or market-based networks, or the politicians, businessmen, and activists who dominated empowerment networks, as discussed elsewhere in this book. Collectors recognized both the importance of their financial support for an artist’s work and their role in the ownership and care of art objects created through their interest and support. The collectors I met were middleclass professionals who could therefore afford to pay $100 to $7,000 for artworks. This price range meant that individual artists could survive and continue to make art, but that their household was usually supported by a second income earned by the artist or by others in the household or from inheritance. The breadth of the network of Bronzeville collectors became apparent over five years of referrals from a broad range of sources. Initially referrals came through the network of artists and collectors Patric McCoy knew, later from artists at art fairs and from committee members involved in the development of public art. Finally, referrals also came from random contacts such as a university administrator who purchased one of my pieces donated

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to a student activity fund and said, “I don’t collect art, but my sister does. She collects way too much art.” Small social worlds were linked into a larger network that crossed geographic, gender, and education boundaries and included both men and women. The broader network involved upward of 1,000 participants, while the smaller circuits ranged from around 20 or so artists and collectors who knew each other and regularly went to or participated in exhibitions together, to the 400 or so artists and collectors who attended the South Side Community Art Center’s Annual Auction and purchased art. In 2003 the auction brought in $40,000 in art sales; that figure grew to well over $100,000 by 2006. Black Cultural Capital Adapting the Black Metropolis narrative of a “city within a city,” art collectors like McCoy and Charles Bowen, the founder of the National African American Military Museum, were intent on constructing what amounted to a culture within a culture, that is, black culture and black aesthetics separate from but located within Chicago’s larger cultural field. These collectors, interested in nurturing a social environment where art objects could be created by black artists and owned by black collectors, were producing the knowledge and cultural base that constituted black cultural capital. And they were not only amassing artifacts of a culture that was largely invisible to the rest of Chicago and the outside world, but as the primary collectors of this artwork, they were central to the production process. Their private worlds represented a facet of black cultural identity emerging through contemporary Bronzeville. It was distinct from the dominant cultural representations of black culture within the mass media, that is, of the blues musicians who sang of poverty, love, and sex, or their contemporary counterparts, the saggy-bottom hip-hoppers chanting of raw sex, gangsta life, homies, and violence. And as educated, politically active, middle-class professionals, they sought more than the status granted by the dominant culture to a subculture. Among the collectors interviewed, art collecting provided an aesthetic dimension to the movement politics that pervaded black collective life in Chicago (plate 5). Collectors talked about and promoted the art and the living creators of the objects they collected. This promoted the existence and importance of black culture—something they saw as distinct from the white mainstream art world as well as from the mainstream commercial view of black culture. What was markedly absent from their discourse was

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speculation about the potential economic value of the artworks. Indeed, the very nature of their purchases, often directly from artists, undermined the establishment and tracking of any market values. Instead, art collecting was viewed as a social good in its own right and as a vehicle for social change. According to McCoy: I’ve been collecting for twenty years. I like to interact with living artists, mainly someone who is living and breathing in my local community. I learned about collecting from people who have amassed collections that have become important, such as Vivian Hewitt. When you have pieces from artists who are signing pieces to the collectors who buy them, you end up with a collection of work that truly reflects a time period without all that hoopla of chasing the “famous artists.” It really grabs what people were doing at that time. When it comes to looking at the end of the twentieth century, I have a piece of that. [Since] artists tend to know each other and interact with each other, [even] without a clear statement of a movement we become a movement. (McCoy interview 2003)

Collecting and owning black culture was a socially conscious activity. As such, these collectors were not part of the networks frequenting West Loop and River North commercial art galleries or supporting Chicago’s major downtown cultural institutions; nor were they “magnificent millionaires” who could buy whatever they wanted or collectors whose ostentatious consumption was intended only to elevate their social status (Moulin [1967] 1987, 87); moreover, they were distinct from the speculators active in New York art markets since the 1980s. They did, however, view themselves as instrumental in creating a new paradigm for selection of African American art and its inclusion in “a new global aesthetic consciousness” (Montgomery 1998 [2005]) A Taste for Overwhelming Abundance A number of practices distinguished these collectors from other kinds of cultural consumers. Collectors assembled hundreds of handcrafted objects for private display. Preference for overabundance among these black art collectors contrasted with the more traditional spare display seen in mainstream art museums, galleries, and homes. All the collectors who purchased artworks directly from local artists were sidestepping formal downtown art markets. The Bronzeville collectors did so with the desire to be part of the

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cultural production process at the ground level and, as McCoy liked to point out, “from the bottom up, rather than the top down” (McCoy interview 2008). In Bronzeville, private parties offered opportunities for the kind of interaction that built knowledge and recruited new participants. Daniel Texidor Parker introduced the idea of the private party and its importance in building knowledge of black culture and the network of artists and collectors in Bronzeville. Parker was a retired counselor at a local community college who had a PhD in education. While many people did not know Patric McCoy, Charles Bowen, or their collections, everyone I met knew of Parker and his collection. During the course of this research, he self-published a lavishly illustrated coffee table book, African Art: The Diaspora and Beyond (2004), and was featured in a number of television, magazine, and newspaper articles. This recognition was the direct result of the size and scope of his private collection and his long-term cultural leadership (plate 6). Parker was close to the epicenter of the network of Bronzeville collectors and private art parties that cultivated the network. His two-story condo was filled with more than a thousand pieces of art. He recounted one of his recent house parties: Before I moved, I had a party. I invited all the artists that I collected to come [as well as] art entrepreneurs and people who had a sincere interest in the art. And I had a party so that that level of people could interact. I [sometimes] had other parties and talked about the art as I am talking to you. It was an opportunity to kind of interact—artists with each other, artists with art entrepreneurs as well as people who had a real interest in collecting art but maybe had only collected one or two pieces. So you try to use your venue as a place of motivation and inspiration. Hopefully, if someone comes here and sees all this art, and we have [an artist like] Robert Johnson to talk about the art and what it is like to do the art, and see something like this [pointing to one of Johnson’s painted windows], and he talks about how he did it, why he did it, it is an inspiration, motivation, to purchase the art. And then, when they see it here, they might say, “Wow that’s really cool, I would really like to have something like that in my home.” (Parker interview 2003)

A late-twentieth-century, middle-class incarnation of a rent party,4 private art parties provided participants with an alternative to the kind of exchanges that take place through formal markets. The home provided a venue, and the network provided the structure for collectors to become directly involved in art production, sharing the knowledge and being part of

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the creation of local culture. The private interactions built an interdepen­ dent relationship between artists and collectors. Exchanges between collector and artist were not sales of commodities isolated from their makers; they were not “objective” sales typical of formal market interactions; they were more than an exchange of money for art. The exchange represented the interdependence between artists and collectors in the production of meanings and who regularly bought, sold, bartered, and traded works outside of a formally organized art market. At art-centered parties, collectors assembled friends and acquaintances interested in collecting art. This direct interpersonal interaction empowered artists and buyers to control the details and the impact of their transactions. Furthermore, it enabled local people to play an obvious and direct role in the creation of meaning through cultural objects. Local convention emphasized “passionate interest” rather than emphasis on the “disinterested pleasure” often associated with Kant’s analysis of beauty. Yet collectors exchanged accounts of the kind of sensory and intellectual experience and debate that have throughout modernity been characterized as aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, the act of collecting art represented a passionate pursuit involving everything possessive; activity at art parties centered on collectors and their collections, extending their ideas of aesthetic production beyond the metaphysical into the material and the social.5 As collectors’ and artists’ preferences became inextricably intertwined in these aesthetic networks, so did the production and the tasting of art. Among the collectors who spoke of their driving passion behind collecting was Carol Briggs, whose collecting habit was developed long before her role as a founder of Diasporal Rhythms (plate 7). The public school principal’s small brick bungalow was packed with artwork in the same orderly but obsessive way that McCoy’s was. Early in her career as a collector, Briggs began to collect through her relationship with a Nigerian artist, Adedayo “Dayo” Laoye, and her friendship with another principal, Joan Dameron Crisler, with whom she co-sponsored a school-based art fair. As she walked me through her two-story home, the burglar alarm chirped, alerting us to her basement door opening and closing. It was a sound she dismissed as she looked out the back window. Seeing her son leaving through the garden entrance to her home, she looked back to me and she said, “Do you know what I fear most?” I expected her to explain how a central station alarm provided her with some protection from theft or fire while giving her peace of mind for the safety of her family and collection. Instead, her body dissolved like a chocoholic confronted with her favorite candy. “My biggest fear is that

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I will meet another artist whose work I will have to buy. I just don’t know what I will do” (Briggs interview 2006). Owning Art/Owning Oneself Passion was transformed into activism when owning art became defined within the network of collectors as a metaphor for owning one’s own culture and oneself. The prevalence of art production directed to private collectors was fueled by and in turn fueled intensive interest in self-determination by local residents. Collectors reported that ownership of art objects was an expression of resistance to the history of white cultural domination. It was defiance against the historic enslavement and ownership of black people by whites in the United States. Parker emphasized how he collected art and urged others to do so as a means of control and ownership of black culture. Owning the original work by black artists, he explained, is important to me because art of African people, people of the Diaspora, has been so copied, and that most of the original art [is in] Europe. . . . So it becomes very important to someone like me to have as much as possible the original art, since very few black people have any original art. . . . The big difference [between owning an original and a reproduction] is, if it’s art produced by your ancestry, art that reflects you, you would want that reflection to be in your home. You would want the original, the essence of it, to be in your home. And psychologically, it impacts upon you in some way when all you can ever have is a copy of it and someone of another distraction [sic] [raises his voice] has the original and the ownership. So yes, it becomes very important. And yes, I am very emotional about it. (Parker interview 2003)

Ownership of original artworks for Parker was a metaphor for ownership of the history and destiny of black people and for self-determination. Moreover, he argued that seeing art in public museums was not enough; rather, art needed to be in private spaces where it can shape one’s own self-image on a daily basis. “[African-America art] should not be housed exclusively in museums; it is imperative that the cultural legacy created by our ancestors be reflected in our home . . . for the images we live with on a daily basis as children, and grow to love, will be the images we love as adults” (Parker 2004, 3). Citing the psychological evidence (Parham, White, and Ajamu 1999), Parker encourages African Americans to “use themselves, their culture, and their history as a primary referent” (Parker 2004, 4).

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Similarly, for Patric McCoy, collecting was about preserving a culture and the knowledge it contains, and having a strong self-identity. “If this stuff is not preserved, it will just disappear,” he said. “Furthermore, it is about strength on the inside, knowing who you are. We have to do something to hold on to that strength, because things aren’t so stable out there” (McCoy interview 2003). McCoy had numerous images of the historic struggles of black people that he pointed out in a room containing predominantly black-and-white artworks. The dominant image was a print of a finely rendered portrait of the late Chicago mayor Harold Washington. There were other such pieces, which he described as “common images that you can see in other people’s homes.” Above these, McCoy pointed to an almost abstract image that he had purchased in Africa and said: Most of the pieces in this room do have a kind of familiar look, except this one is kind of unusual. I got it in Lusaka, Zambia. It is a black-and-white [woodcut] in almost a reverse sort of image [because of its black background and white images of people] and there is a coffle. The people that were captured were put into sort of like harnesses and marched to the slave markets or to the sea, and so forth. So, it’s almost like all you see is a silhouette in reverse of people hunched over and walking in a line. This one [set the tone for the room], because I was kinda doing this whole room in black-and-white images, and I said this one would go in there. (McCoy interview 2003)

As this picture was in the top corner of a wall surrounded by images of contemporary black leaders, it set the tone for the room arranged to represent the history of black/white relations. The history of slavery and freedom was one of the predominant narratives represented through art in this room and among at least some of the artists McCoy collected. But although both McCoy and Parker had pieces in their collections framing “blackness” in relationship to “whiteness” or “white domination,” not all of their pieces refer to black/white relationships. The range of objects they collected included abstractions and landscapes by black artists, portraits of the collectors and their families, self-portraits of artists, images of musicians, and pieces that describe or reflect the lives of black people as humans or as residents of a place with a shared history. Through their individual and joint efforts, the network of people involved in art collecting asserted their own subjectivity about the meaning of being African American. This collective effort was a central part of events in their social lives, which included going to exhibition openings, art fairs, private parties, and infor-

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mal dinners where art was bought and sold. The social connections created through the practice of art collecting helped to generate their thinking about the connection of such objects to everyday life. For these collectors, the objectification of life through art provided a focal point for understanding their place in the larger world order. What is “black,” according to these accounts, was distinct from what is European, and often involved an explicit rejection of European perspectives, instead focusing on particular ways of celebrating the importance of cultural life among black people. Just as the gathering of materials and the assembly of these materials on the part of artists were essential to the production pro­ cess, so was the production of meaning on the part of these collectors.

Distinction of the Black Middle Class Local Leadership Black collectors distinguished themselves through their collections. Without using the language of Bourdieu, they were aware of the power conferred through control of aesthetic knowledge and practice. Distinction or the ability to be distinct was a key to the social function of art not only in creation and maintenance of social difference but also in legitimizing it (Bourdieu [1979] 1984).6 Their efforts to distinguish themselves and their collections were not to raise themselves up as distinguished from lower classes, but from the dominant culture. In Bronzeville, art production focused on the buying and selling of objects for private display. Collectors—rather than art administrators, art historians, or politicians—led this social engagement. Art collecting provided black middle-class professionals with a vehicle through which to exercise local leadership for building cultural knowledge and ownership. Although the white elite who collect art have also asserted leadership, particularly as donors and trustees within arts institutions, there was no parallel among the white middle classes. The black middle class of Chicago had been criticized and even ostracized for their wholesale exodus from the Mid-South region of the city after construction of high-rise public housing projects and for allowing the locale to be dominated by the poor. The labels “Uncle Tom”7 and “boojie”8 point to their abandonment of race-based shared interests often articulated by activists for the poor. Yet the black art-collecting practices I observed were not carried out as a mirror to white practice, as Frazier (1957) characterized many decisions and practices of the black bourgeois as being. Yet it was in line with

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much conventional interaction, in which successful blacks were expected to display the attitude of the “race man” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962, 390–97). This expectation framed collective and individual action among these collectors and was visible and transformed through a shared interest in producing and maintaining a culture that speaks to the plight of black people, yet created new opportunities for cultural self-determination. These leaders sought to create a cultural context, beyond the walls of the African-centered museums, within which an autonomous black culture could thrive. Leadership by collectors was based in the values of selfsufficiency, black ownership, and black cultural expression drawn from, among other sources, black nationalist ideology and literature. It was a consciousness and self-identity that emerged amidst the poverty and destitution that engulfed this area when it was considered to be Chicago’s most notorious black ghetto. For a number of these collectors, the criticism of the black middle class who left this area when high-rise housing projects “warehoused” poor blacks (Black 1999) was misdirected at the people who left, rather than the public-housing policy. The identity asserted by these collectors was a black identity cognizant of, yet resistant to, an ascribed subordinate status by white society. Nowhere was this expressed more concretely than in the poem “Property Values” by Sam Greenlee, which states in part: “I’m a culturally deprived member / of the indigenous population / of the inner city . . . / which is enough to hangup anybody. Excuse me while I lower some property values” (Greenlee 1975, 34). For Greenlee, deprivation of culture was at the core of the problem. And as he stated, no other group was so stigmatized that their mere presence had the capacity to “lower some property values.” Greenlee, the heralded author of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, was among the artists regularly featured at Bronzeville art events. I interviewed him after an event celebrating Margaret Burroughs’s eighty-fourth birthday held at the South Side Community Art Center. He had mistakenly taken my parka, which looked surprisingly like his. When we met to exchange coats, we had the opportunity to talk about what he had done since the 1970s when a film based on The Spook—a fictional account loosely based on his life—created controversy. According to Greenlee, the FBI pressured the Hollywood film distribution company United Artists to stop its distribution because it depicted a disgruntled former agent using tactics learned in the CIA to lead an underground revolution, which was carried out by inner-city forces masquerading as corner drug addicts. When asked what he thought of the building of cultural institutions in Bronzeville, the longtime advocate for the poor condemned the forced removal of 35,000 poor people from

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public housing and said: “If you mean what do I think of a movement for black ownership of property, of businesses, and of cultural institutions, and what I think of the long-awaited celebration of black culture, in short, I would say, what is happening in Bronzeville is a good thing” (Greenlee interview 2003). Reciprocity between Collectors and Artists Collectors, who buy artists’ works, expect artists to continue to produce art that is meaningful to them as individuals and to a larger population of black people. This expectation of reciprocity that binds collectors and artists was articulated by Joan Dameron Crisler, another one of the founders of Diasporal Rhythms, at their 2008 artist awards ceremony: Those of us who may not have the talent to create art, but certainly have the wisdom and the passion to appreciate art, have an obligation and responsibility to support those of you who have been blessed with the gift. But the other side to that coin is that those of you who have been blessed with the gift have an obligation and responsibility to tell the story, to tell it openly, honestly, and powerfully, so that no one can be in denial of the true history and culture of African people . . . and now to cite August Wilson: “There are and have always been two distinct and parallel traditions in black art—that is, art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society, and art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America by designing its strategies for survival and prosperity.”9 That is our charge to you. (Crisler 2008)

Two artists who have been honorees of Diasporal Rhythms, Dale Washington and Marva Jolly, each acknowledge the importance of the bond between artists and collectors. For both artists, making art was about creating objects that were meaningful to people they knew or encountered in their everyday life. According to Washington, “If there’s no appreciation for your gift and [if there are not] those who love it, then you aren’t doing it right. . . . I’ve had people who I’ve given art to and they’ve cried” (Washington interview 2003). For these artists, the artwork becomes a bond between the artist and the collector. Yet these artists produce work not only for it to be appreciated, but purchased. According to Jolly—a ceramicist, a tenured faculty member at Chicago State University, and the founder of an occupational network for women artists, Sapphire and Crystals—the purpose of making and showing art is to sell it. “By selling our work, we know our work is valued and has value” (Jolly interview 2005). Unlike some of the collectives of

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artists described later in this book, artists throughout Bronzeville pursued sales as part of the art-making process, a practice that links aesthetic value to financial value. Bronzeville was unique among the three places in this study for explicit cooperation among artists and collectors, and for the leadership by collectors in establishing a local culture that was distinct from white culture. In Pilsen’s Podville area, artists intended their work to be autonomous from the locale, the network, and economic concerns. Occasional buyers of such artworks were not linked in a network of collectors through the locale or even to collectors throughout the city, but instead sought out opportunities to purchase works in these outlying areas as adventures in market speculation. Diasporal Rhythms’ recognition dinner, its annual home tour of collectors’ homes, and the informal collectors’ parties all have precedents in Bronzeville artists’ open-studio events. Jolly hosted an annual open-studio event to sell off works that have “stayed too long” in her studio; Nigerian artist Dayo held regular open-studio events in addition to public exhibitions in local restaurants, galleries, art centers, and schools. Dayo was one of the most avidly collected artists in Bronzeville. This was in part due to the fact that he was a highly productive artist. But, secondly, he generated visibility for his own work. His open-studio events were to stimulate sales by allowing collectors to socialize, but also to compete among themselves. From Dayo’s perspective, black people could afford to buy art, but there was not a tradition of doing so. “It’s a black thing. Blacks with money are more likely to spend it on something else, such as clothes, cars, or electronics rather than art,” he said. Dayo saw his role in educating potential collectors and providing regular opportunities for them to socialize as central to his survival as an artist. At his studio events, he encouraged discussion among collectors and artists on what it meant to be a collector of works by black artists: Most every collector I have, they have become friends [with each other]. . . . When someone buys one of my paintings, I say, “Thank you,” and I give them a certificate of authenticity. I make them interact with other collectors of my work. They have a “club” of sorts. They share their collections with each other. That’s a kind of camaraderie I’m creating [through my work]. (Dayo interview 2002)

Every one of the people I interviewed was a member of “Dayo’s Club.” As a Yoruban prince, Dayo was esteemed as a representative of the African

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homeland and was often called upon to speak of African traditions. Dayo was one of the few artists I interviewed who lived off his sales. He sold on average forty to sixty pieces a year at prices ranging from $100 to $10,000. And he actively worked to make sales. “The artist is the person who has to sell their work. Even when you have a gallery or agent, we are the ones who have to make a sale. Until your name is a household name like Picasso—of course then you don’t have to show up—but until then, we make the sale.” Dayo reported that more than half of his annual sales happened out of his open-studio events. Public exhibitions maintained visibility and interest in his work. At a show at the South Side Community Art Center, where I first saw Dayo’s work, he had sold twenty-three out of sixty-four pieces on display. He had become a master at creating the kind of competition among collectors to generate this volume of sales, as he described here: I always like to see one or two red dots [on the wall label indicating “sold”] before I get to work because I know I will work that crowd. . . . Ninety percent of the sales happen opening night; you’re lucky if you make 10 to 20 percent after opening night. [I have learned] in my ten years of smooching and necking the collectors, the way you socialize will enhance your sales that opening night in most cases. With each person, you talk, you smooch, photograph, autograph, then you move on to the next person. It is both the muscle of the work and the crowd that creates the excitement on opening night. You feel hyped. Once the first person buys, once he buys it, he wants to flaunt it. Once you see red dots flying, it is quite contagious. (Dayo interview 2002)

It is through the enthusiasm of the opening night that Dayo generated an environment that transformed disinterested observers into passionate buyers. He chose themes strategically and prepared his own labels and text panels for his pieces around the theme. In one case it was “Divas and Legends,” which centered on black musicians, but included local leaders and people who shared common attributes, including the “uniqueness of their talents, charm, their sense of freedom, perseverance, love for humanity and their ancestry.” He provided a special tribute to “our mothers.” In preparation for the opening night, he sent out full-color cards of his work. “I found people save these as if they are art,” he said. He also telephoned friends and collectors to personally invite them to the opening; and he provided wine and food. The steps leading up to opening night culminated with Dayo’s personal interaction with all who came. The atmosphere transformed attendees into collectors of Dayo’s work or, as Dayo referred to them, “my collectors.”

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While Dayo had sold many pieces and was well known in Bronzeville, the market that existed for his work remained intimately connected to him just like the bonds among the participants in the collecting network. These bonds revolved around meanings generated and exchanged through these interpersonal interactions. It is important to note that this is not typical of art sales made through a gallery situated within a national or international art market. Rather, such artworks enter into a market with values established and sustained separate from the artist. Such values are at first arbitrarily established based on the artist’s credentials, including degrees conferred, awards won, exhibitions reviewed, and sales to other collectors and institutions. A River North gallery owner once explained that he established starting sale prices for a new artist’s works based on a standardized price per square inch multiplied by a figure based on the artist’s credentials. Sales were then documented and records maintained by the gallery owner, separate from the artist. The path to skyrocketing market values for works by international art stars in the 1980s went from solo shows in SoHo, to works in noted private and public collections, and then back on the market through fine art auctions, often over the course of a few years. One sale of my own artwork during this research in an open-studio event held as part of an art festival in Rogers Park exemplified the relationships I have had with buyers of my artworks. An accountant from Chicago’s West Side attended the open-studio event in conjunction with the October 2004 Chicago Artists’ Month publicized in the Chicago Reader. After reviewing my artwork hung uniformly on display in the hallway outside my studio, he approached me to discuss the work and asked to see my résumé. He noted that I had received my undergraduate degree from Indiana University, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and studied with Robert Barnes, an artist he had also collected. He asked who else I had studied with at Indiana. I mentioned another professor whom I did not get along with, who went by the pen name “Roland Markup.” The man laughed and said, “The problem with him is that he knew that most of his students were better artists than he.” With this endearing statement, he purchased one of my pieces. He then called a few days later to see if he could come back to buy another, but asked if I would reframe it to match the one he had already purchased. When he came to pick it up, he brought with him one of Barnes’s pieces he had purchased; it had a review of the Barnes show attached to the back of the painting. We talked for a short time, and then he paid for the second piece and left. A week or so later I received a call from his number, which was pro-

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grammed into my cell phone. He had not left a message, so I called him back. He acknowledged that he had indeed dialed my number, but it was a mistake; he did not call to talk to me. I said, “Oh, OK.” I thanked him for purchasing the work and said I hoped he enjoyed it, and then we hung up. We never saw each other or spoke again. He presented himself as a collector and seemed to purchase artwork he liked, but also seemed to speculate on its potential for increasing in value. The relatively low price tag for the work coupled with my history studying with other artists he had collected apparently made it a good bet. Such practices of market speculation were not visible by collectors in Bronzeville in any of the activities I witnessed nor were they reported on by artists. Rather, the conventional discourse focused on the importance of building collections, expanding the network of collectors who purchased black artists’ works, and preserving black culture through black ownership.

How Collections Manage the Uncertainty of Subjective Judgment Interpretations of “the Moment” The hosting of events to expand the network of collectors meant collectors had active social lives. But more importantly, the interactions helped collectors like Patric McCoy to address the uncertainty that comes from the subjective judgment of art. Observing, discussing, and being observed at private parties were important to a collector’s understanding of the range of aesthetic preferences that were shared. The knowledge created and shared through this activity constructed knowledge of a culture, history, and identity that had at its core resistance to external domination. Most of McCoy’s collection was contemporary work made by local artists from the 1980s to the present. He said that he focused on artists who interpret “this moment” in contemporary life. Few of the pieces he purchased were literal representations of local life; but most represented, in his words, “the thought of what art should be and could be in this environment in these times.” His collection included works inspired by the Black Power movement, abstracts, landscapes, portraits, Afrocentric designs, and art that was a direct reflection of contemporary events, as illustrated through his description of two collages by Kevin Lee (plate 8): This artist did one show at the South Shore Cultural Center with these collages, and then kind of disappeared off the scene. They are very, very interesting collages. They tell the stories of the present culture. This [one] is of Mike

88 / Chapter Four Tyson showing him being handcuffed by the dollar, Desiree [Washington] running for the money, [here is] Justice with her boxing glove on, effectively saying she knocked him out, and Robin [Givens] wearing the [boxing championship] belt. And then here’s his image, wrapped up in the flag. I think it is a wonderful encapsulation of the moment. [Over] here is O.J. [Simpson] and the Bronco, the knife, the bloody glove, Nicole [Brown Simpson], Judge Ito. The image is of O.J. the hero bursting out like he did on the Hertz ad, yet here he is splitting [in two] and one image is replacing another. (McCoy interview 2005)

McCoy stopped short of framing the plight of these two fallen men as their own fault, the fault of the women in their lives, or the fault of the larger society. Instead, he, like the artist, left the ultimate interpretation up to the viewer and simply ended his story by stating, “The man is a genius. We haven’t seen him since that first show.” As a tour guide for me and several other of his guests through his twobedroom condo, McCoy told stories about unusual situations in which he bought a piece. One piece was purchased at the Bud Billiken Parade10 from a “guy who said he was just out of prison.” He also shared stories about why he hung a work where he did or what the piece meant to him. A polished docent, McCoy guided conversation only to the point where others had something to say. Then he stopped talking until the conversation ebbed. The social connections among visitors to his home helped to generate thinking about the connection of such objects to everyday life. It did not take long for me to learn that private tours and private parties were not unusual events, or something staged for me personally; rather, they were typical of the kind of interactions that Bronzeville collectors sought out and encouraged. This became apparent through an interview with Annette, an artist who goes by the name of Malika, whom I met at the R.A.W. (Real Art Work) show. She was an art teacher at Dixon Elementary. She had been at McCoy’s just a few weeks before I interviewed her. She explained that she had never before been to his place, although he had invited her often. That evening she went with a friend, and while she was there, she also met Bryant Johnson, the owner of Steele Life, a gallery that had just opened on King Drive and Forty-Seventh Street. Malika explained: [I went with] a friend of mine [named Sylvia]. . . . She’s a fine artist who does textiles. She did his shower curtains and I think his couch covers. . . . So, he had asked me several times to come on over, but I’d never gotten anybody to go with me as an entrée. I didn’t want to just drop by, you know. So Sylvia

Aesthetic Networks and Cultural Capital / 89 said, “Well, come on,” and she called him and said, “I’m going to bring Malika with me,” and he said, “OK,” and I finally got to go over there. So that’s how that happened. So when I went there, the gallery owner Bryant and his wife was there. (Malika interview 2003)

Malika shared a feeling of exuberance being surrounded by so much art and by people who loved to talk about what it meant. Her experience reinforced how the circuit of private connections was built through a central figure like McCoy, who not only purchased a lot of artwork, but who transformed his home into a meeting place for artists, collectors, and gallery owners. It’s a really positive energy. It makes you want to just create, you know. And whenever I go out and I’m in a show or with some of my fellow artists, I can go back and really create something. Being at Patric’s house, being exposed to all his art, it rejuvenates, it energizes me. . . . And just being around them helps me to vibe off of them, so to speak. Just being around a kind of person that likes to create this positive energy helps me create. I think that’s [why] I like to sit around with my students, and try to get them to use that muscle, that creative muscle. It’s so wonderful; it’s just a high that I can’t figure out how to describe it. (Malika interview 2003)

The Universal versus the Particular At Daniel Parker’s home I was immediately drawn to a piece a few feet from the door. The piece, according to Parker, pointed to the “particular” experiences of black people in the United States. It was next to a group of works all on the subject of “Black Face” by Julian Williams (plate 9). By Parker’s account, this piece was a comment on “blackface minstrelsy,” which Parker considered to be a racist representation of black people by white people and the alienation that black people have experienced living without a cultural milieu that celebrated their own ethnic and cultural heritage. The large piece hung next to a number of other smaller paintings also by Williams that revealed the more tragic side of having a black face, that is, one of lower status and the associated feelings of being objectified as a clown and the subordination that comes with the racial territory of blackness. According to Parker: There seem to be two schools of thought in terms of African American art or “black art.” One is that art is directly related to the black experience or [the second] that it is exterior to the black experience and perhaps more universal

90 / Chapter Four in its presentation. This particular piece is very germane to the black experience. In the larger piece, you see the lips are exaggerated. [It] mimics black people who are mimicking white people who are mimicking black people. [We laugh] OK. And so that really is what it is. That shows a black man, as you see, with blue eyes. And if you look at all of his tags [baggage tags attached to the painting] from various places he has traveled, [you see] he has only traveled to European places. And so he only sees the world from European eyes, at the expense of his own blackness and who he is. That’s what that piece is about. (Parker interview 2003)

The artist, Julian Williams, had created an artistic identity for his work through interrogating and re-presenting stereotypes of blacks as Step’n Fetchit comedians, over-performing sports figures, overly endowed sexual beings, or violence-prone “gangstas.” Like many artists I interviewed, Williams, who has a MFA in painting and was an adjunct art professor, had to work an additional day job to earn enough money to keep producing art. His day job was as an airline baggage handler. Gendered Practices, Gendered Circuits The African American men and women art collectors that I came to know moved in largely gender-specific circuits revealing gendered meanings and approaches to collecting. According to Parker, “While there are more black women who buy art, there are more black men who actually have amassed collections,” leading him to observe that both are equally important to the creation and preservation of black culture. Further difference was evident in how they talked about the purpose of collecting: men bought art as reflections of their own identity, whereas for women art often played additional practical or functional roles in their lives. While both Parker and McCoy owned substantial numbers of artworks by women, they owned more by men. They each reinforced my observations about this when asked. McCoy pointed out that, initially, his own collecting network did not include women. “It just happened that way because most of our ideas come out of social situations and that’s the way we typically socialize,” that is, with members of the same sex. He pointed out other circuits dominated by women, among them the woman’s collective Sapphire and Crystals and the show at Dixon Elementary School that has led to the building of a collection of art for that particular Chicago public school. “It’s a fabulous show, and the principal [Crisler] there is also a collector,” he said.

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When McCoy and Parker began to work to establish Diasporal Rhythms, a formally organized nonprofit organization, the two public school principals Carol Briggs and Joan Dameron Crisler were among those first to be invited to participate. By 2008 the network had thirty-five members who had each paid $100–$200 to join, and the group had recognized fifteen artists with awards, hosted an annual collectors’ home tour, and sponsored a number of arts lectures and workshops. The long-term vision of the group was to open a contemporary art museum. Functional Purposes of Women’s Art Collecting Women’s participation in art-collecting networks in Bronzeville filled multiple purposes. Yet there were many similarities and intersections across gendered collecting circuits. Like the men’s, women’s collecting networks operated through interpersonal contact. According to Ayana Karanja—a Bronzeville resident, an artist, a faculty member at an area university, and a collector of African-centered wearable art, including jewelry and handwoven textiles—information spreads through word of mouth: “Someone will call and say, ‘Jimmy King is at Patrick [Woodtar’s] store Saturday and Sunday,’ or, ‘Koswan has come up from the South,’ ” she said. “Blacks are very African-centered in their dress. Artists come from all over. We hear about it from our friends” (Karanja interview 2001). Among the functional purposes of collected art, some women’s collections were built around wearable clothing and jewelry, art that worked as a design element in the home, and art that served educational purposes, as in the collection assembled for Dixon Elementary School. Crisler, the principal at Dixon, appeared for her interview and tour of the school’s collection wearing a one-of-a-kind artist-made outfit and a large stone handcrafted into a necklace. Together with Malika, the art teacher, they explained how they had assembled the art objects displayed in the extensive collection throughout the school with proceeds from the booth fees of the annual art fair. Outside of her office was a piece by the Nigerian artist Dayo that celebrated the women’s leadership. The work was mounted at the school entrance outside the principal’s office (plate 10). Using Yoruba mythologizing, Crisler explained how the piece reflected both women’s roles in African society and in the school: Ye Ye Oba, this is Queen Mother. What Dayo was saying is that in [the Yoruba] African tradition, the mother is the strength of the village. It’s the mother who raises the child, the son, to eventually be the king. So that’s what this

92 / Chapter Four represents. This was Queen Mother. You know. It wasn’t King Father who was in charge of molding the next prince or king; it was the mother. That’s kinda like what the school represents. We view ourselves, particularly since 99 percent of us are females, that we are that yardstick, that strength that molds these children to be whatever they’re gonna be later on. (Crisler interview 2003)

At first it was a surprising to me that the collectors’ network linked into this school not only involved the art teacher but also the principal. Furthermore, it was surprising to find that this school, too, had built a substantial collection of art that not only created an aura of creativity and identity within the school, but also that these works were presented as education tools. “Every piece on display communicates some value that we feel is important that we are trying to teach our children. If we don’t, who will? You certainly aren’t going to learn anything from all the billboards selling alcohol in our community,” explained Crisler. The school’s collection, the support of creativity it represented, and the networks of living artists connected to the artworks created interaction among schoolchildren, parents, teachers, artists, collectors, and other people who attended the fair held at this public school. As work associated with building the collection was primarily carried out by educators, the artworks and activities were also interpreted by this circuit as an extension of their public educational mission. The annual art fair at Dixon School served collecting, fund-raising, and educational purposes. The show provided artists an opportunity to show and collectors an opportunity to buy artworks. Funds raised through the $75 booth fee allowed the school to buy art and build an art collection. Exposure to the range of artworks at the show provided schoolchildren and the more than a thousand visitors with access to works created by living artists. The show also provided children with a firsthand opportunity to participate in entrepreneurial activities. Consistent with long-held theories, aesthetic preferences reflected the subjective view of the collector and the context where the work was displayed.

Men’s Work versus Women’s Work In addition to the differences among men’s and women’s collecting, the every­day work of women artists was organized differently from men’s everyday work as artists. This was highlighted by Marva Jolly, who pointed out the disparity experienced by women artists. “Most of us women have full-time jobs, so making art is our second full-time job.” Such was the

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case with Malika, who taught at a public school, and with Joyce Owens Anderson, who taught at Chicago State University. More male artists were self-employed as artists. The outcome was that men were more available to engage in the kind of socializing already discussed as so important to artists’ careers and to the production of local culture. How this led to men having more access to opportunities was exemplified by Gregg Spears, then a painter in his fifties who also managed the South Side Community Art Center. In his effort to organize a meeting with local artists and a representative of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs interested in their technical assistance needs, he said, “I can get all kinds of guys. They are all available during the day. I am really trying hard to get some women here, but it’s difficult because they all work” (Spears interview 2003). Just as Jolly indicated, most of the women artists Spears knew had day jobs at educational institutions. Because ideas come out of such social events and artists’ careers are built through such social interaction, it should come as no surprise that women were less visible than men in collections and in shows and at events. Expanding Beyond Local Places The lack of free time, leading to the lack of exposure for women artists and greater visibility for men, led to the establishment of Sapphire and Crystals, an occupational network of women artists who regularly mounted formal exhibitions of their work. While based in the Bronzeville area, black women from throughout the city have joined this support group for African American women artists. Jolly, a feminist and a ceramic sculptor, founded Sapphire and Crystals in 1987 because she and other black women artists needed a support structure to continue producing their work. She suggested that the name include “sapphire,” which, in her words, referred to “women with attitude.” Jolly said she wanted the group to support the kind of thinking she saw in such spirited women. The circuit built upon the leadership roles black women have historically played. While this constituted feminism among white women artists, it was not often characterized as feminism among black women artists. According to Jolly, “You know, feminism is not something that is necessarily supported in the black community or by black women” because of its historic alignment with white women’s issues. Moreover, “feminist” was interpreted as lesbian, as one male artist noted, and gay or lesbian identity was cultural territory that was not publicly displayed or discussed with me during this research. Sapphire and Crystals played a pivotal role for black women artists.

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According to Ayana Karanja, “Most black women artists from the South Side who have achieved some recognition for their work have at one time or another have been involved with Sapphire and Crystals” (Karanja interview 2001). The group was formed because there were rarely exhibitions of African American women artists, as explained by Jolly: Sapphire and Crystals provides a support system for their members. They provide connections between their members and other organizations. We build careers for black women artists through mentoring young women who are just beginning to talk about being an artist as well as mentoring each other to improve our work. I am dogmatic about the quality of work. I have helped people to understand that if they are going to exhibit, they are going to have to do better work. It’s not just this “black women thing.” They have to produce art. (Jolly interview 2005)

Sapphire and Crystals events and exhibitions have taken place both inside and beyond Bronzeville, as the women are regularly involved in activities sponsored by white women artists. Sapphire and Crystals has given most of the group’s participants enough visibility for their work to be included in private and corporate collections elsewhere, including the collections of Diasporal Rhythms’ members. Participants worked together to produce Sapphire and Crystals exhibitions; the loose-knit group only met when it was necessary to plan and carry out an event. They divvied up the costs and the work necessary to pull off the event. This has led to structured exhibition opportunities for the women involved in the network. Rather than focusing on exchanges to build social life, the women of Sapphire and Crystals have focused on creating opportunities upon which to build careers and support each other as leaders. According to Jolly: Part of our mission is the goal of building leadership among African American women artists. These efforts have taken hold, with recent activities spearheaded by Arlene Crawford, who organized Black Arts Week events, and Juarez Hawkins, who narrated a public-access “video salon,” highlighting artists featured in a 2001 Sapphire and Crystals exhibition at ARC Gallery [in River West]. (Jolly interview 2004)

Black Arts Week events drew together black arts leaders from throughout Chicago to the South Shore Cultural Center to celebrate the work of black women and men from many generations.

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Women played multiple roles in Bronzeville collecting circuits. Women were artists, collectors, caregivers, and educators, as well as administrators for local cultural organizations. What women lacked in time for socializing at private parties hosted by collectors, they made up for through formal exhibitions and through their local leadership. According to noted writer and filmmaker Sam Greenlee, women typically provided administrative and financial leadership wherever it existed in the arts in Bronzeville. “Raising money has traditionally been the job of women in the black community. You know, from bake sales to organizing fund-raisers to writing grants, they are the ones that seem to do it” (Greenlee interview 2003). Indeed, most of the large-budget organizations were founded under women’s leadership, including the South Side Community Art Center, the DuSable Museum of African American History, Little Black Pearl Workshop, Muntu Dance The­ atre, and the Harold Washington Cultural Center.

Formal Art Organizations and Art Markets in Bronzeville Private interests and shared aesthetic preferences deployed through this network fed back into the public sphere through an increasing number of local art fairs, commercial art galleries, and a number of nonprofit arts organizations established in Bronzeville after the millennium. Revenues from the annual art auction sponsored by the South Side Community Art Center (est. 1941) grew from less than $25,000 in the late 1990s to over $100,000 by 2006. Steele Life Gallery was opened on the corner of Forty-Seventh and King Drive by photographer Bryant Johnson. This was a dramatic traditional gallery space found on the second floor of a newly remodeled building named the African Market Place. A trendy, upscale restaurant, Blu 47, opened the following year across the hall from his gallery with a southern menu and live jazz music. Gallery Guichard opened in 2005 in a gray stone mansion on King Drive near Thirty-Fifth Street at the southern end of the mile-long art piece, the Public Art of Bronzeville, installed in 1996 as part of a streetscape project. Founded and managed by painter André Guichard and at least one member of Diasporal Rhythms board as an investor, the gallery filled three floors of the building and hosted regular exhibitions. Nicole Gallery, which operated out of the River North gallery district for more than two decades, opened a satellite space in the same building as Steele Life. Once a month the three galleries and the South Side Community Art Center on South Michigan Avenue near Thirty-Ninth Street sponsored a motorized trolley to drive visitors to the gallery openings in Bronzeville. The commercial

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ventures sought to build a formal market for the cultural products regularly sold directly through artists’ home-based studios. Although the new galleries were celebrated as part of Bronzeville’s cultural renaissance, by 2009 the momentum they received as new businesses had slowed. Nicole closed her Bronzeville space, and Steele Life Gallery closed its doors altogether.

Conclusions Through examination of aesthetic networks in Bronzeville, this chapter provided insight into how cultural capital was created through the development of shared artistic preferences and aesthetic judgments within a network of activity. In this particular art world, members of the black middle class provided leadership for the range of activities necessary for art production; as art collectors, they provided leadership and were the center of art production networks predominantly concerned with aesthetic judgment and preferences within a present-day black cultural milieu. Their private parties, like historic rent parties, offered an alternative to the kind of exchanges that take place through formal art markets and cultural institutions. These parties provided a gathering place and structure through which a growing network of African American people—including artists, bureaucrats, teachers, and professionals—could become directly involved in art production and the creation of local culture. Their private parties functioned to accomplish both the production and distribution of art while fostering the creation of knowledge about its existence. Through these parties, they nurtured others into purposeful art collecting and advocated for cultural transformation. Yet their advocacy was not to transform the illiterate masses into rational citizens, as proponents of elite culture in France had argued for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century; rather, the activities of this new class of art collectors was an extension of civil rights efforts that initially focused on the problem of social and economic inequality, and now sought to extend these concerns to addressing the disproportionate distribution of power that had accumulated through the institutionalization of culture in the twentieth century. Cultural cohesion emerged from an ideal of ownership of self and the establishment of a cultural legacy for people who were historically denied ownership of their own person and whose culture had been dominated by external interests. Through asserting their own shared interests in producing, maintaining, and distributing culture, participants in this aesthetic network created a local culture whose meanings were directly connected to living artists and the living art appreciators.

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Black cultural capital created through such networks challenged grand aesthetic narratives of Western civilization while reinforcing postmodern epistemological pluralism—that is, that there was not a single form or structure through which knowledge was produced and diffused, but many. Such gatherings nurtured and increasingly advocated for a cultural transformation—one that challenged the accumulation of power by the dominant class through its cultural institutions. The activities of this new class of art collector at first continued the civil rights efforts that focused on social and economic inequality, but extended these concerns by challenging the disproportionate distribution of power that continued to accumulate through institutionalized cultural practice in the twenty-first century. As a result, localized art production was purposeful and became a source of power for black people. Moreover, aesthetic preferences began to take on their own logic—a logic based in subjective preferences extending beyond an individual and not dependent upon some other external justification. Twenty-first-century Bronzeville provided a unique context for the increasing recognition of aesthetic preferences of black collectors as a valuable and even useful form of knowledge. This knowledge had been ignored not only by the cultural arbiters of the downtown cultural core, but also by traditional black leaders whose value systems, rooted in social justice causes, rejected what appeared to them as extravagant displays of wealth by petty bourgeois. Yet within the emerging territorial place of Bronzeville, this aesthetic activity provided the knowledge necessary to mobilize resources on a grand scale. The particular facts of this case study can be generalized to other places: that art producers with shared aesthetic interests can create art and collections that are meaningful to a larger network of people yet remain outside of the realms of institutionalized and commercialized fine art objects. The network form of organization provides a vehicle through which artists and non-artists alike may cooperate to produce such art and establish significant places; they may exert leadership through promoting and advocating the benefits of art. Both religious and secular art collectors—from ancient African shamans to the Catholic priests to wealthy businessmen such as the Medici—have exerted such influence through their collections. However, the subject of black aesthetic networks and identity within the contemporary black middle class is a new subject within the sociology of art. As a result, this investigation contributes new understanding of black aesthetics and black cultural capital and their meanings within the changing social location of black Americans.

FIVE

Autonomy Networks and Artistic Control

The pure intention of the artist is that of producer who aims to be autono­ mous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends to reject not only the “programmes” imposed a priori by scholars and scribes, but also— following the old hierarchy of doing and saying—the interpretations super­ imposed a posteriori on his work. . . . To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the “subject,” the external referent, which involves subordination to functions—even if only the most elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something. (Bourdieu [1979] 1984, 3)

Art producers who place the highest value on artistic autonomy are focused on producing artworks in relationship to a history of art that exists outside of temporal space. Yet, to survive, such artists are engaged in a variety of re­ lationships necessary to sustain production and their own autonomy as art­ ists. The network relationships discussed in this case occurred in Pilsen but were not bound to the place or its everyday life. Instead they existed as prac­ tical activity necessary for artists to pursue artistic goals. The interpersonal interactions and their connections to local places were short term and even transitory. As one artist put it, “Transience . . . is an accurate representation of making art in the current society” (Ruby 2005). Although short-lived, such activities were important to the existence of an artist’s career. Both Becker (1963) and Giuffre (1999) recognized the contradiction between the demands for autonomy and for activities that produced an artist’s career. Becker1 considered the careers of dance musicians as careers in a “deviant occupational group” because of their interest in “maintain­ ing freedom from control over artistic behavior” (1963, 102). Giuffre2 con­ ceived of a photographer’s career “as a sand pile, in which each actor’s

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attempts to reach the top changes the shape of the climb” (1999, 815). Mir­ roring Bourdieu (1993), Giuffre viewed the career as the individual trajectory through time and space; social space was the web of possible positions a photographer could hold and the career was the trajectory through that space (Giuffre 1999, 821). Activities of visual artists examined in this chap­ ter were conscientiously located outside of the boundaries of control and authority of formal organizations or markets. Their place in a local network was constructed through lateral connections within a network form of organization (Podolny and Page 1998). The interactions among artists were social arrangements designed to sustain production and artistic autonomy by providing access to resources including public visibility for artistic work; recognition through postcards and other publicity pieces, newspaper and Web listings; articles or reviews; occasional sales; and frequent access to short-term contract work. To sustain such relationships through a network that prioritized autonomy, artists of­ ten chose against the development of the kind of career that was gauged by movement through status positions in an organization, but their activities produced a career nonetheless within a borderless social space defined by the reach of the network. Just as business scholars have found, networked businesses often had to forgo opportunities to make money in the short term to sustain network relationships over the long term (Podolny and Page 1998). These artists were committed first to the pursuit of artistic autonomy, second to the network of involvement that helped them to sustain produc­ tivity, and third to other interests such as those that might lead to paid work or art sales. Among the participants in the autonomy network discussed in this chap­ ter are three categories of artists that I define as cutting-edge artists, transna­ tional artists, and museum-quality artists. Among the cutting-edge artists were recent art school graduates who formed a collective of artists’ spaces, the ArtPilsen Collective. They rented space on Pilsen’s east side in an area they nicknamed “Podville,” after their landlord, one of the locale’s longtime landlords whose primary market was artists. They engaged in agreements with each other for cooperative action designed to increase the public vis­ ibility of their work. They provided each other with referrals to events held outside their collective that would build both individual and shared vis­ ibility of their artwork. Among their collaborative events were their “Second Friday” monthly openings in their “domestic spaces,” and larger exhibitions mounted as alternatives to the downtown art fair involving similarly inter­ ested artists from throughout the city and beyond. The transnational artists shared the concerns and activities of Pilsen’s

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cutting-edge artists and even participated in many of the same events. They were also based in Pilsen but located along the Eighteenth Street commercial corridor in the Mexican section of Pilsen. As transnational artists, their iden­ tity was not rooted within a single nation but across two or more nations. The core members of this group were bicultural Latino/American artists, who involved artists from throughout the world—including Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, Eastern Europe, South Af­ rica, China, and Japan—in their exhibitions. Like the cutting-edge artists, the transnational artists were also mostly art school graduates, but they reached beyond the borders of Pilsen, their Latino heritage, and their art school education to challenge Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchy, assimilation, gentrification, and mono-culturalism. Their activities were distinguished from the other cutting-edge artists by their regular critiques of both tradi­ tional Eurocentric and ethnic art forms reminiscent of a world hierarchically ordered by distinct nationalistic cultures. The museum-quality artists were older and had established artistic careers through exhibitions in nonprofit galleries and museums, reviews of their works, and features in journals, catalogs, and books. From private “bitch sessions” (Altman interview 2002) to public debate, these artists provided each other with support and criticism of each others’ works in progress and finished pieces. Just as was highlighted by the poet Tyehimba Jess, these visual artists showed up to each other’s private events and to public openings or lectures in commercial galleries and regional museums. They also provided referrals that led to increased institutional legitimacy for each other’s works. What distinguished the museum-quality artists from the cutting-edge and transnational artists were primarily generational differences that were evi­ dent through their methods and their opportunities for recognition. While the older museum-quality artists might produce conceptual, installation art and show works through older galleries participating in the Art Chicago in­ ternational art fair held each year at Navy Pier, the younger cutting-edge and transnational artists participated in large-scale alternative exhibitions such as the Stray Show 2002, described as including “emerging contemporary art organizations . . . unconventional spaces, art collectives, and emerging galleries” (Stray 2002) and mounted in a vacant 37,000-square-foot stor­ age facility on Kingsbury Place just north of the West Loop loft and gallery district; Art Boat, an exhibition mounted in a rented tourist cruiser launched from the docks of the downtown exhibition hall and tourist center at Navy Pier,3 where the Art Chicago international art fair took place (2003 and 2004); and the alternative “young” art fair Nova, originally an acronym for

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“Network of Visual Art” (Workman 2005b), first mounted in 2005 in the rooms of a North Side seedy hotel on Belmont Avenue rented entirely for the purpose of the fair. Just as the Art Chicago fair featured galleries displaying their artists’ works in conventional-styled booths that mimicked the white-box format of contemporary museums and galleries, the alternative events followed the approach of the Stray Show and involved Chicago’s “stray” art galler­ ies, that is, those not located in one of the city’s art districts. As noted by Stray organizers, such events claimed a place in “Chicago’s avant-garde tra­ dition” while “asserting their vision for the global art community’s next generation, forming a network of people, practices and philosophies.” They shared what was acknowledged and even celebrated as a transitory existence: “Most of the participants are accustomed to setting up wherever and whenever possible, either exhibiting new talent out of their own ga­ rages [or] apartment galleries or as collaborative groups without a regular venue. . . . Location may not be a primary concern for this rising community of independents” (Stray 2002). Displays in these alternative exhibitions mim­ icked the gritty, even trashy aesthetic of their nonconventional exhibition spaces.

Cutting-Edge Artists in Podville The concentration of roughly two hundred artists within the eastern section of Pilsen, or “Podville,” was built through a number of resources unique to the area: obsolete factory buildings and wood-framed two-flats that once provided housing for immigrant factory workers; a bohemian aura; a steady stream of skilled art school graduates from nearby professional schools, colleges, and universities ready to be entrepreneurial tenants; and a landlord who was supportive of artistic practice. Podville’s “open format” artists’ spaces created a hub for artistic auton­ omy. Artists at work in these specially designed spaces regularly presented works to their friends and to the public from their living rooms or the gal­ lery spaces that existed in place of living rooms. The landlord/tenant rela­ tionship for these artists’ spaces was one that allowed artists to carry out the kind of activity necessary for art production: making holes in the walls, dropping paint on the floors, hammering, sanding, using paint and solvent that create noxious fumes, and hosting art events far into the night. Such freedoms allowed artists to pursue “serious” artistic goals within a support­ ive network, while existing outside of traditional nonprofit, institutional, or market relationships. The exchanges among art producers were agreements

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to act cooperatively, particularly in scheduling opening nights, promoting their exhibitions, and participating in group exhibitions held both within and outside the locale. By sharing audiences through such cooperation, this network preserved the loose social connections that sustained their access to opportunities, their productivity, and their artistic autonomy. Irony, mixed with anarchy, undergirded the attitude of many of these cutting-edge artists toward the corporate real estate firm that was their landlord. The name “Podville” was a satiric reference to the mythic “Pot­ tersville,” the corporate incarnation of Bedford Falls when family-owned, neighborhood businesses fell under control of the evil banker Mr. Potter in Frank Capra’s classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life. The name “Podville” was simultaneously an endearing reference to John Podmajersky II, whose craftsman’s skill first imbued the obsolete industrial buildings with a sense of place, and a criticism of the more recent corporate management style of the real estate firm as it exerted a monopoly control of property in the area he called “Pilsen East.” Moreover, the name captured the tension between the wonderful life in a network established through creative interaction among artists and the requirement of tolerating corporate intervention in their lives. Kimberly Aubuchon, a recent master of fine arts (MFA) graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was the director of Unit B, a basement gallery in a Podville residential unit. She collaborated with other artists through the ArtPilsen Collective, staging monthly openings in their “domestic spaces” to gain visibility and attract people to their quiet niche of Pilsen. By adopting names for their spaces such as “Apt 1R” or “Unit B” (the unit designation on a lease), by informally referring to the area as “Podville,” and by acknowledging that they could do the kinds of quirky things they did because they were “Pods and they live in Pod Places,” they acknowledged the simultaneous control and freedom that was an under­ current to their network of cultural production and that had produced its transience in this locale. The ArtPilsen Collective involved ten artists living in the easternmost fringes of Podville. Although it was the closest section of Pilsen to the downtown Loop, it was in a nether land between the Interstate Highway 94 overpass, the Chicago River, and the highly commercial Chinatown. “Sec­ ond Friday” exhibitions were mounted in artists’ domestic spaces, which included in 2002 Apt. 1R, Unit B, Bucket Rider, Drivethru Studios, Gallery SixFourFive, and Dogmatic Gallery. These exhibitions crossed the public/ private boundary in that they were publicly announced but existed in art­ ists’ private domains or domestic spaces. Artists/gallery owners individually

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promoted their openings through a citywide Internet listserv, ChicagoArt. net; through their shared website, ArtPilsen.com; and through mailing lists generated from past exhibition attendees and occasional buyers. Their ma­ jor source of income was through full- and part-time employment and free­ lance jobs in nearby Loop locations: they worked in arts administration, graphic design, web design, exhibition preparation, and exhibition con­ struction. Art was sold to buyers or collectors coming from outside of Pilsen. These outsiders were not involved in local social life as collectors were in Bronzeville. Through use of technology and collaboration with other artists hosting openings out of their domestic spaces, these art school–educated artists sought public visibility for their work. As the artwork existed out­ side of any functional purpose—including educating people, earning an income, or even making a statement—gathering people together to see the art was the only activity that located it and its makers in time and space. Unlike aesthetic networks in Bronzeville, there was no discussion of the meanings of artwork or of culture within or beyond the network. Rather, theirs was an occupational shared interest, rooted in the artists’ coopera­ tive efforts to support and maintain each other’s autonomy as independent producers of art. The concentration of domestic spaces and artist studios in Podville had given such artists who wanted visibility and legitimacy for their work the op­ portunity to achieve these outside the traditional institutional structure of nonprofit organizations and outside the commercial art market. Just as their activities crossed the public/private divide that often separates work from home life, it also crossed the nuanced conventions that distinguished their arts events, parties, and productions from the activities of formal arts organi­ zations and markets, including the nonprofit arts organizations founded in Chicago 1975–85, such as N.A.M.E, Artemisia Gallery, Randolph Street Gallery, and MoMing, all of which had closed by the end of the century. Yet the Podville domestic spaces operated as something close to a sole propri­ etorship as individual authority was retained by the artist-renter. Each artist promoted his or her efforts as “a gallery” without any formal status—such as a Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) or 501(c)(3) nonprofit status4—and without the separation between business and personal life, such as separate phone lines or bank accounts, that had been a hallmark of modernity. They each operated without a board of directors or paid staff. Their primary agreement with each other as a collective was for them each to carry out an event on the second Friday of the month to attract people to openings and share audiences.

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Routine Production I want to continue doing this, first because it’s successful. But also I’ve met so many wonderful people, just artists. It’s really keeping me in the game. I really like the whole process of it—meeting artists. I have a passion to know what people are thinking about. It keeps me social to plan—don’t want to call it “a party”—well, “a production” every month. (Aubuchon interview 2003)

Like the Bronzeville collectors who hosted private parties to build a network of collectors, Kimberly Aubuchon’s purpose as an artist hosting events out of Unit B was largely social. Success for Aubuchon was gauged by the turn­ out of artists to her events, the access the social connections provided to her and the artists exhibited at Unit B, and to the subsequent opportunities with more visibility, such as through Art Boat and the Stray Show, both exclusive “alternative” exhibition opportunities for galleries like Unit B. Through her monthly “production” in Podville, Aubuchon featured art­ works of friends and associates in exhibitions mounted in the front room of her basement apartment. It was a small room, approximately ten feet by ten feet with black-and-white checked linoleum tile on the floor. In addition to the ways already discussed, the production crossed the public/private bor­ der in other ways. To attract people to her events, she sent out cards and e-mail notices announcing her production to friends and the public. Her productions took on a more public form than Bronzeville collectors’ parties because announcements were distributed through lists of people, some of whom she did not know. On these nights, she put a sign out on the side­ walk, like other businesses might hang a shingle. It pointed to the gangway entrance to her apartment/gallery, Unit B (plate 11). Consistent with the professional conventions at work in many nonprofit and commercial galleries, Aubuchon rarely showed her own paintings in Unit B exhibitions. Yet they were on display in the rest of her apartment, available for people to see, and were often featured in group shows that re­ sulted from her participation in the ArtPilsen Collective. Her paintings, first drawn on computer and then painted on large canvases, appeared as crude and mid-century computer renderings transformed into paintings. Just like the crude aura of Unit B, her paintings belied her technical expertise. Her knowledge of and adeptness with both gallery administration and compu­ ter technology were skills she exploited in promoting the gallery and the collective as well as her work at a downtown museum.

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Undermining Consumerism The group’s website, ArtPilsen.com, was created and maintained by Eric Medine, a thirty-something artist and professional web technician, who held regular shows out of a studio/gallery space, Drivethru Studios, named for the recycled McDonald’s “Drive-Thru” sign that adorned the front of his building. However, the artwork produced within the studio was a conscious affront to the consumerism represented by fast-food restaurants. In fact, Medine indi­ cated that he was not interested in selling work because he did not want to have to “babysit” collectors. Rather, artists gathered at his space to collectively reject the kind of rational, market-oriented or institution-oriented behavior that often characterized activity in the gallery district or among nonprofit cul­ tural institutions. And the gallery, which was originally co-owned by Thomas Waters, had a history of ratcheting up the environment, just as the language of its manifesto posted on its website promised. In a combination of heavymetal and surfer jargon, it promised to “bring you the fastest, loudest and crunchiest of all the fine arts . . . a wild and violent ride through the thorny business of making art all day every day” (Drivethru 2003). Medine rented a storefront space on the fringes of Podville because, as he explained, “there were not many independent spaces available for the kind of work I do” (Medine interview 2003). Medine was the main “authority” at Drive­thru. The studio’s primary purpose was centered on creating unique social situations rather than making money. For Medine, making art that could be sold was secondary to making art that celebrated the autonomy of the artist: There’s more independent space now than when I first started. I just really needed a space where I could show installation work that is not really sellable or, how you say, “hocked.” You know, most artists who probably do it for a liv­ ing like to make objects you can sell, you know, [art that] pays the bills. And I like to make, like I said, installation, performance art, video art. There are certain venues where that stuff is appropriate and you can [earn money to] pay your bills, like through what my [new roommate Nathan Peck] over here does a lot, through video mixing, doing eye-candy-type video stuff for clubs. I originally found this space so I can show my work and not have to deal with someone tell­ ing me, “Oh, you can’t do that here.” (Medine interview 2003)

For Medine, autonomy over what he does was the primary value he acted upon, but that did not mean he was alone in his art production activities. He could afford to not focus on selling work for several reasons. First, he

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was trained as a web designer and made a living off of a nine-to-five web design job in the Loop and by teaching web design at night. Furthermore, he lived in the back of the storefront, as he “has to live somewhere,” he ex­ plained. Third, Medine had Nathan Peck, whom he introduced as “my crazy freak in residence.” Peck taught video and time arts at St. Xavier University, hosted regular video-mixing events that attracted people to the venue, and helped to cover some of the financial costs of the space. In addition, Medine hired an intern through what he described as a semiformal exchange in which “each bills the other for services rendered. She’s gonna help me with my openings and press releases. I charge seventy-five bucks an hour for tutoring on web design. This is how it works: she helps me with my thing, and when she’s done, she gets taught how to be a web designer by somebody who does it for a living.” The exchange was explicit because, according to Medine, “it’s got to be something [formal], otherwise people don’t work well when they are working for free. I learned that with my last intern” (Medine interview 2003). This internship worked out for all involved. Medine needed help running the gallery. The intern was inter­ ested in learning the principles of running a gallery. Peck wasn’t interested in running a gallery, but he was interested in having space to show his own work and set up interactive events. Furthermore, Medine acknowledged, “I can do the things I do because I’m a Pod.” As a resident of Podville, he was part of a place built around the kind of artistic autonomy he valued and that therefore tolerated and encouraged the quirky things he did. The area was a magnet attracting artists seeking this kind of interaction with other artists. Medine’s work focused on events that he designed as unpredictable social situations. Yet similar to the kind of satisfaction expressed by Patric McCoy, one of the Bronzeville col­ lectors, Medine explained that he made the kind of art that he did because it was fun and provided opportunities for social interaction created by and around the artwork: A big aspect of it is just, you know, its fun. It’s fun to do stuff like a body banquet [where people are invited to eat dinner served on a na­ ked body]. It’s fun to have stuff like the “Rube Goldberg Show,” where I turned the whole house into a life-size mousetrap game (plate 12). That stuff’s just fun, you know. It makes me laugh every time I think of it. You know, it’s like some people collect postage stamps, I like to make really big toys. Do you know what I mean? I could go on for hours about it being more complicated than that, [but] to me it’s really pretty simple. It’s about having fun and setting up situations. It’s interesting to see the way

108 / Chapter Five people [respond]. . . . You learn by other people’s reaction to your work. One of the reasons I like making interactive pieces is people will do something I just don’t expect. (Medine interview 2003)

As “spontaneous play,” such activities were recognized as a form of creative activity that, along with “charisma of ability” or “magic,” could be viewed as harmonious to ascetic devotion and a rejection of worldly rationalism that has characterized the impulse for artistic autonomy since its early foundations in religious practice (Weber [1915] 1946, 341). While Medine emphasized the “unpredictability” of his work, it was unpredictability that he controlled within the conventions of what he described as “the dry, bor­ ing museum style” of presentation. His events, according to one outsider, Robert Johnson, a painter from Bronzeville who participated in a show at Drivethru, were indeed more like “parties” than those in Bronzeville collectors’ homes that were intent on linking buyers to artists. From Johnson’s perspective, the purpose of such shows was to socialize with peers, not to sell art. He said: I like places like Drivethru, even though I know that the majority of the crowd probably didn’t come to spend any money and they’re probably all artists. So you know [it is about] having that interaction and getting feedback from more of a peer group at a show, versus going to a show for collecting purposes or [having] the money-down group. [These are] two different experiences, you know. (Johnson interview 2003)

Unlike Kimberly Aubuchon, Medine did not shy away from the term “party” to describe what he did. Yet he pointed out that over the years he sought more control of what occurred at these events. “I used to have parties and kegs with every opening, but we’d have people throwing beers around and stuff like that, so now we have parties once in a while that are a little more controlled.” The unpredictability that he controlled was, nonetheless, a con­ frontation with everyday life. It also was a confrontation with the rationality and predictability of modern business practices that have infiltrated much of the gallery world, holding expectations for artists, like other makers of salable products, to produce objects similar enough to each other to create a market. The Bonds of Trust, Reciprocity, and Shared Interests The interests shared among cutting-edge artists in Podville were not based in an interest in the history of a people, justice, or “our fair share of the

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public goods,” as it was in Bronzeville, but it was another kind of network created by cooperative action and intended to support the autonomy of artistic production. Their activities were based on trust that others would act, that is, host an opening on the agreed night; shared interest in bring­ ing audiences to the area and in creating visibility for the artwork they presented; and reciprocity, such as helping each other run their galleries and exchanging resources like access to computer technology and mailing lists. Running a gallery was not like some other sorts of retail venture, such as a clothing store, according to Andrew Rafacz, founder of another gallery in the collective, Bucket Rider. “I didn’t plan this out exactly,” he said. “I decided to hang some of my friends’ work, and I sort of then quickly figured out that everyone else was hanging some work that month on a certain day. I decided to latch on to that date. The whole idea was to hang it and tell some people and see what happened.” As a poetry and philosophy student, he did not know how to run a gallery and was not enrolled in a university program designed to teach him to do so. Gallery owners from Unit B and Apt. 1R up the street, who were Art Institute students and were also show­ ing work out of their domestic spaces, quickly embraced Rafacz and showed him what he needed to do to be taken seriously by them and others who came to the area. He explained: I found out that there is a lot of behind-the-scene stuff that you have to do before you get a show ready. Cards, publicity is the big issue to get people down here. You know, getting up on certain websites and whatever, and all of that came to me by the way of Kimberly [of Unit B], Van and Mat [of Apt 1R] telling me what I should do. So they’re directing me in the right direction, [so now] even the week before the show, we don’t have to interact. There’s a real relationship among the people of this neighborhood running galleries, [and who are] also friends. (Rafacz interview 2003)

Rafacz does not hide the fact that much of his early success with Bucket Rider was the result of the interest in sharing audiences that was the basis of their collaborative action. My first show was sort of as a test run. It was a huge success. I never expected it. And so much of that is because of the neighborhood. We all open at the same time . . . and it kind of legitimizes what we are kind of doing down here, too, on another level. . . . I would say, less than a year ago, even . . . we were all drawing pretty distinct crowds. But then people would all sort

110 / Chapter Five of circulate around the neighborhood that night, so, on a good night, it wouldn’t be surprising to have two hundred people coming through [my gal­ lery], which is great. Maybe you might not even sell anything for the month. Or you might show somebody that’s really [not interested in selling work], but the people who come are really interesting. It’s a younger crowd in gen­ eral. We stay open a little bit later. For the most part, yeah, it’s fantastic. I don’t know if I would be doing it if it wasn’t for the community here: it’s hard for me to say. I’ve thought about that a lot lately, because when I first started, I got so much support from Kimberly over at Unit B and, uh, Van Harrison and Mat LaBlanc over at 1R. . . . I wouldn’t have been able to do this the way that I have, at least initially, if it wasn’t for those folks and their support. It’s pretty amazing. (Rafacz interview 2003)

Like Kimberly Aubuchon’s Unit B, Bucket Rider is also a basement gal­ lery. What it lacks in chic appeal is made up in the appeal of its weird, raw space that is partitioned with a metal balcony and stairway—once provid­ ing access to a furnace or some other piece of industrial machinery—that divided the wall space horizontally into two four-foot sections. The balcony created the wacky, illogical kind of “low overhead,” as in the movie Being John Malkovich, requiring viewers over four feet tall to cock their head or hunch over to look closely at the work (plate 13). Rafacz described the work on display as a combination of sculpture and installation. It included large stuffed animals, pink walls, and gold dioramas containing narrative sto­ ries of animals set in compromising situations indicative of, among other things, human uncertainty and human sexuality: It is sculpture and installation [Halfway Home] by Emily Counts. She’s a Chi­ cago artist. This is similar to the work she’s been doing over the last year or so. It is sculpture. She does a lot of diorama work. As you can see, there are several large-scale dioramas [framed three-dimensional images of animals in the forest standing on two feet and interacting as if they were human]. And then it’s [also] installation [as the walls are painted bright pink and include other furniture installed in the area]. It came about from her interest in this particular space—the fact that there [are] two levels. The idea is that it’s sort of a cross section of almost a dollhouse. (Rafacz interview 2003)

Halfway Home seems to fit the space as if the quirky balcony had been built to accommodate it, rather than the reverse. While the space seemed most suited for this innovative installation, Rafacz indicated that he typically showed traditional forms of painting and drawing.

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For Rafacz, the network provided an occupational support system. Gal­ lery owners helped each other mount shows and cooperatively promoted their shows. According to Rafacz’s account, what kept the network of gal­ lery owners together was reciprocity, the give-and-take, the “I’ll help today because I might need the help tomorrow” attitude that Putnam (2000) re­ ferred to as “social capital” but Rafacz attributed to the spirit of making art. He elaborated: Great example: Yesterday, we were open for a group from MCA [Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago]. I left the cups that I bought for the wine down at work. We had all the wine and we were open. We had people com­ ing in. But we had no cups to put the wine in. So I called down to Gallery SixFourFive, right on the corner, Dave Cuesta, and I asked if he had any cups, and he said come on down and he gave me a bunch of cups. Maybe it’s trivial, but it’s little things like that. I know that I could ask him for favors like that at any moment; I could flood him with those, and he’s still going to support me and help me out. I tried to even pay him for the cups, and he wouldn’t let me. Of course he wouldn’t, which is the way that it should be, because again, it’s art. (Rafacz interview 2003)

Rafacz’s view of art “as peripheral to just about everything, particularly to survival,” makes it flexible, so flexible it can fit into just about any space, including his double-decker basement. “It’s pretty magical. It’s not bureau­ cratic. I don’t know how to describe it. It can be in here and still be taken seriously, I think. Art can fit inside your brain if you take it seriously. Or just on paper,” he said. It was this magical realism that led him to name his gal­ lery Bucket Rider, after a Kafka story: This story basically is about a chimney sweep who is so hungry and he’s not getting any food and he hallucinates that he’s—well, depending on how you interpret it—he’s either really flying down the streets of London or is halluci­ nating. But it’s a short piece by Kafka. . . . I’ve always loved the story. But I also think it’s really appropriate to describing sort of that perpetual hunger that one has to agree to, to be involved in the arts, you know. Or maybe, once you agree to it, it’s probably the right way, as long as you continue to stay hungry, maybe you stay sharp or something. (Rafacz interview 2003)

At this point, it was still relatively early on a Saturday morning, and Ra­ facz offered me a “glass of coffee” as I stepped over into his space to look at Counts’s installation Halfway Home. Rafacz had to leave, as he was doing a

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side job in the West Loop gallery district, preparing a gallery space for a Ger­ man dealer who rented it for a month during the upcoming international art fair. Innovation through Interaction Pushing the limits of autonomy within a particular medium was Nathan Peck, Medine’s “freak in residence” who regularly arranged video-mixing events at Drivethru Studios. Referring to it as “a media scene,” Peck de­ scribed these events as “situations where we try to bring together people who will bring some videotapes over and want to mix them on top of other people’s [tapes].” Such events were focused less on the video production or documentation than on the people who attend. “After the first event, we tried to make it clear it’s not a film screening; it’s like a video journal where we have a video mixer, DVD deck, VHS deck, digital video deck, and usually some sort of a laptop or computer,” Peck said. “You bring your video into the situation, and you can merge your video with other people’s to create video collage and interactive art pieces” (Peck interview 2003). This activity produced unique, autonomous situations for social interac­ tion. “A scene can begin developing out of media as easily as it can out of a space. So all of a sudden you have a situation where you get a handful of telephone calls where it’s like, ‘All right, well, we’ve set up another evening where we can do this similar sort of thing.’ Now I can just take my things and go with that situation,” he explained. Both Medine and Peck said that the results sometimes are “just mud,” but other times there is “synchronicity,” where two senses were triggered at the same time to create a “memory set”—or where other artists simply say, “It works.” Peck, who usually ran the events, explained, “You try to set up a situations where an image becomes re-contextualized because it’s merged with another image. You’ve got two powerful images, and all of a sudden it becomes a third powerful image because it is moved back and forth be­ tween them” (Peck interview 2003). Both men agreed that the experience was not “as satisfying” as watching television, in which a single narrative progressed toward a single climax. “At some point it just becomes pretty pictures,” Medine said. “It’s kind of a weird thing. You get to play with technology, which is one of the reasons I think you’d like it, because it’s all these expensive toys you get to play with.” He acknowledged that the synchronicity was “somewhat scripted,” as the product, which exists only as an experience, was the result of Peck and Medine inviting particular people to the event.

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“I intentionally stack the deck to a certain extent. I try to bring in at least three people that I know whose work I know that I like and I’d like to see mixed together,” acknowledged Peck. The emphasis was on the process of interacting or collaborating with other people rather than on making a final product, because, as Peck said, “We don’t even record it.” It is the unique­ ness and the lack of repeatability of the imagery that refocuses the activ­ ity on live interaction, bringing people together and getting them to come back. He further explained the connection between the medium and the network of artists involved: My primary interest is to start dialogue, start conversation about this media. I can sit and have a conversation with other people who are already doing this. But, of course, as soon as I can introduce a new person, like Ann, this woman who came in who had never touched this kind of stuff before, by the end of the evening I can have a conversation with her that I couldn’t have at the be­ ginning of the evening. It’s because she starts playing with this kind of stuff; starts to have an interaction; starts having the same sort of moments that I’ve had, and so then we can now talk about it. (Peck interview 2003)

Such events lead to the kind of unexpected experiences that Medine and Peck seek. As explained by Medine: Let’s face it . . . a lot of those guys, man, I can’t tell their work apart. It all kind of looks the same. Not that they don’t have skill or anything. They all kind of talk to each other, they all come from the same place, they all switch footage with one another. But then you get someone like this woman, she’ll bring something to it. It’s a direction you never would have come from . . . and that shit was really strong. And it’s like, “Oh wow, I never thought about doing that.” (Medine interview 2003)

According to Peck, this kind of interaction “fed the scene.” “Each person is coming into it with their own taste, their own expectation of the media, so that by the time you’ve introduced a new person to that media, you have a new possible set of results,” he said. Like the Bronzeville collectors, Medine and Peck did it for social and artistic purposes: they used the me­ dium of video and the process of video mixing to attract more people to their art form. The social interaction also brought them personal satis­ faction. But unlike the Bronzeville collectors, they were not interested in building long-term, shared aesthetic preferences that could then be used to contest broader political or cultural power relationships.

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The autonomy afforded to artists and galleries by showing artwork out of their domestic spaces was, for Rafacz, “brilliant.” I think I can speak for the other galleries in this neighborhood, the other alter­ native spaces, when I say that we’re doing things just as broadly and deeply as any professional gallery, or we hope to, you know. . . . The level of seriousness is there. The only thing that’s different is the space, you know. For the time being, it suits my economic situation, you know. If I don’t sell work, I still just have to pay my rent. I think that is a really brilliant sort of relationship. I don’t have to sell the work in this show. Last month I had an installation, [but] nothing was actually for sale. And that was fine. I don’t have to always sell work, because, again, you know, I’m still just really making my rent. The costs for a show are pretty low. And they even split it—the artists help me [to cover the costs]. (Rafacz interview 2003)

Cutting-edge artists involved in the ArtPilsen Collective placed the high­ est priority on artistic autonomy, but they created social and occupational situations to support this autonomy and maintain art production. They did not pursue art production for the income needed for human survival, but instead pursued these network relationships to construct an identity as an artist and to survive as an artist producing art. Their activities were points of intersection and interaction with other artists, and it was these connections that constituted their career and were included as “exhibitions” or “events” on their résumés. These résumé listings did not produce a linear path to suc­ cess but were considered by many to be what distinguished a professional from an amateur artist. As Aubuchon and Rafacz pointed out, events they sponsored were successful because people showed up. Their careers then were defined by a time and social space in which artistic autonomy was the preeminent value; individuals became known through the art they produced and the activities in which they participated. As the social space was defined by the network of relationships that existed among the artists, it was a flexi­ ble space and could extend beyond a locale to events such as the Stray Show, Art Boat, and Nova, but it was dependent upon the routine exhibition activi­ ties in Pilsen. Once the artists sponsoring the events moved from Pilsen, the meanings generated by this network of interaction also came to an end.

Transnational: Freedom from Ethnicity The network of transnational artists found farther west in the Mexican sec­ tion of Pilsen also placed the highest priority on artistic autonomy. Their in­

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novation arose out of a multi-ethnic, transnational identity that undermined the foundational structure of a culture rooted in a single national history. They too were involved in the ArtPilsen Collective, but as young Latino/a artists, they distinguished themselves from any legacy of a Eurocentric ap­ proach as well as Mexican ethnicity promoted by the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) and the older Latino artists of West Pilsen. They were critical of Mexican ethnic practice as being nostalgic for something that did not exist, and instead they pursued a kind of autonomy afforded by cross­ ing national, cultural, and stylistic boundaries and collaborating with artists from throughout Chicago and the world. Among the transnationals were the Polvo Art Studio founders—Jesus Macarena-Avila, Miguel Cortez, and Elvia Rodriquez-Ochoa—who oper­ ated the gallery through a rental space among Mexican businesses on the Eighteenth Street commercial corridor. Entered through a side entrance off the main street, the space had a loft-like appearance but was a domestic space where Cortez and his son lived. They promoted the space with a hightech, culture-savvy website. Polvo’s inaugural exhibition, The Subaltern Show (2003), critiqued the global hierarchy of cultures; it was followed by Terrorist Art: Protesting War, a critique of global imperialism as the Bush administration invaded Iraq. The exhibition featured fifteen artists who freely railed against the “War on Terror” and the invasion of Iraq in a time when most people selfcensored out of a fear of governmental retaliation. For example, in a comic book–style triptych, Juan Compean presented satiric images of President Bush on an analog television screen with text bubbles such as “Hey! Who sprinkled anthrax on my FREEDUMB fries?” Cortez fashioned a consumerline wallet in a box titled Homeland Security, Tri-fold wallet. The packaging satirized propaganda circulated by the Bush administration as it prepared to invade Iraq: “In this chaotic world you need a wallet that will withstand any biological attack. Keep your valuables secure. Free Duct tape inside!!!” I purchased the piece for the $14.99 sale price on the back of the box and found inside a full-grain tri-fold wallet with a Homeland Security ID and emergency duct tape. Polvo and the galleries of the ArtPilsen Collective were among the “thirty young galleries, collectives, project spaces and artists from Chicago and vari­ ous cities” on Art Boat (an alternative exhibition to the international art fair held on a triple-decker, tourist cruiser) and at the land-based Stray Show. Admission tickets for Art Boat, billed as “a three-hour tour” aboard the Anita Dee on Lake Michigan, sold for $40 and included free food and drinks. The boat left the Navy Pier dock, where the fair Art Chicago was under way.

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On Art Boat, Unit B and Gallery SixFourFive mounted traditional exhibi­ tions displaying artworks on pedestals and easels. Drivethru brought a re­ furbished pinball machine that its owner, Eric Medine, had reprogrammed with his own electronics. Andrew Rafacz and a number of artists from Bucket Rider dressed in 1960s cruise wear and performed as characters from the TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island. Another woman performance artist, who wore an evening gown she had woven out of dollar bills, stood statuesque while soliciting dollar donations for her next performance. Dolan Geiman and Ali Walsh brought their Hockshop installation, a portable art machine with Geiman inside spitting out handmade artworks through its various portals according to the patrons’ selections on the vending machine selection panel. Polvo sponsored a collaborative installation promoted as “simulta­ neously capturing the collective, multicultural artist identity fundamental to Polvo while tapping the conceptual chords and aesthetic distinctions inher­ ent [in the artist’s] individual work” (Polvo 2003). The seventy boxes made by participating artists were displayed on a table as the artists encouraged “Art Boaters” to pick them up, move them around, open them, repackage the art, and even take them home. The piece was intended to perpetuate Polvo’s conviction “to remain outside highly commercialized artwork” (Polvo 2003). Polvo artists’ participation in such high-profile events led to invitations by downtown galleries and institutes. The Glass Curtain Gallery at Colum­ bia College Chicago invited Polvo founder Jesus Macarena-Avila to curate an exhibition in 2006 of young contemporary Latino artists for its South Loop gallery. The exhibition, like Macarena-Avila’s own work, crossed the borders between culture and art, urban and rural, by incorporating traditional urban art forms, along with pop culture imagery, such as low-rider cars, graffiti, large-scale digital photography alongside images of rural folklore, including bandits, border guards, “taquería” food carts, and mariachis. The transnational approach of Lo Romántico included a selection of Chi­ cago’s Latino/a artists from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America whose works produced a narrative that was playful while being critical of immigrant status within the “high culture/low culture” paradigm. For example, Robert Karimi’s photos of the U.S.-Mexican border asked the question “If a Mexican crosses the border illegally but no one sees him, is he still illegal?” while outside on the sidewalk was a performance featuring Mexican American border guards killing those who illegally crossed a border they were protecting. Also inside the gallery was Ornamentos 2004, an instal­ lation piece of small, embossed, commemorative sheets of metal pinned to

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the wall by Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto. She adapted the Mexican folkloric tradition of “Saints without Bodies,” but instead of commemorating dead people, she embossed pictures of mundane daily events from newspapers in Puerto Rico and Chicago. In a display recalling museum dioramas of Mexican women cooking on open fires, Elvia Rodriquez-Ochoa produced an installation of a contemporary Mexican kitchen that included a micro­ wave oven, packaged tortillas, and cornflakes boxes featuring Celia Cruz as “The Queen of Salsa” and Cesar E. Chavez as “Civil rights and farm worker leader.” As if the intermixing of fine art, popular culture, and commercial culture throughout the exhibition was not enough, Macarena-Avila further chal­ lenged those who perceived Latino aesthetics as “lowbrow” by including a low-rider car parade outside the gallery on the street. Members of the Amistad Car Club parked their large, mid-century American refurbished low-rider cars on Wabash Street in front of the gallery and invited visitors to inspect the engines, trunks, and leather interiors handmade in Mexico. From inside the cars, owners activated the hydraulic suspension systems, making the cars bounce. Transnational artists were predominantly second- and third-generation Latinos and Latinas who challenged both the romantic nostalgia of their parents’ view of the homeland, as well as essentialist views of race and eth­ nicity. By interpreting autonomy as freedom from both Eurocentric and ethnic cultural paradigms, these artists were part of a generation of artists who envisioned transnational cultural production as one existing outside national borders.

A Network of Museum-Quality Artists Generally speaking, all fine art is considered to be appreciable. It has the po­ tential of becoming more valuable, depending upon the artist’s future reputa­ tion. However, it should be noted that works produced by unknown artists, or by artists who are best described as being “non-museum-quality,” can be expected to decrease in value when offered for resale since their secondary market is extremely limited. [But this artist] is consistently described as a “museum-quality” artist. (Jacob 2001, 12)

As stated by appraiser Jane C. H. Jacob (2001), the artworks of many artists will never have values—whether aesthetic or financial—that appreciate over time. But at work in Pilsen were also “museum-quality” artists whose focus

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was establishing and increasing the aesthetic value of their artwork. These artists produced artwork that was of the quality shown in Chicago’s com­ mercial galleries and its downtown, ethnic, and regional museums. Central and western Pilsen was home to many independent artists who shared a pan-ethnic identity of “Latino,” yet some did not celebrate or pro­ mote any sort of ethnic identity. They pursued traditional arts careers as art educators and exhibitors. They were all part of what a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (2002) report defined as an “informal arts district.” Oldest among those were the Prospectus Art Gallery and studios in the Asociación Pro-Derechos Obreros (APO Building) established in 1960. Colibri Gallery— run by Montserrat Alsina, a Venezuelan artist, and Roberto Ferreyra, a Mexi­ can artist—sponsored exhibitions, taught printmaking workshops, and held Aztec dance classes for youth and adults, out of the building they owned on Eighteenth Street, just west of Damen Avenue. To the east were artists who were middle-aged or older and were faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, or Columbia College, and whose works were among those mature artists featured in highly regarded exhibitions at both the downtown and regional museums. Among them were Fern Shaffer and Edith Altman, both social activist artists who mobilized national and international involvement in their work as strategies to build its recognition and aesthetic value. They did this by involving the expert skills of art historians, critics, and curators who recognized the historic significance of their work and included it in museum exhibitions and published commentary and reviews of their work in catalogs, journals, and books. Shaffer, in her mid-fifties, had been the president of a nonprofit feminist gallery, Artemisia, for more than a decade and had won $5,000–$7,000 grants to support her collaborations with an African American artist and jazz musician, Othello Anderson, with whom she had collaborated since the early 1980s. Together they produced a series of photos based on annual performance rituals that took place throughout the world and were carried out to honor the earth. Othello and I have been doing a nine-year ritual project. It began in ’95 and it will end in 2003. Every year we go and do a ritual; we pray for the earth. There is no one who will pray for the earth. The Kochi in Peru pray for the earth. They had it right. We, in Western civilization, have it wrong. Our last ritual was in Newfoundland. That was for the oceans. We went to the food belt in Wisconsin. We went to the headwaters of the Mississippi; that was [a ritual] for the rivers. We went to the top of the mountain in Appalachia; that

Autonomy Networks and Artistic Control / 119 was for all the mountains being carved out of the coal that is inside them. In 1999 we went to Death Valley. That was for the death of a millennium. (Shaf­ fer interview 2002)

Shaffer and Anderson conceive of their performances outside of con­ temporary time and place, linking ancient performance to daily caring and healing of the earth in contemporary times: The motivations for the rituals are to bring spirit back into the community at large. Rituals are an action that speaks to the heart and soul but does not necessarily make sense in a literal way. . . . We document the ancient practice of ritual using technological methods as a way to record our contribution. The photographs become a record, a memory of the ritual. (Shaffer quoted in Gablik 2005)

The idea for a ritual always begins with the idea of healing, according to Anderson. “You could probably think of it as an environmental umbrella of healing. Everything we do comes under the umbrella of the environment. We talk about water, air, forest, mountains, foliage, and the food basket of the world. So everything is under the umbrella of any environmental con­ cerns” (Anderson quoted in Gablik 2005). Their performances were featured by art historian Suzi Gablik on the cover of her book Re-Enchantment of Art (1992) and discussed for their im­ portance to this period of art history in which “connective aesthetics” re­ placed the aesthetics of deconstruction and despair. According to Gablik, art should heal. She has cited their work on several occasions because it exem­ plifies an aesthetic approach that is not “indifferent to the spiritual power of beauty” (Gablik 2005). Their work has been included in exhibitions on the topic of the environment and performance art traveling throughout the United States and in South America, and on the online museum of en­ vironmental art, www.greenmuseum.org. Shaffer and Anderson were not interested in having audiences at the performances but did make handmade portfolios of photographs for sale. We do not [involve] an audience [in] these rituals, because the audience be­ comes a distraction and we need all of our attention for the ritual at hand. The photographic image is central to the outreach of our work, as it makes the work accessible [and] to bring awareness . . . of the importance of protecting the earth, its beauty, and the environment that needs to sustain itself. (Shaffer in Gablik 2001)

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Shaffer was not involved in the development or preservation of Pilsen, and as she did not own any real estate and sold few art pieces, she was not positioned in any way to benefit from direct interactions with Pilsen art­ ists. However, she liked living in Pilsen, where there was a concentration of other artists living and producing art and a daily ethos that encouraged art making. Edith Altman, in her sixties and recently a widow, was a retired faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and a resident of Pilsen for two decades. Considered by some critics and curators to be one of the top installation artists in Chicago and Illinois, Altman built her career as a social activist artist around large-scale art objects addressing the top­ ics of power, immigration, aging, symbols of good and evil, learning, and building a better world. Early in her career, she exhibited through N.A.M.E. Gallery, a nonprofit alternative space she helped found in the 1970s; she was represented by two commercial galleries, Marianne Deson Gallery and Fassbender Gallery, both of which were known for exhibiting conceptually challenging work but not for sales. At this stage in her career, she exhibited primarily in regional museums throughout the United States and in Europe; she earned additional recognition through receipt of high-status grants in amounts up to $25,000 from both the Illinois Arts Council and the Na­ tional Endowment for the Arts. Altman owned half of a two-story loft building in Pilsen just north of Podville. It was her living and working space. She had been a mother and homemaker for the first half of her adult life. As she became known for her conceptual and installation work, she had several short-term faculty posi­ tions but had been supported by her husband’s income. As a widow, she now lived off of Social Security and her late husband’s pension. During this research, I helped Altman assemble a catalog of her life’s work for a retrospective show in Germany. Throughout this process, she showed me how recognition of her work was a gradual process. She moved from group shows where she was not “named” in publicity nor mentioned in reviews, to being a featured artist. She secured increased recognition through solo exhibitions at nonprofit galleries, then at university galleries and regional and midsize museums. When I asked Altman how she got specific shows, she repeatedly traced access to one or another in her closest network of friends who produced museum-quality artworks and exhibitions. Among these was a core group of people she described as “mature artists who get together and bitch.” She named six artists in their fifties, sixties, and seventies: a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute; an artist and regularly published critic; a

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photographer married to a top administrator of a cultural institution; and three other artists with national reputations and national representation in galleries. Altman’s relationship with these museum-quality artists provided her access to curators, gallery directors, critics, and others who made deci­ sions about the kinds of exhibitions that can confer status upon an artist and their work. Her most recent work, drawn from her history as a child survivor of the Holocaust, was a large-scale installation filling a 3,000-square-foot mu­ seum that confronted the manipulation of symbols that enabled the Nazis to gain power in Germany. In one room, she showed detailed drawings of the many incarnations of the symbol that became widely recognized as the Nazi swastika. On one wall, she placed a ten-foot “reverse” gold-colored, swastika-like design that once was viewed as a symbol of life; opposite it on the floor was a black “mirror” reflection of the symbol that ultimately rep­ resented Nazi terror. Other rooms were about immigration, learning, and her father’s experiences in a concentration camp. She followed this piece with a similar-sized installation focused on how children learn to hate. How Shall We Teach Our Children? was comprised of fifty-four separate pieces— photographs, text panels, signs, video, and sculptural objects, including a handmade wagon, benches, and a freestanding goat—to address the topic of how children are taught to hate. While I was in her studio in 2002, she received a call that the lawsuit she had filed against a museum that had lost or damaged numerous parts of How Shall We Teach Our Children? had been settled, allowing her to talk with me about it. As she had built her reputation by making conceptual objects and installation pieces that existed outside a national art market, she had sold few pieces. So when the museum lost and damaged parts of her installation, and she wanted to be paid for the loss, the museum claimed there was little evidence of the $12,000 value listed on the loan agreement form they had signed when they accepted delivery of the piece. Altman filed a lawsuit against the museum for the replacement value. When the museum refused to pay, the lawsuit went to full trial. Ironi­ cally, while Altman’s entire career had been geared toward recognition based outside of market values, she ultimately had to prove a market value for recognition of the artistic value of her work and of the value of her career as an artist. She accessed two attorneys through the citywide non­ profit group Lawyers for the Creative Arts, who agreed to represent her on a contingency basis. She also hired an expert appraiser to establish a market value for the conceptual piece. According to the appraisal, replacement value is defined by the handbook

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of the Appraisers Association of America (AAA) as “the amount it would cost to replace an item with one of similar and like quality [such as similar age, quality, origin, appearance, provenance, and condition] purchased in the most appropriate marketplace and within a limited amount of time” (Jacob 2001, 1). The appraiser used an approach recognized by the AAA to establish a value for a unique conceptual piece: General factors that can affect the determination of value include the state of the artist’s reputation, the marketplace acceptance of the works of such size and character, the relationship of the works to all the artist’s other works, the number and the prices of the sales during the artist’s life, and accessibility of the work of art as it relates to size, authenticity and condition. These factors are typically reflected in the actual sale and auction prices when the sale has taken place in the appropriate market and within a suitable amount of time. The assignment of value . . . takes into account the specific factors that affect the value of the work of art. (Jacob 2001, 2)

The appraiser compared the purchase prices of Altman’s work to two other women who worked in similar genres, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, both nationally known artists based in New York City. Both had sold mixed-media graphic work like Altman’s work. Furthermore, both had sold installation work, which Altman had not. Altman’s single-media works initially sold for $500 to $6,000, whereas Holzer’s were reselling in 2002 auctions for up to $82,000 and Kruger’s for as much as $55,000. Both Holzer and Kruger had sold mixed-media installations for higher prices than single-media objects, indicating generally a higher value for installa­ tions. Altman had recently sold a sculpture for $6,000, and this price rep­ resented the highest sale price over a twenty-eight-year spread of gradually escalating prices. By citing reviews from a variety of sources, including a gal­ lery dealer, a critic, and a former curator—all indicating that she was “one of the top installation artists in Chicago and the state of Illinois”—Jacob argued that Altman was at the “climax of her career” (2001, 12). Jacob established an appreciated value over the initial value of $12,000 that was documented in the museum contract, and then added the replacement cost based on the estimated cost to repair or replace the damaged or missing pieces and the appreciated value. She established the appreciated value in this manner: Comparables demonstrate that [Altman’s] work has appreciated in squareinch value by 1.89 times since 1975, and the increase realized was .343 per­

Autonomy Networks and Artistic Control / 123 cent each year. By calculating the number of years between 2001 and the year the [museum] exhibited the artist’s work of art (1995), and by multiplying that number (5.5) by .343, we were able to show the appreciated 2001 value for How Shall We Teach Our Children? at $22,680. (Jacob 2001, 12)

Jacob determined a replacement value of $30,339.50, based on “cost to replace or repair damaged or missing pieces ($5,139.50), diminution of value because of loss of reputation ($16,200), and loss of income ($9,000),” (15–16). There was a trial in which Altman, Jacob, and others testified. The judge placed the case in arbitration. During my work in her studio, Altman settled for $18,000. She was satisfied that she recovered some of her loss, but with a third of the settlement going to the attorneys, $2,500 to the ap­ praiser, and $5,140 to repair the damaged pieces, the additional amount that Altman got for all her trouble was $4,360. Rather than address the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment, the ap­ praiser relied on making a simple distinction between “museum-quality” art and art that is not of this quality. Citing reviews attesting to the quality of Altman’s work, the appraiser pointed out that Altman was “consistently described as a ‘museum-quality’ artist” (Jacob 2001, 12). But the strongest evidence that Altman produced “museum-quality” work was the fact that it was shown in museums. The quote that opened this section was found in a footnote in the ap­ praisal to How Shall We Teach Our Children? It explained the phrase “appre­ ciated value” without distinguishing anything intrinsic to the art that made one work more museum-quality than another. Rather it emphasized that unknown artists and artists whose works are not shown in museums can be expected to decrease in value. Through Shaffer’s performances and Altman’s lawsuit, we can begin to see the network of people who are necessary for artists to become known as “museum-quality artists” and, further, for the aesthetic value of their work to become recognized by experts and for their work to be shown in museums. The judgment of quality has more to do with the network of people one is engaged with than other forms of demonstrable value. What distinguished Altman and her work was that when challenged to do so, she was able to mobilize a network of people who advocated on her behalf, testifying of her worth as an artist and of the value of her art.

Conclusions The first relationship of artists who prioritized artistic autonomy was with art history. Therefore, in everyday life, they were focused on accessing

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resources that supported their quest to make work relevant to art history while limiting any form of social, economic, or cultural control of artistic production. With the actions and language that bespoke of artistic auton­ omy woven through their activities, such producers sought circumstances that increased their own artistic control over their work; they cooperated with others to assert and support each other’s interest in autonomy over what they produced. Their involvement in activities with artists, critics, art historians, curators, and other experts created network connections that de­ fined the social space in which what they did as makers of autonomous objects made sense. Once the connections and routines established by the interactions of these artists ended, that which defined the social space in which they operated also changed. This was a transitory social space created through the interactions of such artists. Motivation for artistic autonomy propelled many artists in a direction that is not explained by use values or exchange values, or of the logic of social or occupational opportunity. Yet it was one from which other forms of commerce, such as commercial galleries, restaurants, bou­ tiques, and real estate entrepreneurs, could benefit. The fact that none of the galleries or artists discussed in this chapter are still active in Pilsen high­ lights just how transient their place was. This was an art world in which art school–educated artists were at the center of activities but were further de­ pendent upon a commercial real estate firm that supported artistic auton­ omy. This was a transient world in which a social space was established through rental units leased by a single corporation. Vacancies were quickly filled by an abundance of college art students and recent graduates available to be tenants of the “open format” rental units, yet the meaning of social space was redefined by the participants. Localized activity of autonomy networks created some access to art mar­ kets and art institutions for those interested in such pursuits. Among the galleries of the ArtPilsen Collective, Apt 1R moved to Brooklyn, New York, and reopened the gallery only to permanently close it shortly thereafter. Bucker Rider moved to the West Loop gallery district in Chicago. In 2009 the gallery was renamed the Andrew Rafacz Gallery, after its owner. Unit B moved to Austin, Texas, and continued to operate as a domestic space. The artist founders of Polvo closed their space, and each sought different avenues to enter a global cultural arena with exhibitions in Europe, Mexico, Central America, and Africa. To achieve autonomy required that artists perform the kind of isolat­ ing social practices that signified autonomy while forgoing the power that comes with other forms of civic engagement, such as property ownership

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or political mobilization. To be the master of one’s product required that artists leave themselves untethered from the concerns necessary to establish financial values and from the institutional programs imposed by “scholars and scribes” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984), as well as landlords, museum admin­ istrators and curators, even politician and judges. They also acted without an interest in developing market values for their work. The interests of this network of artists in artistic autonomy contrasts with the interests of collec­ tors who sought to harness the cultural meaning as a form of solidarity. The network relationships of these artists were sustained as long as their shared interest was sustained. As such, relationships were transitory be­ cause the freedom associated with artistic autonomy was itself transitory. Although artists discussed in this chapter included these activities on their artist’s résumé or in a bio, such activities existed outside the boundaries of organizations and markets with clearly defined positions, leaving such art­ ists little opportunity for a predictable outcome or “fate,” as Becker (1963, 101) once argued was characteristic of a career, other than moving on. To­ gether these events and activities constructed meanings that transcended daily life. The idea that their social and cultural space within which they existed was in a state of flux and that their connections with others created the length and breadth of what was possible made their efforts satisfying and worthwhile.

SIX

Problem-Solving Networks and Social Stability

The Glenwood Avenue Arts District is in the heart of Rogers Park and features numerous artist studios, music venues, theaters, and restaurants, and it is fast becoming known as a vibrant arts destination. Rogers Park is the most culturally and economically diverse neighborhood in Chicago. More than 80 languages are spoken among the community’s 63,000 residents. Rogers Park celebrates diversity and harmonious living. (Text on the flyer for the Kick Off Party for the 2008 Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival)

A Context of Cultural Diversity and Progressive Politics On any given day, thousands of residents pass through the intersection of Morse and Glenwood avenues on their daily rounds, yet few are aware of its unofficial designation as an arts district. For most, its tattooed cement embankments and air fragrant from simmering ethnic cuisine provide an intersection with daily life in Rogers Park; it is a passageway for the pink hair, dreadlocks, Afros, nose rings, saris and sarongs, trench coats and mix-andmatch thrift-shop fashions worn by bustling commuters, ordinary cooks, or activists who call Rogers Park “home.” And as the heart of the Glenwood Avenue Arts District, it became a conduit for solving local problems. From the early twentieth century, when Rogers Park was a haven for congregations of religious minorities, through the end of the century, which brought racial, ethnic, and linguistic change, the place has been a laboratory for cultural convergence. White ethnics, who made up 99 percent of its population through the mid-century, continued to dominate even as their numbers diminished to less than a third of the population by 2000. Still, the children and grandchildren of some of its earliest residents remained even as it became a haven for new immigrants from Eastern Europe,

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Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and East Asia. Although there were almost equal proportions of white, black, and Latino residents in Rogers Park (32% white, 30% black, and 28% Latino in 2000), its substantial Asian population (10%), along with the linguistic and ethnic variety of its foreign-born residents (34%), blurred these neat racial boundaries and made Rogers Park a place where multiplicity, diversity, and difference would be represented as its cultural ideal. Rogers Park was not Berkeley, but it was the closest thing to it in Chicago. Just as it was home to those longtime residents descended from its earliest settlers and an increasingly broad array of new immigrants, it also was home to a variety of older and younger bohemian leftists—Baby Boomers once active in the 1960s anti-war, civil rights, and sexual liberation movements, and Gen Xers redefining these issues for the new century. Their concerns for human rights, civil rights, gay rights, animal rights, and global warming were consistent with the pervasive slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally”; it was a theme they acted upon in their daily lives. Amidst these activist networks were people especially concerned with the future of the locale and who mobilized to preserve its diversity. Decline versus Gentrification “Love of the place we call home” and “belief in the creative potential of art” were just two explanations offered for why local advocates championed diversity and why they did it through art events, festivals, and public art. But behind these explanations was tension. Located on the northern fringe of the city, Rogers Park could no longer attract middle-class families and upper-income property owners as a “suburb within the city.” Conversions of apartment buildings to condominiums, proposals for streetscape projects, and tax increment financing (TIF) districts to support investment by outside developers all symbolized gentrification, something only a small segment of property owners and businesses supported. But Rogers Park also had the potential for decline—a problem that few places closer to the city center faced. Unlike the centrally located areas of Pilsen and Bronzeville that were attractive for expansion of the central city, Rogers Park was off the developers’ radar. Located ten miles north of the city center and filled with solidly constructed but aging early and midtwentieth-century buildings, the area had little promise for the dramatic revalorization of property seen in the inner city’s former ghettos and ethnic enclaves. Moreover, bordering the more expensive, exclusive northern

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suburb of Evanston, it offered few of the quality-of-life amenities—such as high-quality educational, civic, and commercial services—attractive to those people who could afford to live a few miles farther north. With its particular geographic location and within the larger socioeconomic changes under way across Chicago, the question of its future—whether it was heading for decline or gentrification—permeated the locale. Consistent with mid-century activism to control racial change (Molotch 1969a), diversity advocates mobilized to address these threats. They operated through a problem-solving network, involving both civic and cultural interests, seeking to maintain diversity as a steady state rather than just a transitional phase in an urban succession pattern headed for either decline or gentrification. Many of the descendants of its earliest residents recalled the time when the area north of Howard Street was called the “Juneway Jungle” because of the predominance of poor blacks living on Juneway Terrace between Evanston and the rest of Rogers Park. Local leaders initially undertook action to thwart the flight of the white working and middle classes in the midst of tension from an increasing black and non-European immigrant population, but by the 1990s they began to assertively advocate for “diversity” as the local cultural identity. Variety among Diversity Advocates Diversity advocates dominated art production in Rogers Park. Their manner of influence was different from the white, elitist hegemony that dominated the downtown institutions or the expression of Afrocentric, Latino, or other ethnocentric cultures elsewhere. What motivated diversity advocates could be understood by three types1 of activists—social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs—each distinguished by the different perceived threats that propelled them into action: •

For social activists, its affordable housing and history of tolerance and political activism made Rogers Park an attractive place. Many of its artists, human rights workers, environmentalists, hippies, and bohemian leftists, both young and old, had either been priced out of residential markets elsewhere in the city or knew of others who were, and did not want it to happen in Rogers Park. Social activists supported affordable housing, freedom of speech, and social equality, while mobilizing against anything that could be interpreted as a sign of gentrification, including increased rents, condo conversions, strip malls, streetscape projects, and tax increment financing (TIF)

130 / Chapter Six districts. Acting more as activists for a broad range of social causes than as community improvers or cultural entrepreneurs, these social activists sponsored political protests and free cultural events, featuring local youth and artists from places often referred to as “oppressed,” “undeveloped,” “colonized,” “poor,” or “third world,” with the intention of allowing immigrants to Rogers Park to have a voice in its future. •

Reports of criminal activity—from kids’ bikes stolen out of family garages to “wilding youth” beating up strangers to gunshots—motivated all kinds of property owners to join community improvement efforts. They mobilized against symbols of decline, such as trash in vacant lots, garbage in alleys, and graffiti on public walls, as much as they did for more serious crimes involving drugs, prostitution, and theft. These community improvers were focused on increasing local property ownership and small business activity, and in the process they were more willing to support the very things social activists resisted. As a result, their activities were regularly criticized as efforts to gentrify Rogers Park. But their activities were more often than not consciously anti-elitist, anti-individualist, anti-multinational capitalist, and anti-interventionist. This ethos was exemplified by, for example, the Community Day Parade, which was produced by and for local residents, rather than, as they pointed out, a parade of corporate and nonprofit sponsors.

•

Its late-night entertainment, lakefront beaches, and history as a place for the cultural intelligentsia attracted cultural entrepreneurs. These café owners,

masseuses and masseurs, clothing designers, silk painters, feng shui practi­ tioners, spiritual companions, life coaches, web-page designers, art therapists, organic gardeners, pet walkers, caregivers, home schoolers, pastry chefs, hors d’oeuvres caterers, musicians, poets, and artists were not necessarily those who mobilized specific actions per se, but they mobilized themselves daily to do the creative endeavors that produced an aura of profitable creativity that could sustain an individual or family. They maintained the casual bohemian environment with an entrepreneurial twist that was for many the essence of Rogers Park. Yet how these cultural entrepreneurs actually earned enough money to live on was often a mystery.

These “ideal types” of diversity advocates are not outlined for the purpose of evaluating one of them as a preferred lifestyle over the others, but are analytic categories to orient individual actions within local events. Indeed, these activists have even more in common than just their various efforts to shape the future of the locale. For they were all utopians of sorts. With ideas rooted in Marxism, various forms of secular spiritualism, and theories of natural science—these diversity advocates envisioned a steady state of

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cultural variety. They were like the early ecologists (Cowles 1899; Warming 1909; Durkheim 1933; Park 1925, 1936; Jacobs [1961] 1992; Worster 1979) who saw nature’s ideal as “nothing less than the most diverse, stable, wellbalanced, self-perpetuating society that can be devised to meet the requirements of each habitat” (Engel 1983, 140).2 Rather than signaling decline or the impending domination by a single group, diversity represented a form of adaptation to the environment and part of the process of evolution of communities toward life in equilibrium—a state in which the most diverse, stable, and cooperative environment could exist. These utopians believed that equilibrium could be established among the different kinds of people and different cultures in their locale; they sponsored “community-building” activities, which they designed to bring together people who otherwise might not interact. These were strategic efforts to establish ties and shared experiences among what could be a volatile mix of cultures and interests. And it was these activities that anchored a problem-solving network within what would become the Glenwood Avenue Arts District. Problem Solving and Art Production Diversity advocates maintained stability in the locale through the production of regular events that celebrated not only racial and ethnic diversity in Rogers Park, but also the creative expressions of artists and others who indulged difference as a way of life. Moreover, they sponsored these activities in areas considered to be “problem spots” where vandalism and property crime were often the remnants of a variety of illicit activity. The activities and exchanges in this network depended largely upon local volunteers who donated their time, energy, and money to organize, promote, and attend free festivals, activities, and events, as well as to engage youth in art activities for building cultural bridges over the kind of divisive tensions that arise among such differing interests. Among their activities: •

Obscenities and gang tagging on the Chicago Transit Authority embankment were repainted as a mural by traditional muralists working in collaboration with spray-can writers.

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Harassment of Arab and South Asian residents and businesses after 9/11 was addressed by a neighborhood march and forum featuring poetry and performances by South Asian and other local poets.

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Teenage prostitutes were reengaged as “neighborhood citizens” through work with an independent filmmaking organization to document the local streets from their vantage point.

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Graffiti on a Lake Michigan retaining wall was transformed through an annual mural-painting festival on Father’s Day.

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A crime-ridden corner around a vacant building became a place for art events and artists in residence.

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Nights of slow business at local cafés and restaurants were pepped up by “open mic” poetry nights, art exhibitions, and music concerts.

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Regular summer festivals that included mural painting, music, dance, art, food, and drinks supported individual expression and brought families, students, and professionals together from throughout the locale and beyond (plate 14).

Network participants resisted all efforts to formalize their activities through one of the existing nonprofit organizations or through some new organization designed specifically for the purposes of creating and supporting the arts district. And it was a problem-solving network, as neither aesthetics nor individual autonomy could motivate involvement. Rather, people came together to support activities that addressed a specific purpose, particularly one that solved a problem among the diverse people, cultures, and interests of Rogers Park. This contrasted with the aesthetic activities that sought shared meaning and cohesion through a particular kind of art or through the reputations of individual artists, organizations, or businesses. It also contrasted with the activities of autonomy networks designed to support and increase individual artists’ control over what was produced. This network of problem-solvers brought together the mixture of social activism, neighborhood improvement, and cultural entrepreneurship pervasive in Rogers Park. They worked to transform areas of the neighborhood into what Jane Jacobs ([1961] 1992) might have considered the ideal: places with mixed uses both day and night for all different kinds of people. Although similar activities elsewhere may have followed what are increasingly rote accounts of gentrification—one in which art activity redefined a place while revalorizing property, making way for a new class of people to move in—this is instead a story of how a problem-solving network used art to address the century-old problem of a cement wall while maintaining stasis within a dense mixture of small businesses, residential diversity, and vibrant cultural expression. Among these problem-solvers were Al Goldberg, a musician and real estate agent whose community-improvement efforts were often interpreted as efforts to gentrify the neighborhood; Craig Harshaw, an artist and social activist who was among those who stood against any effort to gentrify Rogers Park; Dorothy Milne, cultural entrepreneur and artistic director of the

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Lifeline Theatre; Katy Hogan and Michael James, owners of the Heartland Café; and the Lifeline Theatre, which combined the three types of diversity activism through their extensive involvement in the locale. Heartland, Lifeline, and Insight Arts were each active in Rogers Park before Goldberg acquired the building that would become ArtSpace RP. They were reservoirs for the cultural capital embedded in Rogers Park and the foundation of its problem-solving ethos for art production.

Facing a Mile-Long Cement Wall The Cause of Decline of a Street? The cement embankment, built in the early twentieth century as a support structure for the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) train tracks, divided Glenwood Avenue into separate and narrow northbound and southbound streets, and created potential for division and class conflict in Rogers Park. Most of the commercial properties that faced the mile-long cement wall were vacant or largely unused. Whether or not there were obscenities and gang tagging on the wall, or exchanges of sex or drugs for money along the street—which there often were—the two-block stretch north and south from the Morse elevated train stop was often avoided by residents and visitors alike. Al Goldberg acquired the nearly abandoned building on the busy corner of Morse and Glenwood avenues through a building trade in 1999. As a co-founder of the Rogers Park Builders Group and a member of the Rogers Park Community Council, Goldberg was a community improver concerned about the increasing number of vacant properties on Glenwood. The vice president of a national real estate firm specializing in the sale of apartments and commercial real estate, he had access to both the financial and construction resources necessary to transform this commercial building, designed as doctors’ offices in the early twentieth century, into ArtSpace RP. Championed by Alderman Joe Moore’s staff as being “well connected in the arts”—something he attributed to his aunt, who had founded the Chicago Artists Coalition—Goldberg promoted the idea of the arts as an engine for economic activity in the neighborhood. Goldberg saw the two-block stretch in either direction from the Morse elevated train stop as having a threatening atmosphere that further contributed to the problem of vacant commercial space. He pointed out that people would descend the train at the Lunt Street exit by the Heartland Café or walk east or west on Morse—a block or more out of their way—to avoid

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walking down Glenwood Avenue. From his perspective, what the train station created in the form of access to local businesses and foot traffic for street-level commercial property, the long, cement-covered hill supporting the train tracks and lined by vacant storefronts took back. His persistence and optimistic idealism made it difficult for most people—except the most radical of the social activists—to paint him as an evil real estate agent seeking to gentrify the neighborhood. A musician and real estate broker who first moved to Rogers Park as an economics student in 1968, Goldberg had ample time to sit around in coffee shops and restaurants to keep the pulse on what was happening. Although few people knew him as a drummer who once played with Yama and the Karma Dusters or as the founder of a sound engineering company he called “Euphoria Blimp” that sponsored free concerts in Lincoln Park (Rogers Park [2000] 2003), many people had seen his multi-racial drumming circles playing on Glenwood Avenue. With his insider knowledge of Rogers Park properties and his connections to the arts, he brokered information among several local networks and committed energy to organizing meetings and events that created bridges between his art, business, and real estate interests. More of a community improver than a cultural entrepreneur, he advocated that “diversity” include more cultural entrepreneurs of all racial and ethnic varieties, more owner-occupied buildings, and more sustainable small businesses. Goldberg rehabbed the vacant building on the corner of Morse and Glenwood with this vision in mind. However, the building did not have the bohemian character of the other neglected properties converted for use by artists on Glenwood Avenue. It was a solid brick structure built in 1919 for professional use by doctors seeing patients but no longer suitable for contemporary health care. Goldberg did more than fix broken windows and plumbing and throw a fresh coat of paint on rotted windowsills. He preserved the original entryway with its classic marble staircase and tile floors laid when the building was first built and most of its plaster walls in the hallways. But the individual spaces were reconstructed using drywall. He installed new commercial-grade windows intended to muffle the street and train noise that went on all night long; he installed an electronic intercom and security system to control access to the building. He updated the electricity, installing individually metered rooftop heating and air-conditioning for each unit, as well as wiring the building with both DSL and cable lines. Two of the upstairs studios were live/work apartments each with a full bathroom and kitchen. Three of the remaining six studios had kitchen fixtures but shared a bathroom—a large modern room with lighted vanity, a shower,

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and ample space for two people, such as a makeup artist and a model. His dedication of the building for use by artists led many to applaud his efforts. Of the rehab and redesign of the building, Katy Hogan, co-owner of the Heartland Café, said, “He did it right. Someone should give him an award for that” (Hogan interview 2001). Based on a referral from Hogan, I met with Goldberg as part of this research and ultimately rented one of his studios. The arts building fit my research interests and its low rent fit my graduate school budget. I rented a 12-by-15-foot unit on the second floor in the center and back of the building, farthest from the train line and from both Morse and Glenwood avenues. It had new but cheap kitchen fixtures, such as a metal sink, a simple white stove, and refrigerator; it also had direct access to the shared bathroom. A wall of 3-by-8-foot windows opened onto a rooftop deck. The studio space could have functioned as a large office or small studio for any arty professional. I paid $400 a month for three years to facilitate my research in Rogers Park and the other two Chicago locales. Within days of moving a table and chairs, a futon, some dishes, and painting supplies into the studio, I became friends with Richard, a middleaged artist whose studio was across the hall from mine. He had graduated with a degree in fine arts from Indiana University in Bloomington in the early 1980s, as did I, but we never recalled meeting each other back then. When Richard first heard me shuffling around inside my studio, he knocked on the door and peeked in. Seeing nothing on the walls, he mumbled, “Hmm, it takes a while to get things started in a new place, doesn’t it?” This expectation from Richard and other artists in Rogers Park—that I needed to make art in the studio I rented to earn any legitimacy among local artists— propelled me to put together a new body of work. This was something I had done each year since graduating from Indiana University in 1981 through the mid-1990s.3 Renting the Rogers Park studio allowed me to experience again what it meant to produce art, and to do it within one of the locales I was in fact studying. Community Improver Uses Art to Clean Up the Corner Goldberg’s efforts to clean up the corner, beginning with the creation of ArtSpace RP, put him at odds with at least some social activists who considered him a gentrifier. Even though he was a longtime resident championed by other community improvers and many cultural entrepreneurs because of his efforts to promote the arts in Rogers Park, the building made him an

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easy target for those activists who were critical of elitist art and virulently opposed to gentrification. These activists stood against just about everything ArtSpace RP stood for: art for art’s sake, the artist as an individual rather than member of a group, and the artist working alone in a studio rather than within a social context. Goldberg’s own account of what happened after he took ownership of the building on the corner of Morse and Glenwood in 1999 resembles accounts of other urban industrial loft conversions revalorized by artists. He took ownership of the two-story building in 1999 through a building trade with another property owner and invested $1 million to rehab the 11,500square-foot building into eight street-level commercial spaces and nine second-floor spaces for use predominately by artists. But in keeping with a problem-solving ethos, his renovation of the largely abandoned building on the busy neighborhood corner of Morse and Glenwood was done to solve a number of local problems. With artists, he could solve the problem of the vacant, obsolete structure, built as doctors’ offices, with smallish rooms each having a sink but no bathroom, and limited space for the equipment now used by doctors. The artists and art organizations who were Goldberg’s preferred tenants could put the building to new use while also bringing a host of beneficial activity to an area. He was unabashed in his use of artists as tools to address a range of local problems, not to mention creating new residential and commercial real estate markets: Artists bring people and money into a neighborhood. Artists often are pioneers. They will go into areas before the general market is ready for it. Artists will assume a greater risk than the general market. [As renters] they create stability and income in a building which otherwise would be vacant or rented to undesirable tenants. . . . Artists create demand and business for other businesses. They attract people to the neighborhood who are coming to their events. (Goldberg interview 2002)

Before he rehabbed the building, Goldberg described the building as “a scene in NYPD Blue. There were squatters, crack addicts, hookers, and a guy’s pit bull staying here. The windows were covered with plywood. People would not walk down Glenwood. Now, there is lots of foot traffic by the building” (Goldberg interview 2002). The murder at the Morse el stop in front of his building in 2001 transformed what many saw as a threatening environment into a dangerous one,

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and clarified his view on the need for change. The murder, thought by police to be drug-related, led to an increased presence of undercover narcotics officers and regular patrols by marked and unmarked police cars. Neither represented the kind of change desired by Goldberg. He preferred to use his building to change the mix of the people on the street and was unapologetic about his use of artists as instruments to “clean up” the corner. Staff at the local office of Ward 49 alderman Joe Moore pointed to the “multiplier effects” as the reason they continued to “do whatever they can” to support him and other similar art-related projects. Goldberg’s first offers to local artists for discounted space were ignored, as they already maintained home-based studio spaces in relatively inexpensive apartments. And his first two efforts to subsidize a gallery in one of his street-level spaces also did not pan out. One locally based group of artists could not generate enough interest to even move into the space. Inclusion Arts Gallery and Education Foundation then successfully established a co-op gallery but could not sustain interest to keep the lights on and promote exhibitions­­ after only two years in operation. These failed attempts led Goldberg to actively recruit artists from the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, including the collective “Temporary Services,” who established an art center of sorts in one of his street-level commercial spaces on Glenwood Avenue rent free. Goldberg pursued a collective to be his pro bono tenants—rather than the collective pursing him, or his pursuing a third local group—because he thought “a collective of artists,” rather than a co-op or even a nonprofit group, had a better chance of fitting into Rogers Park, while sustaining the energy to maintain the space and host events. The collective took over the gallery space established “Mess Hall,” described on their website as “a place for visual culture, creative urbanism, sustainable ecology, food democracy, radical politics, and cultural experimentation” (Mess Hall 2009). Their nonstop array of events fulfilled Goldberg’s interest in attracting outsiders to Rogers Park but also fueled criticism of his efforts. Goldberg faced further resistance as he sought to extend his vision several blocks in each direction from ArtSpace RP, first through his support of a streetscape project, then by declaring it the “Glenwood Avenue Arts District.” As he pointed out, the area already constituted what the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs considered to be “an informal arts district” (Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs 2002); he sought to make it explicit. Without municipal or legislative support for such districts in Chicago or Illinois,4 Goldberg proceeded toward this goal through alliances he

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formed among local businesses. He laid the groundwork for this through the Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group, a monthly breakfast meeting first held in May 2001. Social Activists Protest Efforts to “Clean Up” Corner The problem-solving arts activities did not always represent harmony and consensus among Rogers Park residents. For example, among the social activists interested in local problem solving but who resisted efforts by Goldberg were artists involved with Insight Arts, a nonprofit organization located two blocks west on Morse Avenue in a former Catholic school and founded in 1991 by Gen X artists/activists. Under the leadership of executive director Craig Harshaw, it was self-described as an organization of “artists, community activists, and libratory educators” (Anderson 2002). It sponsored a march and poetry forum in support of South Asian residents and businesses harassed after 9/11 and was part of an activist coalition organized by the Rogers Park Community Action Network (RPCAN) that staged noisy protests at Alderman Moore’s office against the Morse/Glenwood streetscape projects and TIF districts, which Goldberg had supported. The art produced by Insight Arts featured and attracted a young, racially and ethnically diverse crowd, most of whom could not afford to own property in Rogers Park. What distinguished their social activism from other similar events in Rogers Park at the Heartland Café, for example, was that admission to Insight’s events was usually free, and the sponsorship of the activities was also free from attempts to produce income, such as through food or beverage sales. Its free art classes planted the seeds of art and activism in local youth; its adult artistic events were simultaneously cutting-edge art and political activism. For example, a multimedia performance on race and incarceration, a blueprint for a bluegoose, by its artistic director karen g. williams, featured three women each performing in separate “classrooms”— partitioned spaces that opened into a central space where the audience sat. Each woman’s isolation in a separate classroom was simultaneously visible and portrayed for the audience the individual psychological impact of incarceration on family members. David Boykin’s multi-racial jazz trio playing drums, upright bass, and clarinet in what seemed to be random patterns provided an atonal backdrop to the performance. Through art, Insight Arts took on other political topics such as tenant rights, workers rights, and immigrant rights, through events such as “A Speak Out Against the North American Free Trade Agreement,” featuring poets from around the world; performance of The Housekeepers Diary in

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which professional maid and artist Lisa Alvarado emerged from under dirty laundry piled in the middle of the stage as the audience arrived; and Changing Worlds, an exhibition of photographs and oral histories of immigrant families. They advocated for affordable housing and defended the human rights of all, including the sex workers and disenfranchised youth who occasionally worked on Morse and Glenwood avenues. As they were opposed to gentrification and all forms of “racist and classist displacement” (Insight Arts 2002), they saw development of the arts district as one more incursion of gentrifiers into Rogers Park and resisted any effort to be involved with it or the arts festival it sponsored. As a counterpoint to Goldberg’s efforts, the artists of Insight Arts advocated for “diversity” to include the poor, new immigrants, children, elderly, gay, lesbian, and transgendered as among the valued residents of Rogers Park. So as other businesses, nonprofits, and artists became part of the problem-solving network within the Glenwood Avenue Arts District, Insight Arts did not. Instead, they represented a critical view of the arts district and served as a moral barometer to gauge change in Rogers Park by including the voices of those left out of more commercial activity in their arts activities.

Problem-Solving Ethos in Rogers Park The first meetings of the Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group (RPBANG) were held at the Heartland Café or No Exit Café, both located a block north of ArtSpace RP on Glenwood Avenue. The Heartland Café was opened in 1976 by social activists Katy Hogan and Michael James, who set the standard for blending art, business, and advocacy. And long before the Heartland was established, the No Exit Café moved to Rogers Park from Evanston in 1967. Whereas the Heartland Café modeled a post-hippie lifestyle of political and cultural activism through small business entrepreneurship, No Exit was a post-beatnik coffeehouse, originally founded in 1958 as an Evanston hangout for Northwestern University students. Through the 1990s, both Heartland and No Exit were Rogers Park venues for live music and poetry; No Exit served a distinctively coffeehouse literati, with jazz and folk music and a take-one, leave-one book-loaning library; the Heartland’s cultural offerings were more amplified and pointedly political as were other remnants of its founders’ anti-war involvements. In 1999, when No Exit’s previous owners had decided to exit the café business, James and Hogan purchased and sustained it as one of their own competitors. Under Heartland’s ownership, No Exit remained a coffeehouse with jazz, folk music, and poetry for intellectual literati, but it was also

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marketed to gay and lesbian audiences. So, for example, while at the Heartland Café on Wednesday nights was “In One Ear, Open Mic Poetry,” hosted by Peter Wolf, on Thursday nights it was followed by “Scott Free’s Grinder: Queer Words and Music” at No Exit. As owners of substantial business, property, and cultural capital, Hogan and James were involved in just about every aspect of activism, community improvement, and cultural entrepreneurship in Rogers Park. By the time Goldberg had finished rehabbing ArtSpace RP, the Heartland Enterprise included nearly enough businesses to constitute an arts district all by itself. It had long ago expanded the original Heartland Café—offering a full food and beverage service from early morning to late at night—to include a Buffalo Bar specializing in high-end imported beers and local microbrews; a General Store filled with pamphlets, books, and artisan works from throughout the world; and art exhibitions and live music, featuring both local and nationally known artists. In addition to No Exit, it had taken over a number of other failing businesses on Glenwood Avenue. Next to the Heartland Café, and accessible through its own kitchens, was the Red Line Tap, a pool bar with live country music and slightly cheaper beer than its own Buffalo Bar; and the Studio Theater, a black-box rental space next to the Tap that was rented to small theater groups in which to produce their own plays. It also published an annual political and literary journal and sponsored regular political and cultural forums and athletic events. Heartland on the Lake was a food stand it operated in the summer months at Loyola Beach on Lake Michigan. No Exit became a successful, award-winning cabaret space with a 2009 production of Evita, produced by James and performed by Theo Ubique Theatre Company, in which the audience and the entire café were part of the set (Jones 2009). Since the day they opened the Heartland, Hogan and James have worked to make it easy for people to come into their restaurant. Bright-colored murals that greet people as they leave the Lunt Street exit of the Morse train stop, sounds of music, and the sight of people sitting and talking on their outdoor patio have all fostered the Heartland’s identity as “a stabilizing feature in the neighborhood.” According to Hogan, this identity could, in part, be attributed to the arts activities that take place there. At first it was hard for me to believe that people saw us as a stabilizing feature in the neighborhood. But landlords bring future tenants here to sign leases and to show them what kind of community exists in Rogers Park. To many people we are an immense safe haven. People hear the music and see the art

Problem-Solving Networks and Social Stability / 141 and the people in the place and it represents life to them. We are a haven for the sense of community that exists in Rogers Park. (Hogan interview 2001)

Art and music “created a sense of life” and were, in Hogan’s view, part of the package that “moved the drug deals farther down the block.” But she acknowledged the attitudes of the partners and their staff—and how they all addressed customers and potential problems on the street—were also part of that package. “People’s sense of safety often takes precedence over the real facts. So if something or someone made a customer fearful, we would say, ‘OK. Where are you going, we’ll walk you there’ ” (Hogan interview 2001). The owners used art to draw people into the restaurant for purposes beyond eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The dining-room walls were a changing exhibition space for exhibitions of art by local artists or on progressive issues. Among the works exhibited were photographs by youth in the Insight Arts education programs; paintings by Al Tyler and his wife Anna, two Bronzeville artists living in Rogers Park; paintings by Diana Berek and an art group called “Artists of Rogers Park”; exhibitions sponsored by Lew Rosenbaum’s Labor and Arts Festival; and surrealist art by Penelope and Franklin Rosemont, founders of the Chicago Surrealist Group. These exhibitions often had national and international reach, such as Drawing Resistance, organized as part of the Rogers Park–based Labor and Arts Festival, with art by “40 North American Political Artists” (fall 2001); or Surrealism Here and Now, an exhibition organized by the Chicago Surrealist Group (summer 2002). The Rosemonts—who had traveled to Paris to meet with Paris surrealists and its famous founder, André Breton, in 1965—provided a unique bridge between two historic and struggling movements: surrealism and revolutionary social activism rooted in the labor movement. They sponsored surrealist art exhibitions, like those at the Heartland, “concerned with advancing the critique of miserabilism, the liberation of wilderness, the triumph of play over work, that is, in social revolution and the realization of poetry in everyday life” (Franklin Rosemont 2002); they kept the literature from both movements in print through the historic publishing house Charles H. Kerr Publishing, which they ran from Rogers Park. Although Penelope was known as a surrealist painter and Franklin was a surrealist poet and collage artist, they maintained an international presence through their Black Swan Press, a smaller imprint of Kerr Publishing that published surrealist poetry and art. Kerr Publishing was founded in Chicago in 1886 just weeks before the historic Haymarket Riot and remained “the oldest anti-establishment

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publishing house in the world, but still as young as tomorrow,” according to its own catalog. It was the notorious publisher of radical, socialist, and labor history for which Franklin Rosemont served as the chief steward and editor from 1983 until his death on April 15, 2009 (Chicago Tribune 2009). The Heartland owners also sponsored live events. Among these were “In One Ear: Open Mic Poetry,” a weekly event that had gone on at the Heartland for more than a decade. Every Wednesday night around 9 p.m., poets and their friends began to gather just as its host, Peter Wolf, and his entourage arrived and began converting the diner into a late-night poetry club and collecting a $2 cover charge. Wolf, who always introduced himself as the host of the event and “a third-generation Rogers Park resident,” trumpeted the Heartland over every other venue in Rogers Park, because of its wide appeal and its functionality as a diner and a bar with a sound system. “From neighborhood youth, to the college set, to old-timers, it is a place where all are welcome. They can sit and listen, have something to eat or drink—tea, coffee, soda, water, or beer—or sign up for three minutes on stage” he said. The open mic soapbox, announcement billboard, and poetry night were just the kind of cultural activity that was easy for the Heartland owners to support: it was self-sustaining, it brought business to the restaurant, and it further linked the partners to locally based civic, cultural, and business networks. It allowed their reach to extend far beyond their own activism and that of their forty employees, to any of their thousands of customers who would pitch them an idea. The Heartland Café made the most of the array of cultural capital rooted deeply within Rogers Park’s activist networks. Moreover, the Heartland was the kind of place—one of mixed uses at all times of day or night—to which the Glenwood Avenue Arts District would aspire. The Heartland was the product of the social activism of its owners, staff, and customers. According to James: [The] “wholesome foods” restaurant was part of what we envisioned as an interconnecting network of businesses to serve the people, body and soul, and build a progressive base in the community. We wanted to encourage a vision that connected health, personal growth, and political consciousness. We also wanted to provide workers with a positive work experience including time to organize or do political work, including art, education, culture, and family. (James 2001)

Hogan often attributed their business growth to her business partner, James. “It’s my partner who is the capitalist,” she would say, while she was

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a primary advocate of art as “community building.” This approach was distinct from the community-based art projects that first emerged in the mural movement on Chicago’s South Side. According to Hogan, the business partners viewed all aspects of their operations as community building: We look at people’s work as their art and art as a community-building activity. With this perspective, there are no boundaries to the scope of community building and cultural activity people are involved in. It includes raising a family as well as working on a job. Part of our mission as employers is to support our employees, not only in their work here, but in their lives. Among our forty employees are mothers and fathers, students, actors, artists, political activists, and neighborhood residents. (Hogan interview 2001)

Their problem-solving approach engaged individuals while providing a structure through which to think, act, and maintain a sense of shared in­ terest in the local place. So, for example, to solve the problem of parking for customers, Hogan and James entered into an agreement with Trilogy, which Hogan described as “an adult-support outfit” without referring to its clients as mentally disabled adults. In exchange for allowing Heartland customers use of the Trilogy parking lot during the evenings and weekends—when the social service agency was closed—Heartland would feed a Trilogy group of staff and clients, en masse, a few times a year. Moreover, rather than treating their clients as odd, she explained: “We would be nice to them, but join in the behavior modification, such as take the sugar packets off the table, so someone would not sit and open each and every one” (Hogan interview 2001). Within what amounted to their corporate brand, Hogan and James advocated for “diversity” to include a variety of people and activist causes, from world peace, anti-racism, gay rights, and workers rights, to local community building in Rogers Park. The Heartland was as much a place for cultural entrepreneurs, like Pete Wolf, to carry out his own income-producing activities, as it was a place for current and future community improvers—landlords, real estate agents, prospective home buyers—to share in the “sense of the community in Rogers Park”; or for social activists to promote their visionary agendas for the future. These networks of activists fed the Heartland businesses and were, in turn, fed by the restaurant. Moreover, the problemsolving ethos of its business practices laid the foundation for how to get things done in Rogers Park. So, when Lifeline Theatre moved to Rogers Park and needed parking or wanted to deal with the graffiti on the cement embankment in front of their theater, they followed in Heartland’s footsteps.

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Or when the networking breakfast for artists and businesses needed a place to meet, they turned to the Heartland for food and space.

Using Murals to Redefine Space Art Is for All Lifeline Theatre’s artistic director, Dorothy Milne, was among those who were initially reluctant to be involved in the Glenwood Avenue Arts District. The nonprofit ensemble company had moved to Rogers Park in 1986, before Goldberg took ownership of the corner building. The actors purchased a former electric company substation, a large brick building located on Glenwood Avenue a half block south of Morse Avenue, and converted it into a 99-seat facility for their own MainStage productions. Lifeline brought the nonprofit theater model—funded by a mix of charity donations and ticket sales—to Glenwood Avenue. The ensemble augmented its MainStage adult and family-friendly theater productions with a Kid Series featuring classic children’s literature as well as an “Art for All” outreach program providing free and discounted tickets to the elderly and disadvantaged while subsidizing tickets for its children’s programs. When Lifeline Theatre purchased their building on Glenwood, three blocks south of the Heartland Café, these cultural entrepreneurs adopted Hogan and James’s problem-solving approach to dealing with neighborhood problems. They too struck a deal with Trilogy to use its parking lot on theater nights in exchange for free tickets for Trilogy clients. Driving older model cars and wearing arty, thrift-shop clothes, ensemble members fit in on the street. The lack of street traffic was an asset for the theater, as it allowed for buses, cars, taxis, and Lifeline’s own free shuttle service to lock up the street before and after performances. It also allowed Lifeline to host events and an annual Summer KidFest on the street in front of their building. Long before the Glenwood Avenue Arts District was established, Milne was an anchor for problem-solving efforts on the street. She was among the cultural entrepreneurs who did more than involve herself in producing art: she participated in anti-racism and affordable housing efforts with social activists, while assertively advocating for the concept of diversity to include families and children. And in 1993, when the ensemble decided to take on the problem of the obscenities and gang tagging on the CTA embankment across the street from its theater building, they did it by commissioning a mural to cover the entire 20-by-500-foot CTA embankment between Morse and Farwell avenues.

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Lifeline Theatre’s fund-raising and promotional material for the mural project represented the theater as engaged in “the business of art, but also in the business of our community”; it framed the locale as suffering from “absentee landlords, dwindling city resources, tenant displacement due to neighborhood ‘revitalization projects’ and hard times” (Lifeline 1992). It presented itself as a local leader and a member of a “large community network” that sought to improve the community by addressing such problems. They were advocates “for better police patrol, removal of unwanted graffiti on public and private property, increased garbage removal and street cleaning efforts”; Lifeline Theatre’s motivation for producing the mural was to “improve the . . . ambiance of the block and discourage vagrancy and defacement of private and public property” (Lifeline 1992). It sought to replace the obscenities and gang tagging that occasionally marked the embankment with a mural representing “the ethnic and cultural diversity of . . . Rogers Park” and wanted to do so in a manner that mixed traditional styles with youthful hip-hop and street art. The theater raised the $6,000 necessary for the mural project, which it claimed would “offer a shining example of a successful collaboration between the arts, the community, and the private sector, not only in beautifying the neighborhood, but in showing a sense of community pride and ownership” (Lifeline 1992). The Art Is for All mural (plate 15) mural, completed in 1993 and still intact in 2008, included iconography from the fine arts intermixed with that of popular and ethnic culture; its montage of faces, objects, and patterns linked a traditional WPA-era style with the youthful graffiti gestures of spray-can writers. Among the fifteen muralists were two well-known “spraycan writers,” Dzine and Casper, who had co-founded the graffiti crew Aerosoul in the 1980s. After completing several commissioned murals, including Art Is for All, Dzine hit it big showing his work in art galleries in Chicago, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. His notoriety surpassed that of the traditional muralists involved with the project, who were longtime members of the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG), including Olivia Gude, Jon Pounds, and Bernard Williams. The mural and its mix of iconography remained intact and unblemished by unwanted vandalism to become the symbolic backdrop of diversity for Lifeline’s annual Summer KidFest, and ten years later for the activities of the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival. Artists of the Wall The same year, a different group of property owners adopted a similar problem-solving strategy using mural painting to address another cement

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structure. The first Artists of the Wall mural painting festival was held in 1993, as a way to address the problem of graffiti on the Loyola Beach retaining wall. The 3-by-600-foot retaining wall served as a beachfront park bench between Pratt and Lunt streets in Loyola Park, part of the Chicago Park District on Lake Michigan. The festival was originally an idea of the Loyola Beach Neighbors Association (LBNA), a nonprofit group of residents living in Rogers Park between Sheridan Road and Lake Michigan who engaged the Loyola Beach Advisory Council, the volunteer group for the park chaired by Hogan, the Heartland co-owner. The LBNA members wanted the problems of nighttime brawling to stop and the obscenities and gang tagging on the wall to be cleaned up. They were community improvers who saw the graffiti as vandalism that created a negative space and encouraged litter and neglect of the beach in the vicinity of the wall. Hogan’s committee brought in the concerns of social activists who sought to solve the problem in a way that would engage local residents rather than police. Like Lifeline’s approach, they supported the idea of a festival that would engage youth and adults in painting the wall together. But rather than creating a permanent mural, they wanted to support an annual festival as a process that would build connections among people and foster cultural ownership of the vandalized space, rather than to celebrate the work of specific artists or perpetuate a cat-and-mouse game between the taggers and police. Hogan’s involvement in the Loyola Beach Advisory Council, the wall painting, and the festival was an extension of the beach food concession stand operated by the Heartland Café throughout the summer. The annual themes initially were intended to stimulate fun, but many people took the job of painting to the theme very seriously. For example, in 2001 the theme “2001: A Neighborhood Odyssey Hullabaloo” sought to link Homer, The Iliad, and the lake with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hogan said, “We hope people paint according to the theme, but as ‘a hullabaloo,’ it is a way to bring people together to have fun and build a sense of ownership of the place and a sense of community connection around an annual event” (Hogan interview 2001). Among the painters that year was a professional artist, David Libman, who painted the one-eyed Cyclops from The Iliad as gentrifiers invading Rogers Park. And just as Odysseus and his crew triumphed by stabbing the Cyclops in his eye, a multicultural mob was standing up against the hairy beast advancing on their lakefront utopia with spears and pitchforks. “The Cyclops . . . is a representation of gentrification in modern times. I think he’s

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ruthless and bites the head off people without morality or regard to affordable housing,” Libman said (Kleine 2001). Winning first place that year was commercial artist Stephen Titra, who painted the elevated train being transformed through a wave of water into Odysseus’s ship. “It’s about taking the Red Line all the way to the end of the line. If you do, you’ll find Odysseus’s ship waiting for you,” he explained. “If you remember, [Odysseus] spent 20 years trying to get home [after] he realized all the things that were important to him were there. . . . Rogers Park [is home] for us. . . . This is the best place in the world to live,” he said (Kleine 2001). Attendees could watch as the painters of varying skill levels—from “professional” to “kids spattering paint”—developed a variety of messages and meanings. As one blogger noted, “The liberal values of the neighborhood always get expressed in the paintings along with regular quotes from Meher Baba, Budd[h]a, etc. It always feels like a revisit to the ‘60s when I take the stroll and dig the art” (posting on Yelp.com, 7/12/2005). As the point of the event was to solve the problem of neglect by replacing it with shared ownership of the place, the inclusion of professionals, amateurs, and ideologues were seen as “part of the charm” of the event (posting on Yelp.com, 7/12/2005). Although aesthetics and even artistic quality played no role in who got to be an artist of the wall, the festival succeeded in motivating skilled, well-known artists to take on a section. Mural Making as Problem Solving Art Is for All and Artists of the Wall set the standard for the problem-solving ethos of art that was publicly supported by residents and businesses in Rogers Park; they were the kind of activities that addressed commonly shared problems and involved the widest possible array of local residents. The two mural projects—similar in their intent and outcome but different in their process—were equally important symbols as art that solved local problems. Whereas the Lifeline mural Art Is for All was a permanent art installation, the Artists of the Wall was an annual mural project and beach festival. Yet both projects provided opportunities for young and old to transform their youthful indiscretions into sanctioned public art. Whereas Lifeline commissioned professional muralists and spray-can writers to paint a mural as a solution to the problem of racist, sexist, and pornographic slogans and epithets scrawled on the cement embankment across from their theater facility, the Artists of the Wall festival allowed youth and adults to paint whatever they wanted

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on a cement retaining wall each year while enabling many businesses, residents, and neighborhood associations to come together for an annual beach festival. Both became symbolic spaces to renew old ties or forge new ones. Although both projects symbolized utopian harmony, diversity, and democracy in Rogers Park, neither was without conflict or criticism. Peeling under-paint and a fee increase to $30 for painters led to criticism of Artists of the Wall festival organizers. Although the 2008 festival had fewer registrants and few professional artists, even its staunchest critics, bloggers on The Broken Heart of Rogers Park, found enough worthwhile paintings to award one artist with its “best localized art-activism” award. And more than one Rogers Park resident did not like the Art Is for All mural. In a formal letter of complaint, a resident admonished the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) for giving permission for the wall to be painted and indicated a preference for the “concrete wall” that had some “natural charm because of the hanging vines”; the writer claimed that the mural was turning Rogers Park into “a circus sideshow of bad taste” (Letter to CTA 1993). Lifeline responded in a letter that they were “very sorry to learn [someone] was so deeply offended by the mural” (Lifeline 1993), but in their view the strategy of including traditional muralists and younger spray-can writers paid off. They pointed out that since the mural was completed, “there has not been one incident of graffiti or defacement on the entire embankment and our own property has also seen a dramatic decrease in unwanted tagging” (Lifeline 1993). But the criticism points to the fact that although diversity advocates and their problem-solving ethos dominated Rogers Park, theirs was not the only perspective in the locale.

Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group The first meeting of the Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group that I attended was in 2002. Intrigued at the notion that such a meeting was happening in the first place, let alone at 7:30 in the morning, I rolled off the futon in my ArtSpace studio for the Wednesday morning breakfast at the Heartland Café. Among the breakfast regulars were one of the co-owners of the Heartland Café, Michael James or Katy Hogan; Michael Glasser, a commercial landlord, founder of RP Builders Group with Goldberg, and proprietor of the website RogersPark.com, who managed the Listserv for the breakfast participants; Amy Westgard, an artist, a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute’s Master of Arts Administration program, and the host of regular salons for artists; Tom Westgard, Amy’s husband, an attorney credited with starting the first networking breakfast; Kimberly Bares, execu-

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tive director of DevCorp North, the local economic development corporation interested in strengthening Rogers Park’s commercial corridors; and Dorothy Milne, artistic director for Lifeline Theatre. Initially referred to as RPBANG and still active in 2009 as RPBizArts, the breakfast meetings were a nexus for cultural entrepreneurs. The breakfast meeting became the local “art committee” and served to introduce new artists and businesses to the locale. At each breakfast new participants were introduced. Returning participants were each given an opportunity to report on their activities and provide updates for ongoing projects. So, for example, when a bakery caterer, Marked for Dessert, moved into Rogers Park, its pastry chef, Mark Seaman, brought dessert samples and menus to the breakfast and became the dessert caterer of choice for the network. Michael Harrington started attending the group as a local writer and announced his candidacy for political office at the networking breakfast. The networking breakfast also served to build support for some projects introduced at the breakfast, though not others. Initiatives of DevCorp— including the farmers’ market, the women’s festival, and the Wisdom Bridge Theater project, all taking place on Howard Street, nearly a mile north of Morse—did not motivate involvement by this Morse- and Glenwoodcentered group. Moreover, efforts to formalize processes, purposes, or identities, such as through the establishment of the Rogers Park Arts Council spearheaded by Amy Westgard, were moved to a subsequent meeting that took place after the breakfast. Yet the breakfast became a vehicle for orga­ nizing the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival (GAAF) and for the establishment of Glenwood Avenue as an Arts District (GLAAD). Sometime in mid-2002, a number of RPBANG breakfast attendees agreed to participate in an open-studio event and street fair to be held in October. Each of the people in this core group represented linkages to other individuals who either would be involved in the festival or were needed in some capacity to carry it out. Artist Amy Westgard took the lead in producing documents for the planning process and working with DevCorp to arrange for tents and other items needed to stage the street part of the fair. She agreed to manage artists interested in setting up on the street. I agreed to notify the rest of ArtSpace RP’s upstairs tenants and arrange for open studios and an exhibition in the building to include artists from throughout the locale. Al Goldberg agreed to do the publicity and work with the city for the necessary permits. Dorothy Milne of Lifeline Theatre would program and manage a stage at the south end of Glenwood with theatrical pieces, music, and dance. Tara Noftsier and a group of other artists in Phantom Limb studio on the opposite side of the CTA tracks from the Heartland Café would

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manage and program music at the stage on the north end of the festival on Glenwood at Greenview Avenue. As committee members were busy doing their part to pull off the street fair, the committee became constituted as the “Glenwood Avenue Arts District.” The name was proposed by Goldberg and was named as the festival sponsor. Goldberg would produce a brochure and directory as part of the effort. He invited others not involved in the planning committee to be listed in the directory for a fee of $10 to $100. Conflict between Goldberg’s vision of the arts district’s having a “European flavor” and one with the bohemian and gritty image envisioned by some of the artists broke out two months before the event was to take place, producing factions in the festival organizing committee. The conflict came to the surface in mid-August just as the first announcements calling for artists were circulated. It happened after a member of Inclusion Arts Gallery created a design for the street banners that Goldberg hoped to have installed along the street and used as a logo for the festival and for the arts district. Whether the design was a naive and cutesy rendition of a street or an ominous portending of what the realtors involved in the effort hoped Glenwood might become, the image of a quaint European street seemed artificial to most of the festival-planning group. The conflict exaggerated the differing interests of committee members and led to disarray in the art festival organizing group. Some of the members argued that they had become involved in the festival planning to make the street a place where people feel safe, while others wanted a party to share with family and friends. And while some people were intent on selling art, others wanted to build larger markets for businesses or real estate in Rogers Park. For most of the committee, the logo design and the description of the arts district found on the inner leaf of the directory was overly focused on the real estate rather than the art and artists: Glenwood Avenue, in the “Heart of Rogers Park,” between Pratt and Touhy Avenues, is a unique urban stretch of mixed use stores and upper floor apartments with an inviting European flavor of narrow, cobblestone streets, the elevated train embankment, and quaint shops and storefronts. . . . (Glenwood Avenue Arts District Directory 2002)

About the same time this conflict came to a head, Goldberg found out that city permit fees for a weekend festival added up to thousands of dollars, and in addition they would be required to pay overtime wages for city workers to tap into the city electric lights, provide port-a-potties, and clean

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up after the event. The city further required anyone selling on the street to have a vendor’s license, something most street fairs purchased on behalf of the registrants as part of the registration fee. These costs, which came to light just months before the festival date, reinforced Amy’s position months earlier that we needed a formal organization to pull off such a complicated event. Tara, of the Phantom Limb Studio, offered to rework the design. While passing out her business card, she suggested we keep a vision of our shared reality and promised to carry out the task of redesigning the logo with humor and the skills outlined on her business card: “visual artist, sensuous sculptor, wily graphic designer, sexy chick, fabulous cook, bathing beauty, and spygirl extraordinaire.” Her final design replaced the quaint cobblestone streets and lampposts with an image of train tracks overlaid with a paintbrush that was altering the tone of the tracks. Although an intellectually brilliant design, its style was too crude for some committee members. Claiming it was too late to get the street banners installed in time for the festival, Goldberg never had the banners made. The new design was used for the flyers and the directory only in its first year. Days after the mid-August meltdown, someone learned we could sidestep all the city’s requirements by referring to the festival as “a block party for local residents,” something the city allowed with minimal fees and police presence. As the purpose of such events was bonding among neighbors, likely attendees would be people who were close to home or business, had access to their own electric service and bathrooms, and would clean up after themselves. The party therefore required no city electric, waste containers, or portable bathrooms. This solution allowed us to proceed with the fair as long as we collected no fees and no one planned to sell anything on the street, except of course, as someone noted, the drug dealers and prostitutes who worked there every day. With Tara’s design on the cover, the directory that Goldberg finally distributed included his original text and listings for the 43 studios and businesses that made up the Glenwood Avenue Arts District. Among these were Lifeline Theatre, Heartland Café, ArtSpace RP, 4 other businesses of the Heartland enterprise (each in separate listings), 19 of Goldberg’s tenants, and 16 other studios and businesses, including Ms. Egg Roll (the Chinese food takeout) and the Morse “L” Drugs (a pharmacy in ArtSpace RP). The sponsors of the arts district, listed on the back of the directory, were 3 property rental agencies, including ArtSpace RP. Operating under a network form of organization—with no one person in charge—staging of this first annual festival appeared disorganized. Indeed,

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no one actually knew what was going to happen, and during the fair no one could say what was going on down the street; there were no posted schedules of events and no information booth. The festival began later than its scheduled noon starting time, as everyone—from the streets and sanitation official who was supposed to arrive with the yellow tape to cordon off the area at 9 a.m., to the police with barricades and the city tow trucks to remove parked cars—all showed up one to two hours late. This meant that by the time festival volunteers were able to section off areas for tents and booths, artists had already blocked out their own spaces, just as families at downtown festivals do with coolers, tents, and barbeque grills. Without any sort of organizational mechanism to control who was to be where and how much space in the street they each could take, there was potential for mayhem. But after high noon passed, there was enough room for everyone and space left over. The first annual “Outrageous Open Studio Art Walk and Succulent Street Fair” brought several thousand people to Glenwood Avenue. And in a style typical of Glenwood Avenue, money was illegally exchanged on the street, but on this day sales of art and beer far surpassed sales of drugs or sex (plate 16). As there was no organizational authority or guidance, the elements of the day that worked flawlessly were those that were self-directed and the result of skilled cultural entrepreneurs playing the part they wanted to play from beginning to end. This was the case, for example, with Lifeline’s stage on the south end of Glenwood. As they had already done an annual KidFest every year in August, they simply did it again this day in October. They moved a stage from inside the theater and drew on their own electricity; they scheduled onstage a punk rock band, Afro-Caribbean drummers, and flamenco dancers, with their own actors playing parts from Around the World in 80 Days. Goldberg’s multicultural drumming circle, which included drummers from nearly every drumming tradition, maintained their drumbeat all day long at the corner of Morse and Glenwood just outside the viaduct. Our exhibition inside ArtSpace RP was a combination of artists showing work in and around their own studios and a group show in the hallway with several invited artists: Amy Westgard, Mark DiBernardi, Jill Sutton, and Julian Cox. As each of these artists had shown their work many times before, they each brought their own tools and supplies when they came at the designated time a week before the event to hang their work. They each came back to remove it later that month, spackling the holes in the wall before they left. The things that were left not coordinated seemed to be deliberately so. The fact that the street banners defining the arts district were never made

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or hung by Goldberg was more than just a lack of time. There was resis­ tance to the idea from the start; it was resistance to Glenwood Avenue either becoming a replica of a quaint old European cobblestone street or a gritty, bohemian artist enclave. The redesigned logo, as painted train tracks, was used only in 2002; in subsequent years other designs included an image of an electric blender and abstract designs.

Conclusions A network of producers that function as a local problem-solving network engages local political leaders, businesses, organizations, and artists in art activities that address local concerns and engage local residents. This type of network was uniquely suited to address the problems of diverse interests in this culturally and demographically diverse place. It was particularly suited to engage social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs who shared an interest in maintaining stability in this changing locale that was threatened with either decline or gentrification. It was this shared interest that was regularly brought to the foreground by skilled problem-solvers when discord and division threatened their efforts. While other places near the city center faced the threat of wholesale transformation involving displacement of large segments of their ethnic populations, more distant locales, such as Rogers Park, faced the threat of internal division and disinvestment as their racial and ethnic diversity increased. Just as residents of Bronzeville and Pilsen asserted race and ethnicity as a resource to be mobilized, diversity advocates in Rogers Park mobilized residents of diverse backgrounds and offered images of diversity as a resource to solve the problem of “difference” among a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse population. Through a problem-solving network, they shunned external investment, preferring to mobilize local resources involving social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs, using art as a focus to bring people together. The idea of an arts district was initiated to benefit real estate interests. Many of the visual artists and other cultural entrepreneurs renting studios on Glenwood Avenue saw greater potential for an arts district to raise their rents rather than provide them with paying customers. Yet they continued to participate in an open-studio event in conjunction with the citywide Chicago Artists’ Month sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in October. Sometime after 2004, Goldberg had street banners installed on Glenwood Avenue identifying it as an arts district. By 2006 the

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competition with the rest of the open-studio events throughout the city, and with prodding by Lifeline, the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival was moved to August. Tension arising in the problem-solving network required that participants cross their own ideological boundaries in order to have a say in the future of the street. Initially reluctant to be involved, Lifeline framed their reluctance as a conflict with the theater’s performance season, including its own August KidFest. They limited their involvement but became a festival sponsor and the southern anchor of the arts district. Heartland became the northern anchor and hosted a stage and programmed its music, while a competitor, Morseland, the supper club and music venue on Morse east of the tracks, joined in as a festival sponsor. The fact that social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs stayed involved in the network, and through public discussion were able to reject some of the ideas in favor of others, provided the means for their collective engagement in the future of Rogers Park. Among the ideas rejected was the idea of Glenwood Avenue being transformed into a quaint, cobblestone arts district. The establishment of a local arts council— even with the promise of a nonprofit organization, foundation and corporate sponsorship, and paid staff to do all the work of the festival instead of relying on volunteers—was also rejected. The idea to unite all the festivals in Rogers Park under one umbrella—including a Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival, Lifeline’s KidFest, the Loyola Park’s Artists of the Wall, and a number of music festivals sponsored by local clubs—and host them at the same time to attract a larger non-local audience and increase their economic impact was also not supported. Although individuals continued to pursue efforts on their own, what brought people together was their shared interest in maintaining the diversity of Rogers Park and their preference for acting on this interest by sponsoring art activities through a network form of organization. However, they each advocated in their own way for solving problems that threatened Rogers Park’s racial, ethnic, and cultural balance. Glenwood Avenue became the center of this problem-solving activity, drawing in community improvers, cultural entrepreneurs, and social activists, who together formed an alliance against proposals for strip malls, new condo constructions, TIF districts, and streetscape projects that framed “problems” as something only “development” could solve. Of the three types of diversity advocates, some social activists remained staunchly against real estate development and the arts district, yet were in-

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creasingly tolerant of the festival. Cultural entrepreneurs, as proprietors of small businesses, supported the festival but were generally against development because of its potential to price them out of their own market. Community improvers were the most willing to support the idea of an arts district and to listen to developers’ ideas. But just as some residents welcomed the potential for increased value of their property, for others the possibility for increased property values had the negative potential to raise their property taxes to levels beyond which they could pay. Without a full-blown streetscape project to bring out the quaint, European flavor of the brick, asphalt, and cement of Glenwood Avenue, the problem-solving network redefined the place and built enduring ties for continuing to host the festival, which in 2009 was in its eighth year. By this time, many thousands of people crowded the street during the festival; it was even announced throughout the region on the Jewel supermarket checkout line tele­ vision network as a “fun family event.” Although admission of the public to the festival remained free, artists and others who wanted tent space on the street were charged a fee to participate in the festival; festival permits from the city of Chicago allowing for the legitimate sale of food, drinks, and art became standard practice of the festival by 2005, yet the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival remained an activity of a network of volunteers, with Lifeline Theatre as its fiscal agent managing income and expenses, including donated funds, festival fees, and permits. For local residents and businesses, art as a community-building strategy was a proactive response to conflict amid a changing post-industrial metropolis. Unlike the activist muralists in Bronzeville who began producing murals as a way to be engaged with and to engage poor residents in cultural production, Rogers Park nonprofit organizations and small businesses produced murals and events to address signs of decline and neglect while representing diversity in a positive light and to resist the whitewashing that often accompanies infrastructure and real estate investment. Moreover, as an activity carried out through a network structure, it provided an organizational alternative to traditional mechanisms of cultural hierarchy long employed by the dominant culture. Diversity advocates working with residents and business owners mobilized local resources in response to the changing demographics of the locale. Art produced through a problem-solving network created images of diversity and experiences with diverse people while maintaining stability in a changing urban place. The success of local problem-solving efforts were heralded by Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones when he reported on the 2009 Joseph

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Jefferson Awards (the Jeff Awards) to three Rogers Park theaters: Lifeline Theatre, Theo Ubique, and Side Project. After first reminding readers of the abrupt exodus of Curious Theatre Company from the Glenwood Avenue Arts District in 2004 after crime rates increased and wilding teenagers attacked theatergoers, Jones recounted how in speech after speech, each of the Jeff winners attributed their success to the sense of place they had in their artistic home, Rogers Park, and stated that “artists always do their best work when they feel like they have a home.” Jones also heralded Rogers Park alderman Joe Moore as one of “Chicago’s most arts-supportive alderman.” But Moore in turn rightly credited neighborhood residents and businesses for banding together and making what he termed “the turnaround” possible (Jones 2009).

SEVEN

Gentrification Networks and the Whitewashing of Culture

Gentrification and Urban Transformation Artists as Complicit Actors in Urban Transformation The term “gentrification” has been broadly applied since the 1970s by academics and urbanites to explain the class-based transition of local places. The term conjures images of well-heeled elites who take over working-class neighborhoods while remaining unsympathetic to loss of long-held homelands, workplaces, cultural identities, and local histories. Yet by focusing attention on a specific type of end user—that is, “the gentry”—it masks the public policies and social practices behind the transformation from a working-class to a middle- or upper-class place. Moreover, the definition of gentrification as a class-based transition (Zukin 1982; Logan and Molotch 1987; Clark 2004; Lloyd 2005) limits “culture” to that of the middle or upper class, leaving race and ethnic culture largely unexamined. By redefining gentrification as a local transformation resulting in (1) a piling up of the white middle and upper classes, (2) homogenization or the “whitewashing” of local culture, (3) an influx of global franchises, and (4) expansion of elite institutionalized culture through the nonprofit arts sector, we can see that ethnicity must be erased or made invisible for gentrification to occur. Seen in this light, the processes of gentrification, although often celebrated for the revenues they bring to cities and the increased property values they bring to some owners, are an extension of the institutional racism that has devalued property owned by non-whites and propelled segregation, while also devaluing ethnic culture. White as the Local Color This case study of art production networks in Pilsen shows the roles that artists play when growth machine developers come up against what I refer to

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as an ethnically driven stability machine—that is, a politically, financially, and culturally empowered alliance of ethnic institutions, organizations, and citizens, hell-bent on resisting the erasure of culture and displacement of ethnic people from valued urban spaces. In Pilsen, artists were found between these two powerful urban interests. Armed with little more than an art school education, artists are often considered by ethnics to be “foot soldiers for the gentry.” This case study shows why this is so. Yet it also shows how the activities of artists can lead to a variety of local cultural results: “whitewashing,” that is, the cultural transformation that excludes ethnic artists and ethnic practices from the local cultural production to establish arbitrary privileges for elite consumers; isolation of artists who pursue artistic autonomy; or ethnic engagement in activities to empower ethnic producers and legitimize ethnic art forms with traditional forms of civic authority. A gentrification network can be constituted by any group of people who share an interest in increasing the value of local resources. Yet two types of participants are typically involved: property developers, who drive the transformation process and stand to benefit the most from transfers of property, and a range of complicit actors, including small business owners, independent home owners, staff at nonprofit arts organizations, and artists positioned to at least marginally benefit by the economic and cultural transformation accompanying gentrification. The term “whitewashing” is derived from the historic practice of physically covering up or painting out murals and other signs and symbols of ethnic culture, but in this case the “whitening” of local culture is intended to encompass a more extensive range of practices designed to exclude ethnic artists and ethnic practices from local cultural production. As highlighted in this chapter, participants in the gentrification network are complicit with the processes that privilege white cultural producers and their cultural products, while excluding other art producers—who may also share an interest in increasing the value of local property, goods, and services—but who work against these practices because they limit artistic autonomy or they devalue ethnic culture. In effect, these resisters become an empowerment network.

Theories of Gentrification Urban sociologist Sharon Zukin defined gentrification as under way “when a higher class of people moves into a neighborhood, makes improvements to property that cause market prices and tax assessments to rise and so drives out the previous lower-class residents” (1982, 5). This is a useful definition that, in theory, would apply to any place no matter its racial or

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ethnic composition or culture, but was specifically based upon the cultural transformation of SoHo in Manhattan. Between 1950 and 1980, SoHo was the place for art in New York City and in the world. It became a hub for a modern, global art market distributing art from throughout the world. As Zukin (1982) found, gentrification occurred through the interests shared by global financiers and city government in the wholesale revalorization of industrial-era property into structures more useful to a post-industrial finance economy. Among those also active in SoHo’s gentrification networks were upwardly mobile non-artists—middle- and upper-class professionals— who were interested in living among SoHo’s bohemian artists. The strength of this theory is that it looks beyond the argument of “spontaneous” market activity as an explanation of the class-based transition and instead illuminates the economic interests behind such development. However, the theory fails to distinguish between the interests of artists who are complicit with gentrification and those who are not; moreover, this definition does little to address investment and transformation in non-white locales. Logan and Molotch’s (1987) neo-Marxist critique of the urban growth machine focused on markets and the conflict that arises between use values and exchange values of city property. Yet they argued that culture is the force behind the economics because cultures define markets: “Markets themselves are the result of cultures; markets are bound up with human interests in wealth, power and affection. Markets work through such interests and the institutions that are derived from them. These human forces organize how markets will work, what prices will be, as well as the behavioral responses to prices” (1987, 9; emphasis in the original). Yet their view of “culture” did not account for the cultural capital embedded in the arts and ethnic cultures or for the logic propelling artistic interests in autonomy. In fact, none of the literature on gentrification or urban transformation investigated how the value of artistic autonomy operated, whether by the same logic that drives economic interest or, as I argue, with logic different than either use or exchange values, which provide the logic of markets. Moreover, this literature did not investigate how and why the mobilization of political and cultural capital in ethnic places can successfully resist the cultural transformation that typically accompanies class-based transformation.

Gentrification in Chicago In Chicago’s city center, just as in Zukin’s (1982) case of downtown Manhattan, a class-based transformation began in the early 1970s with the Chicago 21 Plan to redevelop the inner city (City of Chicago 1973; Gapp 1973;

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Rast 2001). Behind the plan were Chicago’s wealthiest elites, who argued that change was necessary for the city to survive into the twenty-first century. They envisioned a city transformed from one in which the city center was an island surrounded by a moat of poverty and squalor to one in which the center would rise like a summit amid a mountain range of economic, cultural, political, and social activity. The plan set in motion neoliberal policies based upon public/private partnerships, in which large multinational corporations and small private investors acted in consort with public agencies. These policies operated through a growth consensus that powered the “growth machine” (Molotch 1976; Logan and Molotch 1987). As the city aggressively deployed its power over land use, infrastructure investment, the distribution of federal urban development funds, and other policy tools (Rast 2001), downtown infrastructures and properties were redeveloped and values escalated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, properties in areas near the Loop, such as Bronzeville and Pilsen, were seen to possess latent value and unrealized tax revenues by the growth machine seeking to expand into the inner city, whereas distant places such as Rogers Park were of little interest to developers but were increasingly attractive to those renters and property owners displaced by real estate development in and around the city center. As the policy direction was set in motion—moving outward initially from the city center toward the northern and northwestern sections of the city—leaders in inner-city ethnic locales began to mobilize resistance to the cultural transformation of their locales by seeking legitimate power in the establishment of ethnic cultural institutions and by valorization of ethnic cultural practices. The policy direction set forth by the Chicago 21 Plan was directed toward increasing the value of local properties through infrastructure investment by the city and by private investment in properties. As policy fueling the growth machine, it began with investment in city services and structures in the downtown city center, and then extending north and northwest, which led to property transfers there among independent property owners, and to new large- and small-scale construction. These processes generated new income for the city and for property developers. This policy direction also led to expansion of the institution of culture through growth in the size and in the number of nonprofit art organizations operating within the city center and north of the downtown area. Change typically occurred building by building, block by block. What began in the downtown Loop business district proceeded north to the Near North and Old Town areas, then to the adjoining Lincoln Park area by the

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early 1980s. Lakeview, an entertainment district first popular with gay men and then other young professionals, became attractive to upper-middle-class professionals when developments such as the town homes of “Sweeterville” replaced the Reed Candy Factory, and lofts and condos of “The Brewery” revalorized an old Schlitz Brewery. By the end of the 1990s, the class-based transformation could also be seen in the West Town community area comprised of Wicker Park and Bucktown. Although the West Loop industrial area was never densely populated by artists as was SoHo in New York, during the 1990s it was transformed from an abandoned industrial area populated by indigent transients and the dispossessed into a commercial district filled with condominium lofts, restaurants, and galleries, appearing as a commercial arts district without ever having a substantial number of artist inhabitants. Then University Village was built south and west of the Loop. Distinctive by its scale: an 87-acre, $700 million newly constructed development extended south to the border of Pilsen. Driven by the development interests of the city of Chicago and the University of Illinois, an entire neighborhood was razed and then rebuilt from the ground up by a single developer. The crumbling Maxwell Street Market area along four blocks of Halsted Street was bulldozed for 930 new condos, townhouses, and lofts; dormitories and other university facilities; along with 120,000 square feet of retail space (Pearce 2002). These commercial spaces attracted nationally franchised bookstores, coffee shops, restaurants, and clothing stores that could afford the scaled-up rents. In little more than a year, Maxwell Street was transformed from a slum into an upper-middle-class neighborhood—producing what took two decades to accomplish in the areas around the Loop, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and Wicker Park.

Gentrification: Establishment of Arbitrary Privileges Increasing the Value of Local Resources By redefining gentrification as the activities of a network brought together by a shared interest in increasing the value of local resources—including property, goods, and services—and then distinguishing between the cultural processes that lead to cultural homogenization versus cultural involvement and enrichment, we can distinguish between the cultural pattern of gentrification and that of empowerment. Gentrification networks seek to assert arbitrary privileges and create exclusive spaces for a delimited class of people while simultaneously excluding others and devaluing property and

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practices of culture outside of the whitewashed frame; empowerment networks seek investment while preserving and enriching the reserves of ethnic culture, as discussed more fully in chapter 8. Although the economic and cultural practices that characterize gentrification are sanctioned, they are part and parcel of social inequality, as argued by Bourdieu (1984). It is important to note that no section of Pilsen had, as of 2008, seen the wholesale razing, rebuilding, and homogenization of culture that happened blocks north of Pilsen in the former Bohemian settlement of Praha, now “University Village.” This is in part due to Pilsen’s long history of laborbased activism that has been sustained through ethnic political activism centered on Mexican identity and culture. In addition to this social and historic identity, geography has also limited development. Although it is just south and west of the city center, Pilsen has never been the kind of place to which wealthier people wanted to move. It was a low-lying floodplain that still, in the twenty-first century, was plagued by flooding during heavy rains. It is where elite families, such as the McCormick family—owners of International Harvester and later the Chicago Tribune—had built their nineteenth-century factories. These same factory buildings were left behind as the companies moved production to outlying rural areas and then outside the United States altogether. As a result, the quality and value of local commercial infrastructure and resources declined to the point of being worthless for any industrial production, leaving the local residential infrastructure and its value also to decline until the 1960s. As Bohemian Czech and other Eastern European laborers moved west to the suburbs, two new groups—Mexicans and artists—moved in. Although many of its properties are owner occupied, several real estate firms operated on its easternmost section. The Pilsen Gateway for Gentrification The Pilsen Gateway on Halsted Street just south of University Village is appropriately named, as it was built to invite a new class of resident into Pilsen. The new construction of loft/condos was to attract independent property speculators and short-term property owners who used the finance capital available before the 2008 collapse of the financial sector to buy and resell property as a source of income. The condominium project, promoted as the “first new construction in Pilsen in 30 years,” was built in 2003. Few local residents thought there was any chance of finding buyers for the thirty-two condo units offered for $190,000–$350,000 in 2002–2003 as these cost more than even a refurbished single-family home or two-flat.

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Insight into exactly how it began to change the relationships among local property owners and planted the seeds for the kind of cultural homogenization fostered by University Village became evident through my interaction with Edith Altman. She was an artist who had lived and worked in Pilsen since 1985 in a loft she owned that adjoined the construction site. As construction began in 2003, I was helping Altman prepare for a retrospective exhibition of her art. She lived just off of Halsted Street, next to the Pilsen Gateway condo development. Beyond her building was vacant land intermingled with wood-framed homes owned largely by Mexican Americans. Altman was a widow who lived in the industrial building she and her husband had converted into a loft in 1983 after purchasing it with another professional artist couple. They divided the brick, two-story former mechanic’s garage—built on a 200-square-foot lot with a walled-in junkyard—into an artistic nirvana. Each loft had a large studio space on the first floor and a second-story loft for living. The self-contained live/work space surrounded by a walled garden with secured parking created an environment conducive to pursuit of her artistic goals. Yet poor drainage was still a problem as the streets flooded during heavy rains and the smell of sewer gas was often present. Her neighbor was the property owner behind the Pilsen Gateway condo project. He announced his plans just after the city’s arts district report was released. At this point in her career, Altman was preoccupied with a number of large-scale exhibitions of her work in regional and university-based museums, among them a retrospective of her lifetime of work planned for exhibit in Germany. Altman had escaped from Nazi Germany with her family when she was twelve years old. As a Holocaust survivor, some of her later artwork addressed how the Nazis secured power through the manipulation of symbols. When her husband died in 1999, she was at first challenged by the daily maintenance of the aging loft building. She ignored, for example, the sawdust that dropped on her clean display table each day, unaware that carpenter ants had infested her skylight twenty feet overhead. However, she was increasingly distracted by the construction activity of her neighbor. She had gotten along with her neighbor Pete (pseudonym) and often referred artists to him as potential renters of his properties before he built the condo units. She recounted how during the condo construction his project disrupted her life and changed their relationship. I had some problems with him recently. You know he owns the lot behind me. He put up a trailer to sell the condos in the building he is constructing

164 / Chapter Seven across the street. As he has started digging the foundation for his new building across the street, he had his worker place the dirt from the foundation in the lot directly behind me. I went out and asked the guy who was dumping the dirt if he would not put it there. That lot is on high ground—it is higher than my lot. There is going to be a mud slide covering up the sewer. (Altman interview 2002)

According to Altman, direct interaction among owners had usually been enough to address any issue that arose, as the property owners were united by a shared interest in maintaining their own property, its value, and their own security in a locale with active street gangs, vacant lots, and moldering, obsolete industrial buildings. Alerting one of Chicago’s many maintenance and regulatory authorities such as the Department of Zoning, the fire marshal, or the Departments of Streets and Sanitation of problems was often avoided, as it invited intrusion by the web of city authorities into the artists’ live/work environment, still illegal in the city. So Altman first tried to settle the problem on her own with the property owner. I called over to Pete, who said something to Dorian [pseudonym], the guy who was doing the digging. I went outside and explained that I was worried that when it rains there would be a mud slide and the sewer would plug. Dorian looked at the sewer and said that the sewer needed to be cleaned anyway and that I should call the sewer department. (Altman interview 2002)

This comment was intended to be dismissive of Altman’s concerns. Both Dorian and Altman understood such action could lead to the intrusion of bureaucratic red tape for both Altman and her neighbor. Miffed at the worker’s disregard, Altman did call the sewer department. I called the sewer department. They sent someone over who said, “Yes, the sewer needed to be cleaned,” but this sewer was not on their map. So one guy said maybe it was on another map. Then they asked if I knew anyone in City Hall I could call because they could not clean out the sewer, but dumping the dirt in the empty lot “was illegal.” So I called my alderman. We had an appointment for the next day in the alley. [In the mean time, Dorian] came to visit me. He said, “You aren’t going to start anything now, are you.” He said that I already “opened up a can of worms.” And if I got an inspector over, the inspector might just find something wrong with my property. (Altman interview 2002)

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As a widow and an artist who lived alone in an industrial space, Altman was cognizant of her own vulnerability. She was aware that city zoning regulations had never fully approved the idea of artists living and working in an industrial space. Zoning officials claimed to be upholding industrial-era worker protection that prohibited sweatshops, yet were also to protect the interest of the city in preserving industrial space within the city limits. In her frustration, Altman acknowledged, “I am an artist living and working in the same space. We paid someone a lot of money to rehab this space. I think everything is up to code,” she said. “But the guy dumping the dirt said ‘You’d be surprised what they might find.’ So he threatened me” (Altman interview 2002). Property development in the area, even by longtime local property owners, meant a shift in the shared interest that kept stability in the area. Because of Altman’s concern over possible damage to her building foundation, she had done what she could to keep the sewer from flooding. However, her neighbor, focused on his multimillion-dollar building project, dismissed her concerns. Instead, he thought she should share his interest in increased property values—something he claimed she would realize simply by being adjacent to his higher-value property. She recounted his dismissal, “He said, ‘I don’t know what is wrong with the artists in this area. They should be happy. I am making their property more valuable.’ ” Altman thought that their long history as local residents and property owners should lead him to a different response. “I thought I would get a little more respect than that, but [instead] he threatened me. So I did not know who to call. The next day, I just kept my mouth shut. I heard a noise and there was a bulldozer moving the dirt away from my building” (Altman interview 2002). Altman got the very specific result she wanted in this particular conflict with Pete, but it marked the end of their shared interest as local property owners. The new building brought a new class of property owners to Pilsen, young professionals whose interest was aggressively invested in short-term increases in the value of local property. According to public records, most of the thirty-two condos were sold during construction in 2002–2003; within two years, ten of the condos were back on the market selling for an average increased price of $40,400 more than the initial sale prices of $190,000– $350,000. Sales from May 2005 to June 2006 topped a $60,000 increase in value. Among the condo buyers, 22 percent had Latino names; 12 percent were Asian. During this time, Altman did what many artists do who are confronted with the economic and cultural changes brought by gentrification: she self-selected out and sold her loft. As it sold for $700,000—ten times

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her initial investment of $70,000—she was able to benefit from the local development, although angry that she felt in some ways “forced” to leave Pilsen. She moved north of Chicago to be near members of her synagogue. She purchased a loft/condo in the northern suburb of Evanston. Construction of new multi-unit condominiums, such as the Pilsen Gate­ way, is only one kind of investment driven by a finance economy that supports the homogenization of local culture that characterizes gentrification. Reminiscent of “slash and burn” techniques to clear forests, it accomplishes its goal by fully clearing out outmoded structures and their users. However, it is not the only example of the efforts by a gentrification network in Pilsen. The Land of Pod The obsolete factory buildings, surrounded by wood-framed two-flats that once provided housing for immigrant factory workers, were redeveloped into “open format artist spaces” by John Podmajersky II, the son of Slovakian immigrants who settled in Pilsen in 1914. When the Podmajersky family first moved to Pilsen, it was still dominated by Bohemians, Eastern European ethnics from the region of Bohemia, in the present-day Czech Republic. Early on, Podmajersky did much of the rehab work on his properties, investing both money and sweat into his buildings. He described the environment he constructed around these spaces and interior courtyards as “bringing humanity back to human beings,” “building a neighborhood around human feeling and connection,” and “developing an environment that nurtured people and inspired them” (Chicago Journal 2001a). “Podville” was the name used by its tenants and other residents of Pilsen because of the monopoly control exerted by the Podmajersky family over an area spanning three blocks in any direction from the intersection of Halsted and Eighteenth streets. Now a multimillion-dollar real estate firm, it operated somewhere between two to three hundred rental units, with artists as its primary market. Podmajersky was often quoted in newspaper accounts explaining how he convinced the first artists to move into his properties from Hyde Park, when the Harper Square area populated by artists faced “urban renewal” in the 1960s. The artists moved into a nondescript “grey loft building” (Adelman [1979] 1983) in a desolate section of Pilsen at the corner of Eighteenth and Halsted streets. Podmajersky explained why artists were his ideal tenant: “The artists were low maintenance, and they are great people to be around,” he said. “I’d rather rent to people who have passion and inspiration in their

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lives and appreciate beauty. The arts have that and so do the blue-collar people” (Pearce 2002). Through his support of artistic activities, such as the Pilsen East Artists Open House—an event initiated and organized by his artist renters in 1970 and often referred to as the “Art Walk”—Podmajersky nurtured what amounted to a corporate brand built around artistic autonomy. One mea­ sure of his success was his ability to fill vacancies by referrals only from renters (Chicago Journal 2001b). By 1970 Mexican culture was also flourishing in the eastern section of Pilsen, as evidenced by a number of murals by Mexican American muralist Mario Castillo painted in 1968–69 while he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Many of these murals were painted over as the corporate real estate firm took ownership of more local property. Podville renters like Eric Medine, the proprietor of Drivethru Studios, valued the artistic autonomy they had as “Pods.” “I can do what I do first, because I am a ‘Pod,’ ” he said. “I originally found this space so I can show my work and not have to deal with someone telling me, ‘Oh, you can’t do that here’ ” (Medine interview 2003). As a resident of Podville, he was part of the ArtPilsen Collective and a rental market built around the tenants’ shared interest in artistic autonomy, and he knew no one would care if he transformed his space into a life-size mousetrap game or held a “body banquet,” in which food was served upon the body of a naked woman. Podville was a successful real estate market built around such highly motivated artists, a number topping fifteen hundred over thirty years, according to the Podville website, ChicagoArtsDistrict.com (2002). Although some artists had lived in Podville since the 1960s, most were transient, short-term tenants. Spaces were quickly filled by the steady stream of young artists still in area art schools and university art programs attracted to the aura of “bohemian” artists in the area. Even though rents were relatively low compared to properties just over the Chicago River and closer to the downtown Loop, they were higher than those just a few blocks west in what has become the largely Mexican sections of Pilsen. Yet few commercial operations—such as local grocery stores, restaurants, or professional offices—existed in the six-square-block area of Podville, and most of its street-level commercial spaces were vacant or occupied by his artist renters with limited business operations. Accounts by tenants and non-tenants alike provide insight into the fine line between autonomy and control, empowerment and gentrification, and corporate redirecting of efforts that once sought to support the creative efforts of artists—no matter how quirky—into an increasingly aggressive

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gentrification effort intent on increasing the rental values of properties. These accounts show a real estate corporation’s role in efforts to increase the commercial appeal of the area by rebranding it as the “Chicago Arts District”;1 they show how some renters were complicit with Podmajersky’s effort to attract a higher class of consumers, while others actively resisted these efforts. Increasing the Values of Other Resources In 1978 Elena Romani and her husband, Marco (both pseudonyms), founded the nonprofit arts organization Pros Arts Studio in the center of Pilsen. “Back then they couldn’t give buildings away. You needed to be a pioneer to move in here,” she said. Romani, a performance artist, and Marco, a builder who worked for a nonprofit community development corporation, were among the independent urban pioneers who bought inner-city buildings in which to live and produce art. Interested in property for its use value, Romani and her husband purchased the brick two-flat to live in and produce art. The property was located where Mexican families intermixed with families of other ethnic backgrounds. They invested time and energy into their property and wanted their investment to not decrease over time, but their purpose was not primarily investment. In this sense, one could argue they are part of a local network interested in the increased value of local property, yet their interest was in making Pilsen a place with cultural value, not just value in real estate. Romani’s work in the nonprofit art organization invested in local culture as a resource. Pros Arts Studio worked with local youth and their families to end gang violence; they produced murals with youth to get rid of the gang tagging and other signs of urban decline caused by wholesale abandonment of property. Romani and her colleagues at Pros Arts were also among the cultural pioneers who first aggressively pursued foundations and government agencies to fund community-based art programs that they carried out with local schools and social service programs, extending the reach of the institutions of culture into the locale. Romani moved to Pilsen as she finished her master’s degree in perfor­ mance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At that time in 1978, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum had not been founded; and although the demographic proportion of Mexican Americans in the locale was increasing, Mexican culture had not gained cultural dominance. Her own approach to performance, which once included beach and street performances, changed as she became more involved with Pilsen residents.

Gentrification Networks and the Whitewashing of Culture / 169 We used to do this thing called “art attacks.” We would pull up to a corner and start performing. Eventually, Marco [her husband], got involved. But at first he thought we were nuts. Even when we did the first parade, which we did mostly to get some stuff from [an art gallery on] Hubbard Street to Pilsen, Marco hid. He thought we would get shot. It was a pretty dangerous place then. (Romani interview 2003)

Art attacks were just the beginning of their local performances that were increasingly intent on getting rid of gang violence while engaging local youth in arts activity. Yet from the first parade in which art objects and people safely moved through the locale, public performance became a tactic to reclaim the streets and build positive public interaction. “Collaboration is a big part of [what we do], but also working with our neighbors, acting on their suggestions. You can live in a neighborhood but be part of a community,” said Romani. The name “Pros Arts” was derived from their first program with the local Catholic school, St. Procopius School, locally known as “St. Pros.” The organization would expand the network of people likely to be involved in local art production from art students, mutually involved in each other’s work, to including Mexican children, their parents, and social service administrators. They were among the first arts organizations to hire “teaching artists,” a new occupational group of independent, self-employed artists who, like Romani, would carry out art projects with youth and be paid as contractors through grant-funded social service and arts programs. At that time, Urban Gateways [youth art program] was just getting started. This is back when it was really an “urban gateway” giving inner-city kids access to the arts. [One of the staff members there] encouraged us to found an organization—not just a consortium of artists—so we could get grants. This was in March of 1978. I was collaborating with Sandra Cisneros2 who taught at Latino Youth [a social service agency and alternative school for youth at risk of getting involved in criminal activity]. When she moved on, she left the program to me. The program, founded by Cisneros and Rudy Lanzano, used “drug money,” that is, CETA funds from the federal government intended for programs to stop drug use. They did writing programs with kids and published chap books. Danny Solis [who later became the alderman for Pilsen] was the principal [at Latino Youth]. (Romani interview 2003)

Through such work, the educational mission of the nonprofit organization Pros Arts Studio became focused on ethnic culture rather than supporting

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cultural homogenization as a by-product of increased values of local property and service. It would also become a place through which artists could carry out art projects with youth. Romani liked working with youth, but it was also a way to support herself as an artist. “[I’m] drawn to it because it’s fun and the kids keep me thinking. But another reason to go into teaching is: this is where you get paid. You don’t get paid jumping up and down behind a screen [as a performance artist].” According to Romani, the “Pros Arts’ approach means involving your neighbors in what you do and acting on their suggestions. It’s not only about doing your own work, but involving and teaching others, and the work gets changed by who is in it” (Romani interview 2003). Although Romani and her husband were of Italian lineage, not Mexican, the organization hired several artists of Latino descent and sponsored largely Mexican ethnic events. They staged celebrations on Mexican holidays and drew upon popular Mexican imagery, such as that of José Guadalupe Posada, for example, as part of their cultural programs. Pros Arts programs linked local art activity with Mexican cultural traditions—intermixing American clowning with Italian commedia dell’arte and comedic skills modeled after Cantinflas, a lovable clown known throughout Mexico and often referred to as “Latin America’s Chaplin.” Their art events were structured as culminating activities for youth-centered art classes, block parties, or ethnic processions celebrating Mexican ethnic heritage. The most popular of these holidays was Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, on November 1 and 2, first sponsored by Pros Arts in 1979 and now an annual celebration with a procession throughout Pilsen and performances by and for children in schools and a nearby park.

Exclusive Spaces for Elite-Culture Consumers Using Artists as a Pivot Point for a New Real Estate Market in Podville In contrast to the work of Pros Arts—which was founded upon the involvement of Mexican families—in the farthest east section of Podville, four blocks east of Halsted Street, was a collective of artists whose shared interest in artistic autonomy shaped their activities. Although they had little interest in increased property values, they did want to increase the visibility of their artistic work. Their efforts were ultimately co-opted by the real estate corporation they rented from. As participants in the ArtPilsen Collective, they held regular art openings in their apartments, which they referred to as “domestic spaces” (Aubuchon

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interview 2003). They coordinated their art openings for the second Friday of each month, to attract and share audiences. Once the Podville corporate management became aware of the “Second Friday” events, for which hundreds of people trekked to this quiet, residential section of Podville east of the Dan Ryan overpass, the Podville property manager sought to entice the galleries of the ArtPilsen Collective to move to its long vacant commercial space on Halsted Street. Kimberly Aubuchon, the proprietor of Unit B, recounted how the property manager prodded her to move from her basement apartment on Des Plaines Street to a more visible commercial space on Halsted Street. [He] has been coming to the openings, like the last three, and has been blown away. It’s packed. It’s always packed. He’s just amazed that it happens, first of all. The first time he came was Valentine’s Day. . . . It was one of the biggest attendances I’ve seen. He couldn’t believe that people crawled out of their houses in the middle of winter to come to Pilsen to look at art. He’s actually had a couple meetings with me and some of the other, well, all of the galleries that he rents to, about getting us into, well, he wants to liven up that stretch of Halsted he has control over, you know. And I’m like, “Good for you.” He says he doesn’t want a Dunkin’ Donuts there. He is having a hard time finding people that can do it, I guess. (Aubuchon interview 2003)

Conscious of her own autonomy in showing artwork out of the front room of her basement apartment, and committed to the successful collaboration among the artists of the ArtPilsen Collective, Aubuchon resisted the offers by the manager, even though they carried the potential for more commercial activity: I said, “I can’t do this. I’m paying $725 for this. I didn’t get a raise last year and Podville raised my rent, you know.” He said, like, “Well, we’ll maybe subsidize you. We want to get you in a space up there. I think you would be great in a storefront space. If you’re getting crowds like this, what kind of crowds would you get there? Maybe you’d sell more art. Maybe you’ll get a different clientele.” (Aubuchon interview 2003)

Aubuchon emphasized that the “domestic” environment combined with the successful collaborative arrangement among artists of the ArtPilsen Collective was one of the reasons she thought the shows at her place were intriguing; they attracted crowds and opened doors at other galleries for her and the artists in her shows. To move into a more commercial setting, in

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which sales would ultimately be necessary to stay afloat, might compromise the ethos that was generated through the current arrangement. My response was “maybe.” I don’t know. You know, I really like this space a lot and I have a backyard. It’s a home/gallery/studio. Seriously, I don’t know. I worry what would happen if I take it out of this domestic setting, because it’s kind of what all these spaces are all about to begin with. And if we move to those more commercial spaces, I just worry about the—I don’t know, maybe I’m just being paranoid—but I worry about the integrity of the collective, how it will survive, if it will be able to survive. If I take a risk like that and I fail, then it’s over, ‘cause I don’t have anything. I don’t have any money. (Aubuchon interview 2003)

Aubuchon pointed out that she was still paying off a twenty-year $20,000 loan she took out to pay for her master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And, as she put it, she was barely making her rent through an administrative job at one of the downtown museums. As a fortyyear-old woman, she joked she had little financial freedom to look forward to: “Finish paying off school loan, enter wheelchair” was her prognosis for her future (Aubuchon interview 2003). Rather than move to Halsted Street, Aubuchon and another ArtPilsen member, Heather Burkart, co-owner of Gallery SixFourFive, agreed to work with the management on a number of curated exhibitions to take place in his commercial spaces for the Pilsen East Artists Open House and Art Walk. Arts Districts and Zoning Policy The shift of Podville’s management strategy from marketing to artists to using artists as a pivot point for a new commercial market became clear in 2002. When the time came for the 32nd Annual Pilsen East Artists Open House Art Walk to take place, it never happened. Rather, Podville’s managers used the annual event to unveil the repackaging of Podville as the “Chicago Arts District.” They took advantage of the policy initiative put forth by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and put it to use as a marketing brand for Podville property. City bureaucrats seeking to develop cultural policy, artists interested in showing their work and building their exhibition résumés, and Podville employees working to make the Art Walk a success became complicit actors in a gentrification effort that was about to take a sharper focus on a narrower market.

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Although some people thought properties throughout Pilsen had the potential for rapid escalation in value, as occurred around artists in SoHo, few people were aware of how SoHo operated as a place for artists before it caught the interest of Wall Street financial investors. Over the course of a half century, SoHo’s art producers were able to achieve a stable living environment, as chronicled by Charles R. Simpson (1981). SoHo activists—led by author and urban preservation scholar Jane Jacobs (who was ultimately arrested and charged with second-degree rioting for her role disrupting a State Highway Department hearing, as accounted in Simpson 1981, 142)— won legitimate recognition for artists within city zoning laws. Through astute local activism and urban innovation, artists won the right to live, work, and own space in these industrial lofts. According to Simpson, SoHo “developed as a local community—spatially organized system of inter­ action among neighbors—out of the cultural and organizational resources of a preexisting metropolitan occupational community” (186). It involved a full range of producers necessary for the occupation: artists, gallery owners, critics, academics, skilled laborers, and advocates. Moreover, as early as the 1960s, SoHo artists formed cooperative associations to occupy and remodel entire factory buildings for studio and residential use (Simpson 1981, 2). This was a territorial place and “occupational community” that took into account and supported artists’ shared interest in autonomy. But Pilsen was not SoHo, just as Chicago was not New York. In spite of efforts by city bureaucrats in Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the zoning change had not occurred, leaving artists’ interest in autonomy to be confounded by the fact that zoning laws barred artists from legally working and living at the same time in the same structure. This legal barrier helped to sustain their transience while empowering property owners, such as the owners of Podville real estate, to lease out artistic autonomy as part of limited rental agreements. A report drafted by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), “Chicago Artists’ Space Strategy” (2002), sought to motivate a change in the Chicago zoning law, which was under revision in 20023 for the first time in nearly one hundred years. But rather than make a wholesale change in zoning law, the report sought to establish limited “arts districts” and identified Pilsen as “an informal art district [serving as] a model for an Art District Strategy that could be replicated in other Chicago neighborhoods” (2). It offered policy recommendations that would provide arts districts with “formal recognition or long-term civic support mechanisms.” The report, authored by artist and city bureaucrat Barbara Koenen, recommended the city deploy

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zoning tools consistent with “industrial corridors, residential neighborhoods, commercial corridors, and landmark districts” (8). Highlighting the unique circumstances of artists’ work and their unique contributions to the city, the report identified the special space and housing needs of artists: To control expenses and to allow spontaneous access to their work, artists often prefer to live in or adjacent to their studios. They generally need big, flexible spaces, lots of natural light, adequate ventilation, freight elevators, and storage. . . . Artists are particularly vulnerable to displacement, since they help to create an identity in an area, only to suffer from it as prices rise. And when they are renters rather than owners, as is the case with most local artists, they are unable to benefit from rising property values. (2002, 2)

According to the study, the problem was not one affecting only artists; it was one that weakened “cultural life in the city as a whole.” It identified five components of an arts district: concentration of arts activity, special recognition by the city, specific promotion, creation of incentives, and implementing policy. Key to planning recommended by the report was the goal “to protect the affordability and long-term stability of the arts and neighborhood” (8). The study asserted: “Pilsen unquestionably qualifies as an arts district under the ‘concentration of arts activities’ criterion [already] outlined. . . . In addition to the residential artists, a recent DCA cultural resources survey identified over twenty arts-related uses and organizations within the community area, and another 25 within a mile radius” (9). The study identified two anchors for the arts district on Eighteenth Street: the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and the Asociación Pro-Derechos Obreros, referred to as the APO Building, which housed a gallery and artist studios. It also mentioned the “Halsted Street artists’ colony developed by the Podmajersky family beginning in the 1960s. . . . With artists targeted as their preferred tenant base, the Podmajersky properties have been a force in preventing gentrification in Pilsen up to this time” (11). Whether it encouraged the belief held by some speculators that the values of local property in Pilsen had the potential to rapidly escalate as they had in SoHo over the second half of the century (Simpson 1981; Zukin 1982), or it ignited fear in private property owners that regulation from the city could limit their ability to profit, the report fanned development already under way in the locale and stimulated new development, rather than succeeding to develop a policy mechanism that supported the informal arts networks. Local developers were convinced that Pilsen’s proximity to the

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downtown Loop business district and Pilsen’s obsolete warehouses, many of which were already revalorized as artists’ studios, had the potential to attract upwardly mobile young professionals drawn to the chic, cosmopolitan aura of a global arts market. Co-opting the Arts District So when the time came for the 2002 Pilsen East Artists Open House and Art Walk to take place, Podville’s managers instead produced an exclusive event and unveiled the “Chicago Arts District.” They took advantage of the policy initiative and used it as a brand for Podville property. This rebranding caught many by surprise, as it turned policy makers, artists, and employees into complicit actors, many unwittingly and unwillingly, with corporate efforts to attract a higher class of cultural consumer. For nearly thirty years, the organizational mechanism behind the Art Walk had been the volunteerism of artists from Podville; the event also included artists from throughout Pilsen, showcasing them in their studios, allowing them to act as their own agents in the sale of their work. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, people who were not “Pods” could pay a fee to be included in the event and were featured on the map that was distributed at the Art Walk. Including all artists of Pilsen was a strategic way to ensure that a crowd would show up; the sheer number of participating artists meant friends and families of the artists would provide the core audience of walkers throughout the then-gritty streets of Pilsen. Elena Romani and her husband, Marco, had lived and worked in central Pilsen but were active with artists, educators, and activists throughout Pilsen. The first time they participated in the Art Walk was 1976. At that time you couldn’t give buildings away in this area. You had to be a pioneer. [Local] kids either ended up in jail or at Latino Youth [a social service agency]. There were shootings every week, and it is still happening. Back then, you could pay to be listed in [the] Art Walk if you were not a Pod person. They got the Rotary Club involved; there was a trolley[-like bus] that took people all around, as far west as the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. The Art Walkers came [all the way over] here [three blocks west to Morgan]. Another year we had an event at Walsh School [across from Podville]. We sold hot dogs. It was really great to see all these Art Walkers come into the school where we were clowning and selling hot dogs. We tried to get involved this year, but they wouldn’t let us. And there was no trolley. (Romani interview 2003)

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The first year that Romani and Pros Arts were not allowed to participate was 2002 and would have been the 32nd Annual Artists Open House. The event shifted from an artist-led event, involving the full range of artists living and working in Pilsen, to an event staged and controlled by Podville management. Heather Burkart, a Podville administrative assistant, was listed as the “event coordinator.” Throughout the year, Heather and her partner Dave ran SixFourFive, a Pod gallery in a finished, chic commercial storefront on Eighteenth Street two blocks off of Halsted Street; they lived on the second floor above the storefront in a loft accessible via a spiral staircase in their kitchen. Her administrative work for the Podville management business led to her position as event coordinator for the Art Walk. Their gallery, SixFourFive (named for the building address), functioned more like a commercial gallery than the rest of the ArtPilsen Collective. They mounted monthly exhibitions, represented other artists, and assertively sought to sell work. Burkart’s vision was to “raise the national stature” of the event to something more than an artists’ open house (Burkart interview 2002). Aubuchon and Burkart put together CS/32 a curated exhibition to open the week before the 32nd Annual Art Walk, which was to be an exclusive open studio event of the newly proclaimed Chicago Arts District. In addition, they arranged for a national art exchange “with the prestigious New Haven City-Wide Open Studios project, featuring a selection of some of the finest artwork from the Eastern seaboard” (Chicago Arts District press release 2002). When she was asked by a local reporter why the Art Walk and other events excluded all but Pod artists, Burkart she said, “We’d love to be totally inclusive, but logistically, it just doesn’t work” (Isaacs 2002). As the repackaging of Pilsen East was unveiled a week in advance of the citywide Chicago Artists Month in October, local artists living outside of Podville organized a boycott of the scaled-down event showcasing art only in Podville studios and commercial spaces. Mayhem in the Arts District The move to exclude everyone but “Pods” led to mayhem during the weekend event, including protests and a parade of “artistes refuses.” Led by sculptor Kenneth Morrison, they marched through what he referred to as “the land of Pod.” It is a place, as he put it, where nobody talks because they are afraid of being exiled. “I’m one of the only people who has nothing to lose, because I own my own building” across the street from the borders of Podville. They protested the “exclusive and divisive event” (Isaacs 2002).

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News reports quoted angry artists charging that “Pod People took over the event.” They usurped and redesigned the event to attract what they defined as “qualified art buyers . . . those who have the capacity to buy or make offers of opportunities” (Isaacs 2002). The street performance and protest during the exclusive Art Walk drew on the already finally tuned skills of local residents in costuming and making noise. It included street exhibitions, protest signs, and a “ragtag band . . . [of] celebrants dressed in fuzzy animal suits, and sombreros” (Isaacs 2002). But long before the controversy surrounding the exclusivity of the 2002 Art Walk, artists had complained about the increasingly rigid structure imposed by Podville staff during the Art Walk, directed to framing the event as a market activity for both art and Podville property. Jane (pseudonym), who shared a Pod studio with several other artists, paid the $50 entry fee to participate in the open-studio event in 2001, but her studio-mates did not. Podville staff intended to bar participation by renters who got a “free ride” on the publicity and traffic of the event without paying the participation fee. Among the materials distributed to participants were instructions to artists on how to aggressively market their works to studio visitors. The suggestions included greet visitors, pass out business cards, and offer help. During the weekend run of the event that Jane had signed up for, a monitor passed through the Pod properties to survey whose works were on display in the studios. This person pressured artists who had not paid the exhibitor’s fee to remove works so as to not “steal business” from artists who had paid the fee. Jane was successful in selling several works during the event, and she even secured a commercial representative who would regularly market her work to corporate offices. Nonetheless, an opportunity for a better studio on the North Side of Chicago led Jane, like Edith Altman, to self-select out and leave Podville later that year. Moreover, within two years, every one of the Pods who participated in the ArtPilsen Collective had left Podville. Their departure allowed the Chicago Arts District corporate offices to take over the “Second Friday” events they had sponsored for several years and the ownership of the ArtPilsen.com domain. It is unclear whether Podville management prohibited exhibitions from “domestic spaces” like those that had been organized by the ArtPilsen Collective. But most of the thirty-five galleries promoted through its new website, ChicagoArtsDistrict.org, were along Halsted Street. These new Podville events in prime Podville commercial spaces lacked the consistency of those that were sponsored by the autonomous actors of the ArtPilsen Collective and were even more transitory than the artists themselves. This led at least one local art critic to question if the corporate control exerted throughout Podville was the cause:

178 / Chapter Seven Despite the obvious push to market Pilsen’s art spaces as “artist-run,” there has long been this specter of uniformity and corporatization that hangs over the whole place, due largely to the involvement of the Chicago Arts District (at www.chicagoartsdistrict.org), a group funded by the Podmajersky family (aka “the Pods” . . .)—who own much of the neighborhood real estate. It’s bred an argument that goes something like this: because most of the art spaces are underwritten by a real estate company, the suspicion is that they’re just trying to use art to raise the value of the property they own. Ergo, those spaces are robbed of their autonomy and are willful participants in the stifling of their own natural artistic development. It’s never been clear, exactly, how true this charge [is]. But one must honestly ask: what’s so godawful about an affluent property owner who wants to invest in the arts? (Workman 2005a)

The increasing focus of the Art Walk on art sales and on Pod real estate meant even fewer Pod artists participated in the annual open-studio event. Fern Shaffer, an artist in her late fifties, liked living among other Pods but rented a large studio space farther south, in Bridgeport. For Shaffer, the Art Walk provided little access for the kind of interaction she sought for her art. After participating in the open-studio event one year, she acknowledged that it “seemed successful because it attracted lots of people.” However, she did not like the intrusion into her privacy. “I don’t want those people—strangers who come to the Art Walk—in my house. When I did it before, the people that came didn’t care about the art. They just wanted to walk through people’s houses. I don’t want those people in my house,” she said (Shaffer interview 2002). The increasing focus of the event on Pod real estate, along with the escalating rents for apartments, led Shaffer to be among the transient artists who opted out of Podville, with Shaffer moving to Humboldt Park. Artists who left Pilsen criticized the Art Walk as an “interior design” showcase of Podville real estate rather than a showcase for art (Washington interview 2003). Indeed, a corporate press release for the event promoted the architectural spaces and gardens as one attraction of the event: Visitors to the open house will not only be able to wander throughout the workplaces of some of the most talented artists in Chicago. They will also be treated to the hidden beauty and serene surroundings of numerous off-street courtyards and gardens, many of which have been recognized by the city’s Department of the Environment for their visual appeal and creative intricacy. (Podmajersky press release 2002)

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The annual event and the monthly “Second Friday” exhibitions, now fully appropriated as a marketing tool by a single real estate corporation, more aggressively stoked the marketability of the Podville rental properties and was part of the successful business approach that enabled its management to charge substantially higher rents than landlords in the Mexican part of Pilsen, while maintaining a low vacancy rate. But unlike a new loft/condo development to the north of Podville, the Pilsen Gateway, Podville did not appeal to those real estate buyers; it sought a new rental market willing to pay more for space than its existing one. And unlike the artist sections of SoHo or Rogers Park, which were not owned by a single corporate interest, Podville was. The Podville rental market did set the stage for development of the properties surrounding it. The whitewashing of Pilsen East—first through the architectural redesign of industrial-era factories and immigrant housing, the homogenization of public space, the co-opting of a once artist-run studio walk, and then the creation of sterile, minimalist design spaces intended to attract a professional class of renter—occurred slowly over a thirty-year period in which the murals and signage that bespoke of Mexican ethnicity and the gritty, non-commercial artwork disappeared, replaced by the kind of art that could be displayed in the institutionally homogeneous style of “white box” downtown galleries. Artists living in this corporate rental market were increasingly expected to perform not only as makers of their own art but as polished sales agents of commodities destined to increase in value. The whitewashing of culture and the attraction of upscale consumers enabled property developers, small business owners, home owners, and a few among the highly educated artists to extract the value created through these interpersonal exchanges. Yet even though some art produced in Podville was sold and therefore had a market value of sorts, it was not part of the downtown and West Loop art market, nor was it recognized in a national or global market. Art sold in Podville did more to create value for local consumable goods, property rentals, and property transfers than it did to create a sustainable market value for the art itself. Although Podville retained much of its flair as the “quixotic dream” of a second-generation immigrant craftsman who built it, the twenty-firstcentury corporation pivoted its market interests to a higher-class market, for which Bohemian ethnics and bohemian artists would soon be no longer needed. As this account shows, a local development corporation, interested in increasing the value of its own real estate, could act independently to pursue this interest; and in this case, artists interested in attracting buyers for

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their artworks were welcomed into the process as complicit actors. Although all artists were not required to participate in the developer’s efforts as part of their rental agreements, those who chose to open their studios were expected to act as part of a market that creates financial values.

The Ethnically Driven Stability Machine Enriching Local Ethnic Culture Art producers from the rest of Pilsen who were excluded from the Art Walk continued as they always had at Pros Arts Studio, the Asociación ProDerechos Obreros (APO Building,) the National Museum of Mexican Art, Yollocalli Youth Museum, Radio Arte, Polvo Studios, and the hundreds of Latino artists’ studios that existed throughout the locale. But the co-opting of the Pilsen arts district to transform Podville into the “Chicago Arts District” so antagonized independent artists throughout the rest of Pilsen that they reestablished the “Pilsen Open Studios” event centered on the Eigh­ teenth Street spine of the DCA’s initially proposed arts district. They held the event in October in conjunction with the DCA’s annual celebration Chicago Artists’ Month and claimed ownership of the original open-studio event. They were able to garner increased support from the vast array of Mexican businesses and from the city of Chicago. And just weeks later, the annual Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead procession continued as it had for nearly as long as the Art Walk had taken place. Pros Arts had sponsored the Día de los Muertos celebration since 1979; it included a procession of humans in skeleton makeup and comedic performances and stunts by and for children in a nearby park. The event provided visibility for the Mexican ethnic culture long before the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum opened in 1986. The Día de los Muertos celebration involves artists and families in an event that merges indigenous Mexican and Catholic practices. It is celebrated throughout Mexico as a holiday in which the living and the dead, the rich and the poor, are to join in conviviality to remember the departed and to celebrate life. During this festival, families prepare funeral altars in their homes with candles, food, and drink; they go to cemeteries to clean, decorate, and occasionally picnic on the graves of the deceased (Tyler 1979a, 217). This cultural practice was immortalized through the distinctive skeleton caricatures by artist José Guadalupe Posada, a nineteenth-century Mexican printmaker whose images were popularized throughout Mexico by the Penny Press (Bailey 1979). His animated skeletons, or calaveras, were

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dressed as the living—in tuxedos, traditional clothes of peasant women, men, farmers, or bloated politicians—and moved among the living on this holiday (Reuter 1979). In 2002 Pros Arts staff, local artists, and local families gathered at 5 p.m. at a park building as they have for nearly twenty-five years. Pros Art staff and assistants arrived wearing tuxedos or other costumes that recalled Posada’s characters and were ready to help prepare for the procession. I joined in as Jasmine, an artist intern from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, organized the assistants—including a high school intern, a Pros Arts board member, and a number of children—to help kids and adults as they set up stations for face painting and accessorizing their costumes. At one station I asked a young boy, who appeared to be about eight years old, what I was supposed to do with the strips of paper, glue, glitter, scissors, and photocopies of Posada skeleton prints that were scattered on the table. He said I could choose between the wide and narrow pieces to make a top hat or a crown. The twelve-inch strips were for top hats; the six-inch ones for crowns. I decided to make a crown and tested a strip of paper by wrapping it around my head, only to find it was too small. He tried a longer one. When it didn’t work, I lamented, “My head is too big.” As if the comedic skit planned for later that night had already begun, the boy called out: “We need a bigger one. Her head is too big.” We tested a few pieces but could not find any to fit. I suggested we staple two pieces together. He agreed. “Stapler! Stapler!” he called out to another assistant, who brought one to our table. We stapled two pieces together, and then he demonstrated how to cut the points at the top. As I began to cut the rest in crooked and of uneven widths, other kids copied me. A nearby adult interceded, demonstrating for the youth how to cut evenly distributed points, as the kids exchanged looks, laughed, and made faces at one another. The eight-year-old assistant then showed us how to cut out Posada’s skeletons and use the glue stick to attach them to a hat. When I finished cutting my crown points, I used Elmer’s glue to write in script “dance of the dead.” I poured glitter on it and set it aside so it would dry as glittery, relief type. I cut out several Posada prints of dancing skeletons and attached them to the crown. The eight-year-old assistant stapled the crown in a circle for my head, covering the seam with a Posada skeleton print. At the other tables, kids and adults applied white and black face paint. I watched and photographed a variety of approaches, then joined in. My inexperience at turning my face into a skull was quickly evident. It was only after the fact that I understood the basic technique to make flesh appear as a skeleton: black circles around the eyes; a triangle or two holes over the nose,

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teeth marks over lips and cheeks, following an imaginary jawbone on the side of the face. My own face mask did not mimic a skull; rather, it looked more like a Barnum & Bailey clown or a French mime. Pros Arts had also prepared for the slapstick comedy night and a show of clown tricks in the gym before the nighttime procession through the streets. Hundreds of parents and several elected officials crowded into the gym to see the children perform. After each of the honorary (elected) guests spoke, the performance of skits based on story lines in Posada prints began. With the start of each skit, Romani walked across the staging area carrying an oversize Posada print with an image and the title of skit. Among the skits was “The Gravestones,” which featured a group of veiled Latina girls, praying as they crawled on the floor to a makeshift cemetery. As they crawled to the gravestones, kids dressed as skeletons and ghosts popped up from behind the markers. The girls stood up and screamed, and then they laughed and danced with the spirits. “The Doctor” involved one girl comedian dressed as a calavera with a doctor’s smock and stethoscope, and another girl as a living woman patient. The girls did traditional slapstick routines, such as the doctor instructing the patient to sit, then moving the chair so the patient fell to the ground. The tricks and the slapstick comedy entertained local families and friends while teaching kids to make fun of and laugh at some of life’s more challenging moments. Moreover, they learned new physical skills and new ways for assertive human interaction, a particular challenge for young immigrant children. Local Is Multiracial The multiracial procession that followed included nearly three hundred adults and children—of Mexican, American, Asian, and African descent— winding through Pilsen’s back streets, escorted by three police cars, as participants blew whistles and noisemakers loud enough to wake the dead. The procession was not a protest or a rally, but a celebration. It was an opportunity to dress up, perform, make noise, and celebrate on the streets at night, where only gang members had once staged fights and shootouts. The annual Día de los Muertos processions included stops throughout central and West Pilsen, where displays and installations of altars were inside homes, schools, and social service agencies. Among these was Casa Aztlán, a Bohemian settlement house built in 1886 that had by 1980 re­ focused its social service programs on the increasing Latino population. By the late 1980s, when the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM) finally opened on the western edge of Pilsen in Harrison Park, it too began

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to host annual Día de los Muertos displays. The museum, or “the big dinosaur” as some local artists refer to it, is often mistakenly credited with the rich ethnic culture that exists in Pilsen and has more than once also been mistakenly credited in newspapers and journals with sponsoring the Pros Arts–sponsored celebration. Its Day of the Dead exhibition became one of its most popular exhibitions by the early 1990s. Traditional “altars” became installations constructed by professional, local and non-local Mexican artists, who worked with local children, youth, and families to construct artistic memorials. The local residents who poured into the museum came with as many as four generations of family members to view the installations. Some of the displays were issue focused, such as one calling for worker protection as it honored miners who had died when a shaft collapsed in Mexico, or one seeking immigration reform by highlighting the plight of family members who died trying to enter the United States illegally. Others were personal accounts of a cherished teacher or family member who had died. With such locally based exhibitions held in the same space where internationally renowned artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera attracted audiences of fifty thousand or more, and insightful exhibitions originated by the museum, such as The African Presence in Mexico, travel throughout the world, the museum established a solid institutional base for Mexican culture not only in Pilsen, but for Chicago and the United States. Its presence further enabled an extensive network of Latino art producers to join with the more powerful network of businessmen and -women and families to stand against the cultural homogenization found within the contentious and increasingly exclusive “Land of Pod” (Isaacs 2002). This ethnically driven stability machine has successfully asserted local cultural ownership and enfranchisement for the growing proportion of Mexican immigrants who have been in Chicago since the late nineteenth century.

Conclusions Through an in-depth investigation of the struggle over local space and local culture in Pilsen, we can refine the theory of gentrification as including cultural practices that whitewash local culture to enable incursion of largescale and small-scale investors and the piling up of “gentry.” These cultural practices contrast with the activities of empowerment networks, which, as discussed more fully in the next chapter, seek to restore cultural reserves and enrich local culture. This case study of the cultural struggles in Pilsen demonstrates how some network activities are designed to create privileges for those who would benefit the most from increased local real estate

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values—specifically developers, independent property owners, and some artists—while excluding those who do not serve these interests—specifically ethnic property owners and renters. Social, economic, and political practices that establish privileges and exclusivity are tools to increase the value of local real estate and other resources, at the expense of ethnic cultures. By redefining gentrification as the activities of a network brought together by a shared interest in increasing the value of local resources and then distinguishing between the cultural processes that lead to cultural homogenization versus cultural enrichment, we can now distinguish the cultural pattern associated with gentrification. The practices I consider to be “whitening” local culture diminish the importance of race and ethnicity while creating exclusive spaces with exclusive art. This exclusivity, in effect, devalues ethnic culture. This chapter develops gentrification theory beyond a simple class-based transformation to show how the whitewashing of culture is done as part of the cultural transformation that has long accompanied middle-class wealth, and is part of a larger structure of institutional racism that has devalued the products, people, places, and cultures of non-whites. Artists both inside and outside Podville stood against gentrification efforts that sought to establish new cultural boundaries between Podville and the rest of Pilsen. Some Pod artists and many local non-Pod artists protested the co-opting of the arts district and the attempt to delineate between the cultural products of the Chicago Arts District and those of ethnic Pilsen. Artists who aligned their efforts with local anti-gentrification consensus— either by participating in or supporting ethnic cultural activity—became part of an “ethnically drive stability machine” that could tap into resources from throughout and beyond the locale to resist cultural homogenization and displacement. This case study expands our current understanding of the transformation process typically labeled gentrification by taking into account the cultural interests of the racial and ethnic middle classes. The next chapter presents a more in-depth view of the operations of an empowerment network. This case study demonstrates how the homogenization typically accompanying gentrification relies on historic forms of racism as it pits a whitewashed culture of the middle and upper-middle classes against local ethnic culture. It also reveals how this process is an extension of racist practices that have resulted in disinvestment in locales where racially and ethnically defined cultures have predominated for nearly a century. The cultural enfranchisement of the black and Latino people that occurred in Chicago through the community-based art movements from 1960–90 succeeded in embedding local cultural capital within local places. This capital was

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used to combat resurgent efforts to homogenize local culture as part of late twentieth-century development efforts. As is evident through this case study, gentrification was not only a classbased transition characterized by the incursion of “gentry”; it was a cultural, social, and economic transformation intended to benefit a narrowly delimited elite. The processes of gentrification homogenized the culture of local places in order to create a gateway for increased investment by independent property owners and globally franchised businesses that rely on standardized cultural forms for their success. As part of the process, racial and ethnic cultures are erased or rendered invisible by virtue of exclusion. As this account demonstrates, people interested in increasing the local values, and who supported investment and ethnic cultural enrichment, did so without supporting the cultural whitewashing that is so essential to the piling up of white middle- and upper-class investors that characterizes gentrification. As has been seen in this case study, people who stood against the exclusive cultural practices of the gentrification network had created alliances to embed ethnicity within the local place.

Eight

Empowerment Networks and the Restoration of Local Culture

When Frederic Martel, a French cultural attaché visiting Chicago, asked me to take him on a tour of Chicago’s South Side, among our stops was the Spoken Word Café, a newly opened coffee shop on the corner of Forty-Seventh and King Drive, the historic corner, referred to by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton as “the center of the Black Belt . . . the urban equivalent of a village square” ([1945] 1962, 379). By the late twentieth century, this corner had become the cultural and political headquarters of Third Ward alderman Dorothy Tillman, a local political official who had secured nearly $20 million in mostly public funds for a theater facility and cultural center as part of local economic development activity in her Bronzeville ward. As she prepared for the grand opening of the new Harold Washington Cultural Center, she had installed light-post decorations along several blocks extending in all directions from the intersection. The decorations were cut in shapes of musicians who were singing, conducting, or playing horns or other instruments. As we waited for a cup of soup and coffee from her daughter, who was the proprietor of the café, Alderman Tillman entered. I walked up to her, shook her hand, and congratulated her for getting the figures up on the lights. I was unsure if they were art, streetscape designs, or holiday decorations. Not wanting to commit a cultural faux pas, I asked her what she called them. “Markers,” she said. “I call them markers. We need markers to identify our community.” (Author’s field notes, November 2003)

Public art, cultural facilities, and cultural production operate as cultural shorthand for a locale. They are symbols that give off an instant reference point to the local social structure. Alderman Tillman’s assertion that the public display of objects representing local culture were “markers to identify

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our community” boldly articulated what others would only subtly infer: localized public art, historic places, and cultural facilities function to stake out urban space by providing public evidence of the shared values and beliefs found within a local place. These twenty-first-century territorial markers enabled local residents to assert collective ownership of a place and to create meaning and history within an urban place. They codified knowledge about the area called “Bronzeville” within the larger metropolitan context of Chicago. While Bronzeville-based aesthetic networks focused more generally on owning African American culture as was produced by predominantly artists of the African Diaspora, a Bronzeville-based empowerment network focused on owning Bronzeville. These territorial markers enabled local residents to stake a historic and political claim to the area while building markets for heritage tourism. Among the efforts of the empowerment network since 1990 were identification, landmarking, and mapping of historic sites such as the homes of author Richard Wright, author and activist Ida B. Wells, and musician Muddy Waters; landmarking, preservation, and restoration of the Eighth Regiment Armory as well as eight business buildings constructed by black entrepreneurs from 1920 to 1945; the restoration and preservation of historic public murals painted by black activists between 1970 and 2000; the construction of a series of bronze artworks, including Monument to the Great Northern Migration, a bronze map naming the area “Bronzeville,” a series of artistic park benches, and ninety-one bronze plaques making up the Bronzeville Walk of Fame of historic “he-roes and she-roes” of the community; and the construction of three new art facilities and renovation of the historic Sutherland Hotel on Forty-Seventh Street. The empowerment network involved both local and non-local participants, accessed external funding and other external resources, and put to use ideas external to the locality. These facts challenge traditional claims of art produced by local networks as more “authentic.” However, the fact that a broad network of diverse participants connected through an extended network focused on local projects and accessed the opportunity, power, and resources available through this particular locality provided the aura of authenticity to these innovative, big-budget empowerment projects. Many people who were ultimately important to the existence of the art that identified and marked this territory were therefore participants in the art production process. However, they may not have been aware of their roles as collaborators in the construction of these places. These markers were not simply products of the excess cash in government budgets in the 1990s. This case study of art production in Chicago’s

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Mid-South region demonstrates how an empowerment network mobilized the resources necessary to redefine the local color from one associated with one of Chicago’s most neglected ghettos into one of a culturally rich, predominantly African American place. They did so by redeploying art, local history, and local culture as symbols of this historic yet twenty-first-century place. While property values have escalated in this former ghetto, tourists are barely trickling into Bronzeville and there is still limited recognition of the area’s importance to black history.

A Place That History Passed By Bronzeville refers to the Mid-South region of Chicago, three miles south of the Loop from Twenty-Sixth Street to Fifty-First Street and comprised of four South Side community areas: Douglas, Oakland, Grand Boulevard, and Kenwood. By the last decade of the twentieth century, it was a place like no other. Circumscribed by a complex web of industrial and commercial transportation lines—including the Chicago River, the Dan Ryan and Adlai Stevenson expressways and multiple train lines—it remained isolated from the rest of the city as it had for most of the century. But since the early 1980s, black middle-class professionals had been moving back to Chicago’s Mid-South just as their white counterparts did to the North Side. They moved into the high-rise apartment buildings along its northern and lakefront borders, into Kenwood homes where many of the wealthiest and most illustrious black leaders once lived on its southern border, and, yes, they moved into the mansions lining Martin Luther King Boulevard. But beyond this wall of style and wealth, on block after block vacant land was everywhere. There were no boarded-up buildings, no groups of kids or unemployed men hanging out on street corners. Swaths of vacant land throughout Bronzeville remained undeveloped as urban areas north and northwest of the city center completed a full-scale transition from poor and working-class white ethnics to middle- and upperclass gentry. In Bronzeville every one of the neglected properties—including the federal housing projects—had been torn down, leaving emptiness to distinguish this place from others equally distant from the city center. In the new millennium, how to end a century of disinvestment was the problem this network of powerful local, city, and federal leaders faced by mobilizing the cultural capital that had been embedded in the locale for more than a century. “Restoring Bronzeville” became the mantra for redevelopment planned in the early 1990s. Adapted from a generic reference to any segregated,

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predominantly black place or town in the post–Civil War United States, the “Bronzeville” narrative that drove the redevelopment of the Chicago’s MidSouth region referred to a specific place and time where black life, culture, business, and politics thrived as if they were in their own city; it represented black cultural distinction.

An Empowerment Network This chapter shows how a network of black leaders, professionals, and residents interested in the empowerment of their people mobilized both the knowledge and financial resources to conceive of the twenty-first-century place called Bronzeville and to bring it into existence while setting its course for the future. This case study of the production of public art and cultural facilities in a predominantly black, inner-city locale at the end of the millennium reveals more than how the place got its name; it represents the locale’s increasing capacity to mobilize the political and the cultural capital necessary to bring such an idea into being. The interactions that enabled creation of this place involved a network of middle-class professionals, which I refer to as an empowerment network. These participants used their political skills honed through traditional movement-style politics in combination with cultural innovation to redress the history of disinvestment and deprivation in the locale. They mobilized both political and cultural capital to stake claim to territory and to assert physical and cultural ownership of the place. Network participants had access to the information, money, and skill they needed to bring the power of culture back to the locale though the kind of resources and institutional structures available elsewhere. Moreover, their efforts had the potential to end the historic devaluation associated with the stigma of blackness. This cultural development project was outlined in the “Mid-South Strategic Development Plan,” but was not the result of a planned and systematically organized process one might think to be typical of “an ongoing program to rejuvenate” a place, as declared by Mayor Daley at the dedication ceremony of the Public Art of Bronzeville (Hill 1996). Rather, the accounts here provide insight into the social construction of knowledge, art, and power, and of the networks of people that were needed to be involved in a project of this scale. Who was involved, how the knowledge was constructed, and how it became infused in the locale through public art, cultural facilities, and historic landmarks were the product of seemingly disconnected circuits of

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an empowerment network whose activities took place over a thirty-year period. This chapter of the story extends the cultural activist traditions begun in the 1960s when a circuit of black educators first established a museum of African American history, and then were followed by activist muralists, who produced the first community-based murals, both linking Chicago’s South Side to the foundations of black cultural capital.1 The empowerment network began to emerge in the 1970s when a circuit of historic preservationists connected new aspects of black history to the local geographic area and established the significance of the place to black history. The result was the formulation, at least on paper, of the Black Metropolis/Bronzeville Historic District by 1986. This knowledge was then put to use by a circuit of residents, administrators, architects, and urban planners in a 1993 strategic plan for the area that focused on “Restoring Bronzeville.” The plan became the rallying cry for local advocates when city, state, and federal agencies failed to appropriate enough funds for the project. The final participants to join the network were artists and arts administrators, who embedded its ideas in local artistic traditions. Bronzeville was the product of this network of people interested in claiming a geographic and historic space for black culture. Social connections between people enabled a process in which chance and weak social ties (Granovetter 1973) led various individuals to bits of information and opportunities necessary to further a personal or group agenda. In each of the phases, there was little certainty about what was going to happen next. Each step of the process illustrated how an idea traveled through social networks of weak ties to someone who both needed it and put it to use to accomplish the task at hand (Burns and Stalker 1961). This loose-knit network structure contrasts with the tight-knit structure in Bronzeville’s collecting networks, or a hierarchal structure of a government bureaucracy. It was because of this network structure through which ideas passed and were developed that the innovation occurred at all. But because the development of ideas occurred over time, no single person really knew how it all happened. Only in the newspaper article covering the dedication of the Public Art of Bronzeville was there a public reference to it as part of some larger city plan. In fact, accounts from interviews provide evidence of the tension between the city’s goals and that of the local residents and leaders. Through the relatively minor act of producing the art of the Public Art of Bronzeville, the official designation of a twenty-first-century place called Bronzeville became reality. The artwork was made entirely of bronze and included two monumental statues, ninety-one diamond-shaped plaques, a

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map of a historic place called Bronzeville, decorative fencing, and sculptural park benches. The production process reinvented the community-based approach pioneered by the South Side activist muralists by involving a broad network of local and non-local artists, citizens, leaders, and bureaucrats. The project was part of a larger effort that created the social and political identity of a place where black individuals and families first came to Chicago, where they lived during segregation, and where many remained for nearly a century; twenty-first-century Bronzeville was constructed to further attract a growing population of middle-class blacks to the area. The people involved, resources accessed, and the shared local interests that came together redefined what a predominantly black place might be, and the participants did it through the innovative deployment of historical narratives and contemporary art throughout the locale.

Contradiction and Innovation Surrounding the Bronzeville Landmarks Only five years had passed between the time when the Public Art of Bronzeville project was completed in 1996 and when I began to try to track down how it came into existence. At first, no one I asked in Bronzeville seemed to know how the historic buildings were identified and who connected them to a narrative of historic Bronzeville and how the public art came to be installed. Interviewees knew only sketchy details and offered contradictory accounts, making it difficult to trace a single narrative of events. Among the contradictory accounts were those from the same household of Bronzeville residents living just off King Drive where the monuments were installed. On the one hand, the wife said that “the community was not involved; the artwork was the work of the city of Chicago and white gentrifiers” (interview with author 2001). On the other hand, in a separate interview, the husband argued that the community had “everything” to do with the project. Although he could not remember specific people involved, he said referring to the Bronzeville Walk of Fame: “Those are our stars, the he-roes and she-roes in the sidewalk” (interview with author 2001). Both of these seemingly competing narratives, along with many others, had elements of truth. The fact that every one of the bronze plaques embedded in the sidewalk was underscored in relief with “Mayor Richard M. Daley, 1996” was offered as evidence to support a conspiracy of outside gentrifiers; however, the fact that the individuals named were exclusively black luminaries supported the alternative claims. The information available, nonetheless, supported a network theory of its production, as no institution was

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responsible for creating the knowledge and no one was in business to make money from its creation. Outsiders on the Inside A posting on the website for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks represented the scope of the knowledge provided through initial interviews with Bronzeville leaders and residents: These nine structures are what remain of the “Metropolis,” one of the nation’s most significant landmarks of African-American urban history. Developed during the first decades of the 20th century, this “city-within-a-city” was home to numerous nationally prominent African-American-owned and -operated businesses and cultural institutions. This district offered a commercial alternative to the race restrictions and indifference that characterized much of the city during the early part of the 20th century. Between 1910 and 1920, during the peak of the “Great Migration,” the population of the area increased dramatically when thousands of African-Americans fled the oppression of the South and emigrated to Chicago in search of industrial jobs. Further development of the area was halted by the onset of the Great Depression. Many famous people were associated with the development of the area, including: Jesse Binga, banker; Anthony Overton, entrepreneur; Joseph Jordan, musician; Andrew “Rube” Foster, founder of the Negro National Baseball League; Ida B. Wells, a civil rights activist, journalist and organizer of the NAACP; Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot; and Louis Armstrong, the legendary trumpet player and bandleader who performed at many of the area’s night clubs. The name, “Black Metropolis,” became firmly established with the publication of a 1945 sociological study of the same title. In later years the area was referred to as “Bronzeville,” a term attributed to an editor at the Chicago Bee. (Chicago Commission on Landmarks 2004)

A referral by the director of public art in the Department of Cultural Affairs led me to Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s official cultural historian who was said to “know a lot about Chicago neighborhoods” (Lash interview 2003). When I ran into Samuelson in the hallway of the building where his office was, I asked him if he knew where the knowledge came from that led to the landmarking of these buildings, and he said, “I made it up.” With my response to this terse statement, “What do you mean you made it up?” he took me to his office and told me about the research that he did as a young history buff and the subsequent access he had to the Commission

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on Chicago Landmarks that enabled him to get the buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places at the same time Chicago’s own Department of Planning and Development almost “killed Black Metropolis.” Samuelson was the link between several groups of people specializing in historical research, building restoration, black history, and black cultural practices. In addition, he was connected to several city commissions and departments involved in preservation and development, including the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and the city Department of Planning and Development. According to Samuelson, there were no training programs in architectural preservation and restoration in Chicago at the time, so he learned what he knew through his own research and through hands-on experience working with an architectural preservation firm. Furthermore, there was little information about the buildings built by black real estate entrepreneurs, and there was no reason for the city, private investors, or local black leaders to have an interest in preserving the crumbling, abandoned buildings of the black ghetto on Chicago’s South Side. In the early 1970s, Samuelson was an employee of an architectural restoration firm and a skilled researcher armed with an English degree from Roosevelt University. He indulged his free time researching early twentiethcentury music by black entertainers, particularly ragtime. Through this interest, Samuelson stumbled upon the fact that Joe Jordan—a black musician, composer, and entrepreneur—was also a real estate speculator who built an office building in Bronzeville.2 Jordan had been the musical director for a black-owned entertainment theater, Robert T. Motts’ Pekin Temple of Music, at Twenty-Seventh and State streets, and wrote the song “Lovie Joe” for the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. Jordon had been diligent in securing copyright protection for his compositions. When the song was used to introduce singer Fanny Brice in 1910, it made Jordan a small fortune, which he then invested in real estate. At Samuelson’s first visit to the Jordan building at 3529 South State Street in 1971, he found a crumbling edifice getting worse by the day. Jordan had been among a handful of real estate speculators living in Bronzeville who built buildings and businesses from the ground up to serve the local needs of the rapidly growing, segregated black population. As Samuelson pointed out, until the time of the first Great Migration of blacks to Chicago (1914–20), blacks typically moved in or took over buildings abandoned by whites, rather than building new ones. For Samuelson, the buildings built by black entrepreneurs to serve the segregated place were significant historical structures because they were the first such buildings and they were central to the exis­ tence of this “city within a city,” Black Metropolis. According to Samuelson:

Empowerment Networks and the Restoration of Local Culture / 195 I went to the library and went through the microfilms. I read every issue of the Defender from 1908 to 1940 when it was a weekly. Whatever I was able to get from old newspapers, whoever I was able to identify, I would call on them. The few people who knew about life in the Black Metropolis I called on, people like Earl Dickerson, who later headed Liberty Life [Insurance], and William Barnett, an elder political leader. Black Metropolis had an economic vitality about it. It had a self-sustaining business community. (Samuelson interview 2005)

In the Chicago Defender, Samuelson found advertisements and articles on Jordan and other entrepreneurs. One advertisement announced a bond issue ($45,000) for the proposed Jordan building. The bonds, along with $25,000 from Jordan, enabled construction to be completed in 1917. According to Samuelson, the building was celebrated and was a source of local pride until larger black-owned buildings superseded it in the 1920s. Among these new buildings was the Overton Hygienic/Douglass National Bank Building. In an effort to raise capital necessary for this building, Anthony Overton advertised the building as “A Monument to Negro Thrift and Industry.” Each of these buildings, along with several institutions and organizations, became part of what Samuelson would propose as a thematic historic district. As an independent researcher, Samuelson identified buildings and sites that he thought were “significant to African American history”; he then connected these to Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis and to what he found published in the Chicago Defender. According to Samuelson: By the mid-1920s, black migration from the South had slowed, which also slowed business growth. I focused on what was important to the community, and what black entrepreneurs built. I included social organizations, social institutions, as well as buildings by black businessmen. There was the Eighth Regiment Armory at 3333 South Giles, an all-African-American regiment. It was vacant and had been purchased in a tax sale. [Before segregation laws were struck down,] it was typical for there to be fully segregated black regiments, but not typical for a black commander. This had a black commander. They used to rent out the ballroom for all types of social events. I identified twelve buildings [for the proposed thematic district] that were still standing, but in bad condition and getting worse by the day. (Samuelson interview 2005)

Samuelson eventually had more than a decade of practical experience researching, restoring, and preserving buildings. He said, “It was a personal

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interest. I did it on my own at night and on weekends. I personally boarded up some of these buildings. On one, I put a sign, ‘Please do not vandalize, this is part of your history.’ ” He planted the seeds for a network of preservationists to generate interest in someone acquiring and preserving the buildings. Samuelson, who was by then a self-taught expert in architectural preservation and the only person who knew anything about the buildings of Black Metropolis, responded to official announcements for demolition. “I would go to court and passionately argue on behalf of the building’s significance. I would show up at people’s homes when I saw renovation under way and offer free advice on preservation, advice that was often unwelcome. I would present talks and slide shows.” His first architectural tour was in 1978 for Alderman William Barnett of the Second Ward. Samuelson got the opportunity to do something about the deteriorating buildings in Bronzeville in 1983 when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks3 hired him to review building permits for proposed alterations to historic buildings. He had been a regular consultant to the commission on rehab proposals involving historic buildings. Samuelson became part of a nine-member staff that made recommendations to the commission on what should be landmarked. According to Samuelson, “They were open to me suggesting things. I said, ‘I would like to propose to make a landmark, thematic district,’ mentioning these buildings, to tell that story and hopefully to generate interest in them, interest in acquiring and preserving them, and they let me write a proposal.” In 1984 the commission reviewed this proposal, in which he outlined the argument for establishing the “Black Metropolis Historic District.” The original proposal included in the district a small stretch of State Street that contained the Jordan building, along with three other historic buildings and some vacant land that was the former site of the Binga Bank. As an afterthought, Samuelson added the Victory Monument to black heroes from World War I and five other historic buildings located on Wabash, Indiana, Giles, and King Drive. It was an innovative proposal because it focused on structures that were historically significant because they were built through the efforts of a segregated people and the work of black entrepreneurs and leaders. This strategy diverged from traditional proposals for landmark designations, which connected an architectural work to canons of influence around particular architects, such as Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright, and their artistic styles evident through choice of form and material. Judgment of aesthetically significant architecture was therefore based on the architect, its form, design or materials, or its use or users—particularly those people who had achieved local or national notoriety. The buildings in Bronzeville were significant in

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Samuelson’s mind because black entrepreneurs built them. Yet this determination of historical significance was outside of the existing canon that guided most judgments of architectural or historical significance. Samuelson submitted the proposal to the Landmarks Commission during the administration of Mayor Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first woman mayor, but it passed the commission just as the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, took office in 1984. Before the recommendation could be sent to the Chicago City Council for final approval as a landmark, review and approval was required by the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the lack of which, in Samuelson’s words, “almost killed Black Metropolis.” Internal fighting, typical within the ranks of the administration in Washington’s first term, took over the process and eventually devoured the entire Landmarks Commission. According to Samuelson, officials in the Department of Planning were concerned about landmarking what, in their view, were “derelict buildings,” for which there was little local interest in preserving. While there was growing interest in landmark status by home owners in “the Gap,” the central section of Bronzeville, this interest did not include the crumbling buildings built sixty years earlier by middleand upper-class black businessmen. With the Department of Planning sitting on his nomination, Samuelson asked the commission if he could “take his nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.” Commissioners approved his request, enabling him to temporarily sidestep the Department of Planning to do what he called “an end run” for national recognition of the sites. Twelve of his fourteen nominations passed and were listed on the National Register by 1986. In the meantime, the gridlocked Department of Planning effectively “dumped” his nomination in 1987 when the local landmarking ordinance was rewritten. This marked the end of Samuelson’s direct involvement in Bronzeville. He had not succeeded in getting Bronzeville established as a protected historic district, although he did succeed in getting the buildings listed on the National Register. While there was growing investment in the Gap and the mansions on King Drive, Drexel Boulevard, and other Chicago boulevards, at this point no one championed Samuelson’s idea to preserve the work of black entrepreneurs during segregation as significant to Chicago’s history. Why was there no chorus singing the significance of Samuelson’s insight? Academic experts were well-versed in the classics of Sullivan, Wright, and a handful of other significant architects, and by the late 1980s there was a growing body of knowledge on how and why to preserve twentiethcentury buildings based on formal aesthetics, materials, and purpose, but

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few people were aware of how to measure significance in the nearly lost history of black people on the South Side of Chicago. Furthermore, silence among black residents and leaders—a well-oiled activist machine skilled at identifying and pushing issues—was deafening. This silence could be explained by the fact that Samuelson was white and his motives mistrusted. It could be explained by the fact that black real estate speculators, “Negro Thrift,” black enterprise, and black ownership often translated into a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” argument, an argument synonymous with conservative, anti-government aid strategies that deny the effects of racism on black achievement. The silence could have been the result of simply not knowing what to do with the idea. While these buildings might have represented the heyday of Black Metropolis, their deterioration represented the disaster that hit during the Depression and was followed by years of decline as the Chicago Housing Authority built public housing high-rises along State Street and Lake Shore Drive, surrounding the commercial and middleclass residential districts with poverty. Samuelson exited the picture when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks was taken over by the Department of Planning and he secured a position at the Chicago Historical Society; the idea was then picked up by another circuit of the empowerment network.

Local Investment Circuit: The Mid-South Plan A circuit of leaders, the “South Side Partners,” interested in local investment used the knowledge produced by Samuelson and the network of preservationists involved in the Landmarks Commission as it sought investment in the Mid-South region. The South Side Partners came together in 1989 when the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) threatened to leave the Mid-South region if investment wasn’t made to begin to address the years of neglect in the area. Also involved was the First National Bank of Chicago (which later was bought out by Bank One and then J.P. Morgan Chase) and nineteen other members who advocated for “capital investment in communities adjacent to IIT.” About the same time, the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation awarded the city of Chicago a $271,000 grant to prepare a comprehensive “community development plan” that would “reflect the needs and wishes of the community surrounding IIT” (Campbell 1993). The city organized the Mid-South Planning Group, an assembly of eighty-one local residents and leaders, five city agencies, seven consultants from an architecture firm, and two real estate consultants, and included the South Side Partners.

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Samuelson was not sure how his effort to preserve the buildings of Black Metropolis ended up in the Mid-South Plan. But it was ironic that while the right hand at the Department of Planning had dumped Samuelson’s proposal to landmark the area as a historic district, the left hand in the same department was involved in developing a community-based strategic plan focused on “Restoring Bronzeville” and the very landmarks the department just years earlier had refused to recognize. The Mid-South Plan drew on ideas proposed through the Black Metropolis/Bronzeville Historic District as well as a number of other concept papers, including proposals for an African marketplace (Smith 1992); a Blues District (Campbell 1986); and adaptive reuse of the Armory (Applied Real Estate Analysis 1987). After three years of weekly meetings and two facilitated retreats, the MidSouth Planning Group produced the draft of a comprehensive community strategic plan. “The Mid-South Strategic Development Plan,” with its central theme “Restoring Bronzeville,” focused on land-use development that should occur: because of “the rich cultural history the Mid-South enjoys . . . a number of buildings and neighborhoods are designated architectural and historic landmarks” (Campbell 1993, 16). The plan also noted, “Many MidSouth structures are listed on the National Register of Historic Places” (29) but did not directly cite Samuelson or the report by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The chairman of the Mid-South Planning Group, Angelo Rose, was then the executive director of Ahkenaton Community Development Corporation, an affiliate of the Centers for New Horizons, both founded by Sokoni Karanja, who had a PhD in urban planning, was a member of both the South Side Partners and the Mid-South Planning Group, and had been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation with its Genius Award. Among the others involved were Leroy Kennedy from IIT, Gregory Washington from the Grand Boulevard Federation, and Harold Lucas, founder of the Bronzeville Tourism Bureau. The plan for “Restoring Bronzeville” (Campbell 1993) had the potential to create a third Great Migration to the area by attracting the black middle class and reviving the area’s cultural history and economic diversity. The idea of adopting the name Bronzeville and producing cultural monuments and cultural facilities as part of this plan emerged out of aesthetic preferences and cultural practices that embraced black heritage, black accounts of history, and the engagement processes of black empowerment as seen in communitybased murals. Yet it was buffeted by a sea change in the social order of the locale that sought to reposition the black middle class at the center of local

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life, as it had been in the heyday of Black Metropolis. For just as young white urban professionals were repopulating the north and west sides of the Loop from the mid-1970s on, black urban professionals had been moving back to the Mid-South region, purchasing and restoring its historic mansions. There was no one in this network who claimed any direct link to policy advisers for the Clinton administration, yet somehow the network completed the Mid-South Plan in September 1993—just in time for an assembly of bureaucrats and politicians led by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development to apply for funds in a new federal program announced the following month by the Clinton administration. According to the City of Chicago website: [The Empowerment Zone (EZ) program] was established in the fall of 1993 under the Federal Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and is the capstone of the Clinton Administration community revitalization strategy. The program is designed to empower people and communities across the United States by inspiring Americans to work together to develop a strategic plan designed to create jobs and opportunities in our nation’s most impoverished urban and rural areas. (City of Chicago 1998)

The EZ designation meant that Chicago received a $100 million Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), which also required additional state and municipal funding to implement strategic plans for three “impoverished” areas, including Bronzeville and Pilsen. EZ status meant that each area also received priority consideration for other federal programs and direct assis­ tance from federal officials to facilitate implementation of their EZ Strategic Plan. In addition, a range of tax incentives designed to stimulate private investment and job creation would be available to qualified businesses.

Advocates for a Fair Share of the Public Goods Unfortunately, while the Mid-South Plan played an important role in winning EZ status, the plan was never officially adopted by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development for the area and few of its goals were implemented. With Bronzeville declared part of Empowerment Zone No. 3 in 1993, the EZ program set in place a complex granting program that on its face called for proposals for competing programs. But with political pressure coming from all directions, funds were distributed to projects supported by the local aldermen in the three wards, who each advocated for their ward’s fair share of the funds. For example, the plan identified Forty-

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Third Street as the site for a blues district because it was the location of the historic Checkerboard Lounge and the home of Muddy Waters. But as wardbased initiatives took precedence, Alderman Dorothy Tillman mobilized funds to build a $20 million theater and community center and the 47th Street Blues District, near her office on King Drive, as she bulldozed Gerri’s Palm Tavern, a historic blues club a block away. In spite of proposals to turn Muddy Waters’s home on South Lake Park Avenue and Forty-Third Street into a blues museum, the home, located in Alderman Toni Preckwinkle’s ward, has remained largely abandoned as a historic site. The Checkerboard Lounge was closed for code violations and in 2003 reopened at Harper Court in Hyde Park. Also in Preckwinkle’s ward, on Forty-Seventh Street the Little Black Pearl Workshop proposed a $10 million art educational facility and the Muntu Dance Theatre sought funds for a $7 million dance facility. Funded late in the process with a small programming grant was the historic South Side Community Art Center. The three elected officials used their aldermanic privilege to place “holds” on parcels of tax-delinquent property owned by the city of Chicago in Bronzeville in order to have a say in the uses of the property and the projects that were funded. Of the 756 parcels of city-owned land in Bronzeville, 450 were controlled by the local aldermen: Dorothy Tillman held 117 parcels of land in the Third Ward in the southwestern portion of Bronzeville, Toni Preckwinkle held 211 parcels in the Fourth Ward in the southeastern end of Bronzeville along the lakefront, and Madeline Haithcock placed 122 properties on hold in the north center portion of Bronzeville in the Second Ward. Pat Dowell, a deputy commissioner in the city’s Department of Planning and Development, further placed holds on 184 properties on behalf of the Mid-South Planning Group (Quintanilla 1994). The holds on property by elected and appointed officials helped to explain why 20 percent of the tax-delinquent property in Bronzeville remained vacant for much of the 1990s. This vacant land was in addition to the tracts of land once home to both high-rise and low-rise public housing, for which the aldermen also exerted influence over who would win the rights to redevelop. Each of the officials maintained that they were acting on behalf of their Bronzeville constituents: Tillman claimed to be guarding against a “land grab” by real estate speculators, while Preckwinkle did it to ensure jobs for her constituents. “I’m looking for developers who are interested in hiring people from the neighborhood in their project and employing them once it’s complete,” she said. Dowell, an appointed official who later ran for Tillman’s seat, was acting on behalf of the Mid-South Plan. At least one observer, radio talk show host Clifford Kelley, criticized the officials for

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holding out for big projects rather than supporting “neighborhood entrepreneurs [who] were likely to spark development” (Quintanella 1994). The land holds were part of a bigger picture of posturing for funding and power in the midst of the rapid transformation under way in Bronzeville. With the 1994 announcement by the Chicago Housing Authority of its plans to demolish public housing in these and other Chicago wards, thirty thousand CHA residents would be relocated, adding up to losses of high concentrations of poor black voters and political clout.4 The sea change, as characterized by Bobby Rush—former Black Panther and former Second Ward alderman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1992—was directed to a just cause: “You can’t continue to imprison people in the [poverty] that surrounds the CHA based on a captive vote. That would be . . . going back to the 1940s, when the CHA was built to confine blacks because whites didn’t want them in their areas,” said Rush (Burnham 1994). As Tillman shored up funding for her projects at the intersection of FortySeventh Street and King Drive, and Preckwinkle supported development of the Cultural Corner on Forty-Seventh Street in her ward, the original South Side Partners exerted pressure for a portion of the funding designated for the McCormick Place redevelopment. According to Karanja, “Someone got the idea that some of those funds should be coming to our community” (Kar­ anja interview 2003). The resulting $10 million allotment from the “McPier” authority to rehabilitate King Drive was funded in part through Empowerment Zone funds and sales tax revenues. The McPier funding included $500,000 for a “design element” that became the Public Art of Bronzeville. The empowerment network thus far had succeeded in mobilizing both the funds and the power to implement several large-scale cultural facilities projects. It also had the foundation of knowledge about black history and historic preservation to build a historic place upon. Yet it still faced the challenge of how to attract people to the place as residents, business owners, or tourists. One way it sought to do this was through the deployment of public art.

Circuit of Artists and Administrators A fifteen-foot statue perched in the center of an island between six lanes of speeding traffic marks the entrance to Bronzeville. The artwork is surrounded by a busy turnaround at the Twenty-Sixth Street entrance to a McDonald’s restaurant. This is the Monument to the Great Northern Migration (plate 17), the first artwork to commemorate the movement of blacks from the southern United States to the industrialized cities of the North. From the

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sidewalk looking across four traffic lanes, one can see the folksy depiction of an optimistic male traveler facing north toward the Chicago Loop, hand raised, and carrying a suitcase bound with rope. But only when you cross through the busy turnaround do you see the diamond-shaped plaque just north of the statue, which reads: Monument to the Great Northern Migration This bronze monument depicts a man wearing a suit made of shoe soles rising from a mound of soles. The soles, worn and full of holes, symbolize the often difficult journey from the South to the North. It commemorates all the African American men and women [souls] who migrated to Chicago after the Civil War. Alison Saar, Sculptor. City of Chicago, Public Art Collection, Richard M. Daley, Mayor. 1996.

It is the only one of all the ninety-one bronze plaques that reference the city’s public art program. Although he oversaw the development of the Public Art of Bronzeville, Mike Lash, director of Chicago’s Public Art Program and the Percent for Art Program, was not sure how the money for the project was appropriated. “It must have come out of project development in Zoning. The Hyatt [McCormick Place hotel] and new Donnelley [access] were being done [both to the north of Highway 55] and someone must have given a directive stating that ‘you have to provide better transportation to McCormick from the South Side feeder,’ something like that,” he said (Lash interview 2003). Once the money was appropriated to the Illinois Department of Transportation for road construction, there was no mechanism to fund or manage the art production effort. According to Lash, “We were hired to run a Percent for Art–type program. This was a test balloon, as it was not really a ‘Percent for Art’ project,” which applied only to the construction of buildings. “This was to be a community-based public art project,” said Lash. The Chicago Percent for Art Program, created by municipal ordinance in 1978, required 1 percent (now 1.33%) of the construction cost of public buildings to be budgeted for the purchase of artwork. However, the ordinance did not apply to transportation infrastructure or street beautification projects like the King Drive Project. With no other mechanism at hand, the program was used to get the project done. The Public Art Program was designated by the Department of Planning to manage the creation and installation of the art. They joined the network of people involved in the empowerment project, which up to then had

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included staff from a number of aldermanic offices, the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the city’s Landmarks Commission, Department of Planning, and the departments of Transportation, Economic Development, Education, Health, and Public Safety, along with all the participants in the South Side Partners. The Public Art Program then convened a public art committee to make decisions regarding the artworks and artists for the King Drive streetscape project. Of the committee members, only two had been part of the Mid-South Planning Group: Jeff Johnson, property manager at Prairie Shores Apartments, located on King Drive, and Susan Campbell, from Wendell Campbell Associates, the black-owned architectural firm that wrote the strategic plan and designed the streetscape project. Among the other decision makers were members of the Gap Neighborhood Association (which had by then won historic landmark designation for its residential homes); the principal of Dunbar Vocational High School, also located on King Drive; the librarian for the Martin Luther King Branch; and Kerry James Marshall, a black painter and MacArthur Genius Award winner whose studio was in Bronzeville. In total, the committee included nine people it considered to be “community representatives” who were African American residents or business owners, or who had a leadership position within a local agency or institution. Of the remaining members, two were art representatives and four were city government representatives. This circuit of the network would make decisions regarding the content of art projects and the selection of artists. Barbara Koenen, project manager for the Public Art Program, guided the process. According to Koenen, “Originally, it was going to be one big, expensive piece, like a Richard Hunt sculpture [Hunt is a noted black Chicago sculptor]. That kind of top-down management of some single design element, directed by the architecture firm, is typical in streetscape projects. I am not sure who said it, but someone said you can get a lot more art than one piece of art for $500,000.” Koenen credited Alicia Berg, then a preservation planner (who later became a commissioner of planning and development for the city of Chicago), with making the suggestion that ultimately meant activating “the community” through the development of art. “From my mind, the art was to bring history and the potential vitality of Bronzeville into the public sphere,” said Koenen (Koenen interview 2003). Representation by Local Residents The Public Art Program interpreted “community-based” to mean meeting within the community and involving the local representatives in the art

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planning and selection process. But in this situation, the boundary was expanded to include the interpretation of the history of the place through public art. According to Lash, the Public Art Program’s role in this project followed its role established through the Percent for Art Program. He explained: We bring the group together, seven people. We find out what their needs and wants are. This community thought they needed a gateway. They immediately thought of the Puerto Rican flag [that marks the entrance to Humboldt Park]. “We need a transition element,” they said. They wanted a gateway, but we don’t like that kind of thing [like the Puerto Rican arch]. It’s not art, it is contrived, not timeless. But the main thing was the cost. King Drive is a double boulevard. The Doughboy [Victory] monument was built in 1926. It holds the same power and sway today as when it was opened. The Alison Saar monument does the same thing. Bronzeville isn’t about a country. It is about a neighborhood. It’s about Diaspora, the Gap, redlining, and the Great Migration. That is what public art should do. It is for the community. [Bronzeville] wanted people to know there was culture and history here. They wanted to give a sense of the culture and history. (Lash interview 2003)

Koenen managed the community-based art selection process and the creation and installation of artwork as part of the King Drive project. “The main elements of the public art—the map, the Walk of Fame, the park benches, and the monument—were all based on success stories from other cities. The committee had been selected, but I assembled them for the first meeting,” she said (Koenen interview 2003). As an artist and activist who has worked on several art projects designed as “community empowerment” projects, Koenen, now in the role of bureaucratic functionary, wove together activist art conventions from the community-based mural movement with bureaucratic conventions typical of the Percent for Art Program. The result was the Public Art of Bronzeville. It is an atypical product of the program, according to Jon Pounds, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG). Pounds acknowledged, “In most public art commissions handled by the Public Art Program, there is not an expectation of dialogue with the community. There is minimal community engagement only at the lowest level, where one or two community members are invited to participate in the viewing and selecting of slides presented by the program staff” (Pounds interview 2003). The project included the intent, the process, and imagery typical of activist murals introduced in the Bronzeville area in the 1960s and 1970s by

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William Walker, the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), and the Chicago Mural Group. Koenen described the process as “using a dialogical framework typical of Chicago Public Art Group, artist Laurie Palmer, the artist collective Temporary Services, and Mary Jane Jacob’s ‘Culture in Action,’ ” which all see art as an opportunity to engage non-artists in the art production process. “It was my mission, not the mission of the Public Art Program,” Koenen said. “The Public Art of Bronzeville is probably the most significant public art in Chicago, but few people know about it” (Koenen interview 2003). Unlike the activist murals of OBAC or CPAG, this project was now nested within a bureaucratic process, and community input came through an advisory committee of a government program. Koenen, who describes herself as “an artist and bureaucrat,” saw her role as negotiating between the interests of the community-based empowerment network and the city’s Percent for Art Program. The public art committee looked at slides that Koenen said she “slogged to the meetings at Griffin Funeral Home” on King Drive. Committee members identified the types of art and artists to be included in the project, and then it approved of artists’ proposals. In the production of the project, the committee wanted to highlight the work of nationally known and locally known black artists. At least one committee member identified a local artist unknown to the Public Art Program, who ultimately was chosen to create a bench. The committee also played an important role in who was to be featured on the Walk of Fame. It solicited nominations from local residents, groups, and organizations; it compiled a list of people to be honored; and then it made the final selections for who would be featured on the bronze plaques. While an African American graduate student in history was employed as a consultant, there was no systematic historical research done to inform the selection process. Two nationally known black women artists who live outside of Bronze­ ville were selected by the committee to be commissioned by the city to create monumental sculptures as part of the installation. Alison Saar from Los Angeles designed the Monument to the Great Northern Migration and Geraldine McCullough—an artist who taught for many years in a Bronzeville high school and whose sculpture is displayed in Washington Park by the DuSable Museum—designed the plaques used in the Bronzeville Walk of Fame. Gregg LeFevre, an artist from upstate New York, designed the map of Bronzeville, with the support of a cadre of local researchers. Fourteen other artists, nine from the greater Chicago area, created sculptural park benches and decorative fencing referred to as “recognition panels.” Of these, Apache Wakefield and Kimberli Johnson, black artists from Chicago’s South

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Side, were among the bench creators. None of these artists actually lived in Bronzeville. Direct interaction with the artists was nonetheless limited once the artists were chosen; Koenen and Lash could recall only two such interactions. One interaction involved the Monument to the Great Northern Migration, when artist Alison Saar presented a miniature wax model of the traveler who represented all the “souls” who migrated to Chicago. Originally, the traveler’s hand was outstretched in a way that one committee member negatively interpreted as “begging.” Saar took the arm and twisted it up so it looked like he was waving and asked, “How about this?” The committee approved this new pose. In another instance, committee members unsuccessfully tried to get one artist to make a bench out of a metal that would not rust. The ninety-one plaques that made up the Bronzeville Walk of Fame commemorate Bronzeville residents who “have made a significant contribution to the community” (Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs 1996). The 17-inch, diamond-shaped bronze plaques were embedded in the sidewalks and medians along King Drive every 200 feet between Twenty-Sixth and Thirty-Fifth streets. Among the named are Margaret Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum; St. Clair Drake, University of Chicago scholar and co-author of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City ([1945] 1962); Nat “King” Cole, jazz pianist and singer; Butter Beans and Susie, vaudeville comedy team; Oscar De Priest, city councilman and later a congressman; Langston Hughes, author; Richard Wright, author; Major Robert H. Lawrence Jr., the first black astronaut; Ida B. Wells, journalist and activist; John “Jack” Johnson, boxer; Carter G. Woodson, scholar and organizer of Negro History Week in 1926; and Theresa Needham, owner of Theresa’s Blues Club. The 14-by-17-foot bronze slab inset in the King Drive median at ThirtyFifth Street was to highlight landmarks, historic buildings, and places of significance from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (plate 18). Yet the problem of what to call the place led to more than a debate over a name. Naming Bronzeville What began for Koenen as a practical question: what to call the place illustrated in the 14-by-17-foot bronze slab—Black Metropolis, Bronzeville, the Gap, or even East Bridgeport?—turned into a broader local debate that ultimately led to a formal designation of the entire area as “Bronzeville.” According to the project manager, “I was lobbying for ‘Bronzeville,’ while some people wanted ‘Black Metropolis.’ To me, ‘Black Metropolis’ sounded

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heavy-handed, unempowering, like the Fritz Lang movie,” Koenen said (Koenen interview 2003). Moreover, with the entire project constructed of bronze metal, the name Bronzeville was a clever link between the project material and the history of the area. The relatively insignificant question of what name to put on the map developed into a large idea of symbolizing the area’s rich cultural history. Yet the idea did not meet with an immediate consensus across black Chicago, particularly among those who had successfully established the first institutions for African American culture by mobilizing the political capital of what has been framed as a single black “community.” This idea of embracing the name Bronzeville challenged the capital embedded in the idea of the history of a race united through its shared commitment to civil rights and social justice efforts. Just as Black Metropolis was considered “a city within a city,” the idea of creating “a place within a place”—Bronzeville within Chicago’s expansive South Side black community areas and suburbs—was intended to celebrate black economic diversity, black culture, and black entrepreneurialism, yet it had the potential to disrupt the illusion of a single “community” and bring to light the rigid and often unspoken class structures within black Chicago. Among those African American arts leaders against the name was Margaret Burroughs, artist, art teacher, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, resident of the area that would become Bronzeville, and still a Park District commissioner, now under Mayor Richard M. Daley. Throughout her leadership she had advocated for recognition of black culture and black accounts of a history both as unifying forces within a single black community. When asked of her views on the idea, she said: Some people have been referring to Bronzeville, marking out certain areas— this street and that street. I think wherever black folks live in Chicago is Bronzeville and is community. Because what happened is that I guess in the days of the first migration, when Black people came from the south, in the middle twenties, which is when my family came; they were leaving the South for jobs in steel mills and stockyards and all, and so they got off at the Illinois Central train at Twelfth Street. And they got off at Twelfth Street, they moved, just kept moving further and further south. Whites fled and blacks moved, followed them, [and] finally got to livin’ wherever they are now. I consider community wherever my people are. (Burroughs interview 2003)

Similarly, Gregg Spears—an artist, former managing director of the South Side Community Art Center, and resident of the area that would

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become Bronzeville—saw the name as a shallow promotional gimmick. “ ‘Bronzeville’ is an affectation by promoters. This is the South Side. When you say you are going to the ‘South Side,’ you don’t mean Hyde Park [which is located on the South Side]—you mean the black community” (Spears interview 2003). The approval of the name Bronzeville was accomplished, nonetheless, through an extensive advocacy effort led by local activists Harold Lucas and Paula Robinson. Lucas had been a member of the Mid-South Planning Group and according to Samuelson was probably the only person who was part of all the networks connecting the historic designation of Black Metropolis/Bronzeville to the strategic development plan subtitled “Restoring Bronzeville” and to the completion of the public art and restoration of the historic structure. He was the kind of grassroots activist needed for a project like this to develop over time, and Samuelson credits him as having the stamina to see it through: such relentless promotion was needed for the idea of a once-segregated place, referred to as a “bronzeville,” to become significant and deserving of the designation as a national historic area. Lucas found a place as the leader behind the Bronzeville Tourism Bureau and the preservation of one of the historic structures, the Liberty Life Insurance Building, which later became the Supreme Life Building, on ThirtyFifth Street and King Drive. Robinson, who was a publicity consultant when she first met Lucas—then a member of the public art committee overseeing the King Drive streetscape project and later the force behind efforts begun in 2006 to have Bronzeville designated as a National Heritage Area— remembered when Lucas “first came to the office with a shopping bag full of news clips and Xeroxes, you know, you can imagine,” she said (Robinson interview 2005). As the idea came to fruition through the Public Art Program, together they took the idea of naming the area Bronzeville to key residents of the locale for their support. One of their presentations was to a committee that included Charles Bowen, an art collector, retired executive assistant to Mayor Daley, and an owner of a historic home in the northern end of Bronzeville called the Gap. Like Burroughs and Spears, Bowen was also against the name. He recalled that throughout the mid-century, from the civil rights era through Black Power, any reference to an all-black area, particularly by whites, constituted “fightin’ words.” I was absolutely opposed to the area being named Bronzeville. I worked in various jobs before I came to work for the mayor. And that area had always been kind of a mystery to most people. You know, it was always the

210 / Chapter Eight South Side of Chicago. Nobody ever got into a cab and said, “Take me to Bronzeville.” . . . The only real association we had with Bronzeville was from [the black newspaper]. They had a promotion every year before the Bud Billiken Parade; the person who got the most subscriptions to the paper became the “Mayor of Bronzeville.” And we saw that person ride in an open car on Bud Billiken Day. But that was basically what we knew of Bronzeville. I’ve been here all my life. And in industry, the marketing people would always call the area “the Black Belt.” OK. And people who had to sell products in that area, especially if they were African American, did not like the term “the Black Belt.” (Bowen interview 2005)

Bowen had purchased a home in the historic area referred to as the Gap. It was among “the gap” of row houses and masonry mansions designed by Louis H. Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright. The Gap was preserved between large swaths of urban ghetto first bulldozed during the mid-century urban renewal and again in the 1990s when the high-rise public housing projects were dismantled and imploded. Bowen purchased the mansion and coach house in 1980 for less than $100,000 and had invested an additional $300,000 for its ongoing renovation. His coach house opened to the boulevard behind his house. Once called the Grand Boulevard, then South Parkway, it was renamed Martin Luther King Drive in 1968. The boulevard had been widened to a six-lane thoroughfare during the mid-century urban renewal efforts that removed the homes and businesses lining the boulevard between Twenty-Sixth and Thirty-Fifth streets. The widening left visible the coach houses and the backs of the architectural row houses in the Gap. As a local resident with property bordering the historic boulevard, Bowen was involved in the debate that ensued over the name Bronzeville during the development phase of the Public Art Program. His opposition was in part because of the messenger—Harold Lucas, a relentless grassroots activist— and in part because he saw the name as the radical stepchild of the historic practice of redlining, not something that should be thought of as a cultural attraction or that could be used as a strategy for economic development. I came out of the old regular Democratic organization under Congressman William L. Dawson. And Harold Lucas was always one of those who protested and showed his disdain for the regular Democratic organization. Har­ old would come to the headquarters and he would be talking about the black history of that area. So it was always a turnoff to me, to be very honest. (Bowen interview 2005)

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Yet Bowen was so convinced after attending a presentation by Lucas and Robinson that he became a passionate champion of cultural objects celebrating the successes of blacks within the confines of segregation. According to Bowen: I came in kind of late on this project. But I came in because the mayor felt that I should be involved as I was from the community and it was happening there. It was something that kind of went on very quietly, really. I came and I sat and I listened to what [Lucas] had to say. And his idea was to give this area the name Bronzeville. It would be a tourist destination; it would give the area the lift that it needed. [Lucas and Robinson] were talking about [restoring] Victory Monument honoring black soldiers who fought in World War I on King Drive. And they had come up with the concept of having the gateway to Bronzeville. So I listened to him and I said, “Well, my God! He’s absolutely right.” . . . They want to be able to identify us like they identify Chinatown, or like they identify Little Italy, or the Pilsen area. So if they’re going to do that, and they’re going to spend some money in our area to beautify it, I said, “You’re absolutely right.” I got up and gave a speech as to why Harold Lucas was on target and why I thought the area should accept that designation of Bronzeville. (Bowen interview 2005)

Bowen saw a bigger picture. He was not only an art collector, a local property owner, and a retired adviser to the mayor; he was also a master sergeant in the “Fighting Eighth,” an all-black unit of the National Guard whose history can be traced to the Civil War. He was another of the kind of strategically located people with access to resources and power to make a project work. Moreover, shortly after the project’s completion, he was able to extend the vision of the Public Art of Bronzeville to a larger military and cultural history. Completion of the Public Art of Bronzeville The map became the Historic Bronzeville Map, a 14-by-17-foot bronze slab inset in the King Drive median at Thirty-Fifth Street, highlighting landmarks, historic buildings, and local places of significance from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It included “The Stroll,” an entertainment district along South State Street, and the nine landmarked buildings that made up the Black Metropolis/Bronzeville Historic District. Inset in the map were relief artifacts, including records, sheet music, instruments, and club banners

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recalling famous people, historic sites, and events in Bronzeville. The naming of the map “Bronzeville” instead of “Black Metropolis” led to the area’s official adoption of the name Bronzeville. In addition to her committee work and advocacy for the Bronzeville designation, Paula Robinson carried out a number of functions that linked the project to the place. While she and Lucas mobilized support for the name Bronzeville, she “rode herd,” overseeing all aspects of the Walk of Fame: from working with researchers to draft the list of names and with the committee to select honorees, to consulting with the artist on the design of the plaques and with the bronze-casting foundry. Yet, she said, “I was shocked when the final plaques came back with Mayor Richard M. Daley’s name on each and every plaque. By putting his name on every one, they treated these things as if they were manhole covers. But they were art, for God’s sake. They should not have put his name on every one!” (Robinson interview 2005). With the plaques ready to be set in the concrete sidewalk, however, there was little she could do to change the ninety-one cast pieces. The Public Art of Bronzeville serves many purposes: it establishes a place called Bronzeville in contemporary life; it is the cultural and physical gateway to this place, particularly from Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center; it was among the mayor’s beautification projects installed in time for the 1996 Democratic National Convention; it identifies and marks the area as an important historic area suitable as a National Heritage Area; and it emphasizes the cultural contributions of blacks who migrated to Chicago in the early twentieth century. And as an artwork intended to represent larger group interests, it also symbolizes the creative spirit that blacks brought to Chicago, as stated on the attribution plaque for the Monument to the Great Northern Migration by artist Alison Saar: “Though the case appears to be bursting with its contents, upon closer inspection it is empty . . . except for the creative spirit and culture brought from the South. The man’s eyes also reflect each individual’s personal hopes and aspirations for a new life in a new land” (Saar 1996). Yet the flagship piece of the public art installation is both loved and hated, as Mike Lash, then director of Chicago’s Public Art Program, pointed out. It is loved because it commemorated the African Americans who migrated to Chicago. That it placed “blackness” into public discourse in the form of a permanent monument is celebrated by some, yet others who preferred to be considered “African Americans” are left uncomfortable in spite of the fact that it identifies the South Side of Chicago as an important place in black history. The sculpture is hated in part because its folksy appearance lacks the nobility and glory typical of monumental commemorative

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sculptures. As Charles Bowen pointed out, “It could have been more dignified” (Bowen interview 2005). Furthermore, the “shoe soles” that cover the traveler and are intended to invoke The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois 1903) appear to be scales or feathers—reminding some local critics of the historic torture of blacks who were tarred and feathered. Some observers point out that the sculpture is facing north, to the downtown Loop and Chicago’s North Side, possibly symbolic of the continued striving, rather than being interpreted as a welcome sign. Yet Harold Lucas preferred to interpret the hand gesture as “stop,” a symbolic gesture intended to keep out unwanted developers and gentrifiers.

Bronzeville as a Symbol of History and the Locale When the ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the gateway to twenty-first-century Bronzeville took place on September 9, 1996, Charles Bowen was already the founding force behind the restoration of the National Guard Armory at Thirty-Fifth and Giles Avenue in Bronzeville. His first meeting with Lucas and Robinson spurred the idea for how to restore the building of the Eighth Infantry of Illinois, one of the buildings listed by Samuelson on the National Register of Historic Buildings as part of the Black Metropolis/ Bronzeville Historic District. Lucas and Robinson were unaware of the importance of the all-black regiment, but Bowen was not: he was the oral historian of the Eighth Infantry. I was a fraudulent enlistment in that unit when I was fifteen, and I was a master sergeant at eighteen. It was my job for the whole battalion to teach the history. I was in the 184th Field Artillery Battalion. So I taught the history of the unit, from 1864 to the present, to all the new recruits that came in. After they were sworn in, they would have to report to me in Small Hall, a hall that is still there. And I would come up on the stage and I would tell them what a proud history this unit had. This was the only such unit in United States military history—an armory of black troops, where an armory was built and used to house an all-black unit. And this, this building was the only one. Secondly, it is the only unit of a regimental size in United States military history that marched to war under black command. It was the only one ever in history. (Bowen interview 2005)

This unit of the National Guard was organized by the same grassroots methods used by American colonial militias. Responsible for their own defense, early American colonists organized militia by structuring them

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according to British military tradition (National Guard 2008). And as Bowen recalled, local black merchants established the Eighth Infantry and raised funds to build the armory. Built in 1914, during the heyday of black business in Black Metropolis, it was the first armory built for an African American military regiment: When the National Guard was first formed, merchants would set up and have their own units of the National Guard. The guy who owned, say, a big department store would [fund the establishment of a unit]. He would pay for all the weapons and uniforms for a regiment, and then he’d become the colonel. And that’s how the National Guard was actually born. This unit had fought in 1864 at Richmond, Virginia as the Twenty-Ninth Colored Infantry [and then in 1871 was part of the Hannibal Guard militia in Missouri]. When the men came back to Illinois, they would gravitate toward Chicago. They were all out of southern Illinois, as there weren’t that many blacks in Chicago at that particular time. So when they came to Chicago, they wanted to continue their military careers and so forth. So, they would band together, and they bought their own uniforms, bought their own weapons, and drilled in a barn down the street from where the armory is. The community went around, in what they called a “Milk Pail” campaign, and collected enough money to buy the land, then gave it to the state of Illinois so that they would build the armory. So that’s how the armory got there. (Bowen interview 2005)

Bowen saw the opportunity to save the armory in the redevelopment of Bronzeville. He had been involved in early discussions led by a local alderman who wanted to turn the building into a flea market. According to Bowen, “A man named Mr. Todd had won an auction for the building [and paid] $5,000 to the state of Illinois. The building had been unoccupied for thirty-three years. Trees were growing up out of the floor of the building because an atrium let sunlight through and the trees were growing straight up to the sun.” When Bowen had the opportunity to sit next to the mayor at a baseball game, he discussed the problem of turning the building into a flea market: “I said, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s a dignified [use] for the building, to be very honest. My heart and soul were in that building’ ” (Bowen interview 2005). This passion led to an appointment of Bowen to the Bronzeville Blue Ribbon Task Force, charged with developing a strategy for the redevelopment of Bronzeville. Among their efforts, they successfully accessed the $14 million in federal QZAB funds (Qualified Zone Academy Bonds) de-

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signed for use to renovate old buildings for educational purposes. The building opened in 1999 as the Chicago Military Academy–Bronzeville. Its annual operations were funded through the Chicago Board of Education, as it functioned as a high school within the Chicago Public School District. Attached to the college-preparatory high school was the National African American Military Museum (NAAMM), established as a nonprofit in 2000. Bowen was a link between Chicago’s traditional political machinery, established local home owners, local military buffs, and art collectors. He was like Patric McCoy and the other collectors I interviewed who describe their interest in art as passion. Bowen highlighted this fact as one his wife did not fully share: I have better than two hundred pieces of original art. Two catalogs. I have two catalogs of my collection. And, um, I probably have sixty or seventy pieces on the floor that are not framed, that are just sitting on the floor. And I have no wall space. My wife has threatened me. Let me tell you, let me just tell you this. She tells me, “Don’t buy any more. You know you can’t do it, because you can’t put it up.” (Bowen interview 2005)

As part of the activities of the military academy, Bowen initiated an annual art exhibition and fund-raising event, “Art at the Academy,” held each November within the Chicago Military Academy–Bronzeville. The event was modeled after the highly successful annual auction of the South Side Community Art Center, which was located just five blocks away. As with sales through a gallery, artists received a percentage of the sale price, a mea­ sure that like the other collectors’ activities served to support the production of art. Bowen’s role as the oral historian of the Fighting Eighth and his passionate interest led to the seemingly odd pairing of an annual art exhibition within a military academy. The Gala Reception for the Second Annual “Art at the Academy” on November 28, 2003, was advertised to “celebrate the African American aesthetic with great jazz and ‘Art at the Academy,’ a fine art exhibition and auction featuring 50 prominent national artists.” Funds raised from the sale of art totaled $70,000 the first year and $10,000 the second year, representing the majority of the donations to the museum over the first three years of its operations (NAAMM 2002, 2003). The Chicago Military Academy–Bronzeville and the National African American Military Museum are contemporary educational and cultural facilities both housed in a historic structure first identified by Samuelson in

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the 1970s. Although the building was among those he had registered on the National Register of Historic Places by 1986, the Eighth Regiment Armory, the first armory built for an African American military regiment in the United States, was not officially recognized as a Chicago landmark until the late 1990s.

Conclusions Examination of how cultural facilities came into being and how public art celebrating a place called Bronzeville came to be located on Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago reveals how a relatively small network of local leaders attracted more than $100 million in federal, state, and city funds for innovative projects in economic development, community-based art, streetscape design, and public art. They drew on the black cultural capital established decades before to codify local knowledge about a place called Bronzeville within the larger metropolitan context of Chicago. A broad-based network of shared interest was required for the ideas to develop and move to where strategically located individuals with access to resources could put them to use. The people involved, the resources used, and the shared local interest that enabled the existence of the series of works on King Drive—referred to by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs as the Public Art of Bronzeville (1996)—illustrate how public art deployed as territorial markers redefined a place, reconnected its people to a historical narrative, and enabled a new kind of black leadership in local revitalization. Bronzeville was created to represent both the historic and the contemporary culture of an economically diverse, predominantly black place in the twenty-first century on Chicago’s South Side. Furthermore, it represents a place of leadership for the black middle class within local life and in the larger society. These accounts highlight the successes and shortcomings of the mobilization efforts in Bronzeville. Empowerment networks of Bronzeville mobilized both the cultural knowledge and the black cultural capital, and restored it in the local culture through public art and cultural institutions. This black cultural capital first appeared in public through exhibitions at the South Side Community Art Center, then at the Ebony Museum and through community-based processes of activist muralists, and in the programs and exhibitions at the DuSable Museum of African American Art; also this black cultural capital was created anew as a local identity representative of “an economically diverse and culturally rich” place. Most importantly, it signified the cultural practices of an emerging black middle class with interests

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that distinguish the group within the broader field of cultural producers. Just as the early community-based methods expanded involvement in the arts to local neighborhoods, this empowerment network activated further involvement and interest in black cultural practices. To their credit, this network was also able to seed plans for continued infrastructure investment and later for accessing more funds for further structural and programmatic development. One example of continued investment is seen through the preservation and restoration of murals produced by activist muralists in the 1960s and 1970s. The nonprofit organization first established by William Walker and John Pittman Weber as the Chicago Mural Group, and more recently has operated under the leadership of Jon Pounds as the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG), became a partner in the restoration of Bronzeville and has secured as much as $20,000 per mural in public and private funding for restoration and new projects. Among those it has preserved and restored as part of efforts in “Restoring Bronzeville” was A Time to Unite, a mural painted in 1976 at Forty-First Street and Drexel Avenue, originally produced by Mitchell Caton, a postal sorter who had worked on murals with William Walker, and Justine De Van, Calvin Jones, Anthony Campbell, and Grant York (plate 19). The image was a call for solidarity and featured images of a black nuclear family, African textile patterns and motifs, and African drummers, dancers, and blues musicians. Over the thirty-year period since Walker and OBAC first painted the Wall of Respect, CPAG formalized its operations; it formalized the inter­ action process between artists and non-artists, its selection of muralists, and its relationships with city officials, enabling it to secure funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, GATX, Bank One, and the Illinois First state infrastructure fund for restoration of the murals originally painted by activist muralists on Chicago’s South Side. Although CPAG has been highly successful producing murals and public art in neighborhoods throughout Chicago, and in protecting and restoring the work of activist muralists of the era 1960–80, it has yet to find a way to protect the works of later generations of muralists. For example, it was unable to protect the work of three young spray-can artists whose mural on the walls of a Forty-Seventh Street Metra train viaduct was painted out by an order from Alderman Preckwinkle’s office. Although the mural crew was made up of local residents and art teachers at Kenwood Academy—who had secured official permission in 1996 from the Metra officials at the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) to

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paint the viaduct—they had not involved CPAG, the alderman, or a vocal group of neighbors, who ten years later did not like their work. Although the work was not vandalism, it was considered to be “threatening” to some older neighborhood residents because the artists had abandoned representational imagery and ideologies of the mid-century muralists and used contemporary gestures, hip-hop images, and abstract iconography evocative of urban youth culture.5 The reality of distributing large amounts of public funds in Bronzeville created funding territories according to political wards and districts. As central players in the distribution of Enterprise Zone grants and other government funding in Bronzeville, Chicago aldermen focused on areas closest to their own offices and constituents, often without consideration of the potential benefits of clustering art activity in arts or business districts and without effectively mobilizing the cultural capital that developed over nearly half a century through the South Side Community Art Center, the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the work of educators, artists, and collectors. Nevertheless, the locally based art projects that were part of the “Restoring Bronzeville” plan represented how network participants could identify and mobilize local cultural capital in innovative ways to claim local territory while attracting external resources to feed the local economic structure. This process has yet to be able to build and sustain concentrations of cultural or business activity since the ending of segregation and the dissolution of Black Metropolis. After nearly ten years of building and $100 million of investment, tourists are not pouring into Bronzeville; artists and collectors go to private parties in home-based studios and home-based galleries in Bronzeville or leave the locale to attend events elsewhere. Patric McCoy, an art collector and founder of a Bronzeville-based collector’s network, blamed the empty spaces and lack of entrepreneurial enterprises on the “kiss the ring” tactics of power brokers who have built large-budget cultural facilities, at the expense of more even distribution of funds to artists and small businesses. He asked: What do they think is going to happen? People are just going to show up? You need to have the small places for the big place to survive. . . . [The aldermen] want to control things. They really lost the opportunity. If they would have allowed the people to use their entrepreneurial skills, [Bronzeville] would have been done by now. All those empty spaces, all those buildings, that district on Forty-Third, would have been done by now. They are blocked by the “kiss the ring” concept. That is, if you don’t get the alderman involved, get their spon-

Empowerment Networks and the Restoration of Local Culture / 219 sorship, if you don’t give them a piece of it, it doesn’t happen. That money should have been used to encourage entrepreneurs to do it. Those who had the business skills would have anchored the rest. (McCoy interview 2003)

Yet nurturing individuals and their entrepreneurial spirit may even be viewed as contrary to the driving force behind black social-change movements. Collective efforts arising from the civil rights movement focused on the racist barriers to employment and pursued a strategy of securing “representative numbers,” that is, proportionate numbers of black workers in large industry and government jobs consistent with the population. Accomplishing social change has meant that blacks exerted a single voice. However, local leaders who embraced “Restoring Bronzeville” are increasingly framing this restoration to mean building a vibrant, local economy through entrepreneurial activity, particularly reminiscent of historical black trading practices. Local leaders are looking to contemporary art production for models of how these larger goals can be achieved. And among the Bronzeville arts organizations, the Little Black Pearl Workshop stands alone in its innovative approach to teaching youth entrepreneurial skills though art. On a positive note, the process of producing the artworks on King Drive not only engaged local residents in selecting artists and researching subjects; it reanimated the history of a place and of a people while connecting the contemporary development of Bronzeville, for better or for worse, to Chicago’s citywide planning and cultural efforts and to federal economic development funds. It is important to note that innovation leading to the creation of Bronzeville meant that in every step of development someone either had to break a rule or create a new rule or policy to enable its exis­ tence. The Public Art of Bronzeville represents the efforts of an empowerment network that worked to identify and mobilize local cultural capital in innovative ways to claim local territory and empower residents with ownership of its geographic and historic place. The network provided access to external resources earmarked for economic development and knowledge of how to deploy those resources to establish an arts infrastructure and community identity. The series of works employed an amalgamation of conventions drawn from history writing, civil rights organizing, activist mural making, and public art. Ironically, the artists named in the brochure as the “creators” of specific objects were the last participants in a production process of the Public Art of Bronzeville, and possibly the least important: while an individual artist’s withdrawal from the project would have required the committee to secure a replacement, the invisible work of this empowerment network—a group

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of people brought together by their shared interest in replenishing the cultural reserves of this historic place—was unique and shaped the project. This involvement by both local residents and leaders as well as city bureaucrats represents a level of participation that few other public art efforts can claim. This chapter shows how a network could act without formal policy or institutional control to guide a project from beginning to end. Shared local interest brought producers together and enabled them to carry out the project. Their work succeeded in marking the Mid-South region of Chicago representative of the concerns and identity of the growing population of the black middle class. This shared interest enabled disparate networks to converge and individuals to work together in a surprisingly collaborative way as informal policy makers, project managers, and local advocates in the creation of the kind of public artworks and public facilities that can mark and identify a locale.

NINE

Post-Urban Culture?

Researching Art in the Twenty-First Century Demystifying “Community” This study of networks pulls back the magical curtain of “community” to uncover the social structures operating behind the facade of “cultural difference.” Networks of local art producers have been shown strategically using symbols of their local place, its people, and its history as tools to mobilize resources, including people, votes, money, space, respect, status, and power. These networks often emerged from small social worlds that supported innovation in order to mobilize the political and cultural capital necessary to carry out their projects large and small. Contributions to Social Theories of Art The image of the common traveler (as depicted in the Monument to the Great Northern Migration) who carried a seemingly empty suitcase filled with his own creative spirit to make a new life in a new place contrasts with the aura of great objects displayed in a long, elegant hall of a museum; one offers the logic of individual perseverance to explain how a local place was enliv­ ened with culture, the other symbolizes organizational strength. This study replaces both of these mythic images with a theory of a local art production network that was developed through the collection of the rich empirical data from accounts by black, Latino, and white ethnic art producers. This theory gives shape to the evanescent form of a network by identifying the shared interests that bring people together. Through comparison of the various types of art networks, we can now see some consistent patterns:

222 / Chapter Nine 1. Shared interests bring art producers together to accomplish something artistic that otherwise would not happen. 2. Variation in these shared interests of art producers can be understood through a framework of ideal types of networks. 3. A typology of ideal networks is useful to orient specific collaborative activities within the broad range of historically and geographically situated phenomenon. 4. Distinctions among various types of participants further orient individual action within local events. 5. Knowledge and resources are banked within these networks for future use, becoming local cultural capital. 6. Instead of being hidden, or invisible, this knowledge and these resources are visible as local color.

Through the network form of social organization, residents and leaders in places rich with urban cultures have moved beyond their isolating boundaries and beyond the protest rallies to mobilize the political and cultural resources necessary to validate their own histories and art forms. These have been long-term strategic pursuits to redress the unequal distribution of cultural power and to resist displacement of local residents and businesses as the cultural core has sought to expand its territory and influence. And rather than acting as parts of isolated or ethnocentric cultures, local art producers have engaged in innovative alliances to provide stability for what they define as their cultures. These processes constructed identities, histories, and artworks, locating urban places within larger twenty-first-century contexts of global cities.

Importance of a New Framework With this understanding, one can enter into networks of black art collectors, low-rider car collectors, installation artists, spray-can artists, or even model train collectors, and contribute to or stand against the interests of that network. In fact, suburban men who build miniature cities and run model trains together during Saturday afternoon parties provide a compelling extension of aesthetic interests evident within the local networks investigated in this study. Whether one is interested in running model trains, constructing a vibrant place stimulated by a vision of historic circumstances, or supporting the work of contemporary artists, the interactions necessary to bring these meanings to life require others to share in that interest. The typology of art production networks identified in this study frames how

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variation in these shared interests can work within a variety of historically and geographically situated places. Here is a recapitulation of these types. Aesthetic Networks Aesthetic networks involve artists and collectors focused on the meanings of objects and of the place of these objects in cultural time and space. Private interaction between these two types of participants creates shared preferences around contemporary artworks. These preferences are further extended into webs of social interaction within which other local resources, such as knowledge and practical ways of doing things, are banked and available for future use. This reserve is, in effect, cultural capital, and as a result of this reservoir of culture, aesthetic preferences exist and can enter into public space. The activities of art parties offer an alternative to the kind of exchanges that take place in formal art markets and cultural institutions. They provide a social space and interactive process for people to become directly involved in the production of meanings of art and of places. Although these activities also created informal markets for artworks, the buying and selling of art is secondary to the discussion and identification of shared preferences among aesthetic network participants. The case study of the aesthetic network of Bronzeville art collectors helps to orient our understanding of how an aesthetic network operates and the kinds of activity it might undertake over time. Moreover, it contributes new understanding of the activities of the black middle class and of the changing social location of black Americans. As this case study suggests, defining shared preferences and meanings of culture is part of defining social space inhabited by African Americans in the United States. Autonomy Networks The first relationship for artists who prioritize artistic autonomy is with art history, but such artists engage in a variety of practical activities to sustain their production and their own autonomy as artists. The kinds of exchanges among network participants are those intent on limiting any form of social, economic, or cultural constraint on artistic production. With the actions and language that speak of artistic autonomy woven through their activities, these artists collaborate with others having similar interests; they exchange time, expertise, and skill to produce art, while attracting and sharing audiences through routine public events.

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Autonomy artists redefine boundaries between the traditional media, form, shape, and line and the categories of fine art and ethnic culture in order to create new places for themselves and their artworks. These activities, intent on sustaining the autonomy of both the artist and the artwork, contrast with the interests of aesthetic networks, which seek to harness cultural meanings as a form of solidarity. In the case study of art producers in Pilsen, the variety of struggles faced in pursuit of artistic autonomy are understood through the activities of three types of artists: cutting-edge, transnational, and museum-quality. Cuttingedge artists created new artistic spaces; transnational artists crossed cultural borders; and museum-quality artists produced art for museum display while working to redefine the aesthetic predispositions of such institutions. These types of participants represented the range of artists observed who shared an interest in artistic autonomy. Their efforts were intended to transcend the everyday social order, not reshape it. The motivation for artistic autonomy propelled artists in a direction that was not explained by the kinds of values—use or exchange values—upon which markets are based. Without an interest in developing market values for their own work, they were therefore also uninterested in increasing that value or the value of other local resources. Achieving and sustaining autonomy also required that artists forgo the power that comes with other forms of civic engagement, such as property ownership or political enfranchisement. Because autonomy artists forgo these sources of power, they have a transient but useful place in urban locales. They produce a short-term market for property developers interested in transforming the use of obsolete structures such as industrial-era factories, offices, schools, storefronts, churches, and homes. In some locales, artists have provided a short-term mediating presence by using the skills of the working-class craftsman to produce the cultural symbols of the middle and upper classes. And as property renters rather than owners, they have been easily dispensed with through rent increases or removing part of the autonomy bargain that attracted them in the first place to the often substandard rental units. Problem-Solving Networks Problem-solving networks mobilize local resources and employ grassroots strategies involving social activists, community improvers, and cultural entrepreneurs to use arts activity as a tool to solve conflict and discord among local groups. Like the activist muralists in Bronzeville, these diversity advo-

Post-Urban Culture? / 225

cates staged events and produced art objects as a way to be engaged with and engage poor residents in cultural production. Rather than a force to homogenize local culture, they sought to represent the full range of local culture in a positive light. As advocates for cultural diversity, these problem solvers worked with residents and business owners to mobilize local resources in response to social and economic changes occurring within the locale and beyond. Using art as community-building activities, they not only produced images of diversity; they also created experiences with diverse people. Gentrification Networks Gentrification networks begin as a broad network of participants interested in increasing the value of local resources. This broad network can become complicit in efforts by which arbitrarily asserted privileges are used to create exclusive spaces, ones in which the complicit actors can themselves be excluded. As such, gentrification is more than a class-based transition, but one propelled by and conferring benefits to a limited number of participants. The cultural transformation associated with gentrification involves neutralizing symbols of ethnicity, urban youth, and lower classes, resulting in a homogenization or whitening of local places. Although this homogenization process may enable increased investment in the locale by globally franchised businesses, it does so at the expense of the ethnic cultures it devalues, erases, or renders invisible. Gentrification redefined, then, is the social practices that privilege elite cultural producers and their cultural products through a process of homogenizing cultural differences that are otherwise prevalent in a local culture. Unlike aesthetic networks, which are repositories for aesthetic preferences, the knowledge that is banked within gentrification networks refers to practical matters negotiated through public policy restrictions and access to their benefits, and the buying, selling, building, and managing of properties. As this case study shows, some people interested in increasing the value of local resources, and who also supported investment and sustained cultural activities involving the full variety of local residents, stood against “whitewashing” and instead created alliances with an “ethnically driven stability machine” as opposed to the “growth machine.” These activities have been increasingly able to tap resources from throughout and beyond the locale to resist the transformations resulting in cultural homogenization and displacement. As a result, shared interest in increasing the value of local resources does not require and in fact resists the wholesale erasure of

226 / Chapter Nine

ethnic culture, while benefiting from the preservation of that which makes the locale unique. Empowerment Networks Empowerment networks involve an array of local and municipal leaders, administrators, bureaucrats, and activists who share an interest in redefining the cultural uses of public space. Using a combination of political savvy and cultural innovation, they seek to redress a century of disinvestment in local infrastructure, devaluation of local resources, and cultural deprivation. These networks replenish the cultural reserves of a local place and then mobilize this cultural capital to stake claim to territory and assert ownership of both its geographic and historic place. In the case study provided here, Bronzeville began to emerge in Chicago as a territorial place symbolic of a culturally rich, predominantly black locale; its meaning drew upon black cultural capital that had been banked within aesthetic and empowerment networks for more than a century. Efforts to identify and then mark the contributions of black people in Chicago’s and the nation’s history took on new meaning by the end of the twentieth century. Fortunately, in this case the interests of the empowerment network were compatible with those of the elite who sought to redefine the city center; and indeed some members of the black middle and upper classes had achieved access and influence within elite art networks that enabled them to achieve their interests with the help of larger political and cultural structures of the city. Local Cultures, Local Art, and Local Networks Participants in local art networks draw upon an amalgamation of conventions from history writing, civil rights movements, activist mural making, and public art practices to create a local arts infrastructure and identity. As a result, private collections, public art, and cultural facilities serve a variety of local purposes, such as to •

create new knowledge;

•

establish an identity for a people and a contemporary urban place;

•

provide a gateway to local culture;

•

beautify local space;

•

mark sites of historic importance;

Post-Urban Culture? / 227 •

emphasize the cultural contributions of local groups;

•

represent the creative spirit of local residents.

Each of the places investigated in this book had a high level of involvement by artists, local residents, and public officials, who helped to clear hurdles as they arose, allowing the network participants to act without formal policies, positions, or institutional controls to guide the project or activities from beginning to end. Their shared interests enabled disparate groups and professions to converge, so that individuals could work together in a surprisingly collaborative way as informal curators, policy makers, project managers, and local advocates in the creation of artworks, collections, public artworks, facilities, and infrastructure projects that redefined the locale. In an era when the identities of individuals and places are no longer bound to the processes and structures of a manufacturing economy, local art production has become a tool for all kinds of people living in all kinds of places to build satisfying social lives and to solve problems brought on by the changing urban order. Then they can successfully stake claim to local space within the larger urban and global context.

The Future of Race and Ethnicity Locality, Race, and Ethnicity The networks discussed in this book involved alliances among African Americans, Latinos, Caucasians, and Asians in the United States. These alliances come from conceptions of race and ethnicity as a self-defined identity that is individually asserted then mobilized as a collective resource; race and ethnicity are used strategically to extend the democratic ideal of social equity into the realm of culture. As cultural leaders seek equitable representation in the larger municipal history, they also build ethnic cultural institutions capable of legitimizing historic and artistic accounts, presenting ethnic perspectives of historical events and of beauty. These localized institutions are further empowered through the expansive networks of shared interests discussed in this book. The activities of these networks address what black scholars such as Manning Marable ([1995] 2003) consider the “paradox of desegregation”: the loss of power and influence that came when blacks and other minority groups were no longer geographically contained in urban ghettos or ethnic enclaves. Within his call for strategies that enable greater involvement by

228 / Chapter Nine

the middle and upper classes in the struggles of the working class, poor, and unemployed, it is unlikely he envisioned art as part of the package. Nevertheless, activities of these art networks show how this has been accomplished in Chicago. Cultural activities offer opportunities for increasing the influence and involvement of the educated black and ethnic middle classes in the creation and ownership of local space. Use of existing connections to state institutions to mobilize funds and use of these funds for cultural projects that establish ownership of local territory are new strategies for empowering racial or ethnic cultures. Such activities of art production networks extend the capacity of people in local places to create value around local culture using processes once limited to the institutions and markets of a single dominant culture. Ethnic Institutions The presence of ethnic institutions in local places provides an important resource for art producers; they symbolize the cultural capital embedded within ethnic groups and within local places, and, as such, they are useful to stand against efforts to homogenize local culture. The establishment of a black history museum and a Mexican art museum in Chicago anchored local culture while providing a foundation for the institutional legitimizing of ethnic perspectives of history and ethnic art in Chicago. Yet the cultural influence of these institutions remains disproportionately small in comparison to the size of their representative populations and to the degree of disinvestment in these locales. The still untapped foundation for their increased legitimacy is rooted in the expansive networks of activity outside the nonprofit cultural institution form. Although empowerment efforts in Bronzeville were able to attract the funds needed to complete cultural infrastructure and building projects, the ability to mobilize a base of support to attend events, contribute funds, and buy goods and services remains weak. Some advocates point to the relative poverty of blacks and ethnics as an explanation for this lack of support, but this research points to the failure of these institutions to tap into and serve the shared interests evident within local art production networks. Arts facilities in Bronzeville are not alone as facilities all over the United States are challenged to find ways to tap into these networks. So rather than simply build a $20 million structure and expect people to show up, leaders of these newly built facilities must celebrate local culture and history in ways that are welcoming and recognizable to local residents and at the same time that are financially sustainable while further enriching people’s lives.

Post-Urban Culture? / 229

Unanswered Questions This study lays the foundation for understanding and supporting localized cultures in a global cultural context, but can it mark the end of efforts to homogenize local cultures? Although it provides insight into how private interactions and public markers can reframe artistic, cultural, and geographic territories of race and ethnicity, can more equitable spaces be produced in the twenty-first century? If so, where will they be and where will the funds come from to build such places? The network form of organization is a site for innovation; it is a reservoir for the information and access to resources that produce cultural capital. As such, networks are not solid and permanent structures as are the organizational structures behind the stone walls of art institutions, but they are durable and persistent nonetheless. Like a secret society, they are elusive. But rather than possessing a secret handshake, networks exist through exchanges serving their members’ particular shared interests. These cases reveal the subtle interrelation between what is public and what is private: how public funds were accessed to build new spaces for private uses; how public art monuments can represent the private concerns of local residents; and how private collections can be amassed to support the quality and diversity of a place. Although many of the efforts discussed in this book began when public funds were plentiful, these efforts provide insight into how to mobilize resources through the routine budgetary appropriation processes and the decisions of policy makers. Such strategies are as useful when disasters of epic proportions force the rebuilding of places or when the growth-machine interests grab hold of the next big idea that clashes with the interests of an ethnically driven stability machine. The localities in this study shared a common orientation in their resistance to externally imposed meanings and practices, while they sought a place within post-industrial, postmodern culture. Through network relationships, local residents accessed resources to create private and public markers of the racial and ethnic dimensions of their lives. Rather than reproducing historic inequalities by misrecognizing a dominant culture as the legitimate culture of a place (Bourdieu [1979] 1984), participants produced art and local culture that represented the potential vitality of a local place to itself and to outsiders while contesting the broader cultural arrangements that produce subordinate statuses. As an exploration of the social worlds located outside the cultural centers of global cities, this study demonstrates the importance of locality and ethnicity—local color—as a renewable resource for the twenty-first century.

INTERVIEWS

Alsina interview 2003. Monserrat Alsina, artist, co-owner of the Colibri Gallery. Altman interview 2002. Edith Altman, artist. Aubuchon interview 2003. Kimberly Aubuchon, artist, founder and director of the gallery Unit B. Berg interview 2005. Alicia Berg, vice president of Campus Environment at Columbia College, former commissioner in the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, former preservation planner for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. Bowen interview 2005. Charles Bowen, retired executive assistant of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. Briggs interview 2006. Carol J. Briggs, principal at Alfred D. Kohn Elementary School, cofounder of Diasporal Rhythms. Burkart interview 2002. Heather Burkart, artist, founder and director of Gallery SixFourFive. Burroughs interview 2003. Margaret Burroughs, Chicago Park District commissioner, artist, teacher, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, founding member of the South Side Community Art Center. Crisler interview 2003. Joan Dameron Crisler, principal at Arthur Dixon Elementary School, co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms. Dayo interview 2002, 2008. Adedayo “Dayo” Laoye, artist. Dowell interview 2005. Patricia R. Dowell, Chicago Third Ward alderman, former executive director of the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission, former deputy commissioner in the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. Estrada interview 2001. William Estrada, artist, visual arts educator, assistant director of the Yollocalli Youth Museum, a youth initiative of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. Ferreyra interview 2003. Roberto Ferreyra, artist, Aztec dance instructor, co-owner of the Colibri Gallery. Gaspar interview 2001. Maria Elena Gaspar, artist. Goldberg interview 2002. Al Goldberg, musician, real estate agent. Greenlee interview 2003. Sam Greenlee, poet, writer, filmmaker, author of Spook Who Sat by the Door. Guichard interview 2003. Andre Guichard, artist, founder of Gallery Guichard, former curator of the South Shore Cultural Center, co-founder of the R.A.W. [Real Art Work] show.

232 / Interviews Harshaw interview 2001, 2002. Craig Harshaw, artist, executive director of Insight Arts. Hogan interview 2001. Kathleen (Katy) A. Hogan, co-owner of the Heartland Café. Jess interview 2002. Tyehimba Jess, poet, teaching artist, assistant professor, College of Staten Island, New York (CUNY). Johnson interview 2003. Robert Johnson, artist. Jolly interview 2004, 2005. Marva Lee Pitchford Jolly, artist, professor at Chicago State University, founder of Sapphire and Crystals. Karanja interview 2001. Ayana Karanja, artist, associate professor, Loyola University Chicago, board member of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center. Karanja interview 2003. Sokoni T. Karanja, founder and executive director of the Center for New Horizons. King interview 2003. Melvin King, artist, founder of the R.A.W. [Real Art Work] Fine Arts Alliance, exhibiting artist at the R.A.W. Show, 2003, 2006. Koenen interview 2003, 2005. Barbara Koenen, artist, bureaucrat, project director in the Cultural Planning Division, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Kronbeck, interview 2002. Jasmine Kronbeck, artist, staff member at Pros Arts Studio. Lash interview 2003. Michael Lash, director of the Public Art Program, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Malika interview 2003, 2006. Annette Jackson, artist a.k.a. Malika, art teacher at Arthur Dixon Elementary School, artist displaying work at the R.A.W. [Real Art Work] Show, 2006. McCoy interview 2003, 2005, 2008. Patric McCoy, retired environmental engineer, art collector, co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms, a nonprofit organization formed by a network of collectors of artwork by black artists. McCullough interview 2005. Geraldine McCullough, artist. Medine interview 2003. Eric Medine, artist, co-founder of Drivethru Studios. Moreno interview 2001. MariCarmen Moreno, director of youth education at the Instituto del Progreso Latino. Parker interview 2003. Daniel Texidor Parker, professor at Olive-Harvey Community College, co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms, a nonprofit organization formed by network of collectors of artwork by black artists. Peck interview 2003. Nathan Peck, artist. Peterson interview 2002. Tom Peterson (pseudonym), voter registrar. Pounds interview 2003. Jon Pounds, artist, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group. Rafacz interview 2003. Andrew Rafacz, founder of the Bucket Rider Gallery and the Andrew Rafacz Gallery. Robinson interview 2005. Paula Robinson, managing partner of the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, member of the board of advisors for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Rodriguez interview 2002. Elvia Rodriguez, artist, assistant director at Pros Arts Studio, co-founder of Polvo Art Studio. Romani interview 2003. Elena Romani (pseudonym), board member of Pros Arts Studio. Samuelson interview 2003, 2005. Timothy J. Samuelson, cultural historian at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Sanders interview 2002. Gerald Sanders, artist, teacher, founder of Studio Bronzeville. Shaffer interview 2002. Fern Shaffer, artist, former director of Artemisia Gallery. Spears interview 2003. Gregg Spears, artist, former managing director of the South Side Community Art Center.

Interviews / 233 Tortolero interview 2003, 2006. Carlos Tortolero, founder and executive director of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, renamed the National Museum of Mexican Art in 2006. Walsh interview 2003. Ali Walsh, founder of the Hockshop Gallery. Washington interview 2003. Dale Washington, artist. Westgard interview 2002. Amy Westgard, artist, coordinator for the Rogers Park Arts Council Steering Committee. Williams interview 2003. Julian Williams, artist. Williams interview 2002. karen g. williams, artist, artistic director of Insight Arts.

Notes

Introduction

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

The markers were installed in 1999 as a project of the Chicago Tribune Foundation, the Chicago Cultural Center Foundation, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. “Black” as used in this study refers to a pan-ethnic self-identification of people having origins in any of the dark-skinned cultural groups of Africa and is discussed more fully later in this chapter. (For further information on the changing meaning of racial and ethnic categorization, see Lee and Bean 2003; Grieco and Cassidy 2001). In this study, “community area” refers to an aggregate of census tracts set forth by early twentieth-century researchers of the Chicago School of Social Science Research as part of an urban sociology research agenda that was sustained through the first half of the century. Approved by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1930 and first published in the Local Community Fact Book (Wirth and Furez 1938), these community areas are based upon aggregates of census tracts and intended to provide researchers and local leaders with consistent access to demographic information collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Chicago planners and demographers still refer to these “community areas” in formal documents, yet their importance, as well as the publication of the Local Community Fact Book, has diminished with the advent of universal public Internet access to the U.S. Census data via www.census.gov. Initially there were seventy-five community areas. However, prior to the 1980 census, two additional community areas were added: Area 76 with the annexation of the land for O’Hare International Airport, and Area 77, Edgewater, when Area 3, Uptown, was divided by the city of Chicago. All demographic data for 2000 is drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau on www.census .gov. Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park data are calculated through aggregates of the appropriate census tracts. Racial and ethnic data are compiled through “Table P4: Hispanic or Latino and Not Hispanic or Latino by Race [73] Universe: Total Population” on www.census.gov. Overall Chicago data are drawn from the geographic category of “place,” which refers to the incorporated city of Chicago. “Community areas” refer to historic locales but are not designated “places” in the U.S. Census. Figures in the U.S. Census’s Bureau’s “2006–2008 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates” show some change in these figures with a 2 percent decrease in the black/ African American population to 34 percent; Chicago’s white/Caucasian population

236 / Notes to Pages 5–7 is estimated to remain at 31 percent; and its Hispanic/Latino population is estimated to increase 2 percent to 28 percent. 6. “Latino,” rather than “Hispanic,” as used throughout this book, refers to a pan-ethnic population sharing a linguistic heritage of Spanish. The term “ethnic” or “ethnicity” is used in reference to a specific nation or national origin, and “ethnic culture” refers to the symbols and customs of a specific nation, whereas “pan-ethnic” is used to refer to many nations. For example, “Mexican” is an ethnicity that refers to the culture and customs of Mexico; “Puerto Rican” is an ethnicity that refers to the culture and customs of Puerto Rico; “Hispanic” is an ethnicity that refers to the culture and customs of Spain. As the largest segment of Chicago’s Latino population is of Mexican descent, there is a cultural rejection of the term “Hispanic” as a pan-ethnic label, in favor of “Latino,” as the term “Hispanic” is thought to perpetuate a Eurocentric perspective. In Pilsen, Mexicans are the dominant group, so Mexican ethnicity exerts hegemonic authority; however, Latinos of non-Mexican descent also live in Pilsen and were interviewed as part of this study. 7. Postmodernism is a cultural/artistic term often referring to pluralism in contemporary cultural and political discourse, the general discrediting of the high culture/low culture paradigm, and the blurring of the boundaries between art, mass media, and popular culture (Harrington 2006, 21). I also use the term to refer to the time period of last half of the twentieth century, paralleling post-industrial economic change. It is a cultural and artistic period, coined by Fredric Jameson, and, according to some uses, marks a break from mid-twentieth-century “modernity” and from nineteenthcentury Kantian aesthetics For example, in art this is seen in the break from abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock) to the mix-and-match, reproducible styles of pop art (Andy Warhol) and beyond; in architecture it is the break from the minimalist skyscrapers and “form = function” of Bauhaus to the functionalist eclecticism of Helmut Jahn and fantastic excesses of Frank Gehry. These aesthetic fissures then characterize a shift in our understanding of knowledge as fixed, universal, and generalizable to something that has multiple interpretations and changes within different contexts, i.e., is contextual. In contrast, Featherstone traces the modernist roots for many of the postmodernist claims. For an overview and deconstruction of postmodern interpretations of contemporary cultural change, see Featherstone (1992). 8. As Swidler pointed out: “Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or tool kit of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct strategies of action” (1986, 1). 9. See King (1996) for a discussion of segregation of ethnic communities from the larger corporate structure of the city. Subordinated communities are hidden and invisible or presented as backward in contemporary representations of the city, yet are economically vital to the city. His book suggests that revealing the contributions of these sectors will create a more manageable and egalitarian city. 10. “The Loop” refers to the configuration of public transportation tracks that circumvent the center city. The Loop is also a community area, No. 32, in Cook County comprised of census tracts 3201–3206. The first two digits of a census tract number refer to its community area number. As Chicago’s community areas have each been identified by the same number and same census tracts for nearly one hundred years, these numeric identifiers are consistent historical references for tracking population change. 11. A study of arts audiences of Chicago’s twelve largest arts institutions and fifty smaller ones (LaLonde et al. 2006) found that in most areas of the city and the surrounding

Notes to Pages 7–19 / 237

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

metropolitan area, less than 5 percent of the population participated in the activities of these arts organizations. Their analysis of 1.2 million addresses of visitors, members, and patrons collected by these organizations showed that a concentration of participation in the arts comes from Chicago’s middle- and upper-class residents, living in its North Side community areas and northern suburbs. My use of the term “core” is distinct from Crane’s (1992) useful typology of the production of culture as both media and urban arts. Crane builds a typology of three domains: the core domain, the peripheral domain, and urban culture. In her work, the “core domain” refers to large media conglomerates; “peripheral domain” refers to smaller media organizations; and urban culture is the third domain. (1992, 4–5). My focus on producing local color extends her concept of local urban culture produced by urban institutions, local arts nonprofits, and businesses to include the networks of producers that function on the margins of the third domain or are fully outside of it. Weber referred to ideal conceptions of religious rejections of the world as “the constructed scheme . . . [which] only serves the purpose of offering an ideal typical [as a] means of orientation. . . . The theoretically constructed types of conflicting ‘life orders’ are merely intended to show that at certain points . . . internal conflict is possible. . . . They are not intended to show that there is no standpoint from which the conflicts could not be held to be resolved in a higher synthesis. As will readily be seen, the individual spheres of value are prepared with rational consistency which is rarely found in reality. But they can appear thus in reality and in historically important ways, and they have. Such constructions make it possible to determine the typological locus of a historical phenomenon” (Weber [1915] 1958, 323–24). According to Saskia Sassen, global cities are “command points in the organization of the world economy; they are key locations and marketplaces for finance and specialized services and they are major sites of production and innovation for these industries” ([1991] 2001, 3–4). “Capital” is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept for objectifying power in social relationships. Appropriated from the Marxist notion of “property” and the associated power relationships of property ownership, Bourdieu uses it to describe all forms of power contained and associated with access and possession of resources. “Cultural capital” refers specifically to possession of legitimate forms of knowledge of cultural and artistic practice. Bourdieu recognized that the more dominant a group, the more power its cultural objects possess (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990). To define the term “distinction,” Bourdieu turns to Kantian aesthetics, where he finds that the power of cultural capital is embedded in control of aesthetic knowledge and practice. “Nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even ‘common’ ” (Bourdieu ([1979] 1984, 5). Therefore, for Bourdieu, “distinction”—that is, the ability to be distinct—is a key to the social function of art, not only in creating and maintaining social difference but also in legitimizing it. Chap t e r o n e

1.

For Crane, urban culture “is produced and disseminated in urban settings for local audiences. Organizations that attract the smallest audiences with the more esoteric and off  beat material tend to be local cultural organizations that retain an importance in the production and dissemination of culture that tends to be forgotten by those who stress the role of popular culture by conglomerates. Local cultural organizations, which are usually part of cultural networks—subcultures or art worlds—are often

238 / Notes to Pages 24–40

2.

sources of new ideas, a few of which eventually reach the cultural arena. The production of these works is a social activity in which cultural creators are constantly looking at other creators’ works to validate their own conceptions of aesthetic and political issues” (1992, 4–5). According to White, “[Art] dealers turn from a fuzz of hints regarding disparate collector preferences. . . . [T]hey calibrate their commitment choices by comparison to the profile through the choices they observe from the other dealers: Each dealer chooses the volume that will maximize profit [that is,] over what he estimates will have to be paid back upstream for the various volumes of new paintings” (2005, 1). Chap t e r t w o

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Before her death, Stamps became the executive director of the Chicago Housing Tenants Organization, protesting the redevelopment of Cabrini-Green into mixed-use housing in the 1990s. She would die at a youthful age, fifty-two, in 1995, just before demolition of large segments of Cabrini-Green began. Bronzeville refers to the Mid-South region of Chicago and is comprised of four South Side community areas: Douglas, Oakland, Grand Boulevard, and Kenwood. On www.census.gov, information for Douglas, Community Area 35, is found under census tract data for Cook County, IL, and numbered 3501–3515. (The first two digits refer to Community Area 35, which was the number for the Douglas community area. This number is followed by the census tract numbers 01–15.) Oakland, Community Area 36, is found under census tract numbers 3601–3605; Grand Boulevard, Community Area 38, is found under census tract numbers 3801–3820; Kenwood, Community Area 39, is found under census tract numbers 3901–3907. The name “Bronzeville” does not appear in the Local Community Fact Book or in any demographic reference to the area. Although this area is referred to in a number of literary works and by sociologists Drake and Cayton ([1945] 1962) as “Bronzeville,” the name did not appear in any contemporary publications until 1996, with the installation of the Public Art of Bronzeville on Martin Luther King Drive. Pilsen is located just north and west of Bronzeville, beyond the northern border of Chinatown. Pilsen is located within Community Area 31, referred to as the “Lower West Side” by the Community Area Fact Book. Population data are found under data for Cook County, IL, census tracts 3101–3115. Bohemia, once called the Kingdom of Bohemia, was part of the Austrian Empire through much of the eighteenth century and all of the nineteenth century. In 1918— after the fall of Emperor Franz Joseph and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I—the country of Czechoslovakia was formed. It was divided into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, before the end of the century, in 1993. According to Addams, “Hull-House once stood in the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up around it and its site now has corners on three or four foreign colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river live about ten thousand Italians— Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of their long residence in America, and to the north are Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets directly west and farther north are well-to-do English speaking fami-

Notes to Pages 43–72 / 239

6.

lies, many of whom own their own houses and have lived in the neighborhood for years; one man is still living in his old farmhouse” (Addams [1910] 1938, 98–99). Census information for Rogers Park, Community Area 1, is found under census tract data for Cook County, IL, and numbered 101–109. Chap t e r t h r e e

1.

2. 3.

4.

See Jeff Huebner’s insightful account “The Man Behind the Wall” (1997) for an indepth discussion of the Wall of Respect and of the artists involved in its production and in the production of other public art murals. See Wall of Respect, Organization of Black American Culture, 1967, http://www .blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/wallofrespect/main.htm. At this time as museums in Chicago began to show minimalist art, Chicago was a hotbed of political action, both in its politics and art, as pointed out by Kartemquin, a film production company started by University of Chicago students. Among their documentaries is What the Fuck Are These Red Squares? The film title criticized the lack of political content in minimalist paintings while documenting a teach-in at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where striking students responded to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of protesting students at Kent State University and Jackson State University (1970, B&W, 15 minutes, www.kartemquin.com). The issue of a proper monument to DuSable continues to be used as a tactic to increase the public representation of blacks and black accomplishment. Mayor Harold Washington designated a three-acre peninsula at the mouth of the Chicago River near Navy Pier as DuSable Park in 1987. Yet a contemporary controversy has sustained the debate over DuSable, particularly what he looked like. A planned abstract sculpture by Martin Puryear, a well-known, African American artist, has created controversy, as it sidestepped the issue of race and DuSable’s appearance. As most accounts agree that he was a black man and a successful trader, advocates from the DuSable League want a representational image of him as a black man with African features as the monument to DuSable in the park, rather than a representation of him as a light-skinned Haitian with European features, as he is depicted in some historical documents, or an abstract memorial dedicated to him, as is currently planned. Chap t e r f o u r

1.

Kant located the experience of art as separate from everyday life just as it is distinct from realms of rational thought. As Kantian aesthetics have influenced both modern and postmodern aesthetic thought, it is important to state here what Kantian aesthetics are. For Kant, the experience of art was a subjective feeling associated with pleasure and displeasure. The art object enabled one to have a transcendental and contemplative experience of the beautiful, which he saw as a universal experience. Art objects are distinct from objects, which function or can be put to good use in everyday life. Moreover, the experience of the beautiful transcends everyday life experience. The experience of pleasure derived from an art object is also distinct from sensuous pleasure experienced in everyday life. Experiences of the beautiful exclude reason and its associated forms of knowledge and thought as essential to the aesthetic judgment: In order to discern whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation through reason to the object for knowledge. Rather, we relate it through the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with reason) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure and

240 / Notes to Page 72 displeasure. Hence the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, that is, it is not logical but aesthetic. An aesthetic judgment is one the determining grounds of which cannot be other than subjective. But all reference of representations can be objective, even that of sensations (which signify the real in an empirical representation). The one exception is the relation of our representations to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure which refer to nothing at all in the object. In the feelings of pleasure and displeasure the subject feels itself in the way it is affected by the representation. (Kant [1790] 1963, 4)







Kant focused aesthetic judgment on subjective responses rather than cognitive responses or objective laws that purport to determine what makes a work of art. Said another way, he did not focus on the “nature” of the beautiful object; instead, he focused on judgments involved when things are called “beautiful.” In Kantian terms, judgments involved in “the beautiful” are characterized as disinterested; they are judgments, which are contemplative. In his categorizations of types of judgments, he distinguished between “interested” and “distinterested pleasure” and their associated judgments as “good” or “beautiful”; all are central to his hierarchy of judgments. To state something is “beautiful” is the highest form of pleasure one can have in viewing an object. It means there are universal qualities within the object, which would lead everyone to share in the experience of beauty. By contrast, interested pleasure exists in the realm of sensuous delight. Whereas disinterested pleasure involves imputing a universal judgment of beautiful (this is a judgment that everyone would share and in fact one would want everyone to share in it). Judgments about the beautiful are distinct from the functionality of an object and from personal desire. Kant termed something “good” if it is useful and there is thus a conceptual or purposeful basis for its existence. Something is “good” if it first exists as a cognitive experience. According to Kant, it is through the faculty of “taste” that one can judge beauty. “Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representing it by a wholly disinterested pleasure or a displeasure. The object of such pleasure is called beautiful” (Kant [1790] 1963, 12). By taste, Kant was not referring to taste of the senses; rather, he was referring to the “ability to judge about the pleasurable in general . . . the universal”: Take, for instance, one who knows how to entertain his company with things pleasurable (to the enjoyment of all senses) in such a way that all his guests are pleased. We say of him that he has taste. This is a judgment in regard to sociability as based on empirical rules. It is only comparatively universal; the rules in cases of this sort are merely general, as are all empirical rules, and not universal. The judgment of taste on the beautiful, on the contrary, establishes or lays claim to rules that are universal. It is true that judgments in regard to the good also rightly lay claim to validity for everyone. However, the good is represented as an object of universal pleasure only by means of a concept, which is the case neither with the pleasurable nor the beautiful. . . . In the judgment of taste (about the beautiful) the pleasure in an object is imputed to everyone without, however, any conceptual foundation (for then the object would be the Good). (Kant [1790] 1963, 15–16)



Kant laid the groundwork for what would become the distinction between aesthetics and the sociology of art. He distinguished between judgments made according to empirical rules and aesthetic judgments. The topic of making aesthetic distinctions was of particular interest to and critiqued by Pierre Bourdieu ([1979] 1984) in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

Notes to Pages 72–81 / 241

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

As seen in the above quote, Kant labeled the judgments made according to empirical rules as good. In beauty, an object is judged as its own highest achievement; the beautiful transcends its materials and becomes an object in itself. While Kant indicated that judgments leading to proclamations of “beautiful” are better than those which he termed good—which are related to sociability and sensuousness—he opened an area of discourse that would debate this distinction, both in the arts and in sociology, for more than two hundred years. Specifically, Marx (1844, [1845] 1968) condemned Kantian aesthetics as bourgeois aesthetics. For Marx, the work of the craftsman in every- day life would be the highest form of human activity as it was centered on practice. In contrast, another sociologist, Georg Simmel, did not discuss contemplative aesthetics and universality; instead he focused on interactions that are “sociable” (1950). According to Bourdieu and Passeron, cultural capital consists of “the cultural goods transmitted by the different family PAs [pedagogic actions], whose value qua cultural capital varies with the distance between the cultural arbitrary imposed by the dominant PA and the cultural arbitrary inculcated by the family PA within different groups or classes” (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990, 30). These black collectors challenge late nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics in which “disinterestedness” was the distinguishing characteristic in aesthetic judgments or judgments of taste. Scholars cite Kant’s philosophical treatise Critique of Judgment and its “Book I: Analytic of the Beautiful,” originally published in 1790, in which Kant makes distinctions between “interested” and “disinterested” pleasure, and places “disinterested pleasure” above “interested pleasure” in his hierarchy of distinctions; it therefore had more aesthetic value. According to Kant, one can only experience beauty through judgments characterized by “disinterested pleasure,” that is, a kind of pleasure that one does not want to own and possess for oneself alone, but pleasure that one wants to share with others. By virtue of disinterestedness, one can experience something that is universal (Kant [1790] 1963). Just as the twenty-first-century art parties provided a social atmosphere to introduce collectors to artists while supporting an alternative economy, early twentieth-century “rent parties” served as a alternative to segregated clubs while offering a place to socialize, eat, drink, dance, and play music. These private parties, held in apartments, were an important part of the development of blues music in Chicago. Although it is often assumed that the cover charge helped to pay the rent of the host, according to Jones (1963), such “pay parties” were important cultural venues and also developed careers for musicians: “The boogie pianist achieved a special social status, playing at various Chittlin’ Struts, Gumbo Suppers, Fish Fries, Egg Nog Parties. His services were much sought after, and he could gain entrance to all these ‘pay parties’ without being expected to pay” (Jones 1963, 115). Mike Featherstone provided a detailed investigation into the aestheticization of everyday life. For an overview and deconstruction of postmodern interpretations of contemporary cultural change, see Featherstone (1992). See p. 237 n. 16. Uncle Tom is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tom is a privileged slave who lives with his wife and children in their own house. He serves the master selflessly and loyally, in exchange for his position. However, when the economy of the slave master’s plantation begins to crumble, Tom is viewed as one of the most valuable assets and quickly coveted by the master’s debtors. He is sold to cover debts and forced to leave his family. People who act like Uncle Tom are ostracized because they are considered to be complacent and to not use their assets

242 / Notes to Pages 81–129 to improve the plight of all black people. Yet acting complacent was often a survival technique, as Drake and Cayton point out: “If working as servants, Negros must be properly deferential to the white people upon whom they depend on for meager wages and tips. In fact, they often have to overdo their act in order to earn a living; as they phrase it, they have to ‘Uncle Tom’ to ‘Mr. Charley’ a bit to survive” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962, 387). 8. “Boojie” is slang for what E. Franklin Frazier characterized as the social distance of the middle class from the working class and poor in Black Bourgeoisie (1957). 9. Playwright August Wilson, quoted by Crisler. Wilson’s address “The Ground on Which I Stand” was given during the 1996 Theater Communications Group National Conference at Princeton University on June 26, 1996 (Wilson 1996). 10. The Bud Billiken Parade is the annual parade that runs the full length of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive (Twenty-Sixth Street to Washington Park). What began as a marketing tool for the black-run newspaper the Chicago Defender has grown into a spectacular annual event celebrating black accomplishment in Chicago and is held on the second Saturday of August. The 2008 parade marked its seventy-ninth year and involved over “75,000 participants, 1.5 million people along the parade route and over 25 million watching in their homes around the country” (Bud Billiken Parade 2009). Chap t e r fiv e

1.

Becker defined a career as the “fate of the individual within an occupational organization” (1963, 101). He adapted Hughes’s (1937) definition of a career in the study of musicians who exist within occupational networks. For Hughes: Objectively . . . [a career is] a series of statuses and clearly defined offices . . . typical sequences of position, achievement, responsibility, and even of adventure. . . . Subjectively, a career is the moving perspective in which the person sees his life as a whole and interprets the meaning of his various attributes, actions and the things that happen to him. (1937, 409–10)



2.

3.

4.

By investigating musicians’ definitions of success, Becker sees the movement and statuses within a hierarchy of available jobs. Without these self-assessments of success, without income-producing activity, and without ranked positions, such definitions of careers do not work. Approaching a career from position of public recognition, Giuffre studied career paths of photographers who won National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1986 and 1988, plus all photographers who had solo shows in New York galleries in 1988. The study yielded a conceptualization of artists’ careers as “positions within a structure that is itself in a state of flux” (1999, 818). Located on the lakefront, Navy Pier was revalorized in the 1990s as a tourist center with a remodeled exhibition/convention hall, a children’s museum, theater, restaurants, stores, a Ferris wheel, and docks for boat tours. Nonprofit status is something that must be applied for and ruled on by the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Most arts nonprofits are 501(c)(3) nonprofits with educational purposes. Chap t e r s i x

1.

These are ideal types representing an analytic construction that is not intended to represent a preferred way of life (Weber [1915] 1958, 59–60). Such analytically con-

Notes to Pages 131–137 / 243

2.

3.

4.

structed schemes are intended as a means of orientation and to make it possible to determine the locus of historical phenomenon (324). See also p. 237 n. 13. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ecologists studied the interaction of animal, plant, and human communities and their environment. For example, University of Chicago botanist and ecologist Henry Cowles (1899) studied landscapes and plant life of the Indiana Dunes—an Indiana nature preserve located on the southern tip of Lake Michigan. His theory of plant succession sought to explain the preserve’s extreme plant diversity: 1,419 species existed in the Dunes’ 14,000 acres compared to Yellowstone’s 1,120 species in 2,221,800 acres. For Cowles and others after him who fought for its preservation, the Indiana Dunes were a living laboratory of extreme plant diversity; the constant pressure of wind and water, hot and cold, the movement of dry sand dunes butting up against marshland, rife with the forces of decomposition, led to a state of continual adaptation. “The ecologist . . . must study the order of succession of the plant societies in the development of a region, and he must endeavor to discover the laws which govern the panoramic changes. Ecology, therefore, is a study in dynamics. For its most ready application, plants should be found whose tissues and organs are actually changing at the present time in response to varying conditions. Plant formations should be found which are rapidly passing into other types by reason of a changing environment. These requirements are met par excellence in a region of sand dunes. Perhaps no topographic form is more unstable than a dune. Because of this instability plant societies, plant organs, and plant tissues are obliged to adapt themselves to a new mode of life within years rather than centuries, the penalty for lack of adaptation being certain death” (Cowles 1899, 95–96). Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1933), whose concept of the division of labor was based upon a theory of human differentiation, theorized the modern human community as a place where humans self-differentiate through work, giving rise to the cooperation and moral bonding necessary for society to exist, while sociologist Robert Park researched human ecology (1936) in the organization of cities and the balance of human, commercial, and industrial uses of urban land. Park conceived of social equilibrium to be one of institutionalism (Park [1925] 1952, 161). Later urban sociologists sought policy interventions to sustain urban diversity. Jane Jacobs’s classic argument called for city planning of mixed-use neighborhoods. She argued the “need of cities for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant and mutual support, both economically and socially” ([1961] 1992, 14). I had been a member of Artemisia, a feminist co-op gallery in Chicago’s River West gallery district, in 1989–92. Between 1983–2000 my work was shown in a number of commercial galleries in Chicago, including Upstart Gallery on Halsted Street in Lincoln Park and R.H. Love Contemporary on Ohio Street downtown. My paintings were also included in group shows at the Painted Bride in Philadelphia, the Visual Art Center of Alaska in Anchorage, and the Centro Colombo Americano, in Medellín, Colombia. The highest profile of all these exhibitions was The Very Top Chicago Women Painters at R.H. Love Contemporary in 1989. Although I continued to draw and paint in a home-based studio, and both my husband and I made fine art photographs, I exhibited my work less frequently after becoming the executive director of the Peace Museum in Chicago in 1992. As discussed in the next chapter, a report by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (2002) sought to build support for such arts districts. In 2005 a measure was introduced in the Illinois legislature to create arts districts that provided discounts in both sales and income tax collected from these districts. Both measures failed.

244 / Notes to Pages 168–196 Chap t e r s e v e n

1.

2. 3.

A study by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (2002), “Chicago Artists’ Space Strategy: Phase I,” investigated ways the city could promote and sustain artists and arts activities throughout Chicago. This study examined the issues surrounding arts districts in areas of concentrated arts activity and artists’ live/work spaces. The study advocated for the establishment of zoning for arts districts and legalizing artists’ live/work spaces. Cisneros was then an unknown writer. She is the author of The House on Mango Street (1984) and later won a MacArthur Genius Award for her literary accomplishments. Mayor Daley established a Zoning Reform Commission within the Department of Planning and Development to develop new principles for Chicago’s zoning policy. The commission report “Principles for Chicago’s New Zoning Ordinance: Recommendations for Preserving, Protecting, and Strengthening Chicago’s Neighborhoods” (2002) did not call for the creation of artists’ districts, but proposed creation of “at least one mixed-use ‘commercial-residential’ district that allows—as-of-right—residential buildings next to commercial and mixed-use buildings.” It argued: “By providing a greater range of housing options, this also could have a positive impact on housing affordability. The new residential uses could include artist housing, more rental opportunities, and housing for elderly—where the proximity to mass transit, retail districts, and other pedestrian-oriented activities would be especially valued” (Chicago Zoning Reform Commission 2002, 19). Chap t e r e igh t

1.

2. 3.

The concept of black cultural capital is my adaptation of Bourdieu’s use of “capital” to refer to power contained and associated with access and possession of resources, and “cultural capital” as possession of legitimate forms of knowledge and art (Bourdieu and Passeron [1977] 1990). My adaptation for “black cultural capital” recognizes the development of knowledge and power relevant to black people and black experiences throughout the world and, in this particular case, Bronzeville in Chicago, as discussed in chapter 4. Samuelson first learned about the Jordan building in They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music, by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Grossman Janis (1950). At the time Samuelson was hired, the commission was called the Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks. According to Samuelson, although its name included the term “historical,” it focused on “architectural” significance. According to a 2007 publication on the rules and regulations of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, “The Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks was created in 1957 by the City Council. It served primarily as an advisory board, whose principal purpose was to compile a list of significant buildings. In 1968, the City Council adopted a landmarks ordinance that gave the Commission the responsibility of recommending to the Council which specific landmarks should be protected by law. The ordinance also gave the Commission the authority to review building permits for landmarks, to ensure that any proposed alterations would not negatively affect the character of the landmark. In 1987, the ordinance was revised to more clearly articulate the processes for landmark designation and permit review and to add an economic hardship provision for owners. The Commission also was renamed the Commission on Chicago Landmarks at that time” (City of Chicago 2007).

Notes to Pages 202–218 / 245 4.

5.

By 2007 only Preckwinkle, whose ward included all of the Bronzeville Lakefront area, would remain in office. Both Tillman and Haithcock would lose their aldermanic seats in runoff elections. Tillman lost to the former deputy commissioner in the Department of Planning and Development Pat Dowell; Haithcock would lose to Robert Fioretti, an attorney specializing in civil litigation, government administration, and zoning. The mural was originally painted by Sam Mulberry, Mario Gonzalez, Lavie Raven, and others, who painted twenty-three separate sections of the Forty-Seventh Street train viaduct with the formal permission of the Regional Transportation Authority. They used brushes and spray cans to paint “The Twelve Doorways of Perception,” on the north side of the viaduct. It depicted “12 different views of spirituality,” which, according to Mulberry, included elements of Latin American, African, Mayan, Indian, and Native American spiritual practices (Armstrong 2006). The south side was the “Gallery of Style,” an annually changing wall featuring works by artists invited by the crew. Part of this section became a memorial in 2004 to Wyatt Mitchell, aka Attica, an artist and mentor who died. When the mural was painted out by Chicago graffiti-blasters, the Chicago Public Art Group interceded. But rather than facilitate the repainting by the original artists, CPAG managed a new “community-involved” mural project, by conducting a series of community meetings, soliciting artists’ proposals, and assembling a selection committee comprised of CPAG executive director Jon Pounds, Chuck Thurow, director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and Faheem Majeed, curator for the South Side Community Art Center. The threesome reviewed proposals from twenty-eight mural teams and then selected a finalist from CPAG’s core artists. Rahmaan Statik Barnes, an African American spray-can artist with ties to Bronzeville but living in Pilsen, was selected for the final project. Imagery in his proposal was developed from meetings that Pounds conducted with the alderman and a small group of older, white residents. The proposal included images, maps, and prominent Chicagoans painted in the style of traditional mural without any graffiti-like imagery.

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index

AAA. See Appraisers Association of America (AAA) Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 57 abstract expressionism, 236n7 activism: art/arts, 53–54, 148; and art own­ ership, 79; Chicago tradition of, 13, 62– 63; and community, 13, 28, 35, 46, 198; community-based form of, 53–56, 63, 67–69, 205, 216; and community en­ gagement, 146, 155; compassionate, 46; grass­roots, 209–10, 224; and labor move­ ment, 40, 141, 162; and live/work spaces, 173; and local culture, 200–202; and local investment, 200–202; mid-century, 53–54, 68, 129, 191; and murals, 56–59, 69, 138–39, 155, 188, 191–92, 205–6, 216–17, 226; for “our fair share,” 29, 109; political, 13, 129, 138–39, 162. See also activists; civil rights; diversity advocates; murals and muralists; social activist, concept of activists, 29, 35, 54–57, 188, 193, 207, 209; anti-racism, 144; and artists, 54, 118, 120, 132, 138, 155, 205; and bureaucrats, 205, 224; and educators, 54–55, 69, 175; and empowerment networks, 74; engage­ ment of, 153–54; and housing, 35, 144; and labor, 40; and muralists (or murals), 59, 69, 191–92, 205–6, 216–17, 219, 224, 226; and problem solving, 28, 132, 146, 224; SoHo, 173; and their causes, 46, 81, 128, 130, 143; types of, 129–32. See also community improvers; cultural entrepreneurs; diversity advocates; murals and muralists; social activist, concept of

Addams, Jane, 12–13, 40, 238–39n5 Adelman, William J., 35, 40, 166 Adler Planetarium, 60 advocacy. See activism advocates, diversity. See diversity advocates aesthetic networks: compared to autonomy networks, 104, 108, 113, 224; com­pared to empowerment networks, 74, 188; compared to gentrification networks, 225; compared to problem-solving net­ works, 132; concept of, 7, 14, 25, 26, 27, 71–97, 223; and cultural capital, 14–15, 27, 71–97, 223, 239–41n1; foundations for, 70; and local places, 93–95; partici­ pants and resources, 73–81; and shared interests, 73; and small social worlds, 75; and taste for overabundance, 76–79. See also Bronzeville; networks, art aesthetics: concept of, 7, 27, 71–76, 78, 119, 240–41n1, 241n3; connective, 119; and disinterested pleasure, 3, 73, 78, 239– 40n1, 241n3; and distinction, 72, 116, 123, 237n16, 240–41n1; and everyday life, 241n5; and excessive accumulation, 3; and judgment, 24, 72–73, 87, 96, 123, 196–97, 239–41n1, 241n3; Kantian, 3, 72, 236n7, 237n16, 239–41n1; Marx on, 241n1; and overabundance, taste for, 3; and preferences, 7, 12, 25–27, 71, 78, 87, 92, 96–97, 113, 199, 223, 225; and so­ ciology, 71–73; subjectivity of, 123; and values, 29, 69. See also authority; beauty; black, aesthetics; cultural capital; taste African American. See black African Art (Parker), 77

260 / Index African Diaspora, 1, 188 African Market Place, 95 African marketplace, 199 Afrocentrism, 44, 87, 129 Ahkenaton Community Development Corporation, 199 AIC. See Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) Allan, Susan, xiii Alsina, Montserrat, 118, 231 Altman, Edith, 101, 118, 120–23, 163–65, 177, 231 Alvarado, Lisa, 138–39 American Association of Museums, 67, 69 American Journal of Sociology, xiii anarchy: and irony, of cutting-edge artists, 103 Anderson, Jon, 138 Anderson, Joyce Owens, 93 Anderson, Othello, 118–19 Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 124, 232 anthropology, 21 APO Building. See Asociación Pro-Derechos Obreros (APO Building) Applied Real Estate Analysis, 199 Appraisers Association of America (AAA), 121–22 Apt. 1R gallery, 103, 109–10, 124 Architectural Landmarks Commission. See Commission on Chicago Landmarks; Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks architecture: aesthetically significant, 196; architectural vs. historical significance, 195–97, 244n3 (chap. 8); Bronzeville landmarks, 188, 192–99; and gentrifica­ tion, 178–79; postmodern, 236n7; pres­ ervation and restoration, 188, 194–96, 204, 209. See also specific architect(s) and building(s) Armstrong, Louis, 193 art: and centralization, 7; classification of, 24, 30, 72, 224; commercialized (marketdriven), 2, 14–15, 97, 116; and commu­ nity, 56–59, 204; vs. culture, 30; as elite culture, 7, 13, 26, 33; labor market of, 24; local, 226–27; market(s), 22–25, 30, 86, 117, 159; objectification of life through, 81; as peripheral and flexible, 111; as privileged product, 30; produc­ tion of culture theories of, xi, 19–20, 34; and sense of life, 141; and social differ­

ences, 237n16; social function of, 237n16; sociology of, xii, 6–8, 15, 97, 240n1; theo­ries of, 6–8, 71–72, 221–22; and urban places, 4–6. See also artists; art markets; collectors and collections; community-based art; cutting-edge artists; ethnic art; institutional theory; local art; museum-quality artists; net­ works, art; public art, of Bronzeville Art at the Academy, 215 art auctions, 75, 86, 95, 122, 214–15 Art Boat, 101, 105, 114–16 Art Chicago, 101–2, 115 art collectors or collections. See collectors and collections art dealers, 238n2 (chap. 1) art districts. See arts districts Artemisia Gallery, 104, 118, 232, 243n3 art fairs. See specific fair(s) “Art for All” outreach program, 144 art galleries. See arts districts; domestic spaces; gallery owners; spaces; specific gallery/galleries art history: and analysis of form, 30; and artistic autonomy, 123–24, 223; and change over time, 20; and hierarchical categories, 30 Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), 7, 33, 55, 60, 64, 103, 118, 167, 168, 172, 181. See also School of the Art Institute of Chi­ cago (SAIC) art institutions: and art collectors, 76–77, 81, 96; concept of, 7, 23–25, 31, 53, 237n12; and ethnic, 53–71; and experts, 24–25, 29, 67, 123; and institutional field, 7; institutional theory, 7, 19, 23–29, 34, 68, 69; legitimacy, pursuit of, 42, 54, 59–67, 101; vs. networks, 24, 229; organizations, formal, 95–96, 104. See also art organiza­ tions, nonprofit; culture, industries; ethnic institutions; nonprofit organiza­ tions (NPOs) Art Is for All mural, 144–45 (pl. 15), 147– 48, 152 (pl. 16) artistic autonomy: concept of, 27–29, 42, 99–100, 108, 223–24; vs. control 167; as a corporate brand, 167, 173, 178, 224; and isolation, 124, 158; logic, priority, and value of, 99, 114, 123–24, 158, 159, 167, 223–24; and shared interests, 104, 108–12, 125, 167, 170, 173, 224; and

Index / 261 social interaction, 100, 103, 114; social situations, 112–14; and social space, 124, 173; and transience, 125, 224; and transnationalism, 114–17; vs. use or ex­ change values, 159; vs. zoning laws, 173. See also cutting-edge artists; museumquality artists; transnational artists artists: careers of, xi, 19, 24, 93, 94, 99–101, 114, 118, 125, 241n4, 242nn1–2; and collectors, reciprocity between, 83–87; and community-based approach, 59, 69; competition among, 42; expectations of, 17–18, 20; as foot soldiers for the gentry, 157; functioning within networks, 8, 12, 18–19; as pivot point for real estate mar­ kets, 170–72; as property owners, 42; re­ ciprocal relationships among, 18, 83–87; and studies of, 19, xi. See also activists; art; black, artists; bohemian culture; cul­ tural entrepreneurs; cutting-edge artists; museum-quality artists; social activist; transnational artists Artists of the Wall, 145–48, 154 art markets: and competition, 22, 29–30; concept of, 22–25, 86, 223; formal, 77– 78, 95–96, 100, 223; global, 8, 12, 18– 19, 86, 159, 175, 179; informal, 223; speculation in, 76, 84, 87; and values, 76, 86, 117, 121, 125, 224. See also art art organizations, nonprofit: and artists 8, 17–18; as satellites of institutions, 7. See also art institutions; nonprofit organiza­ tions (NPOs) art ownership. See collectors and collections art parties, 1, 2, 11, 77–78, 105, 108, 223, 241n4 ArtPilsen collective, 100, 103–6, 114–15, 124, 167, 170–72, 176–77 art production networks. See networks, art arts districts: commercial, 161; co-opting, 175–76, 179, 180, 184; informal, 118, 137; mayhem and protests in, 176–80; reports and studies, 163, 243n4, 244n1 (chap. 7); and social stability, 127–56; and zoning policies, 172–75. See also specific district(s) ArtSpace RP, 133, 135–37, 139–40, 148–49, 151–52 Art Walk, 152, 167, 172, 175–80 Art Worlds (Becker), 19

Asociación Pro-Derechos Obreros (APO Building), 118, 174, 180 assimilation, 101 Aubuchon, Kimberly, 103, 105 (pl. 11), 108, 110, 114, 170–72, 176, 231 audiences, xiv, 68–69, 103–4, 119, 138–40, 154, 171, 175, 183, 223; of Chicago’s arts institutions, 236–37n11; shared, 103, 109–10 authenticity, 19, 69, 84, 122, 188 authority: and aesthetic values, 69; artistic, 29; civic, 158; cultural, 72; hegemonic, 236n6; organizational, 22–24, 100, 152 autonomy networks: and artistic control, 14–15, 27–28, 99–125, 223–24; com­ pared to aesthetic networks, 104, 108, 113, 125; compared to problem-solving networks, 132; concept of, 7, 14, 26, 27– 28, 100, 223–24; and markets, 124; par­ ticipants, types of, 26, 100, 124, 224; vs. social interaction, 93, 99, 125; and trust, 108–12. See also artistic autonomy; net­ works, art; Pilsen avant-garde, 102. See also cutting-edge artists Baby Boomers, 128 bachelor of fine arts (BFA), 27, 74 Baldwin, James, 57 Bank One, 198, 217 Baraka, Amiri, 57. See also Jones, LeRoi Bares, Kimberly, 148–49 Barnes, Rahmaan Statik, 245n5 Barnes, Robert, 86 Barnett, William, 195–96 Bauhaus, 236n7 beauty: aesthetics of, 72–73, 75–76, 78, 119, 240–41n1, 241n3; appreciation of, 166– 67; and black cultural capital, 72–73, 75–76; of blackness, 57–58, 89–90, 212; ethnic perspectives of, 227; spiritual power of, 119 Becker, Howard S., 10, 25, 18–21, 23, 99, 125, 242n1 (chap. 5) Being John Malkovich, 110 Berek, Diana, 141 Berg, Alicia, 204, 231 BFA. See bachelor of fine arts (BFA) bigotry, 40. See also racism Billiken (Bud) Day and Parade, 88, 210, 242n10

262 / Index Binga, Jesse, 193 Binga Bank, 196 Black, Timuel, 38, 231 black (or African American): and aesthetic networks, 71–96; aesthetics, 3, 56, 59, 72–76, 89–90, 97; art collections, 80, 89–90; artists, 56–58, 72, 92–95; and beauty, 57–58; bourgeois, 2–3, 81–82, 242n8; Chi­cago, 1–4, 36–39, 52, 64, 187, 208, 210, 216; community, 11–12, 208–10; con­cept of, 5, 74, 235n2; cul­ tural capital, 27, 59, 72–76, 97, 191, 216, 226, 244n1 (chap. 8); culture, 3–4, 27, 54–58, 72–73, 75–77, 79, 82–83, 87, 90, 191, 208; entre­preneurs, 37, 74, 77, 188, 194–97, 202, 219; heroes, 56–57, 196; history, 36–39, 54–69, 187–216, 228; nationalism, 82; ownership of black culture, 29, 57–58, 72–74, 79–83, 87, 96, 188, 190; place(s), 189, 212, 219; as a stigma, 89–90, 190. See also aesthetics; cultural capital; DuSable Museum of African American History Black Arts Week, 94 Black Belt (Chicago), 36, 187, 210 Black Bourgeoisie (Frazier), 2–3, 81–82, 242n8 Blackburn, Darlene, 57 Black Face paintings (Williams) 89 (pl. 9) Black Metropolis: Bronzeville as, 36–39, 75, 191, 193–200, 207–9, 211–14, 218; Bronzeville Historic District, 191, 196, 199, 207 (pl. 18), 209–13; and debate over name, 207–13; as place in Chicago, 193, 195–218; as redevelopment narrative/plan, 75, 193–218 Black Metropolis (Drake & Cayton), 195, 207 black middle class, 2–4, 26–27, 30, 37–39, 49, 55, 58, 62, 73, 77, 96–97, 184, 197– 99, 216, 220, 223, 226–28, 229, 242n8; distinction of, 81–87; expansion of, 38; and local culture, restoration of, 189– 92, 199–200, 216–17, 220; and local leader­ship, 81–83, 96, 189–90, 216, 227–28. See also black upper class; class; ethnicity and class; middle class Black Power, 58, 87, 209 Black Swan Press, 141 black upper class, 26–27, 39, 48, 52, 197, 226–28. See also class; white upper class Blesh, Rudi, 244n2 (chap. 8)

blueprint for a bluegoose, a (williams), 138 Blues District, 199, 201 Board of Education. See Chicago Board of Education Bohemia, 40, 238n4 bohemian culture, 7, 33, 102, 128–30, 134, 150, 153, 159, 167, 179 Bohemians, in Chicago, 40, 42, 52, 162, 166, 179, 238nn4–5 Bohemian Settlement house, 66, 182 boojie, 81, 242n8 botany, 243n2 Bourdieu, Pierre, 100, 229, 240n1; on au­ tonomy, 99, 100; on capital, 237n15, 244n1 (chap. 8); on cultural capital, 14– 15, 54, 72, 73, 241n2, 244n1 (chap. 8); on cul­tural classes, 7, 21, 30, 34, 49, 72; on disinterestedness, 3, 125; on distinc­ tion, 13, 15, 99, 237n16, 240n1; on legitimate political and cultural power, 35, 54, 72, 81; on social inequality, 162 bourgeois. See black, bourgeois Bowen, Charles, 63, 74–75, 77, 209–11, 213–15, 231 Bowen High School, 65 Boykin, David, 138 Breton, André, 141 Brice, Fanny, 194 Briggs, Carol, 78 (pl. 7), 91 Bronzeville: and black culture, 4, 36–39, 187–220; as “black metropolis,” 36–39, 75, 191, 193–200, 207–9, 211–14, 218; character of life in, 38; Chicago Bee, at­ tributed to, 193; community areas, 238n2 (chap. 2); and cultural capital, 14–15, 27, 71–97, 223, 239–41n1; demographics, 52; economic statistics, 47–48; formal art organizations and markets in, 95–96; his­toric map, 207 (pl. 18), 211; informal arts activities and venues, 8–10; land­marks, 188, 192–98; and local color, 5, 7–8; local culture, res­ toration of, 14–15, 29, 187–220, 226, 228, 244n3, 245n4; as local place, 36– 39, 50–52; location of, 5, 189; map, his­ toric, 207 (pl. 18), 211; naming, 188, 193, 207–12, 238n2 (chap. 2); as place, 190–92, 208, 212, 216, 226–27; popula­ tion, 37, 39; public art in, 10, 95, 202, 211–13; racial compo­sition, 5–6, 37, 39; as segregated city within city, 3, 5, 36–

Index / 263 38, 75, 188, 193, 194, 208; as symbol of history and locale, 213–16; as symbol of place, 38; as urban place for artistic production, 7–8, 12–13; and urban vs. other municipal forms, 3; vacant land, 3. See also aesthetic networks; em­power­ ment networks bronzeville, concept of, 37, 193, 209 Bronzeville, mayor of, 210 Bronzeville, restoring, 189–91, 199, 209, 217–19 Bronzeville Blue Ribbon Task Force, 214 Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, 232 Bronzeville Historic District, 191, 196, 199, 207 (pl. 18), 209–13 Bronzeville Military Academy, 215 Bronzeville National Heritage Area, 209, 212 Bronzeville Tourism Bureau, 199, 209 Bronzeville Walk of Fame, 188, 192, 205–7, 212 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 37, 38, 57 Brown, H. Rap, 57 Brown, Jim, 57 Brown, Oscar, Jr., 57 Bucket Rider Gallery, 103, 109–11 (pl. 13), 116, 232 Buffalo Bar, 140 Burkart, Heather, 172, 176, 231 Burns (Lugenia) Hope Center, 232 Burroughs, Margaret, 54–56, 59–66, 82, 207–9, 231 Bush (George W.) administration, 115 Byrne, Jane (Chicago mayor, 1979–83), 197 Cabrini-Green, 238n1 CAC. See Chicago Artists’ Coalition (CAC) Campbell, Anthony, 217 Campbell, Susan M., 199, 204 Campbell, Wendell, 198, 199, 204 capital: concept of, 237n15, 244n1 (chap. 8); Marx on, 72; social, 111. See also cul­ tural capital; political capital Capra, Frank, 103 careers: and artistic autonomy, 100, 114; concept of, 99–100, 242nn1–2; and fate, 125; and social interaction vs. autonomy, 93, 99, 125 Carmichael, Stokely, 57 Casa Aztlán, 66, 182 Casper, spray-can writer, 145

Castillo, Mario, 167 Caton, Mitchell, 217 Cayton, Horace R., 3, 36–38, 82, 187, 195, 207, 238n2 (chap. 2), 241–42n7 census data, 5, 6, 41, 47–49, 235nn3–5, 236n10, 238nn2–3, 239n6. See also demographics; population Centers for New Horizons, 199, 232 Centro Colombo Americano-Medellin gallery, 243n3 century of disinvestment, 4, 189, 226. See also disinvestment CHA. See Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Chamberlain, Wilt, 57 Chavez, Cesar E., 117 Checkerboard Lounge, 201 Chicago: arts activism in, 53–54; and cen­ tralization, 7, 31; city center, xi–xii, 3–4, 13–14, 29, 31–33, 35–36, 39, 54, 66, 69, 128, 153, 159–60, 162, 189, 226; cultural context, 5–6; cultural core, 7, 12, 14, 29, 33–34, 52, 59, 69–70, 73, 97, 222; as fertile ground for cultural creators, xiv; gentrification in, 159–61; historic con­struction of local places in, 31–34; map, 32; as model of city, 31–34; racial compo­sition of, 5–6; revalorizing, 35–36. See also black, Chicago; Loop, the ChicagoArt.net, 103–4 Chicago Artists’ Coalition (CAC), 133 Chicago Artists’ Month, xiii–xiv, 86, 153, 176, 180 Chicago Artists’ Space Strategy, 173 Chicago Arts District, 42, 167, 168, 172, 175–78, 180, 184 Chicago Bee, 193 Chicago Board of Education, 215 Chicago City Council, 46, 64, 197 Chicago Cultural Center Foundation, 235n1 Chicago Defender, 58, 62, 195, 242n10 Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), 93, 118, 137, 153, 172–74, 193, 207, 216, 232, 235n1, 243n4, 244n1 (chap. 7) Chicago Department of Environment, 178 Chicago Department of Planning and Devel­ opment, 194, 197–201, 203–4, 231 Chicago Department of Public Works, 68 Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, 164

264 / Index Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP), 164 Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks Commission. See Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks Chicago Historical Society, 198 Chicago History Museum, 60 Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), 38, 198, 202 Chicago Housing Tenants Organization. See Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) Chicago Journal, 166–67 Chicago Landmarks Commission. See Commission on Chicago Landmarks Chicago Military Academy–Bronzeville, 188, 215 Chicago Mural Group, 205–6, 217. See also Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) Chicago Opera. See Lyric Opera of Chicago Chicago Park District, 60–66, 146, 208, 231. See also specific park(s) Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG), 145, 205–6, 217–18, 232, 245n5. See also Chicago Mural Group Chicago public schools, 55, 57, 59, 61, 65, 73–74, 90, 215. See also specific school(s) Chicago School of Social Science Research, 13, 235n3 Chicago Sun-Times, 64–66, 68 Chicago Surrealist Group, 141 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 7, 33, 67 Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), 131, 133, 144, 148, 149. See also Regional Transpor­tation Authority (RTA) Chicago Tribune, 40, 142, 155–56, 162 Chicago Tribune Foundation, 235n1 Chicago 21 Plan, 35–36, 159–60 Chicago Zoning Reform Commission, 244n3 (chap. 7) Cisneros, Sandra, 169, 244n2 (chap. 7) cities. See egalitarian cities; global cities; inner city city center. See Chicago city council. See Chicago City Council civic authority, 158 civic engagement, 124–25, 224 civil rights, 14, 29, 54, 58, 96–97, 117, 128, 193, 208–9, 219, 226; and art collect­ ing, 96

class: as aesthetic preferences or judgments, 52, 72; concept of, as cultural practices, 21, 237n11, 241n2; and conflict, 133, 139; dominant, 15, 30, 31, 34, 69, 75, 81, 97, 155, 228, 241n2; and economic diversity, 37–39, 44, 127, 134, 139, 199, 208; as income groups, 37, 39, 46–48, 74; and place, 7, 13, 36–37, 41, 43–44, 47, 128; with race or ethnicity, 157, 208, 227–28; and urban transition (gentri­ fication), 4, 14, 132, 157–61, 184–85, 189, 225. See also black middle class; black upper class; elite culture; ethnicity and class; middle class; white middle class; white upper class; working class Clinton (William Jefferson) administration, 200 Cole, Nat “King,” 207 Coleman, Bessie, 193 Coleman, Ornette, 57 Colibri Gallery, 118, 231 collectors and collections: and artists, reci­ procity between, 83–87; black, 3, 71– 97, 222, 241n3; and civil rights, 96; and cultural capital, 223; gendered practices and circuits, 90–91; and historic narra­ tives of place, 73; leadership and influ­ ence exerted by, 97; local art, building and buying, 68, 70, 76–77, 87; and local places, 93–95; local vs. cultural core, 70; men, collecting by, 92–95; middle class, collecting by, 2–3, 96–97; overabundance, taste for, 3, 76–79; ownership and iden­tity, 79–82; shared interests of, 27; and solidarity, 125; and subjective judgment, 87–92; universal vs. particular, 89–90; women, collecting by, 91–95. See also gallery owners; museums Columbia College, 116, 118, 231 Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks, 244n3 (chap. 8) Commission on Chicago Landmarks, 193–99, 231, 244n3 (chap. 8) Commission on Zoning Reform. See Chi­ cago Zoning Reform Commission community: concept of, 11, 54, 58, 67; demystifying, 221; empowerment, 205; ethnic, segregation of, 236n9; museums as representation of, 54–56, 65–68;

Index / 265 and networks, 221; occupational, 173; subordinated, 236n9. See also specific community/communities Community Area Fact Book, 238n3 community areas, xii, 5, 13, 28, 31–33, 41– 43, 45, 65, 161, 174, 189, 208, 236n10, 237n11, 238nn2–3; concept of, 11, 235nn3–4; map, 32. See also specific area(s) community-based activism. See activism community-based art: activating commu­ nity, 56–59, 204; and aesthetic networks, 70; as being part of a community, 67; concept of, xi, 11, 14, 53–59, 69; and ethnicity, 64–68; expectation of dialogue (dialogical approach or framework), 53, 56, 58–59, 205–6; formalization of ap­ proach, 59; as ideologies of local partici­ pation, 13–14, 53–70, 239n1 (chap. 4); and institutional legitimacy, 59–64; and intersection of capital, political and cul­ tural, 64–68; and local cultural values, 70; and local culture, restoration of, 204–5; and murals, 57–58; and mu­ seums to represent communities, 54–56, 65–68; and organizations, 69–70; rein­ vention of approach, 192. See also activ­ ism; murals; public art, of Bronzeville community building, 11, 131, 142–43, 155 community improvers: concept of, 11, 26, 28, 129–30, 224; and social stability, 135– 38, 143, 146, 153–55. See also public art, of Bronzeville Compean, Juan, 115 consumerism: cultural, 76, 175; elite, 158, 168, 170–80; undermining, 106–8 contradiction: between autonomy and ac­ tivities, 99; and Bronzeville landmarks, 192–98 core, concept of, 237n12. See also cultural core; urban core Cortez, Miguel, 115 Counts, Emily, 110–11 (pl. 13) Cowles, Henry C., 131, 243n2 Cox, Julian, 152 CPAG. See Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) CPC. See Cultural Policy Center (CPC), University of Chicago Crane, Diana, 3, 7, 10, 19, 30, 237n12, 237–38n1

creativity: and art collections, 92; black, 58; and problem solving, 28, 130; and rapid transmission of information, 22 Crisler, Joan Dameron, 78, 83, 90–92 (pl. 10), 231 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 241n3 Cruz, Celia, 117 CTA. See Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Cuesta, Dave, 111 Cultural Affairs Department. See Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) cultural capital: and aesthetic networks, 14– 15, 27, 71–97, 223; and communitybased art, 56, 59, 64–68; concept of, 14– 15, 54, 237nn15–16, 244n1 (chap. 8); gentrification, 159; and knowledge, 14– 15, 27, 54, 56, 70; and local cultural values, 70; and local culture/places, 184– 85; and ownership, 237nn15–16, 244n1 (chap. 8); and political capital, 64–68; and power, 237nn15–16; and social stability, 140. See also black cultural capital; capital cultural core: center as dominant order, 34; center vs. margins, xi, 5–6, 33, 72; of Chi­ cago, 7, 12, 14, 29, 33–34, 52, 59, 69– 70, 73, 97, 222; concept of, 7, 237n12; expansionist efforts, 222 cultural diversity, 43–46, 145, 225; and progressive politics, 127–33. See also diversity cultural entrepreneurs: concept of, 26, 28, 129–30, 224; and social stability, 130–36, 140–44, 149, 152–55 cultural homogenization: as by-product, 12; and gentrification, 28–29, 42, 157–85, 225; and Latino populations, 42. See also whitewashing of culture cultural omnivores, 11, 51 Cultural Policy Center (CPC), University of Chicago, xii, xiii cultural power, 15, 31, 52, 54, 69, 73, 113, 222; and local places, 33, 35 culture: vs. art, 30; center/margin di­ chotomy (also center/place), xi, 6, 34, 42, 72; concept of, xi–xii, 2, 4–6, 10, 13, 19–25; ethnocentric, 13, 129, 222; high/ low, 68, 116–17, 236n7; as human trait, broadly shared, 53–54; industries, xi, 19; institutional(ized), 2, 7–8, 14–15, 53; institutions of, xi, 18, 27, 34, 72, 168;

266 / Index culture (cont.) national/nationalistic, 50–51, 101; of non-whites, 184; ownership of, 29, 57– 58, 72–74, 79–83, 87, 96, 188, 190; of places, 13–14; popular, 117, 236n7, 237n1; post-urban, 15, 221–29; produc­ tion of, xi, 4, 10, 19–25; sociology of, 21; as strategies of action, 5–6, 73, 236n8; studies, 21; as subordinated product, 30; taste, 51; and urban growth, 159. See also black culture; bohemian culture; domi­ nant culture; elite culture; ethnic culture; institutional theory; Latino culture; local color; urban culture; whitewashing of culture “Culture in Action” (Jacob), 206 Curious Theater Company, 156 cutting-edge artists: activities of, 42, 102–14, 138, 224; and artistic control, 100–14; concept of, 26, 27–28, 100–102. See also artistic autonomy Daley, Richard J. (Chicago mayor, 1955–76), 46, 60–62, 64 Daley, Richard M. (Chicago mayor, 1989– present; son of Richard J. Daley), 46, 190, 192, 203, 208, 209, 212, 231, 244n3 (chap. 7) Dávila, Arlene, 4 Dawson, William L., 210 Dayo, 78, 84–86, 91 (pl. 10), 231 Day of the Dead, 170, 180, 182–83 DCA. See Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) dealers, art, 238n2 (chap. 1) Dearborn Park, 35 Dee, Ruby, 57 Defender. See Chicago Defender demographics, 235nn3–4, 238n2 (chap. 2); and art production, 52; Bronzeville, 39, 47–48; Chicago, 5–6; and class-based aesthetics, 52; and diversity, 153, 155; and ethnic art producers, 31; income range com­parison, 47–48; Pilsen, 41, 47– 48; population, 5; racial composition, 6; Rogers Park, 44, 47–48; See also census data; population; specific locale(s) and place(s) Department of Cultural Affairs. See Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)

Department of Environment. See Chicago Department of Environment Department of Housing and Urban Devel­ opment. See United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department of Justice. See United States Department of Justice (DOJ), 64 Department of Planning and Development. See Chicago Department of Planning and Development Department of Public Works. See Chicago Department of Public Works Department of Streets and Sanitation. See Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation Department of Zoning and Land Use Plan­ ning. See Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP) Depression. See Great Depression De Priest, Oscar, 207 desegregation, 227. See also segregation Deson (Marianne) Gallery, 120 devaluation, of property, 29, 157–58, 161– 62, 184, 190, 225, 226 De Van, Justine, 217 DevCorp North, 148–49 development: of property/real estate, 26, 154–55, 158, 160, 165, 179, 224; re­ development, 35, 37, 66, 159–60, 166, 189–90, 201–2, 214–15, 238n1; urban, 12, 160, 203–4 Development and Planning Department. See Chicago Department of Planning and Development dialogical approach, 53, 59, 113, 205–6 Diasporal Rhythms, xiii–xiv, 1, 78, 83–84, 91, 94–95, 231, 232 DiBernardi, Mark, 152 Dickerson, Earl, 195 disinterestedness: and aesthetics, 3, 73, 78, 239–40n1, 241n3; and art collecting, 3, 73, 78; and autonomy, 124–25; and distinctions, 241n3; and passion, 85; and pleasure, 3, 73, 78, 240n1, 241n3; and taste, judgments of, 240n1, 241n3 disinvestment, 4, 153, 184, 189–90, 226, 228 displacement, 29, 35, 139, 145, 153, 158, 160, 174, 184, 222, 225

Index / 267 distinction: and aesthetics, 72, 116, 123, 237n16, 240–41n1; and art networks, 222; black cultural, 39, 190; black middle class, 81–87; concept of, 237n16; cul­ tural, 13, 19; and disinterestedness, 241n3; and nationalistic cultures, 99; racial/ethnic, 15; and shared interests, 30; and social function of art, 237n16 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Bourdieu), 240n1 districts, arts. See arts districts diversity: and demographics, 153, 155; eco­ nomic, 199, 208; ethnic/racial, 40, 131, 145, 153; and identities, 44; as local cultural identity, 129; and local places, 51; religious, 44; urban, 243n2. See also cultural diversity; ethnicity; race diversity advocates: ideal types of, 130–31, 154–55; problem-solving ethos, 148; and racial change, 129; and social sta­ bility, 131–34, 139, 143–44, 153, 154– 55; as steady state, 46; variety among, 129–31. See also activism Dixon (Arthur) Elementary School, 88, 90– 92 (pl. 10), 231–32 Dixon, Willie, 1 Dogmatic Gallery, 103 DOJ. See United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Dolphy, Eric, 57 domestic spaces, 100, 103–4, 109, 114–15, 124, 170–72, 177. See also spaces dominant culture, 6–7, 15, 31, 69, 75, 81, 155, 228–29, 241n2. See also culture Donaldson, Jeff, 58 Donnelly (hotel), 203 Dorsey, Thomas, 38–39 DOT. See Illinois Department of Transpor­ tation (DOT) Douglas (community area), 189, 238n2 (chap. 2) Douglass, Frederick, 56 Douglass National Bank Building, 195 Dowell, Patricia (Pat) R., 201, 231, 245n4 Drake, St. Clair, 3, 36–38, 82, 187, 195, 207, 238n2 (chap. 2), 241–42n7 Drawing Resistance exhibition, 141 Drivethru Studios, 103, 106–8 (pl. 12), 112, 116, 167, 232 DuBois, W. E. B., 56, 57, 213

Dunbar Vocational High School, 204 Durkheim, Émile, 131, 243n2 DuSable, Jean Baptiste Point, 61–62, 239n4 DuSable High School, 61 DuSable League, 61, 239n4 DuSable Museum of African American His­ tory, 54–55, 63–65, 67–69, 95, 191, 206–8, 216, 218, 231 DuSable Park, 239n4 Dzine, spray-can writer, 145 DZP. See Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP) East Bridgeport, 207 East Harlem (New York), 4 Ebony Museum, 54–55, 60, 65, 216 ecology, 131, 137, 243n2 economics, 31, 159; income statistics, 47– 48, 74; local, 25. See also art markets Education Board. See Chicago Board of Education Education Foundation, 137 egalitarian cities, 236n9 Eighth Regiment Armory (ERA), 188, 195, 213–14, 216 elite culture: arbitrary privileges for, 158, 225; and art/cultural production, 2, 33– 34, 52, 226; black, 63; and city center revalorization, 35; and consumerism, 158, 168, 170–80; counterbalance to domina­tion by, 13; and empowerment networks, 226; and gentrification, 30, 35–36, 157–60, 170–80, 185, 225–26; and growth machine for change, 30; hegemony, 129; in Loop, 33, 69; and nonprofit organiza­tions, 2, 13, 33–34, 69, 157; in Rogers Park, 43. See also art, culture; high culture empowerment networks: and community, 205; and community-based art, 70; com­ pared to aesthetic networks 74, 188; con­ cept of, 7–8, 14, 26, 29, 190–92, 226; and local culture, restoration of, 14–15, 29, 162, 187–220, 226, 228, 244n3, 245n1. See also Bronzeville; networks Empowerment Zone (EZ), 68, 200, 202 enclaves, 12–13, 31, 41–42, 52, 128, 153, 227 enfranchisement: cultural, xi–xii, 5–6, 49, 69, 183, 184; financial, 49; political, 5–6, 49, 224

268 / Index engagement, civic, 124–25, 224 Entering Cultural Communities (Grams & Farrell), xiii entrepreneurs. See black entrepreneurs; cultural entrepreneurs; real estate entrepreneurs Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.). See United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Environment Department. See Chicago Department of Environment equity (equality), 15, 30, 62–63, 129, 227 ERA. See Eighth Regiment Armory (ERA) Estrada, William, 41, 42, 231 ethnic art, 15, 31, 101, 221 ethnic culture, 31, 34, 73, 159, 228; and artistic autonomy, 42; devaluing, 157– 58, 184–85; enriching, 180–82; institu­ tionalization of, 53–54; local, 6, 180– 82, 184; shared interests of, 225–26. See also culture; local color ethnic diversity. See diversity ethnic identity: black, 5; cultural, 50–51 ethnic institutions, 53–71, 158, 228. See also art institutions ethnicity: as asserted vs. ascribed, 48–52, 227; and capital, political and cultural, 64–68; and class, 20, 30, 184, 228; as collective resource, 5–6, 20, 48–50, 227; concept of, 2, 4–6, 236n6; and diversity of, 153; erasure of, 157, 179, 184–85, 225; as local color, 13, 15, 229; local culture, enriching, 180–82; and political and cultural capital, intersection of, 64–68; and race, xi, 4–5, 48–50, 52, 227–29; and self-identity, 5, 44, 49–51, 235n1; and social and cultural order, 5; and stability machine, 30, 157–58, 180–84, 225, 229; and subordinate cultural status, 5, 6, 30, 34, 48, 49, 73, 82, 229; and transnationalism, 114–17. See also black; diversity; Latino culture; Mexican culture; pan-ethnicity; race ethnic locales/places, xi, 4–5, 29, 49, 53, 66–67, 160. See also locales; places ethnocentricism, 13, 129, 222 ethnography, xii, 4, 9, 50 Eurocentrism, 51, 101, 115, 117, 236n6 expressionism, abstract, 236n7 EZ. See Empowerment Zone (EZ)

Farrell, Betty, xiii, 67 Fassbender Gallery, 120 Featherstone, Mike, 236n7, 241n5 Ferreyra, Roberto, 118, 231 Field Museum of Natural History, 60 financial enfranchisement. See enfranchisement financial resources. See resources fine art, 3, 27, 86, 97, 106, 117, 135, 145, 215, 224, 243n3 Fioretti, Robert, 245n4 First National Bank of Chicago, 198 Fogel, Henry, 67 43rd Street Community Organization, 57 47th Street Blues District, 199, 201 Foster, Andrew “Rube,” 193 Fox, Vicente, 68 framework, 11, 15, 25, 29, 34, 54, 206, 222–27. See also research and studies Frazier, E. Franklin, 2–3, 49, 81, 242n8 Fuller, Hoyt, 58 Furez, Margaret, 4, 235n3, 238nn2–3 GAAF. See Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival (GAAF) Gablik, Suzi, 119 Gallery Guichard, 95, 231 gallery owners, 25, 74, 86, 89, 103–4, 109, 111, 173. See also collectors and collections; specific gallery/galleries or domestic spaces Gallery SixFourFive, 103, 111, 116, 172, 176, 231 Gans, Herb, 51 Gap Neighborhood Association, 204 Garvey, Marcus, 57 Gaspar, Maria Elena, 231 GATX, 217 Gehry, Frank, 236n7 Geiman, Dolan, 116 gemeinschaft social order, 6 gendered practices and circuits, and art collections, 90–91 gentrification: and arbitrary privileges, 161– 70; in Chicago, 159–61; as classbased transition, 4; concept of, 4, 7, 31, 36–37, 157, 161; and cultural homogenization/whitewashing, 14–15, 28–29, 42, 157–85, 225–26, 244n3 (chap. 7); vs. decline, 46, 128–29,

Index / 269 133–35; and elite culture, 30, 35–36, 157– 60, 170–80, 185, 225–26; and ethnicity, 185; and local places, 35–36; and local resources, increasing value of, 161–62; policy direc­tion, 35–36; and political capital, 159; and racism, 184; redevelop­ ment, 35, 37, 66, 159–60, 166, 189–90, 201–2, 214–15, 238n1; and social sta­ bility, 128–30, 132, 134–36, 139, 146, 153; theories of, 158–59; and transna­ tionalism, 101; and urban renewal/ transformation, xi, 13, 157–59, 166, 210. See also architecture; historic preserva­ tion; revitalization; urban development gentrification networks: concept of, 7, 14, 26, 28–29, 225–26; and whitewashing of culture, 14–15, 28–29, 42, 157–85, 225–26, 244n3 (chap. 7). See also net­ works; Pilsen gentry, 4, 29, 189; concept of, 31, 157–58, 166, 183, 185 Gen Xers, 128, 138 Gerri’s Palm Tavern, 201 ghettos, 4, 12–13, 31, 37, 52, 56, 58, 82, 128, 189, 194, 210, 227 Gilmore, Samuel, 22 Giuffre, Katherine, 22, 99–100, 242n2 GLAAD. See Glenwood Avenue Arts District (GLAAD) Glass Curtain Gallery, 116 Glasser, Michael, 148 Glenwood Avenue Arts District (GLAAD), 127, 131–32, 137, 139–40, 142, 144– 45, 149–56 Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival (GAAF), 127, 132 (pl. 14), 145, 149, 152 (pl. 16), 154–55 global cities, 13, 15, 222, 229, 237n14 global markets. See art markets Goldberg, Al, 44, 132–40, 144, 148–53, 231 Goldberg, Rube, 107 Gonzalez, Mario, 245n5 graffiti, 28, 58, 116, 130, 132, 143, 145–46, 148, 245n5. See also murals and muralists Grams, Diane, xii, xiii, 23, 24, 67 Granada Theatre, 43 Grand Boulevard (community area), 189, 199, 210, 238n2 (chap. 2) Great Chicago Fire of 1871, 40 Great Depression, 38, 193, 198

Great Migration, 37, 193–94, 199, 203–5; monument, 188, 202–3 (pl. 17), 206–7, 212, 221 Greenlee, Sam, 82–83, 95, 231 Gregory, Dick, 57 Grieco, Elizabeth M., 235n2 Griffin Funeral Home, 206 growth machine, and urban transforma­ tion, 30, 36, 157–60, 225, 229. See also stability machine Gude, Olivia, 145 Guichard, André, 95, 231 Haithcock, Madeline, 201, 245n4 Halfway Home (Counts), 110–11 (pl. 13) Harold Washington Cultural Center, 187 Harper Court, 201 Harper Square, 166 Harrington, Austin, 71–72, 236n7 Harrington, Michael, 149 Harrison, Van, 109, 110 Harrison Park, 65–66, 182–83 Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, 254–55 Harshaw, Craig, 132, 138, 232 Hart-Cellar Act, 42 Haymarket Square, riot (1886), 40, 141–42 Heartland Café, 9, 45, 132–33, 135, 138, 139–44, 142, 146, 148–51, 154, 232 hegemony: and authority, 236n6; elitist, 129 heroes, black, 56–57, 196 high culture, and low-culture paradigm, 116–17, 236n7. See also elite culture; institutional theory Highway Department. See Illinois Department of Transportation (DOT) Hispanic culture. See Latino culture; Mexican culture; Puerto Rican culture Historical and Architectural Landmarks Com­ mission. See Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks Historical Society. See Chicago Historical Society historic preservation, 188, 191, 193–96, 198, 202, 204, 209, 232. See also gentrification; revitalization history. See art history; cultural history; social history History Museum. See Chicago History Museum

270 / Index Hockshop Gallery, 233 Hockshop installation, 116 Hogan, Katy, 132–33, 135, 139–44, 146, 148, 232 Holocaust, 121, 163 Holzer, Jenny, 122 Homeland Security, Tri-fold wallet (Cortez), 115 homogenization. See cultural homogenization Housekeepers Diary, The (Alvarado), 138–39 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 244n2 (chap. 7) Housing and Urban Development Department (U.S.). See United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Housing Authority. See Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) Housing Tenants Organization. See Metro­ politan Tenants Organization (MTO) Howlin’ Wolf, 1 How Shall We Teach Our Children? (Altman), 121, 123 HUD. See United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Huebner, Jeff, 56–59, 239n1 (chap. 3) Hughes, Everett C., 242n1 (chap. 5) Hughes, Langston, 207 Hull-House, 238n5 human resources. See resources Humboldt Park, 41, 178, 205 Hunt, Richard, 204 Hyatt (hotel), 203 Hyde Park, 5, 36, 166, 201, 209 Hyde Park Art Center, 245n5 iconography, 41, 145, 218 ideal types, 8, 25, 27, 222, 237n13, 242– 43n1; of diversity advocates, 130–31, 154–55. See also typology identity: and art ownership, 79–82; black, 51, 75; class-based, 21; collective, 44; diversity as local cultural, 129; ethnic, 5, 49–51; local, and black cultural capital, 129, 216; and social stability, 140. See also self-identity IIT. See Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Illinois Arts Council, 120

Illinois Black National Guard, Armory, 63, 188, 195, 199, 211, 213–14, 216 Illinois Department of Transportation (DOT), 173, 203 Illinois First, 217 Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), 198, 199 immigrants, 12–13, 40–43, 127–28, 130, 139, 166, 183 improvers, community. See community improvers Inclusion Arts Gallery, 137, 150 income ranges, 47–48, 74 Increibles Las Cosas Q’ Se Ven mural, 41 (pl. 1) industrial era, 32, 46–51, 159, 165, 179, 224 inequality, 49, 96–97, 162 infrastructures, 14, 25, 27, 36, 69, 155, 160, 162, 203, 217, 219, 226–28 inner city, 35–36, 82, 128, 159–60, 168– 69, 190 innovation, 12, 22, 30, 59, 69, 173, 190– 91, 219, 221, 226, 237n14; and artistic control, 112–14; and Bronzeville land­ marks, 192–98; through interaction, 112–14; and network form of organization, 229; urban, 173 Insight Arts, 133, 138–39, 141, 232, 233 Institute of Technology. See Illinois Insti­ tute of Technology (IIT) institutional theory: concept of, 2, 7–8, 23–25, 34, 68–69; criticism of institu­ tions, 68; experts, role of, 24–25, 67; foundations for black culture, 72; inno­vation and change, 69; legitimacy, 42, 56, 59–64, 67–68; vs. market systems, 23–24; models, 7, 69; order and hierarchy within organization, 22; practices and proce­dures, 29, 67; recognition, 68; relations to local art production networks, 2, 8, 15; status, 54 institutions. See art institutions; ethnic in­stitutions; organizations; specific institution(s) Instituto del Progreso Latino, 66, 232 integration, social, 32 interaction, and innovation, 112–14 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 242n4 International Harvester, 162

Index / 271 interpersonal and social connections, 8, 20, 28, 78, 86, 91, 93, 99–100, 112–14, 125, 179 It’s a Wonderful Life, 103 Jackson, Annette. See Malika Jackson State University, 239n3 Jacob, Jane C. H., 117, 122–23 Jacob, Mary Jane, 206 Jacobs, Jane, 131, 132, 173, 243n2 Jahn, Helmut, 236n7 James, Michael, 132–33, 139–40, 142–44, 148 Jameson, Fredric, 236n7 Janis, Harriet Grossman, 244n2 (chap. 8) Jefferson (Joseph) Awards (Jeff Awards), 155–56 Jess, Tyehimba, 17–18, 20, 101, 232 Johnson, Bryant, 88, 95 Johnson, Jeff, 204 Johnson, John “Jack,” 207 Johnson, Kimberli, 206–7 Johnson, Robert, 77, 108, 232 Johnson Publishing Company, 63 Jolly, Marva, 83–84, 92–94, 232 Jones, Calvin, 217 Jones, Chris, 140, 155–56, 241n4 Jones, LeRoi, 57, 241n4. See also Baraka, Amiri Jordan, Joseph (Joe), 193, 194 Jordan building, 194–96, 244n2 (chap. 8) Journal. See Chicago Journal J.P. Morgan Chase, 198 judgments: aesthetic, 3, 72, 123, 241n3; of taste, 240n1, 241n3. See also subjectivity Juneway Jungle, 129 Justice Department (U.S.). See United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Kadushin, Charles, 19, 21, 22 Kafka, Franz, 111 Kahlo, Frida, 68, 183 Kant, Immanuel: on aesthetics, 3, 72, 236n7, 237n16, 239–41n1; on beauty, 78; on judgment, 3, 72, 241n3 Karanja, Ayana, 91, 94, 232 Karanja, Sokoni T., 199, 202, 232 Karimi, Robert, 116 Kartemquin Films, 239n3 Kelley, Clifford, 201–2

Kelly, Edmund, 64–65 Kennedy, Leroy, 199 Kent State University, 239n3 Kenwood (community area), 189, 238n2 (chap. 2) Kenwood Academy, 217 Kerr (Charles H.) Publishing, 141 King, Anthony D., 236n9 King, B.B., 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr., Dr. 13 King, Melvin, 232 King (Dr. Martin Luther, Jr.) Branch Library, 204 King (Dr. Martin Luther, Jr.) Drive, 88, 95, 187, 192, 196–97, 201–11, 207 (pl. 18), 216, 219, 238n2 (chap. 2), 242n10 Kleine, Ted, 147 Koenen, Barbara, 173–74, 204–8, 232 Kronbeck, Jasmine, 232 Kruger, Barbara, 122 LaBlanc, Mat, 109, 110 labor movement, 40, 141 Lace, Timothy D., xiv, pl. 14, 16 Lake Meadows Art Fair, 55 Lake Shore Drive, 38, 198 LaLonde, Robert, 236–37n11 Landmarks Commission(s). See Commis­ sion on Chicago Historical and Archi­ tectural and Landmarks; Commission on Chicago Landmarks Land of Pod. See Pilsen; Podville Land Use Planning Department. See Chi­ cago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP) Lang, Fritz, 208–9 Lanzano, Rudy, 169 Laoye, Adedayo Dayo. See Dayo Lash, Michael (Mike), 193, 203, 205, 207, 212, 232 Latino culture, xii, 4–7, 11, 15, 31, 35, 41– 42, 44, 50–54, 58, 59, 64–69, 101, 115– 18, 122, 127–29, 165, 169–70, 175, 180, 182–84, 200, 221, 227, 235–36nn4–6, 245n5. See also Mexican culture; Puerto Rican culture Latino Youth social service agency, 169, 175 Lawrence, Robert H., Jr., 207 Lawyers for the Creative Arts, 121 Lazarus, Emma, 56

272 / Index LBNA. See Loyola Beach Neighbors Association (LBNA) Lee, Kevin, 87 (pl. 8) LeFevre, Gregg, 206 “Leveraging Assets: How Small Budget Art Activities Benefit Neighborhoods” (Grams & Warr), xii Liberty Life Insurance, 195; building, 209 Libman, David, 146–47 Lifeline Theatre, 132–33, 143–56 Life-Sized Mouse Trap Game (Medine & Waters), 107 (pl. 12) Lincoln Park, 134, 160–61 Little Black Pearl Workshop, 201, 219 Livezey, Lowell W., 43 local, vs. global, xii, 6, 12–15, 128, 222, 227–29 local art: and community, 53; exhibition space for, 137, 141; infrastructures, 69; as legitimate, 135; and local purposes, 226–27; new framework for, 226–27; and traditions, 191; and urban develop­ ment, 12; value in, 11 local art production networks. See networks local color (culture): and aesthetic net­works, 96; of black Chicago, 1–4; concept of (as character or sense of place), xi–xii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 15, 31, 36–46, 157, 189, 222, 229, 237n12; and cultural capital 184–85; as distinct from white culture, 85; and empowerment networks, 14–15, 29, 162, 187–220, 226, 228, 244n3, 245n1; and gender, 93; and gentrifica­ tion, 157–58, 166, 168, 183–85; and homogenization of (local culture), 28, 42, 225–29; and local people, 36–46; as multiracial, 4–5, 182–83, 208; research and studies, 6–12, 19–25, 221–22; res­ toration of, 14–15, 29, 162, 187–220, 226, 228, 244n3, 245n1; stability in, 131– 33; structure of, 31; as symbol systems of local culture, 4; as synthesis of literature, 13; and urban space, ownership of, 2; white as, 157–58. See also culture; ethnic culture; local places; urban culture Local Community Fact Book (Wirth & Furez), 4, 235n3, 238nn2–3 local culture. See local color locales: concept of, 11; identifying, 220; and local culture, 187; racial, xi;

revalorizing, 35–36; stability in, 131– 33; urban, xi, 15, 224. See also ethnic locales/places; places; spaces; specific locale(s) locality, 20, 51, 188, xii–xiii; and race/ ethnicity, 15, 227–29; and urban culture, 30 local networks. See networks local places, 12–13, 31–52, 238–39n; activ­ ism, 13; and aesthetic networks, 93–95; and art, 15; and art collecting, 93–95; change following modern industrial era, 46–51; vs. city centers, 33–34; and cul­ tural capital, 184–85; cultural effects of, 30; and cultural power, 33, 35; and di­ versity, 51; historic construction of, 31– 34; shared interests of, 30, 70, 143; shared values/beliefs of, 188. See also local color; places local spaces, 30, 183, 226–28. See also spaces Logan, John R., 159, 160 Logan Square, 41 Loop, the (Chicago), 31, 33, 236n10; South as suburb within the city, 35 Love, Richard H., 243n3 low culture, and high-culture paradigm, 116–17, 236n7. See also elite culture; institutional theory Loyola Beach, 140, 146 Loyola Beach Advisory Council, 146 Loyola Beach Neighbors Association (LBNA), 146 Loyola Park, 154 Lucas, Harold, 199, 209–13 Lugenia Burns Hope Center, 232 Lyric Opera of Chicago, 7, 33 Macarena-Avila, Jesus, 115–17 MacArthur Foundation, 199, 204 MainStage productions, 144 Majeed, Faheem, 245n5 Malcolm X, 57 Malika, 88–89, 91, 92–93, 232 maps: Chicago and community areas, 32; historic Bronzeville, 207 (pl. 18), 211 Marable, Manning, 227 marginalization, 72 Marianne Deson Gallery, 120 markers, territorial, 1, 187–88, 216 markets. See art markets

Index / 273 Marshall, Kerry James, 204 Martel, Frederic, 187 Marx, Karl: on aesthetics, 241n1; on capi­ tal, 72 Marx Brothers, 43 Marxism, 72, 130, 159, 237n15 mass media, 75, 236n7 master of fine arts (MFA), 27, 74, 90, 103 “Mayor of Bronzeville,” 210 MCA. See Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) McCormick, Cyrus, 40 McCormick family, 162 McCormick Place, 202–3, 212 McCormick (Robert R.) Tribune Founda­ tion, 198 McCoy, Patric, xiv, 1–3, 56, 71, 74–78 (pl. 5), 80, 87–91, 107, 215, 218–19, 232 McCullough, Geraldine, 206, 232 McNeil, Claudia, 57 McPier, 60, 202 McWorter, Gerald, 58 Medine, Eric, 106–8 (pl. 12), 112–13, 116, 167, 232 Mess Hall gallery, 137 Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA), 60, 202 Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO), 238n1 Mexican culture, Pilsen as center of, 39–42, 62, 65–68, 101, 114–18, 162, 167, 168, 183, 236n6. See also Latino culture; Puerto Rican culture Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM), 42, 54, 65–67, 168, 174–75, 180, 182– 83, 231, 233 MFA. See master of fine arts (MFA) MFACM. See Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (MFACM) middle class, 36, 227–28. See also black middle class; class; ethnicity and class, white middle class Mid-South Planning Group, 198–202, 204, 209, 231 Mid-South Strategic Development Plan, 190, 198–202 migration. See Great Migration Military Academy, Bronzeville. See Chicago Military Academy–Bronzeville Milne, Dorothy, 132–33, 144, 149

miserabilism, 141 Mitchell, Wyatt, 245n5 mobilization, political, 124–25 modernity, 78, 104, 236n7. See also postmodernism Molotch, Harvey L., 4, 30, 33, 36, 129, 157, 159, 160 MoMing, 104 Monk, Thelonious, 57 Montgomery, Evangeline J., 76 Monument to the Great Northern Migration, 188, 202–3 (pl. 17), 206–7, 212, 221 Moore, Joe, 44–46, 133, 137–38, 156 Moreno, MariCarmen, 232 Morrison, Kenneth, 176 Morseland, 154 Motts, Robert T., 194 Moulin, Raymonde, 2–3, 76 MPEA. See Metropolitan Pier and Exposi­ tion Authority (MPEA) MTO. See Metropolitan Tenants Organiza­ tion (MTO) Muhammad, Elijah, 57 Muhammad Ali, 57 Mulberry, Sam, 245n5 multiracial, local as, 4–5, 182–83 Muntu Dance Theatre, 95, 201 Mural Group. See Chicago Mural Group murals and muralists, 8–9, 132, 155, 239n1 (chap. 4), 245n5, pls. 1–2, 4, 15, 19; and activism, 69, 138–39; as communitybased art, 14, 53–54, 56–58, 191; and community clean-up, 135–38; and local culture, restoration of, 188, 191, 192; and problem solving, 133–39, 147–48; rede­ fining space, 144–48; restoration of, 188, 205–6, 217; and social stability, 133–39. See also graffiti; public art, of Bronzeville; specific mural(s) and muralist(s) Murals for the People exhibition, 59 Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 58– 59, 111 Museum of Science and Industry, 60 museum-quality artists: activities of, 42, 117– 23; concept of, 26, 27–28, 100–102, 224. See also autonomy networks museums: as community representation, 54–56, 65–68; Mexican-American in Pilsen, 65–68. See also specific museum(s) music, 9, 141, 194, 242n1 (chap. 5)

274 / Index NAACP. See National Association for the Ad­ vancement of Colored People (NAACP) NAAMM. See National African American Military Museum (NAAMM) N.A.M.E. Gallery, 104, 120 National African American Military Museum (NAAMM), 75, 215–16 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 193 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 120, 217, 242n2 National Guard. See Illinois Black National Guard National Heritage Area, Bronzeville as, 209, 212 National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA), 42, 54, 68–69, 115, 180, 233 National Register of Historic Places, 193–94, 197, 213, 216 National Trust for Historic Preservation, 232 Navy Pier, 101, 115, 239n4, 242n3 Nazism, 121, 163 NEA. See National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Needham, Theresa, 207 Negro Digest, 58 Negro History Week, 207 Negro National Baseball League, 193 Negro Thrift, 198 Netsch, Walter, 64–66 Network of Visual Art. See Nova art fair networks, art: and artists, 19; and capital, in­ tersection of political and cultural, 64–68; comparisons and patterns, 221–22; con­ cept of (as framework of study), xi, 7–8, 10–12, 15, 20, 22–30, 26, 29, 221–27; as ideal types, 8, 25, 27, 130, 222, 242n1 (chap. 5); vs. institutions and markets, 23–25, 229; as interpersonal connections, 8, 20, 28, 78, 86, 91, 93, 99–100, 114, 125, 179, 191; and production of cul­ ture, 19–25, 53; purposes (uses), 14, 26, 168, 222, 226–27; and shared interests, 8, 10–11, 14, 25–29, 70; as social organi­ zation, 10, 22–23, 195, 222; strategically lo­cated people in, 11; theories of, 12, 17–30, 99–100, 237–38n1. See also aesthetic networks; autonomy networks; empowerment networks; gentrification networks; networks, types of; problemsolving networks

networks, types of: acquaintance, 20–21; aesthetic, 7–8, 26, 27; autonomy, 7–8, 27–28; business, 21–22; empowerment, 7–8, 29; gentrification, 7–8, 28–29; in­ strumental, 20–21; job seekers’, 21; knowledge, 20–21; of nonprofit organi­ zations, 21; problem solving, 7–8, 28; technology management, 21. See also aesthetic net­works; autonomy networks; empowerment networks; gentrification networks; net­works, art; problem-solving networks New Haven City-Wide Open Studios project, 176 New Orleans, as fertile ground for cultural creators, xiv New York Times, 64 9/11, 131, 138 NMMA. See National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) No Exit Café, 139–40 Noftsier, Tara, 149–50, 151 nonprofit organizations (NPOs), 54, 104, 242n4; comparison, 9, 10; and elite, 2, 13, 33–34, 69, 157; number and size, comparison of, 34. See also art institu­ tions; specific organization(s) Nova (Network of Visual Art) art fair, 101–2 NPOs. See nonprofit organizations (NPOs) Oak Brook Polo Club, 63–64 Oakland (community area), 189, 238n2 (chap. 2) OBAC. See Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Obama, Barack, 5, 13, 63 objectivity, 81. See also subjectivity Olive-Harvey Community College, 232 open-format spaces, 102, 124, 166. See also spaces Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), 56–58, 205–6, 217, 239n2 organizations: and authority/governance, 22–24, 100, 152; and communitybased art, 69–70; concept of, 22–23; expectations of, 17–18. See also art institutions; nonprofit organizations (NPOs); social organizations; specific organization(s) Ornamentos (Soto), 116–17 Orozco Community Academy, 41 (pl. 2)

Index / 275 “Outrageous Open Studio Art Walk and Suc­ culent Art Fair” (Glenwood Avenue), 152 Overton, Anthony, 193, 195 Overton Hygienic/Douglass National Bank Building, 195 Page, Karen L., 21–22, 100 Painted Bride Art Center gallery, 243n3 Palmer, Laurie, 206 pan-ethnicity, 4, 5, 42, 51; black as, 235n2; concept of, 236n6; Latino as, 118, 236n6. See also ethnicity Park, Robert E., 31–33, 243n2 Parker, Charlie, 57 Parker, Daniel Texidor, 77 (pl. 6), 79–80, 89–91, 232 parks. See Chicago Park District; specific park(s) particular vs. universal, in art collections, 89–90 parties. See art parties Passeron, Jean-Claude, 13, 35, 54, 72, 237n15, 241n2, 244n1 (chap. 8) Peace Museum, 243n3 Peck, Nathan, 106–7, 112–13, 232 pedagogic actions, 241n2 Pekin Temple of Music, 194 Penny Press, 180 people: concept of, 11; local, 36–46 Percent for Art program, 203, 205–6 Perkins, Pinetop, 1 Peterson, Richard A., xi, 4, 10, 11, 19, 51 Peterson, Tom (pseudonym), voter registrar, 45, 232 Phantom Limb Studio, 149, 151 photography, 50, 58, 85, 95, 99–100, 116, 119, 120–21, 139, 141, 181, 242n2, 243n3 Pilsen: and artistic autonomy/control, 99– 125, 224; arts activities in, 8–10; arts district, 118, 180; demographics, 41, 52, 168; economic statistics, 47–48; Gate­ way, 162–66, 179; gentrification in, 14– 15, 28–29, 157–85, 225–26, 244n3 (chap. 7); informal arts activities and venues, 8–10; labor activists in, 40; and local color, 5, 7–8; as local place, 39–42, 50–52; location, 238n3; Mexican cul­ ture, center of, 39–42, 62, 65–68, 101, 114–18, 162, 167, 168, 183, 236n6; museum, 65–68; naming, 40; public

art, 10; racial composition, 5–6; as seg­ regated city within city, 5; traditional arts activities and venues, 8–9; trans­ formation, 40; as urban place for ar­ tistic production, 7–8, 12–13. See also autonomy networks; gentrification net­ works; Podville Pilsen Café, 40 Pilsen East, 42, 103, 167, 172, 175, 176, 179 Pilsen East Artists Open House Art Walk, 172 place-making, 13, 15 places: abandoned 3, 189; center/place dichotomy (also center/margin), xi, 6, 34, 42; and class, 7, 36, 43–44, 47; con­ cept of, xi, 11–15, 235n4, 243n2; con­ struction of, 4, 6, 15; culturally signifi­ cant, 36, 97, 191, 207; vs. displacement, 29, 35, 139, 145, 153, 158, 174, 184, 222, 225; and diversity, 46, 51, 153, 229; and ethnicity, 41, 52, 159–60, 184; and gemeinschaft, 6; geographically defined, 12, 25, 223; historic, 4, 188, 191–92, 194, 197, 199, 202, 207, 216, 219–20, 222–23, 226; and identity, 50–51, 216, 226; marginalized, 5–6, 72; ownership of, 146–47, 188, 190; a place called Bronzeville, 39, 189–92, 212, 216, 226– 27; a place called Pilsen, 40–41, 168; a place called Rogers Park, 127–32; place within a place, 202, 208, 212; Pod Places, 103, 107; postmodern, 50–51; and race, 37, 52, 190–92, 212, 216; in research question, 9–10; segre­gated, 4–5, 194, 209; sense of place, 2, 109, 156; stigma of, 4, 13; symbol of, 4, 38; territorial, 11, 97, 173, 188, 226. See also ethnic locales/places; local color; locales; local places; spaces; urban places; specific place(s) Planning and Development Department. See Chicago Department of Planning and Development Planning Department. See Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP) pluralism, 97, 236n7 Podmajersky, John, II, 42, 103, 166–68, 174, 178 Podolny, Joel M., 21–22, 100

276 / Index Podville: and arbitrary privileges, 166–68; commercial market in, 172–75; as conten­ tious and exclusive, 183; cutting-edge artists in, 100–14; and gentrification, 166–68, 176, 183; mayhem and protests in, 176–80; naming, 103; real estate market in, 170–72. See also Pilsen poetry, 9, 17, 18, 37, 45, 109, 131, 132, 138–42 Poitier, Sidney, 57 political capital: and black community, 208–9; and community-based art, 64– 68; and cultural capital, 64–68; gentri­ fication, 159. See also capital political enfranchisement. See enfranchisement political mobilization, 124–25 political power, 30, 35, 37 political resources. See resources politics, progressive: and cultural diversity, 127–33 Pollock, Jackson, 236n7 Polvo Art Studio/Polvo Studios, 115–16, 124, 180, 232 pop art, 236n7 popular culture, 117, 236n7, 237n1 population, 5; of black Chicago, 37; concept of, 11. See also census data; demographics Posada, José Guadalupe, 170, 180–82 postmodernism, 5, 49, 97, 229, 239n1 (chap. 4); and architecture, 236n7; con­ cept of, 236n7; and cultural change, 241n5; and local places, 50–51. See also modernity post-urban culture. See culture; urban culture Pottersville, 103 Pounds, Jon, 145, 205, 217, 232, 245n5 poverty, 14, 35–39, 47–48, 52, 75, 82, 160, 198, 202, 228 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 57 power: political, 30, 35, 37; and property, 237n15. See also cultural power Prairie Shores Apartments, 204 Preckwinkle, Toni, 201–2, 217, 245n4 preservationists, 188, 191, 193–96, 198, 202, 204, 209, 232 problem solving: and art production, 131–33; and cultural change, 36; ethos, 139–44; and mural making, 133–39,

147–48; and rapid transmission of information, 22 problem-solving networks: and community improvement, 145; compared to aesthetic and autonomy networks, 132, 147; con­cept of, 7, 14, 26, 28, 224–25; and social stability, 14–15, 28, 127–56, 224–25, 242–43n1. See also networks; Rogers Park production of culture perspective, xi, 4, 10, 19–25 progressive politics, and cultural diversity, 127–33 property: devaluation, 29, 157–58, 161–62, 184, 190, 225, 226; ownership, 2, 42, 72, 124–25, 130, 164–65, 224; and power, 237n15; and shared interests, 164 property development, 26, 154–55, 158, 160, 165, 170–72, 179, 224. See also redevelopment; urban development Pros Arts Studio, 9, 66, 168–70, 176, 180–83, 232 Prospectus Art Gallery, 118 public art, of Bronzeville, 95, 202, 211–13. See also community-based art; commu­ nity improvers; murals and muralists Public Art Collection, 203 Public Art Group. See Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) Public Art of Bronzeville, 95, 190–92, 202–3, 205–6, 207 (pl. 18), 211–13, 216, 219, 238n2 (chap. 2) Public Art Program, 203–6, 209–10, 212, 232 Public Policy, School of. See Harris School of Public Policy public schools. See Chicago public schools Public Works Department. See Chicago Department of Public Works Puerto Rican culture, 4, 42, 116–17, 150, 205, 236n6. See also Latino culture; Mexican culture Puryear, Martin, 239n4 Putnam, Robert D., 23, 111 quixotic dream, 179 race: as asserted vs. ascribed, 48–51, 54, 82, 227; black/white relations, 4, 80; as collec­tive resource, 5–6, 20, 48–50, 153, 227; and diversity of, 153; and ethnicity,

Index / 277 xi, 4–5, 48–50, 52, 183, 227–29; as inherent human quality, 2; as local color, 13, 15, 229; as physical characteristics, 5; race man, 82; racial change, 129, 153; and self-identity, 5, 44, 49–51, 235n1; single vs. multiracial, 4–5, 182–83, 208; and social and cultural order, 5; and subordinate status, 5, 6, 30, 34, 48, 49, 73, 82, 229. See also black; diversity; ethnicity racial change, and diversity advocates, 129 racial diversity. See diversity racism, 64, 72, 143–44, 157, 184, 198. See also segregation Radio Arte, 68, 180 Radway, Janice, 21 Rafacz, Andrew, 109–12, 114, 116, 124, 232 Randolph Street Gallery, 104 Raven, Lavie, 245n5 R.A.W. (Real Art Work), 88, 231, 232 real estate development. See property development real estate entrepreneurs, 124, 194 reciprocity: and artistic control, 108–12; among artists, 18; between collectors and artists, 83–87. See also collaboration; shared interests redevelopment, 35, 37, 66, 159–60, 166, 189–90, 201–2, 214–15, 238n1. See also gentrification; property development; urban development Red Line Tap, 140 Re-Enchantment of Art (Gablik), 119 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), 217–18, 245n5. See also Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) replacement value, 121–22 research and studies, 6–12, 19–25, 221–22. See also framework research question, 9–10 resources: for aesthetic networks, 73–81; and art, 15; collective, 5–6, 48–50, 227; cultural, 34, 68–69, 174, 222; external, 188; financial, 25, 26, 27, 60, 62, 70, 190; and gentrification, 161–62, 168–70; human, 26, 27; local, xi–xii, 7, 25, 26, 28, 153, 155, 158, 161–62, 168–70, 184, 223–26; and local culture, restora­ tion of, 188, 190, 218, 219; mobiliza­ tion of, 51, 70, 97, 221, 229; political,

222; technical, 26, 27; value of, increas­ ing, 168–70 respect, 18, 20, 165, 221 Restoring Bronzeville, 189–91, 199, 209, 217–19 revalorization, 31, 35–35, 128–29, 132, 136, 159, 161, 175, 242n3 revitalization, local, 28–29, 35, 145, 200, 216. See also gentrification; historic preservation R.H. Love Contemporary gallery, 243n3 Rice, Linda Johnson, 63–64 Rivera, Diego, 68, 183 River North gallery district, 76, 86, 95 River West gallery district, 94, 243n3 Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, 198 Robert Taylor Homes, 38 Robinson, Paula, 49, 209, 211–13, 232 Rodriguez-Ochoa, Elvia, 115, 117, 232 Rogers, Phillip, 43 Rogers Park: arts activities in, 8–10; census data, 239n6; as culturally diverse, 43–46; demographics, 52; economic statistics, 47–48; gentrification in, 128–30, 132, 134–36, 139, 146, 153; informal arts activities and venues, 8–10; and local color, 5, 7–8; as local place, 43–46, 50– 52; naming, 43; problem-solving ethos in, 139–44; public art, 10; racial composi­ tion, 5–6; as segregated city within city, 5, 128; and social stability, 14–15, 127– 56, 224–25, 242–43n1; as suburb within the city, 128; traditional arts activities and venues, 8, 9; as urban place for ar­ tistic production, 7–8, 12–13. See also problem-solving networks Rogers Park Arts Council, 149, 233 Rogers Park Builders Group (RPBG), 133, 148 Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group (RPBANG), 138, 139, 148–53 Rogers Park Community Action Network (RPCAN), 138 Rogers Park Community Council, 133 Rolling Stones, 1 Romani, Elena (pseudonym), board member, 168–70, 175–76, 182, 232 Romani, Marco (pseudonym), 168, 175 Romántico, Lo, 116

278 / Index Roosevelt University, 194 Rosemont, Franklin, 141–42 Rosemont, Penelope, 141 Rosenbaum, Lew, 141 Rosenzweig, Roy, 21 Rotary Club, 175 RPBANG. See Rogers Park Business and Arts Networking Group (RPBANG) RPBG. See Rogers Park Builders Group (RPBG) RPCAN. See Rogers Park Community Action Network (RPCAN) RTA. See Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) Rush, Bobby, 202 Russell, Bill, 57 Saar, Alison, 202 (pl. 17), 203, 205–7, 212 SAIC. See School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) St. Xavier University, 107 Samuelson, Timothy (Tim) J., 193–99, 209, 213, 215–16, 232, 244nn2–3 (chap. 8) Sanders, Gerald, 50 (pl. 3), 232 Sapphire and Crystals, 83, 90, 93–94, 232 Sassen, Saskia, 6, 15, 33, 237n14 School of Public Policy. See Harris School of Public Policy School of Social Science Research. See Chi­ cago School of Social Science Research School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 55, 103, 118, 120, 137, 148, 168, 172, 181, 239n3. See also Art Institute of Chi­ cago (AIC) schools. See Chicago public schools; specific school(s) Science and Industry Museum. See Museum of Science and Industry Seaman, Mark, 149 Second Friday, 100, 103, 104, 171, 177, 179 segregation, xi, 13–14, 58, 157, 189, 192, 194–97, 211, 227, 241n4; of city within city, 3, 5, 36–38; of ethnic communities, 236n9; places, 4–5, 194, 209. See also racism self-identity: and art collecting, 79–82; and ethnicity/race, 5, 44, 49–51, 235n1. See also identity Sengstacke, Robert, 57 (pl. 4), 58 Shaffer, Fern, 118–20, 123, 178, 232

shared interests: and aesthetic networks, 73, 96; and artistic autonomy/control, 104, 108–12, 125, 167, 170, 173, 224; concept of, 8, 11, 12, 14, 24–26, 29, 30, 70; and empowerment networks, 219–20; of ethnic culture, 225–26; and gentrification, 164, 184, 225–26; of local places, 30, 70, 143; of property owners, 164; vs. shared knowledge, meanings or acquaintances, 20–23, 30 Shedd Aquarium, 60 Side Project, 156 Simmel, Georg, 241n1 Simone, Nina, 57 Simpson, Charles R., 25, 34, 173–74 Simpson, O.J., 2, 88 social activist: concept of, 26, 28, 129–30, 224; and gentrification, 138–39; and social stability, 129–30, 132, 134, 135, 138–39, 141–44, 146, 153–55 social differences/inequality (Bourdieu), 81, 162, 237n16 social movements, 54, 60, 72 social order, 6, 31, 199–200, 224 social organization(s), 10–11, 195; and networks, 22–23, 222 Social Science Research, School of. See Chi­ cago School of Social Science Research social stability: vs. gentrification, 128–30, 132, 134–36, 139, 146, 153; and problem-solving networks, 14–15, 28, 127–56, 224–25, 242–43n1. See also stability machine social theories: of art, 6–8, 71–72, 221–22; of cultural differences, 54. See also institutional, as social theory sociology: and aesthetics, 71–73; of art, xii, 6–8, 15, 97, 240n1; cultural, 15, 21; his­ torical, xi, 4, 15. See also urban sociology SoHo (New York), 86, 159, 161, 173–74, 179 solidarity, 125, 217, 224 Solis, Danny, 169 Soto, Edra, 116–17 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois), 213 South Shore Cultural Center, xiii–xiv , 87– 88, 94, 231 South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), 9, 55, 75, 82, 85, 93, 95, 201, 208–9, 215–16, 218, 231, 232, 245n5 South Side Partners, 198–99, 202, 204

Index / 279 spaces: cultural ownership of, 12; domestic, 100, 103–4, 109, 114–15, 124, 170–72, 177; open format, 102, 124, 166; re­ defining, 144–48; social, 100, 114, 124, 223. See also locales; local spaces; places; urban spaces; specific space(s) Spann, Otis, 1 Spears, Gregg, 50, 93, 208–9, 232 Spook Who Sat by the Door, The (Greenlee), 82, 231 SSCAC. See South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) stability machine, ethnically driven, 30, 157–58, 180–84, 225, 229. See also growth machine; social stability Stamps, Marion, 35, 238n1 State Highway Department. See Illinois Department of Transportation (DOT) Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 241–42n7 strategies of action: and culture, 5–6, 73, 236n8 Stray Show, 101–2, 105, 114–15 Streets and Sanitation Dept. See Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation Stroll, the (Chicago), 211 Studio Bronzeville, 50, 232 Studio Theater, 140 Subaltern Show, The, 115 subjectivity: aesthetic, 123; and art collec­ tions, 87–92; about being African Ameri­ can, 80. See also judgments; objectivity Sullivan, Louis, 196, 197, 210 Sun-Times. See Chicago Sun-Times Supreme Life Building, 209 surrealism, 141 Surrealism Here and Now exhibition, 141 Sutherland Hotel, 188 Sutton, Jill, 152 Swidler, Ann: on strategies of action, 5–6, 73, 236n8 Symphony Orchestra. See Chicago Symphony Orchestra taste: and aesthetics, 241n3; concept of, 240n1; cultures, 51; and disinterested­ ness, 240n1, 241n3; judgments of, 240n1, 241n3; for overabundance by collectors, 3, 76–79 Taylor, Koko, 1 technical resources. See resources

technology, and collaboration, 104 Technology Institute. See Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) territorial markers, 1, 187–88, 216 Terrorist Art, 115 Theo Ubique Theatre Company, 140, 156 They All Played Ragtime (Blesh & Janis), 244n2 (chap. 8) Thurow, Chuck, 245n5 Tillman, Dorothy, 187–88, 201–2, 245n4 time and space, 69, 100, 104, 114, 223 Time to Unite, A, mural, 217 (pl. 19) Titra, Stephen, 147 Tortolero, Carlos, 65–68, 233 transformation, urban. See gentrification; growth machine transience, 99 103, 124, 173, 178, 224 Transit Authority. See Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) transnational artists: concept of, 26, 27–28, 42, 100–101, 224; and ethnicity, 114– 17. See also autonomy networks Transportation Department. See Illinois Department of Transportation (DOT) Tribune. See Chicago Tribune Tribute Markers, 1, 187–88 Trilogy, 143–44 trust: and artistic control, 108–12; and networks, 21 Tubman, Harriet, 56 Turner, Nat, 57 Tyler, Al, 141 Tyler, Anna, 141 typology: of domains and production of culture, 237n12; of local art production networks, 7–8, 12, 25–30, 26, 221–22. See also ideal types Tyson, Cicely, 57 Ubique (Theo) Theatre Company, 140, 156 UIC. See University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 241–42n7 Unit B gallery, 103, 105, 109–10, 116, 124, 171, 231 United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 203–4 United States Department of Justice (DOJ), 64

280 / Index United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 1 universal: vs. particular, in art collections, 89–90 University of Chicago, xii–xiv, 1, 5, 49, 58, 62, 137, 207 University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), 40, 118, 120, 161 University Village, 161, 162–63 Upstart Gallery, 243n3 urban, vs. other municipal forms, 3 urban core, 8, 13–14 urban culture, 5–6, 14, 19, 30, 34, 237n12, 237–38n1; and locality, 30; post-urban, 15, 221–29. See also culture urban development, 12, 160, 203–4. See also gentrification; historic preservation; property development; redevelopment Urban Gateway, 169 urban innovation. See innovation urban places, 7, 12, 155, 188, 222, 226; and art, 4–6. See also places urban renewal. See gentrification urban sociology, xi, xii, 15, 158, 235n3, 243n2. See also sociology urban spaces, 11, 13, 36, 53, 158, 188, xi; and local color, ownership of, 2. See also spaces urban transformation. See gentrification; growth machine utopias, 130–31, 146, 148 Valdez, Helen, 65 values: and aesthetics, 29, 69; local cultural, 70 Vaughan, Sarah, 57 Very Top Chicago Women Painters, The, exhibition, 243n3 Victory Monument (WWI), 196, 205, 211 Visual Art Center of Alaska, 243n3 Visual Artists Workshop, 56, 58 Wade, Eugene, 58 Wakefield, Apache, 206–7 Walker, William, 56–57, 59, 205–6, 217 Walker, Wyatt Tee, 57 Wall of Respect mural, 56–57 (pl. 4), 59, 217, 239nn1–2 Walsh, Ali, 116, 233 Walsh School, 175

Walter, Little, 1 Warhol, Andy, 236n7 Warr, Michael, xii Washington, Booker T., 55–56 Washington, Dale, 83, 233 Washington, Gregory, 199 Washington, Harold (Chicago mayor, 1983–87), 64, 80, 187, 197, 239n4 Washington (Harold) Cultural Center, 187 Washington Park, 60–63, 66, 206, 242n10 Waters, Muddy, xvi, 1–2, 188, 201 Waters, Thomas, 106–7 (pl. 12) Weber, John Pittman, 217 Weber, Max, 108; on ideal types, 8, 25, 237n13, 242–43n1 Wells, Ida B., 188, 193, 207 Wells, Junior, 1 Wendell Campbell and Associates, architectural firm, 204 West, Candace, 49 Westgard, Amy, 148–49, 152, 233 Westgard, Tom, 148 West Loop art market, 179 West Loop gallery district, 111–12, 124 West Ridge, 43 What the Fuck Are These Red Squares? (Kartemquin, 1970), 239n3 White, Harrison, 238n2 (chap. 1) white middle class, 14, 81, 129, 157, 161, 184, 185. See also black middle class; class; ethnicity and class; middle class white upper class, 4, 14, 21, 26, 39, 52, 128, 159, 161, 184–85, 189, 224. See also black upper class; class whitewashing of culture: concept of, 29, 158; and diversity, 155; and gentrifi­ cation networks, 14–15, 28–29, 42, 157– 85, 225–26, 244n3 (chap. 7); and murals, 70. See also cultural homogenization; gentrification networks Wicker Park, 161 Williams, Bernard, 145 Williams, Julian, 89–90 (pl. 9), 233 williams, karen g., 138, 233 Wilson, August, 83, 242n9 Wilson Junior College, 61 Wirth, Louis, 4, 235n3, 238nn2–3 Wisdom Bridge Theater, 149 Wolf, Peter, 45, 140, 142–23

Index / 281 women, art collecting by, 91–95 Woodson, Carter G., 207 working class, 21, 27, 35–39 41, 52, 58, 129, 159, 224. See also class Workman, Michael, 101–2, 178 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 9, 145 World War I, 37, 40, 43, 196, 205, 211, 218n4, 238n4 World War II, 37 WPA. See Works Progress Administration (WPA) Wright, Frank Lloyd, 196, 197, 210 Wright, Richard, 188, 207

Ye Ye Oba (Dayo), 91 (pl. 10) Yollocalli Youth Museum, 68, 180, 231 York, Grant, 217 Zimmerman, Don H., 49 Zimmerman, Jeff, pl. 1 zoning, 244n3 (chap. 7); and arts districts, 172–75 Zoning Department. See Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning (DZP) Zoning Reform Commission. See Chicago Zoning Reform Commission Zukin, Sharon, 4, 7, 15, 33–34, 157–60, 174