Copyright 2009 Insider-Chicago.com
rss feeds
this week in...- see&do
- eat&drink
- live&learn
- favorite friday nights
- 5 Bitchin'
- 60-second videos
- neighborhood look
this week in...see&doeat&drinklive&learnfavorite friday nights5 Bitchin'60-second videosneighborhood look
BUT HARLEY YOUNG (profiled in video) isn’t the only artist to transform a spare pocket of his living area into a renegade public art space.
A year before Knock Knock Gallery opened its stairwell, Pamela Fraser and her husband, Randall Szott, started an apartment gallery called He Said She Said. At the time, the Oak Park couple was consumed by life with a new baby and felt disconnected from Chicago’s art world. “It was hard to get out and see things and meet people,” Fraser says. “We thought if we did it here people could come to us.”
But Knock Knock and He Said She Said are not the first of their kind in Chicago: “We’re following in the footsteps of an already established tradition,” Fraser says. The Suburban, also in Oak Park, is a concrete, boxy, eight-by-ten-foot shed that’s been kicking around contemporary work from global artists for 10 years.
Apartment galleries aren’t for everyone, though—you need a little bit of ingenuity to take part in this particular tradition. These artists-cum-owners run their spaces at a very low cost. They use as many online channels of free publicity as possible (Facebook, blogs, Twitter) and often solicit help from friends and family to get the word out. They set up their intimate galleries in a living room, a spare bedroom, a medicine cabinet, a window ledge, or even on a refrigerator door. Usually, they only open their doors on weekends or by appointment, so you have to give the artists a ring on their cell phones if you want to catch them at home.
Artists in other cities have also opened their doors to the apartment gallery movement–in February 2009, a walking apartment gallery exposition called Apartment Show NY made its debut. But the movement has the strongest presence in the Second City, Young and Fraser say. For one, the rent in neighborhoods such as Ukranian Village, Pilsen, and Bridgeport is relatively cheap so there’s more space to come by. But the driving force behind this crop of alternative art spaces is a limited number of commercial gallery opportunities for local artists.
“These spaces get started because these artists don’t get representation,” says Allison Peters Quinn, director of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center. “They’re too young, too experimental, or a little too inconsistent so that they don’t get that kind of representation, so they create it themselves.” In larger art markets like New York and Los Angeles, commercial galleries are the first stop for artists looking to make it big. In Chicago, however, the competition is stiff and artists, especially younger ones, must be creative in their quest for success.
The Hyde Park Art Center celebrated its 70th anniversary this July with an exhibit dedicated to artist-run alternative spaces. The show, titled “Artists Run Chicago” and curated by Quinn, presents a decade-long overview of these improvised spaces—some of which have since shut down—in Chicago. It’s also a nod to the Art Center’s good ol’ days, when a group of hippie artists, passionate about showing their work, organized in the late 1930s. “We wanted to have this show that windows our past,” Quinn says, “but hopefully, it gives support to future Hyde Park Art Centers sprouting.”
“Artists Run Chicago” features 37 venues with as many as eight pieces representing each gallery. The crammed exhibit, installed in the Center’s main gallery, is a veritable circus of artwork: a nearly 10-foot tall wooden robot, a giant birdhouse hanging from the ceiling, an ominous crate, a suspended piece of dirty ice dripping to the floor 15 feet below, a series of wood sculptures jutting from the wall like water-worn barnacles, a banner that reads, “Help!!! Wanted” (with “wanted” crossed out). You know, the usual.
“Things are coming at you from all different spaces in all different kinds of media,” Quinn says. “It really shows you that there is this really chaotic production happening, a kind of flurry of it in all different directions. I think that’s really important because you know that things are happening.”
“They’re too young, too experimental, or a little too inconsistent so that they don’t get that kind of [commercial gallery] representation, so they create it themselves.”
What’s happening is more than just art hanging on a wall and an opening night party of champagne and canapés. These artists, who often work multiple jobs, open their homes to neighbors, friends, and fellow artists to encourage a conversation and inspire their own creativity, not just to promote their latest pieces. “It has its time, and I think that’s why they don’t last forever,” Quinn says. “They are artists, practicing artists…but they’re not using these galleries to show their own work.”
Most of these spaces are temporary since leases end, roommates disperse, or artists move on. Their fan base, then, tends to be thin and difficult to develop. But brevity doesn’t diminish the space’s connection or its contribution to Chicago’s alternative art scene.
In Logan Square, 24-year-old Lucia Fabio runs Mini Dutch gallery out of the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her fiancé. After two years of shows, though, Fabio is leaving Chicago. She sees her time here as an incubator for her work as an artist and curator. “I’m so happy that I was able to do it in Chicago,” she says. “The community was so much smaller here…small enough that I was able to make a small name [for myself] in two years.”
Which is exactly why these imaginative spaces continue to pop up in neighborhood nooks and crannies, tucked away in the most unlikely of places. Wandering Caterpillar, a Web site directory dedicated to “Chicago’s fluctuating art spaces,” lists 12 apartment galleries far from the West Loop and the city’s commercial art center on Michigan Avenue. And as time passes artists like Fabio may leave the Chicago scene, only to leave room for other entrepreneurial artists to change their vacant stoop, empty mailbox, or discarded dresser into the next “it” piece of contemporary art.
Friends and fellow artists gather in the front room of Lucia Fabio’s Logan Square apartment for Mini Dutch’s final show.
