Contrary to (what may be) popular belief, I welcome thoughtful arguments on this subject. What I don’t welcome is silence, fuzzy logic,diversion and confusion.

I just wish a few more of the lurkers here would add to the discussion and now just sponge it in. You know who you are.

- Henri Lefebvre

Your Right! You made your point very clear. I didn’t think it needed repeating. Never-the-less what I wrote supports your assertions. From your response, you would think I had argued against your point – I’m not.

Again, I apologize for not being able to attend the panel discussion, so I am at an loss when referring back to that event. My interest in commenting here was not to debate anyones position in this thread, I think all the points thus far are fairly well founded including the issue of racism particularly towards the black population on the southside. Although, I don’t think a comment page is the best venue, there is a lot more that needs to be explored on the topic of racism in the Arts. Racism in Chicago and America is real and is occurring through out our social, cultural, and community institutions, including our art institutions. I think you did a good job baring that out. I apologize for what may have seemed to be an semantic omission on my part. I did not intend to neuter my comment. Rather my interest in commenting was to contribute a fairly narrow, and what I thought neglected, aspect of geography to the discussion.

When “I” think about this topic I don’t just think about the agents of art (makers and consumers) but also the place of art. Whatever you may think about the person, place also has an important role in Art. And when you add markets to the mix, well then, you just created hierarchies of place and centers of the arts which are highly biased toward monied interests.

There has always been a conflict between where the market is and where the artist live. Artists (or the Creative Class), being more mobile, have been known to abandoned where they live to migrate in mass and cluster around these highly capitalized creative centers. But now that capital has become highly mobile, actually much more mobile than people, there is no reason we can not bring these markets to these once discarded communities and neighborhoods and seed the development of more great artist.

See I believe, some of the blind neglect by the institutions of art and the media has expression in our built environment. The built environment is physical and solicits certain behavior. Its the construction of the Dan Ryan all over again. What has occurred on the southside with respect to the art world is another form of white flight and building barriers.

We are only beginning to see revitalization in the Bronzeville neighborhood and the near southside. My worry is that developers such as Community Builders, who are developing the Ida B. Wells area, have neglected the importance of Culture and the Arts to such an extent that they have not attracted the necessary capital to seed a vital cultural life.

Although Pilsen is a near southside community it can serve as a good example for seeding the development of a cultural center. There are several initiatives that make it a vital place for artist to live (the Hispanic Art Museum and the Podmajerski properties to name just two). The last decade has also seen an expansion of the art scene into Bridgeport and farther south. Then of course there is Hyde Park, Beverly and Morgan Park.

But what is forgotten are the neighborhoods that lie under the plumb of fallow 20th century industry – steel mills and oil refineries. There has been very little to no progress in these neighborhoods.

So yes, I think this discussion is fruitful. It has, by it’s title, created a dialectic between the art establishment and the southside. If I was a community organizer, I would say we made same great gains here. So, as much as we need to continue building channels for great artist to reach the great show rooms of the Art establishment so too we need build the channels that brings the Art establishment to the southside.

Regardless, I think this is a great topic that needs to be addressed from all sorts of angles and voices.

(It was early)

Amazing.

I grew up on the northside and moved to East Chicago, Indiana about a decade ago. This brought me to the opposite end of the Chicago Metropolitan Region in what is called the calumet industrial corridor.

As I grew up I always felt I identified with Chicago not just because I was a resident, but also because of my genes. I felt I shared in the genetic profile of Chicago’s built environment and history. This identity can be traced back to my great great grandfather who played an important role in forming Chicago and its identity. He was Roswell B. Mason, a civil engineer who worked on the Erie Canal, brought the Illinois Central to Chicago, reversed the chicago river and most notably served as Mayor of Chicago during the Chicago fire.

A major characteristic of my identity with Chicago was what was absent. I had a massive blackhole in my awareness of the city’s southside. Yes, there were a few islands called Hyde Park and China town that my family would set anchor to every so often and I was a Sox fan, but otherwise I had no other identity with the southside.

Chicago is known for its iconic neighborhoods, and yet from the 1960s through the 1980s, most of Chicagoan’s lived in what I call “Gap Areas.” These are places that lie between identities, mostly serving the nimby instincts (not in my backyard) of iconic identities. Consequently, these places tend to receive discarded land, material, infrastructure, and peoples; out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Whether they are brownfields or brownpeople northsiders do not want to hear their story. It is hard for an enlightened northsider to speak to a Blackhole, even if they grew up in one.

Now that I live down here, I find the authority of my assumptions don’t apply.

But I think they are beside my point.

I don’t claim everyone who picks up a brush or lump of clay should be in the hallowed (hollowed?) halls of the MCA or the AIC. I’m just raising the issue of why, after almost 400 years of AfrAmericans in America, so few of us are even acknowledged as being artists at all in any “mainstream” American museums, galleries and journals – in downtown/Northside Chicago or anyplace else I know?

But I’ll admit, it’s really a rhetorical question. I think most of us who really know anything about the history of America…and Chicago, already have a pretty good idea of the answer.

Right?

Let me be clear I am not letting the Institutions and media off the hook. I understand the pain artist feel when their phone only rings in the month of February. It is truly a numbers game that is largely based on referrals believe it or not. Do I think this formula is useed in other parts of the city? Hell No. But Again, it is what it is and you have to have a plan to deal with it. Just remember at some point in time your work has to stand on it’s own two feet.