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Small is beautiful
After a year like 2009, little plans seem like lifelines.
In June, one week before UNStudio’s Burnham Pavilion opened in Millennium Park, something happened that we actually cared about: The Green Lantern hosted its farewell party. A few months earlier, a city inspector had deemed the Wicker Park apartment gallery illegal, and zoning regulations prevented director Caroline Picard from obtaining a license for the space.
Several apartment galleries closed this year—some for the same bureaucratic reasons that shuttered the Green Lantern, which fortunately still operates its small press. Others, including Logan Square’s mini dutch and Pilsen’s Vega Estates, shut down because their founders moved or moved on. But new alternative exhibition spaces such as Hyde Park’s Home Gallery, Logan Square’s Concertina Gallery and Monument 2, and Humboldt Park’s MVSEVM seemed to take their place every week of the year—and their shows seem ever more polished and professional. The Hyde Park Art Center’s (HPAC) summer exhibition “Artists Run Chicago” welcomed these possibly illicit DIY spaces into the canon.
Designers also embraced a grassroots approach. Delicious Design League, Sonnenzimmer and other studios formed the Chicago Printers Guild; the Show ’n Tell Show grew enough of an audience to move from the Whistler to Schubas; and Caroline Linder and Lisa Smith founded the Object Design League to promote independent product designers.
Such small-scale venues and ventures have existed in Chicago for decades, but the prominence they enjoyed in 2009 is unprecedented—and surely due to the recession, which hit larger institutions hard. In June, the Spertus Museum laid off 26 percent of its staff and reduced its hours to alternate Sundays and one Thursday per month. In December, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign closed its River North gallery I Space. Employees of smaller nonprofits such as Experimental Sound Studio and Around the Coyote (ATC) worked for months in 2009 without pay; at press time, it’s unclear whether ATC will survive at all. Even stalwarts like the HPAC and the Art Institute of Chicago laid off employees, despite the latter’s head-spinning admission hike from $12 to $18.
The Art Institute’s May opening of the Modern Wing seems to have been one of few large-scale successes this year for Chicago art and design. Judging from the staggering number of local exhibitions devoted to China, the future seems to belong to the People’s Republic instead. The Chicago Cultural Center’s contemporary art survey “The Big World,” the HPAC’s video showcase “Shanghype!” and Columbia College’s multiple “Focus China” shows depicted a country where development hasn’t yet slowed, and buildings, bridges, highways and other architecture and infrastructure projects are overwhelming everything in their wake. The year’s other recurring theme was health care, which inspired “Elephants in Small Places” at the Green Lantern, institutional exhibitions including I Space’s “Every Body!: Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969–2009” and “Redefining the Medical Artist” at the International Museum of Surgical Science, and artist Anders Nilsen’s “46 Million” auction, which raised more than $7,000 for organizations promoting a public health-insurance option.
Nilsen organized the auction through eBay, an example of the Internet helping the small-scale survive along with bigger fish. In 2009, we saw pretty much every apartment gallery jump on Facebook; artists, critics and museums embraced Twitter; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art launched ArtBabble.org, a fun compilation of videos from the Art Institute and several other institutions.
Of course, the Internet also creates a feedback loop for our anxieties. Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich has become the go-to artist for anyone illustrating the aughties’ burst bubble. Several months after images of abandoned retail spaces from his series “Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls” appeared in a March issue of Time, they continue popping up on our computer screen. We love Ulrich’s work—we featured it in TOC’s 2009 Photo Issue—but we hope a more cheerful piece comes to represent 2010.
