"Tea" swagger

“We must be crazy for wanting to start an [art] organization now,” Lauren Pacheco says. But in the same breath, the executive director of the new Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) acknowledges that the current financial climate has its advantages. It allowed CUAS to sign an unusually favorable two-year lease on 4,200 square feet at 2229 South Halsted Street, a former clothing and manufacturing building in Pilsen. The first-floor space (pictured) will house exhibitions, artists’ residencies, art classes and workshops.

Pacheco and her brother Peter Kepha, who cofounded CUAS as a nonprofit, seek to present affordable and accessible work with a distinctly urban flavor. They tapped street artist Ray Noland for CUAS’s first exhibition, “Sweet Tea & American Values.” The School of the Art Institute of Chicago grad, who used to share a studio with Kepha, now splits his time between Chicago and Asheville, North Carolina. Noland’s best known for GoTellMama!, the poster, street-art and video blitz that promoted Barack Obama’s presidential campaign from 2006–08. Last year, his witty stencils of Rod Blagojevich blanketed alleys and underpasses across the city after the former governor’s arrest.

Fortunately for Noland, local politics keeps providing new material. Blagojevich’s statement “I’m blacker than Barack Obama” led to a stencil of Blago shining shoes (pictured). Mayor Richard M. Daley’s anti-gun rant, “This is America. Americans kill each other” inspired a portrait of Daley in riot gear. The elevation of barbed sociopolitical critique over the earlier Blago stencils’ distancing humor represents a significant shift in Noland’s practice. The artist confronts violence, race, homosexuality and seemingly nearly every other charged issue in America.

Instead of showing his art illegally in the streets, where it inherently expressed dissent against city and state government, Noland says he wants to create “the look of a Chicago urban streetscape inside the gallery.” He salvaged gutters, awnings and doors from the neighborhood to provide backdrops for the 25 new works in the show, which include T-shirts, posters and large-scale canvases ranging in price from $25–$5,000. The artist and CUAS will share the profits from sales.

Pacheco and Kepha plan to host five or six exhibitions each year. They curated numerous shows as the cofounders of Bridgeport gallery 32nd&Urban, which closed in 2008 after the two other founding partners left for graduate school. The brother and sister have envisioned a new space ever since, picturing an initiative with a more sustainable mission—and more room. While 32nd&Urban could legally hold only 75 people, opening parties tended to attract 300 to 400, who spilled onto the sidewalk still holding their beers.

CUAS needs 32nd&Urban’s built-in audience to deliver on its ambitions, given that its skeleton staff must oversee basic operations, marketing and fund-raising efforts while holding down day jobs. Yet they’re not alone. The CUAS board includes a community organizer, a financial consultant and a former assistant to Mayor Daley. Pacheco and Kepha have also received help from Ald. Danny Solis; the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs’ Chicago Artists Resource program; and John Podmajersky III, whose family developed the Chicago Arts District. (Though former tenants and Pilsen residents have questioned the Podmajerskys’ commitment to artists in TOC and the Chicago Reader, Pacheco credits John Podmajersky III with donating space for a February CUAS benefit that raised $10,000.)

The org’s fund-raising strategies include $20 annual memberships, which offer access to event previews, lower workshop fees and discounts at local vendors such as Blue City Cycles, Quimby’s and Noble Tree Coffee and Tea. Despite the number of Pilsen storefronts claimed by the recession, Noland’s optimistic about CUAS’s prospects: “I expect nothing less than success.”

“Sweet Tea & American Values” opens at the Chicago Urban Art Society Friday 11, 6–11pm.

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