Art and Community: Rocco Landesman Comes to Town

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community. I was fortunate enough to be present at one of those gatherings, a Saturday morning breakfast conversation called the Director's Vision Think Tank at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was hosted by MCA's Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn, and included various MCA board members, committee members and staff as well as artists and others from Chicago's art community. As artist Kerry James Marshall pointed out, it wasn't nearly as diverse as it might have been, but I don't think it was intended to be, given the number of other site visits Landesman had planned for his week long Chicago tour. Hopefully those were even more diverse than the MCA gathering, which seemed designed to address how that particular institution might begin to wrap a programmatic structure around the idea of creating a more dialogical relationship with the community as it relates to its own future conceptual growth, and to explore that issue with a group of its supporters. Landesman's announcement of the Endowment's new initiative Art Works would seem to provide a possible economic incentive for institutions to begin to more aggressively think through the possible reconfiguration of the various component parts of the art community and create an expanded and mutually beneficial paradigm and relationship. The Endowment admits that it is indeed following the example of the kind of work that has in fact been going on in communities across the country for some time.

The MCA conversation seemed designed to begin to grapple with the question of how a mainstream institutions can become engaged in these inclusive issues that community art centers and institutions have long been engaged in. One has a reputation for being as exclusive and elitist as the other has for being an essential part of their communities. Hyde Park Art Center, for example (where I am both on the board and the chair of the Exhibitions Committee) has a strong and explicit mandate to be both of service and accessible to its immediate community, even as HPAC seeks to bring art to that community in ways that are are unique. While the specific purpose of the gathering at MCA seemed a bit diffused--was it intended to extend beyond the institutional walls of MCA into the larger art institutional community or not?--it provided an opportunity for an urgent and ongoing conversation that quickly moves towards concrete programming. I would suggest follow up conversations take place periodically and soon, the better to keep the irons from cooling around this issue. I would certainly hope that these conversations would include those board and staff members whose deep and enthusiastic ideas and support are essential to the implementation of what could easily become yet another very interesting but rhetorical conversation.

A Neighborhood Spot

Speaking of community, I recently stopped in for lunch at Brett's Kitchen, a none to fancy luncheonette located in Chicago's River North. The place has the feel of a neighborhood spot that has been in its place forever, serving generations of area workers at breakfast and lunchtime (no dinner service). Indeed I have been having lunch at this place long before I ever moved to Chicago some twelve years ago. It's in one of Chicago's original gallery districts, so my son and I would often stop in and get our usual lunch when we were in town visiting my brother and his family. My son loved the place for its grilled cheese sandwich, and invariably ordered it with a side of fries washed down with a bottle of lemonade. I've been getting the exact same thing there for some fifteen years: a tabouli and Pyrenees cheese sandwich on multigrain bread with lettuce, avocado and tomato, washed down with an Arizona Green Tea, with the occasional home style oatmeal raisin cookie on the side. I'm sure they make other things there, but don't ask me; I honestly wouldn't know. I've never felt the need to order anything else. When I stop in now one of the owners, Lourdes, always asks about my son when she sees me, since he hasn't been there in quite awhile. She wants to know how big he is, what he's doing. Inevitably she is amazed when I tell her he's now six feet three and in college, since he couldn't even see over the counter when we first started frequenting the place, and I had to hold him up so he could place his order. I'll have to take him by for lunch soon. He may have outgrown the grilled cheese sandwich, but I don't think you ever outgrow those places where people still maintain a connection to each other. It's a reassuring feeling that gets harder to find each day with the rapid pace of change. The corner store in Hyde Park, where I used to get my daily paper and other occasional sundries is now closed and the windows forlornly papered over, awaiting a higher paying tenant once the building is upgraded, but Brett's Kitchen--thankfully--is still there in River North, tucked underneath the tracks of the Brown line "L," doing what good neighborhood establishments have always done.

Rocco Landesman photograph © Damon Winters/New York Times