Kate Zambreno

"Coffee?" Jonathan Rhodes offers, playing the role of hospitable host in the new headquarters for his arts organization. The coffee is served thick and in a glass ("Coffee cups are on my list," notes Shannon Stratton, one of the program directors, as she hurries about the office.)

Last minute changes are being made in the tiny West Loop loft for the following evening's inaugural event for ThreeWalls, a nonprofit artist's residency and exhibition space, the latest to move into the 119 North Peoria building, which is becoming a "factory" for these sorts of start-ups. The art is almost all hung. The first ever artist-in-residence arrived the night before from Winnipeg, Daniel Barrow, who makes live comic-book drawings complete with live monologue. Rhodes helps Barrow move a table to rest the overhead project on for tomorrow's performance. They discuss technicalities and proper angles. But they're not harried; all professionalism and efficiency. You can almost hear the hum. Everything, though, seems thrust into reality with the arrival of Barrow. "We have big dreams. Big dreams. Which don't seem as big anymore. They seem more viable," Stratton observes.

Once kids running galleries out of their apartments or sketching out business plans in bars, Rhodes and his peers are, with their move to the West Loop, entering the professional realm, striving for legitimacy and long-term viability while still maintaining their youthful ideals. "It's really crazy up there, the building's just nuts in general," says Rhodes, a spry 24-year-old wearing red Chucks and a black skull cap as he finds an available chair and sits down to talk. Eventually Marc LeBlanc, who runs the 1R Gallery upstairs, joins in on the conversation. Currently the 119 North Peoria building houses three galleries, including the Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery, once the new kid on the block but now the seasoned player, ThreeWalls, Bridge magazine, and New Catalog, a conceptual stock photo company. "This building in a lot of ways shows the community falling over to a younger and more kind of cutting-edge art being shown," says LeBlanc, a shaggy-haired 22-year-old who just graduated from the School of the Art Institute. He adds that he wishes more art spaces filled the available units. "There seems to be a lull in entrepreneurship right now. Other than Jonathan," he laughs.

Last summer Rhodes was still enrolled in a master's program in art history at UIC while interning at the Museum of Contemporary Art when he began approaching people at gallery openings about this new project he had, an artist-in-residency program that would also serve as an entry point for the public. He approached Stratton and Jeff Ward, one of the individuals behind The Pond gallery in Wicker Park, who eventually came on full-time as directors of programming. He also approached Le Blanc and Van Harrison of 1R, who became involved in the initial concept and programming, and used their connections to put together a silent auction in the summer that served as starter capital for the organization.

"I was kind of learning what was going on in the city with all the young galleries and alternative spaces, trying to learn more. And I really felt that something was missing, and felt that I could help to create something else in this city," he says. Currently ThreeWalls has a staff of eight, all unpaid. Although ThreeWalls is now a "labor of love" for all involved, one of his goals is to provide full and part-time jobs for artists. It's the dream for many in the building that people will stop making the storied exodus to New York. "Chicago has the best art school in the country," says Rhodes. "So we have all kinds of artists and educators, art students as well as visiting artists coming through the city. Why is everyone finishing school and then moving out to New York? Because there's work there, apparently. So how do we get these people to stay in Chicago, and become invested in this city that they began to do their work in, rather than use it as a jumping-off point?"

The next evening's exhibit at ThreeWalls is a meditation on gothic themes curated by the Chicago-based Middlemanagement, which consists of Stratton and Duncan MacKenzie, a fellow artist she met while receiving her MFA at the School of the Art Institute. She and MacKenzie both hail from Calgary, Alberta, and the show features a healthy dose of Canadian artists, including Barrow. "I think every city has its aesthetic, so I think we're bringing in something different," says Stratton of the residency program. "I don't know anybody who makes work like Daniel's." The first two artists-in-residence will be Canadian, and the third comes from Australia. The residency program will allow Barrow to create work in the nearby room until the end of February, where he'll then have another show. "We're very much anti-retreat residencies. We're trying to be really engaged," says Rhodes. "One of the initial ideas with what the program should be is we can situate it in a central locale, right in the gallery district, and have artists that come in be in that community, be in that dialogue, and see what we do here," adds LeBlanc.

One of the benefits of moving into this hub for Rhodes is that ThreeWalls immediately tapped into a ready-made community always willing to sit around and brainstorm ideas and pool resources like equipment and mailing lists. "There are quite a lot of late-night and early-morning and lunchtime impromptu discussions," says Rhodes. "We're not in direct competition with each other so we're all happy to share ideas. It sort of works in all of our interests for all of our ideas to grow."

"The building's becoming a think tank in itself for art practice and cultural production," says LeBlanc. Just a floor up on the thin brown carpeted stairs of the white-walled industrial building sits the offices of Bridge magazine, the first of this new wave of entrepreneurs to move into the West Loop space, a year and a half ago. Soon after they partnered up with 1R, which was originally run out of Harrison's apartment in Pilsen. "Without Bridge we wouldn't have had the opportunity to move into the neighborhood," says LeBlanc. "In a lot of ways Bridge moving into their offices a year and a half ago was a starting point for a lot of this movement." The Bridge unit has become even more crowded. Andrew Rafacz just moved his Bucket Rider Gallery, which he ran out of his Pilsen home, into the former living quarters of married couple publisher Michael Workman and art director Marie Walz.

Workman, who's also Newcity's art columnist, calls the 119 North Peoria building an "experiment in action." Many of the organizations share a young ethos. "None of us are doing art as a sideline. We're doing art as a purpose," he says. He notes that Rhodes' residency program takes an institutional initiative and removes the institution. "How can we do this without being someone's pet project?" Workman explains this common mission. "We want independence, and we want artistic choices we value."

In a way, says Walz, 119 North Peoria is the "starter building," due to its lower rent and the convenience of the "live/work spaces." Kavi Gupta of Vedanta Gallery started in the space now occupied by Bridge, 1R and Bucket Rider, which also played home to NFA Space. After he bought the building across the street, Gupta encouraged Bridge and the other galleries to move across the street from his new space. What's known as the "younger building" will soon be more populated by galleries. Wendy Cooper of the Wendy Cooper Gallery, the "it" place to show contemporary art in Madison, confirms speculation that she will move into the building in either April or May. Many of the newer groups involved think of this time as a certain moment in Chicago's art scene, the building a symbol of a rebirth. "I feel like this building is really important. And our project is history-making," says Rhodes.

There are obvious advantages in moving from Pilsen to the West Loop, the current center for contemporary art in Chicago. It's where the collectors go and all the crowds convene for openings. A young gallery is automatically taken more seriously. "Being in this neighborhood gives it a certain prestige factor," says Workman. But business starts entering art, too. Tony Wight started Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery in 1997 out of a former sporting-goods store on Division Street in Wicker Park. "The goal was to give opportunities for artists, mostly friends, who weren't being shown in the city," says Wight. He showed artists he had gone to school with at SAIC and didn't worry too much about selling the work. Until he moved into the West Loop and he had to worry about making rent.

It's not new for alternative spaces to decide to go commercial and focus on selling art. "I think you either die out or you get more professional and try to make it in New York or make it in the West Loop, which is a new thing," says Walz. Workman notes that many of the Pilsen alternative spaces that were on Bridge magazine's Artboat, a travelling exhibit on one of the Navy Pier cruise ships during Art Chicago, have now closed. Currently ThreeWalls relies on private donations, but in a year it can qualify for nonprofit status and begin approaching larger corporations for grants. "We were just talking of getting a company car. Or at least a company bicycle," jokes LeBlanc. Long-term sustainability is the goal, Workman and Walz explain. In June Bridge magazine is going bimonthly as well as changing its size and shape, making it cheaper to print and easier to distribute. "We're trying to become more professional by changing format to something that can be carried on a newsstand," says Walz. "I think what we're trying to do here is take a really serious professional approach, because we feel like we have the skills to work on the same level as the MCA, just doing smaller projects," Rhodes says. "If you take the relaxed approach I don't feel like the artists or the people working on the project get the sort of recognition they deserve."

At some point LeBlanc says that with their 1R Gallery, he and Harrison needed to make the decision whether they wanted to make a career out of it, or were just showing work and having their friends over. "The first year we ran the gallery, we were drinking beer, and we were having a good time, and the idea of selling work was on the backburner, it wasn't a huge issue," he says. "But then we had the opportunity to move into the West Loop, we said, okay listen, we're either going to run a gallery, or we're going to fold in this situation because now we have bills to pay."

Bridge assisted Rhodes, as well as ThreeWalls, in forming their business plan, which they learned themselves after running a small bookstore. "We constantly give Jonathan business advice," says Workman. "1R didn't have books before they moved in here. Jonathan didn't either. Jonathan had an inflated budget that was totally unrealistic. Working with these guys, and working with us, he's constantly tried to perfect that and get a real sense of how to do this stuff."

The main difference between the galleries and organizations moving into the 119 North Peoria building and alternative spaces is a "fiscal responsibility," says Workman. "These organizations are much more about making a living," he says. Walz places the West Loop rebirth in the context of the Wicker Park gallery district of the early nineties, what's referred to as the Uncomfortable Spaces, the descendants of the current alternative spaces run out of people's homes in Pilsen and elsewhere. "They were interested in more of an anti-capitalist thing that didn't want to be a part of the art market," she says. "A lot of the uncomfortable spaces were about being uncomfortable. They didn't want to be River North spaces. They didn't want to be slick, they didn't want to have regular hours." These new spaces are about balancing business and art. "It's very Warhollian," says Workman. "Business is the most interesting art," he says, paraphrasing Warhol's famous quote. "I think there's something to that."

(2004-01-20)

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