Michael Workman

If art is a word owned by the visual arts more than music, cinema and other media, then few institutions have a stronger hold on Chicago's version of it than the Hyde Park Art Center. Second in historical importance for Chicago artists only to the Art Institute and its collection of Impressionists canvases and stories of a student Georgia O'Keefe, the Hyde Park Art Center was the birthplace of the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, a moment in history that to this day defines what people think of when they talk about this city's art. It's this legacy that, come April, will find its first-ever permanent home in the two-story stone masonry building formerly used by the University of Chicago Press at 5020 South Cornell Avenue, mere blocks from the HPAC's current location in the Del Prado Hotel. It's been reconfigured for the HPAC by celebrated architect Doug Garofalo of Garofalo Architects (an information page on the project is available online at www.garofalo.a-node.net), for whom the design was a significant challenge, given the surrounding neighborhood's wide-ranging mixed-use. "There's a lot of specific things that Doug has designed into the building," says executive director Chuck Thurow. "The most obvious thing is the whole façade, the venue on which artists will be creating, and which immediately puts the Art Center and the surrounding neighborhood face-to-face. Hopefully we won't be in their faces, but that'll really be an interaction with the community. That eighty-foot long, ten-foot-high projection screen with literally seven million pixels is gigantic--you really expect that to be in someplace like Millennium Park or the Art Institute, here it's in a residential neighborhood and that's an interesting dialogue to have." That kind of dialogue, of course, is what the HPAC's always been about and the eagerness to get on with it is palpable amongst the staff and the artists who have always been the Art Center's biggest boosters. For the moment, however, the new building's still only a gutted shell awaiting its final build-out, while at the Del Prado Hotel, there's one last hurrah yet to attend.

Opening night of the Hyde Park Art Center's last-ever exhibition in the building it has called home for twenty-five years, since its relocation here in 1980, it's eerily quiet walking up the huge marble stairs inside the rotating door at 5307 South Hyde Park Boulevard, past the receptionist's desk situated in front of the empty glassed-in barbershop. It's almost reverential, a distended moment, a place in memory almost gone forever. Almost. But not quite yet.

Down the hall, it's a lively night at the member's reception of "For Real," with artists and curators, board members and members of the press circling the ballroom that houses the HPAC exhibition space. Two of its most enthusiastic backers, Michael and Sandra Perlow, make their way through the crowd, asking artists about their work, discussing the new building with board members. It's no question why they're excited: one glance at the chipped, peeling paint, crumbling cornices and lumpy patched drywall are enough. It's a nightmare when someone upstairs flushes the toilet or drains their tub, sending down a spout of water in dripping rivulets through excavations in the ceiling. And yet, somehow, such imperfections are a part of the soul of the HPAC, an institution made to elevate the underdog and garner exposure for the underappreciated. Unlike the city's other major museums, the HPAC has taken the greatest interest in the careers of local working artists. It's not in the Museum of Contemporary Art's charter and the Art Institute in recent years has been addicted to such blockbusters as the Disneyesque Toulouse-Lautrec show. Originally founded as the Fifth Ward Art Guild in 1939, according to the Chicago Encyclopedia, The HPAC garnered support for its artistic community-service mission from the likes of such luminaries as "Senator Paul Douglas, author Helen Gardner, and University of Chicago art historian Ulrich Middeldorf." HPAC seems to operate like a kind of time capsule, still clinging to the concerns of that bygone era in Chicago philanthropy, a time that produced the Adler Planetarium and the Chicago Bauhaus, a time when many of the city's greatest institutions were formed.

HPAC's support of working artists in particular is a mission that the Center has pursued for a full quarter of a century now in this shabby hotel ballroom, hidden from the attention of even most Hyde Park neighborhood residents, without any evidence of concern for the coffer-lining new membership money of blockbusters. Many residents are still unaware that it even exists. But it's clear from the attendance at the public reception on Sunday that the artists know and appreciate its value. Dawoud Bey, Dan Peterman and a few other of Chicago's big-time artists stroll the aisles, shaking hands, remembering aloud their first show here. Many recall the influence of Ruth Horwich, a collector whose support for the Center knows no bounds, and its flamboyant former director, Don Baum. Visitors also reminisce about the Chinese restaurant they used to eat at on the building's roof, or the 24-hour diner that once served as a late-night student hangout. It's not hard to imagine an opening like this decades ago when the Hairy Who made their first appearance on the scene. A founding member of the Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt recalls that a visit to the HPAC at its previous location at 5236 South Blackstone, where Hairy Who I and II went up, was "like traveling through an exotic land." Nutt first remembers hearing about the center sometime in the years 1962-63, and soon after meeting then-director Baum through an artist friend.

"I was framing something for somebody who was going to be in a show and the artist Whitney Halstead suggested that when he came by to pick it up, we have him take a look at the work. He included us in a show and not long after that he invited us to teach kids at Saturday school. It was a few years later that we went to him with the idea that eventually became the Hairy Who. This was I think sometime in 1964." Nutt recalls how in the mid-sixties, it was hard to miss the HPAC since there simply weren't many places like it even in existence. "Hyde Park was literally the only alternative space in town, other than Contemporary Art Workshop, and they only did a few small shows. The Old Town Art Center was in existence at that time too, but that was about it. It wasn't until '69 or '70 that places like N.A.M.E. Gallery, Artemesia and these other alternative spaces started opening." Even then, Nutt largely attributes the success of the Hairy Who show to the artistic openness of the HPAC's infectiously energetic director who, he notes, had a tendency to throw the typical rules of museum curation out the window. "It was one of the few places in the city where younger artists were showing with older artists rather than having them segregated. Mostly that was Don, who didn't really care. If two things looked good together, he showed them that way. And the Center had a certain function that I wasn't aware of, holding classes and generally serving the needs of the immediate community. It had a community that was interested in what was going on and you'd go to the openings and it was very active. Again, too, Don had a lot of enthusiasm and he'd always make sure there was some godawful alcoholic concoction on hand--there was no alcoholic lewdness or anything like that--but it was a very well-lubricated good time."

Visitors to tonight's show are finding the bar no less fully stocked than it was forty years ago, and the art no less dynamic. The current show's divided into two parts. One half is a traditional wall-hung exhibit of mostly two-dimensional work, painting and photography situated in a "white cube" area made to recall the "Mao room" at the Art Institute--so-called because it housed Andy Warhol's portrait of the Communist leader that visitors could see looking down the hall through antiquities, since remade as the "Jasper Johns room." Past this are the offices of the HPAC staff and administration, relocated from their loft up the spiral staircase at the back of the room, every file folder, desk, computer and each little arty knick-knack lovingly restored to its proper place. A hand-written note from the artist Richard Holland hangs on the side of a filing cabinet thanking director of exhibitions Allison Peters for her help with his show (Holland's work involves attaching thousands of tiny bells to the ceiling that produce a chorus of song when activated by wind). A single tiny bell hangs from a ribbon threaded through the die-punched hole in the thank-you card's bottom right hand corner. Confronting personal items like this, just sitting there out in the open, do exactly what moving the office into the exhibition space was meant to: lay bare the process of arts administration, tear down a little the divisions between those who show art and those who make it. "I said, `let's theatricalize their transition to the new space,'" recalls Marie Krane Bergman, the painter at the center of Cream Co. (Chicago), the group that produced the HPAC's closing show. Based on a 2003 exhibit called "Really Real" at the now-defunct Gallery 312, the general idea was to produce an institutional intervention, with HPAC's previously concealed offices the target. "The administrators are always in the back and the administrative side is never involved in the aesthetic side, and opaque to the point of being pretentious, and I wanted to tear down the pretense of `well, you're an administrator so you're not an artist.' I wanted to break those categories down in the hopes of revealing how things really work and push it on towards the future." She clearly intends it as a commentary on the current state of our city's art institutions, and doesn't intend for the show to read as a commentary solely on the HPAC: "I wouldn't say that's inherent to the Hyde Park Art Center only," says Bergman. "I think it's art institutions, the whole Chicago art world."

If the gilded point made with "For Real" is that the HPAC faces a future of greater possible integration with the artistic community it was founded to serve, there's little doubt that the artistic community's excited to see it happen. Chicago artist Howard Fonda, who also has work in the show, thinks it's overdue. "HPAC as an institution in Chicago is unprecedented. There are certainly others that get more play, like the Ren [Renaissance Society], places like that. It's such a community-based place that does such a wide range of shows, yet remains an intellectual repository and a place that doesn't pander to its community or to the critical art world...it does its thing." That kind of street-level access to the art system at the institutional level is something artists are simply desperate for, an access that too often gets obscured elsewhere by the tunnel vision of academic trends or the pursuit of hot commodities in the art marketplace. It's a valuable, practically irreplaceable service the HPAC provides to remain focused on local artists, especially those struggling to emerge and, as with many artists before him, Fonda appreciates that it gave him his first boost. "I curated a show here with [curatorial collective] the Pond in 2004, which was an amazing deal for us and the first time we got to work with a real organization in a real space that had a real history and that was a huge deal for us in terms of a stepping stone and in terms of people taking our show seriously. Chuck [Thurow] came down, liked what we were doing and we were just lucky enough to get asked to do a show."

Thurow doesn't share Fonda's enthusiasm, at least insofar as it pertains to the Del Prado. "People were asking `aren't you going to be nostalgic about leaving this space?' and I was explaining that there were incredible problems with the building," he says, gesturing as he speaks to the waterfall that moments before started pouring from the ceiling. Thurow grimaces as an HPAC staffer places a trash can beneath the leak to catch the water now flowing. You can tell he can't wait to get into the new building, with its expansive 35,000 square feet, of which the HPAC has all but about 7,500, space that has been set aside for the University of Chicago to use as artist's studios. A big increase for HPAC compared to the Del Prado, where they have only a total of 6,700 square feet and only 1,700 of exhibition space. "That brings up something about the building," says architect Garofalo, "It's meant to be a very collaborative place. The Hyde Park Art Center has always been a fairly active community participant in addition to showing all this excellent avant-garde art. The site itself is what I'd call pretty hybrid. It's residential to the east and north and to the south is a gas station. Right there, the HPAC mixes three different uses, right in that little microcosm. Hence the facade, hence the idea that the whole front of the building opens out into the street. Not that it will be used every single show, but one can imagine it being connected to the sidewalk and creating a sort of happening, if you will. It was a fine line in our design. Inside the building too, the circulation from first floor to second and across behind the façade was designed to act as this interconnected loop. You can imagine a show that takes advantage of the façade and the movement through that. There's also varying degrees of enclosure, with the main gallery made to close down to protect all the work that'll be hanging inside, while other areas are organized so that they can be walked through all times of night."

It's difficult to imagine, hearing about all the bells and whistles going into the new building, how they ever managed to keep going all these years in the current one. "The other thing about the new space is that we'll be able to do things we can't possibly do in this one," enthuses Thurow. "In terms of quality of the rooms we'll use for our classes and the five to six different kinds of exhibition spaces. We can be much more generous, as opposed to this, where you have these grand openings once every six weeks and essentially you can do five shows a year. In the new space, we'll be able to have a lot of variety." Standing in the Del Prado Hotel ballroom, the move has the feel of a rags-to-riches story, as if the HPAC, after a quarter-century living in a hotel, is about to move into its own Taj Mahal. It's such a huge change, one wonders if something won't get lost in translation. But Thurow shrugs off any intimation that they're about to inherit the world. "We really want to be a place where people interact with other people, a creative center for the artistic community. It's not a refocus of the mission at all. It's interesting, the Art Center was founded in 1939 to break art out of the traditional institutions and expand the dialogue about art. It's kept that mission all these years and certainly the new building is another innovation of that same mission."

(2006-01-31)

Also by Michael Workman

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Fans of small art spaces will want to check out the current show at Lobby Gallery, its penultimate exhibition before director Matthew Robinson closes the doors for good
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Eye Exam
Pulling into a parking spot outside the Skestos Gabriele Gallery Friday night, I find myself comparing the nearby Lake Street nightclub throngs with the crowd in front of the gallery chatting into mobile phones and puffing on cigarettes
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