A New Animal
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The area was already undergoing a contentious transformation, with artists leading the first wave of newcomers looking for large spaces, low rent, and fast transportation to downtown. Happy-Delpech’s Around the Coyote festival proved to be a huge, double-edged success that expedited the gentrification. The artists showcased their work and the neighborhood at the same time, reportedly attracting as many as 150,000 visitors, some of them shopping for apartments. Rents soon rose to levels that squeezed the artists out. Happy-Delpech left town in ’95 (he died of AIDS in ’99); the next year Around the Coyote, which he had run with an all-volunteer staff, peaked and began to founder. Stefan, who started as an assistant in ’98 and took over as director in ’99 (volunteering most of her time), was rewarded this year with a full-time salary–but she’s had to recast the organization to keep it alive. Around the Coyote is now in the business of bringing art and art education to a community that has plenty of trendy restaurants, bars, and boutiques, but relatively few artists and galleries.
Under Stefan, ATC is reaching beyond the neighborhood. It now describes itself as a “multi-media citywide arts organization.” Only one of its seven board members is an artist (and that artist, Mike Cramer, is also a lawyer); the rest are businesspeople and administrators from other nonprofits. Stefan began an outreach program last year that has ATC collaborating with area schools and offering free Park District workshops. In addition to holding the regular September festival, she launched a Winter Arts Festival and a spring event (“Spring Thing”) that put wire sculptures in nine locations throughout the city. ATC now curates four shows a year in its Flat Iron Building gallery, ATC Space, and rents the gallery ($500 for two weeks) the rest of the time. A new membership option ($25 annually) allows artists to exhibit one piece of work on ATC’s Web site, and an artist-in-residence award brings an artist to the gallery during the fall festival. This year’s winner, announced this week, is Chicago installation artist Patrick Hugh LaVergne. The wire sculptures, collected after six weeks at their scattered locations, will be sold at a silent auction tonight, June 22, at ATC Space. When Around the Coyote comes around this year, September 6 through 9, Stefan expects 200 artists to participate. She says that’s about the same number as last year.
A Neo-Futurist hit last winter, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is getting a three-weekend revival starting June 28, thanks to Portland-based StageDirect, Inc. StageDirect will videotape the performances and edit them for future sale at an anticipated $15 to $20 a pop. Jokes author and Neo-Futurist artistic director Greg Allen says his group will get 5 percent and a “nice commission for filming.” Former Chicagoans Gary Cole and Jeff Meyers have pegged Jokes as one of a half-dozen off-Broadway or fringe theater productions that will be the initial offerings of their startup company. The videos will be sold from StageDirect’s Web site, to be launched this fall. “There’s tremendous material produced all over the country and abroad–it’s up for a few weeks or months for a limited audience and then it disappears,” Cole says. “We believe it deserves a wider audience.” Cole (not the actor), a New Trier East and Stanford law school graduate who once worked for the CIA, is giving up a law practice to run StageDirect and a nonprofit theater, CoHo Productions. “It’s not that I didn’t like the law,” Cole says, “but I wasn’t passionate about it.” Now that he’s following his destiny, besides Jokes, he’ll be bringing Mass Murder, The Haint, and Poona the Fuckdog to the world.
