Down Comes the Oak
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The grant, delayed because of the state’s budget crisis, wasn’t the only thing, but it was the final thing, Wilcoxon says. “We expected it last fall, and at first they said it’ll only be 30 days late.” When January rolled around and the money hadn’t arrived, the River Oak board laid off its only full-time employee, executive director and chief bottle washer Cynthia Todd Quam; when the grant still hadn’t come in March, they gave up the office in downtown Oak Park. “It forced us to look at what we were doing,” Wilcoxon says. Cash reserves had been drained, memberships had dropped from a high of 300 to about 200; some readings were drawing as few as a half dozen people. About a third of the 16 workshops offered the previous fall had failed to attract an eight-student minimum and were canceled. Wilcoxon says the only thing growing was the number of submissions to the journal (over 200 a month, from writers all over the country)–and the Review doesn’t generate income. After a decade of robust growth, River Oak Arts looked sick.
In the early days, it was a one-woman show. In late 1992, Oak Park resident Etta L. Worthington took a New Year’s inventory of her life as a single mother, decided she’d “neglected the writer part of me,” and determined to rectify that by starting a writers’ group and a literary magazine. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she’d come to Chicago to attend the Moody Bible Institute, then transferred to Columbia College, where she studied writing and filmmaking, and wound up working in medical and educational publishing, with an evangelical fervor for literature. She went to the Oak Park Arts Council for funding, wrote letters to “150 of my closest friends,” and, in March ’93, started her writers’ group in space donated by the Oak Park Public Library.
“It’s hard to envision a scenario that wouldn’t put us in a difficult situation very quickly again,” Wilcoxon says. “We’re trying to be fiscally responsible. I think it’s a telling sign of the times when the Donors Forum”–the Chicago grant-makers’ organization–“is distributing a handout on how to shut down a nonprofit.”
Open on a first-come basis to any Chicago-area artist who meets the minimal requirements (a recent juried show, slides that demonstrate consistent work), the CAC show allows each exhibitor to select his or her own work, returning the $25-$60 entry fee to anyone squeezed out. Mammoth from the beginning, it’ll include 340 artists this year–and for the first time Mocek, now a Concordia University professor, won’t be in charge. “It was a nine-month job every year,” she says. “This time I’m just there as an exhibitor.” She’ll also receive a special achievement award at the benefit preview that starts at 7 this Saturday, October 11, at the School of the Art Institute gallery at 847 W. Jackson. The benefit’s $30 a head; the show runs through October 19.
