Downsized
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The Kostiners, who met when Anne took Lewis’s photography class at Columbia College, have been buying old warehouse buildings in the West Loop and turning them into apartments since the 1980s. They bought the building at 312 N. May in the early 90s. It had been vacant for 15 years and had a cavernous boiler room in the basement that they decided to turn into a gallery. After a hard-scrabble Taylor Street childhood Anne Kostiner was doing well financially and wanted to do something to help needy kids. For the gallery’s first few years, while she was its director, the proceeds from sales of work by established artists like Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Richard Nickel were donated to causes such as Children’s Memorial Hospital and Christopher House. In ’96 the Kostiners founded the PEACH Club, an arts program for at-risk kids. The PEACH Club and Gallery 312 became sister organizations, operating as a single nonprofit entity.
Brenner says he and the Kostiners, who’d sold the rest of the building in 2000, agreed that it was time to downsize. A search is on for a 2,000-square-foot space in the same area, to be run by part-time and volunteer staff. Out of the rent-free nest, and cut loose from the PEACH Club, 312 will have to get its own nonprofit designation and board of directors and learn to do some serious fund-raising. “That’ll be a challenge,” Brenner says. “Our supporters are younger and midcareer artists; they give $10, not $1,000.” A moving sale will be held at the gallery October 23 and 24, and a ten-year anniversary and farewell-to-the-space Halloween bash is set for October 30.
Newspapers have been shrinking, and column inches for the arts dropped proportionately, with the bulk of cuts coming from movie and television coverage. At most papers, a larger percentage of stories were written by freelancers or syndicated authors than in the previous study. While arts and sports are both seen as “growth industries,” only sports was able to command an increase in space, because, in the words of Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Douglas Clifton, who was interviewed for the study, readers will “either buy or not buy a newspaper based on their satisfaction with sports coverage.” And expanded arts listings reflect a change in the way newspapers view their role–less as filtering agents and tastemakers, and more as providers of information. Critics are more likely to be called upon to double as arts news reporters.
