A third-floor window was wide open and hot air was blowing through the room last Sunday at the American Indian Center on Wilson. Chris Drew, executive director (and just about everything else) at the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, which makes its home in a warren of dilapidated rooms there, kept an ear cocked toward the window and the street below. The front door was locked, and Drew was listening for latecomers to his free screen-printing workshop for artists. A half hour after starting time only two–Nancy Nicandro and Victor Twu–had shown up. When a third, Justin Attakai, arrived with a portfolio of pristine ink-on-paper drawings, Drew trekked downstairs to let him in.
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Sixteen years after he founded it, Drew’s center is still a barely funded, hardscrabble organization. Its pitch piece for donors says it’s been “doing $75,000 worth of programming each year on less than $10,000 annual budget for too long.” But Drew hasn’t lost any of his zeal. He still believes that the UMCAC can become a self-sustaining community art agency, provide exposure and income for artists, and serve as a global force against racism–all by harnessing the power of the humble but ubiquitous T-shirt. All it’ll take, he says, is $225,000 of seed money.
Drew married in ’95, and since then he’s supplemented his UMCAC income ($1,950 last year) with part-time jobs. But for 20 years prior to that, he says, “I’m proud to say I often lived on less than $10,000 a year, sometimes less than $2,000.” When he appeared in the Reader’s Hot Type column in ’92 (in a story about a T-shirt exhibit controversy), he was homeless; between then and ’95 he bunked where he worked, at the American Indian Center. “He’s definitely an altruistic person,” says artist Monica Brown, who’s been involved with the UMCAC for about ten years. “I’ve made a lot of T-shirts up there.”
