Staying Alive - various artists, various galleries and museums, Chicago, Illinois

Art in America, April, 1999 by Susan Snodgrass

The continuous gentrification of River North, coupled with the district's increasingly conservative art offerings, has prompted some galleries to go elsewhere, although long-established spaces including Zolla/Lieberman, Carl Hammer and Roy Boyd still remain. Rhona Hoffman, an important force on the contemporary scene whose stable runs the gamut from blue-chip to adventurous and includes Leon Golub, Richard Tuttle, Sol LeWitt, Jenny Holzer, Peter Halley, Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey, moved to the up-and-coming West Loop in fall 1996. She joined Gallery 312, Tough and Klein Art Works, the last of which pioneered the area when it reopened there in 1990 after fire destroyed its River North gallery. Although nothing has been officially stated, Thomas Blackman, producer of Art Chicago, is working with a handful of dealers to establish a new art corridor outside of River North, which, he says, "could implode within the next two years." According to Blackman, the collective goal is to purchase a building, then work with a developer to ensure the long-term stability and growth of an area so necessary for the art community's survival.

With or without a building, a new crop of commercial galleries is beginning to sprout outside the environs of River North. Returning to Chicago after seven years in Seattle, Donald Young has recently reestablished his gallery in the West Loop; it will open in time for this May's art fair with a show of new work by Bruce Nauman. Nearby is Vedanta Gallery, which recently purchased another building in the same area. While retaining its original space, Vedanta will expand to its new quarters in September '99, and will offer rentals to Jan Cicero and Fassbender, who will relocate from River North in the fall. After a recent merger with RX, the Chicago Project Room (or CPR), has taken root in Wicker Park. Bona fide opened this October in the Ukrainian Village section of town, luring new audiences by offering, as the press releases state, "free coffee daily to all clergy and police officers."

CPR and bona fide follow the example of the galleries known as the Uncomfortable Spaces, which originally included Ten-in-One, Beret International, Tough and MWMWM. This self-proclaimed group of director-owned galleries was organized in 1991 to provide an alternative to River North, and as a way of sharing resources while drawing viewers to their less-than-comfortable exhibition sites, scattered outside the city's main centers. Of the original group, Beret and Ten-in-One have relocated to Wicker Park and are the only two that remain. Tough shut its doors in February 1999; MWMWM closed up shop in 1996 and last fall reopened in Brooklyn. Ten-in-One director Joel Leib, discouraged by the lack of collectors supportive of local artists, is seriously considering moving his gallery to New York by fall '99.

Today, each gallery functions independently and has established its own identity. Ten-in-One is dedicated primarily to painting, while Beret's mission remains less defined. Tough focused on sculpture and installation. An exceptionally engaging solo show lately was Frances Whitehead's installation at Tough. For antechamber, as both the show and the work were titled, remnants of sculptures created by the artist over the last 15 years were stacked like relics in the gallery's brick vault. A Hydrocal cast of the vault's entrance became the doorway to Tough's main exhibition space, which was empty except for a light projection whose perimeter replicated the dimensions of the cryptlike chamber. Here, the dualities of absence and presence, temporality and permanence spoke metaphorically to the changing relationship of artists to their galleries and their work, and perhaps unintentionally to the shifting exigencies of Chicago's cultural infrastructure.