ISOBEL NEAL (CENTER) WITH DAUGHTER-IN-LAW JEANETTE SUBLETT AND SON LANGDON NEAL, PICTURED AT THE FAMILY’S LAW OFFICE OF NEAL AND LEROY IN FRONT OF A PAINTING BY ROBERT DILWORTH
STEWARDS FOR GENERATIONS THE NEAL FAMILY’S INFLUENTIAL SUPPORT FOR BLACK ARTISTS By GINNY VAN ALYEA Isobel Neal was looking for something to do. By the 1980s she had been a retired teacher for more 10 years, and when Neal told her friend Ann Nathan that she wanted to open a gallery, Nathan said, “You must be crazy.” Neal responded, “Well, I guess so.” Nathan would know, as she had opened her own gallery in River North a few years prior. Neal wasn’t afraid of crazy, having managed a classroom of 60 fourth graders during her years as an inner-city public school teacher at Beethoven School on 47th street. In fact, it was art that helped her manage the daily chaos, wielding it as an incentive to work. She recalls, “At Beethoven if you had any difficulties behaving, you lost your chair. Nobody wanted to stand all day, so art worked as the treat and a motivator. They wanted to get their work done so they could have some fun.”
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At home she employed art in the same way with her young son Langdon, who still remembers working on potato prints and string paintings he was proud to put up on the wall. Neal’s impulse to open a gallery was no vanity project. She had years of experience as an educator, and she had gradually found herself with a new lesson to teach, having realized that no one in Chicago was representing the scores of Black artists whose work she was seeing. She knew she wanted to do something about it. * Prior to living in Chicago, Neal lived in New York City, where she attended NYU. When she took an interest test upon graduation, she was still surprised that her top result was art. “I laughed,” she recalls. “I said, “Art? What am I going to do with that? At the time [women] were either going to be teachers, social workers or nurses. Those were the options. So, I never thought about art for years, except that I liked it.” Neal taught in Chicago for two decades. When she retired, she wanted to pursue other interests fully. At her husband’s
