LIT
From Bohemia to The Black Arts Movement Two recent books make clear how the fate of the cultural cutting edge in Chicago has depended on urban space ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN
BY BENJAMIN GINZKY
I
institutions. The struggle of those socially and politically engaged Black artists poses still-relevant questions about cultural production against the grain in a segregated, post-industrial metropolis.
n 1967, when Black Power activists occupied part of Washington Park and renamed it “Malcolm X Shabbazz Park,” artists from the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) were in attendance. They were there not just as fellow activists or to simply lend their techniques to a propaganda stunt. In her book Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975, art historian Rebecca Zorach says they were “claiming space.” The occupation resulted in clashes and arrests, and it was an instructive experience for the OBAC members, who in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (BAM) and beyond consciously deployed their artistic practices for social transformation on a terrain of contested public space. Zorach’s is one of two relatively recent works that make clear how the fate of the cultural cutting edge has depended on such configurations and refigurations of Chicago’s urban space. Keith M. Stolte’s Chicago Artist Colonies surveys the dedicated spaces for artists and freethinkers that popped up from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. This historical background provides an interesting context to Zorach’s story, which largely depicts alternative spaces after the decline of this bohemia. Reading the two together shows how twentieth-century Chicago worked as a home for groundbreaking art. The growth of artist colonies reflects the initial interactions of commerce and creativity, of elites and avant-gardes, that built Chicago’s institutional fine art scene. The history of the Black Arts Movement, like the earlier bohemia, is one of artists, in tandem with radical socio-political developments, claiming space and building their own
Chicago’s Bohemia
S
tolte maps the emergence of numerous small-scale artist colonies in the 1890s, in the penumbra of the elite cultural stomping grounds where artists sought patronage. Later, commercial ambition spurred the assembly of artists in spaces like Tree Studios and the Fine Arts Building, which took on the character of “colonies” as a critical mass of artists participated in salons and club activities. The Fine Arts Building originally served an established “triumvirate” of turnof-the-century Chicago artists (painters Oliver Dennett Grover and Ralph Elmer Clarkson and sculptor Lorado Taft), but subsequently incubated artists and literati who pushed beyond academic painting and society patronage. Harriet Monroe published the journal Poetry from inside the Fine Arts Building beginning in 1912, breaking ground by publishing Carl Sandburg. Fellow tenant Margaret Anderson published defining works of twentieth-century literature, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, in The Little Review. Beyond these elite studio spaces, turnof-the-century Chicago hosted a wider bohemia characterized by radicalism and independence. Old society mansions were converted into rooming houses in the area around the old pre-fire Water Tower— now the site of flagship luxury retail establishments on “The Magnificent Mile.”
During World War I, a subculture of autodidactic hobos and revolutionaries emerged in “Towertown,” which Stolte describes as “an oasis of racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual diversity.” The Dil Pickle Club there— founded by “hobohemian” and former mine worker Jack Jones as a forum for syndicalist speeches—became defined by welcoming anyone who was “a nut about anything.” Sandburg became a regular, and one could catch one-act plays by Theodore Dreiser and Edna Ferber. This cross-pollination, the heady buzz of a happening “scene,” is more than incidental. Stolte singles out the phenomenon as the essence of the artist colony or bohemian district. Further, he argues that the haunts of today’s young “creatives” “lack the fraternal intimacy or collaborative interaction” that characterized the earlier colonies. He’s not the only one: analyses like Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals point to structural changes in the American city and society to explain what Jacoby saw as the intellectual underachievement of his Baby Boom generation. Jacoby marks the decline
starting with the loss of the cheap rents in urban bohemias such as Towertown, which had enabled artists to access the city and its resources, and more, to collaborate (and compete) with others in the same game. The urban transformation chronicled by critics such as Jacoby and Jane Jacobs would claim Towertown as well as the 57th Street artist colonies, studio spaces developed in a disused concession building remaining from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and gradually populated by members of the Fine Arts Building community in the 1910s. Once home to principals of Chicago’s literary world, including Ben Hecht, Harriet Monroe, and Floyd Dell and his wife Margery Currey, who fostered something of a kingdom of free love and salon conversation, the studios were destroyed as part of the Hyde Park urban renewal project spearheaded by the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. Seeking to achieve a “stable,” racially integrated and affluent neighborhood, this “renewal,” like similar efforts around the country, resulted in the expulsion of poor Black residents
Zorach’s chief argument is that for the Black Arts Movement artists, Chicago communities were more than objects of representation and social comment, as social realism might pose them, but participating components of the artists’ projects. SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
