Q&A Question & Answer
Lois Weisberg
Lois Weisberg apologizes for the construction in Grant Park across from her third-floor corner office in the Chicago Cultural Center. Cranes and earthmovers are building a music pavilion and a theater in the new Millennium Park. Below, on busy Michigan Avenue, people are strolling to the Art Institute. Around the corner, banners and lights call attention to Chicago's theater district.
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Weisberg's efforts as commissioner of cultural affairs have played an important part in this rebirth of Chicago's Loop. Because she has been so instrumental in integrating the arts into the city, she won this year's Motorola Excellence in Public Service Award given by the North Business and Industrial Council in conjunction with Illinois Issues and Motorola. She received the award last month.
Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Weisberg to head Chicago's cultural affairs office in 1989. But she also served the late Mayor Harold Washington as director of the Office of Special Events. Prior to her work for the city, Weisberg founded the advocacy group Friends of the Parks, edited her own weekly newspaper, The Paper, and served as executive director of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
As culture commissioner, she has earned national recognition for the Gallery 37 initiative. That program, launched in 1991 and operated with public and private resources, is designed to give teens job training in the visual, literary and performing arts. Beyond earning a paycheck, participants get an opportunity to work with professional artists to create artwork for sale or public display.
But Gallery 37 tops a long list ofWeisberg's programs and projects. Most recently, Chicago's Cows on Parade won the hearts of natives, as well as tourists from throughout the world.
The following is an edited interview by Illinois Issues' Burney Simpson. Jon Randolph took the photographs.
Q. What is a city's or a government's role in the arts?
I am particularly committed to local government, because I think local government is closest to people. And it gives more to the arts than the federal government or anybody else.
I can't even answer the question if you separate the arts from everything else. To me, the arts are a very important part, maybe the major part, [of what] affects the quality of life of a city. I don't see the difference between picking up the garbage, or having a police department or a fire department or a public library. The opportunity for people to participate in the arts, free, is just as important as a public library, which has all these books for free.
What's good about government support for the arts is that there is no delineation between those who can afford to pay and those who can't. Everyone can participate. That is what makes a great city.
Q. What would you recommend to other cities trying to revitalize their downtown districts?
First, you have to know why you want to do it.
I grew up in a Chicago neighborhood and always came downtown. That was important for a city made up of neighborhoods - that the families who lived in the neighborhoods knew they had a place they could go. But that downtown we came to disappeared. When I came to the cultural center nine years ago, there really wasn't much going on downtown. I decided we should devote ourselves to bringing the Loop back to life.
I believe every city has to have a downtown if it is going to survive as a city. Every city, whether small or large, has to have a place that people see as their gathering place.
The Loop had a tremendous reputation. But it also had this great attraction, the Elevated, which had never been promoted as anything. I thought it was a great attraction, like a Ferris Wheel or something. So one of the first things we did was to promote free El rides on weekends. There was an architectural docent on the train. And you got a very different view of the Loop. It took about 45 minutes. And it was hugely successful.
Then we started something called Downtown Thursday Night to encourage people to stay downtown after dark, to bring some life into this part of the city. We would promote this to people who work here, to stay a few hours later, and promote memberships to the museums down here. I think the Downtown Thursday Night concept helped bring
more attention to the Loop.
The idea now is that people are moving down here, which is important to the revitalization of any city.
And the city played a huge role. Citizens can't do this kind of thing by themselves. But the city worked hand-in-hand with a lot of people and gave them opportunities. You mentioned the theater district. There was some criticism that the city used [Tax Increment Finance] money for that. But the truth is that any city knows they are competing with every city across the country. And you have to give people special breaks if you really want them to come. Now you have the theater district, the Goodman Theater, the Palace, the Oriental. And the city is trying to help the Chicago Theater survive. That's a major commitment for the city.
Q. How do you move some of these downtown efforts to the neighborhoods? And how do you get those people who don't go to the Lyric Opera or the Art Institute involved in cultural activities?
You have to do it two ways: bring programs to their neighborhoods; and a great many of the neighborhoods already have programs, so you have to help them promote their programs, which offer a most amazing palate of ethnicity in the arts. You bring those things out of the neighborhood so other people can share them. You bring them into the central area. But you always have to encourage the neighborhoods in those things they are already doing for their own people. So the city has to support neighborhood programs equally with downtown programs.
A place like the Cultural Center is a wonderful place for the city to have because it's a facility where they can show these programs. Music, the arts, programs for children.
The Gallery 37 program is deliberately set up to bring people downtown, to get them out of their neighborhoods so they can be a part of the entire city. And so they can meet other young people from around the entire city.
It's a twofold thing. We can support the neighborhood and we can get them out of the neighborhood at the same time.
Q. How do you work in neighborhoods that may be facing tougher economic conditions and where the mayor's political opponents may be based?
Now the arts are pretty noncontroversial, with the exception of some exhibits people object to. But the arts as a whole are pretty noncontroversial. So the arts are the best bridge for communities to work with the government. People are not as threatened by working on arts programs. It's apolitical. So I have the privilege of using the arts to bring the government and people in their neighborhoods together.
Q.There is some controversy over whose story is told.
All the arts stories are the same. They're about arts and culture.
I did a program a few years ago called Summer Dance, a free program. And it was out here across the street in Grant Park. And we put up a huge dance floor. And we did free dancing, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And we tried to use a combination of music from all our neighborhoods. And people could come down and they would have an hour to learn to dance and then they would dance. It was absolutely phenomenal.
I came down the night of Greek dancing. I was sure I was going to see all these Greek people coming out. I was sure of it. But it wasn't that at all. It was everybody trying to understand our people better. Everybody wanted to learn Greek dancing.
So now Summer Dance has become a catalyst, [something] that people can do together in the city.
Government has to understand what people want. And you can't understand unless you take a risk and do it. People really have a need to reach out to one another. Dance and music are probably the best way to do that.
Q. Can Gallery 37 be implemented in a rural community?
In Aurora?
Gallery 37 is an interesting concept because it is about government. It really shows you the distance of the federal
government from the community. The federal government jobs program was about giving money to states and cities to have young people work in the summertime. But it really was about putting money in their pockets to keep them off the streets. And you'd see kids in the parks with shovels and nobody supervising them. And Gallery 37 was my answer to that. To take the same money and give them mentors and teachers. They needed supervision; they needed real teachers. Not just some assignment.
So the answer is, yes. If the city would look at the money they are throwing down the drain with these jobs programs, and use that to augment the education of young people. And I don't mean to teach them to do math or reading. That's different.
One of the most important things about Gallery 37 was that we raised private money and we got kids from middle income homes or those that were just above the poverty level that couldn't get in [to the federal jobs program]. That great mixture we put together was 50 percent responsible for the success of Gallery 37. That might be hard for some cities to do, to take that jobs program money and go out and raise the rest of it if they want to mix the young people together.
Q. How would you take some of your ideas to the state level? Can they be transferred to the state?
We have training sessions with Gallery 37. We do three-day workshops all over the country because that's a model program on what to do with teenagers. It's won many awards. It uplifted the image of teenagers in our city. People could see they weren't these awful people. That they had a lot of talent. And that it wasn't too late at that age to develop that talent. All the attention was to the littler kids, grammar schools, first grade. We had sort of written off teenagers. But I think Gallery 37 proved just the opposite.
Q. If you had the opportunity to do similar work for the state of Illinois, what would you do?
I have always tried to work very closely with the state. It's important for the city and state to stop this nonsense about competition.
Recently, the governor asked us to send some cows to the State Fair and we did that. We went down there. More sharing, more interaction. We've written five downstate museums to set up exhibits down there. We're still working on that. The state has a traveling program where people like the Steppenwolf and Goodman theaters travel downstate.
But you can't just do that, can't just send things back and forth. People have to get to know each other. When we sent the cows down to Springfield, that was the first time we'd done that. I sent a staff of 10 people and we asked the Springfield convention bureau to help us. And they provided volunteers in our booth. So everybody worked together. That was the first time that ever happened. And that's what we have to do. There are lots of ways the people in the city and Springfield can work together.
Arts and tourism are noncontroversial [ways] to get to know each other.
Q. How do you go about making Chicago an international city? How do you make folks in Florence, Tokyo or Berlin want to come here?
First of all, you can't do anything overtly. I mean, you do whatever you were going to do in your city for the people who live there. They should be a part of the objective. They are people like any other people in the world. If they like something then the tourists are going to like it, too. Do not plan things for tourists. If you do you're making a terrible mistake. You exploit tourists and they know it. When tourists come to the city, they want to meet the people who live in the city. [Tourists] want to go to the kinds of places [residents] go to.
You want to make things accessible. For example, the neighborhoods used to complain that tourists never came to the neighborhoods. We started a program called Neighborhood Tours so they could go in a group. We got tremendous cooperation from the neighborhoods. People from the neighborhoods lead the tours, they go to the parks, they feed them in the neighborhood.
What did we find? We found that half the people on the tours are from the Chicago area who had never seen these neighborhoods because they didn't feel comfortable unless they were going in a group. And the other half was people from outside the area. And it's a wonderful combination. Tourists like to be with people who live in the city. And the city people are thrilled to have visitors.
Sixty percent of our tourists in the city come from relatives who invite them here. So your best salesmen for tourists are the people who live in Chicago.
Q. As the city reaches out to more people, is there a possibility Chicago will lose its Midwestern roots?
It would be hard for a city like Chicago to lose its Midwestern roots, because that's what people come to see. But what you have to be careful of is what happened in New York. They have so many tourists in certain areas of the city that the people who live there turned against the tourists.
We don't want to do that to our city. We want an equal balance. If you don't want to make your city into a Coney Island or a Disneyland or a gambling mecca, you had better keep that balance.
People are coming here to see what the city has to offer in its cultural institutions. ž
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