Gallery owners: Flexibility necessary for survival

Chicago’s local art gallery community is a tight-knit group.  Ask them about the industry’s history. They’ll tell you this city was once seen as a mecca for new, up-and-coming art galleries – but that was in the mid- and late-1980s.  And things have changed since then.

There was a time when dealers at these personalized institutions sold everything from paintings to kaleidoscopes to cards – all to a stream of clients with a variety of interests from across the globe. The pieces they sold gave customers a respite from the large-scale department stores that had emerged in earlier decades, where so many items were mass-produced.  Art collectors knew they could get something special at one of the at least 96 galleries that existed in Chicago as of 1990.

In fact, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition put together a list of these galleries that were within the city limits, as well as others in the suburbs and further downstate. It served as a resource for their members to learn where they could sell their work.

Fast-forward to 2010, and some gallery owners will tell you the heyday of the 1980s has vanished, and Chicago isn’t able to support galleries the way it once did.   Others don’t bemoan the health of the gallery industry.  They say it’s manageable, if you’re smart about your expectations for your business.

Deven Golden, director of the Compassrose Gallery in 1990, said, “We used to say we were an international gallery that just called Chicago home, but that dried up at the end of the ‘80s.”

Golden, who managed the River North gallery that closed in 1992 after founder Jim Rose’s death, has since moved to New York to pursue his career as a gallery owner.

The persistence of these galleries, their ability to survive, is one way to measure the health of the visual art industry in Chicago.

The Medill News Service followed up with representatives from the 96 galleries listed in the city as of 1990, to find out their fate.  Analysis of a database created from this information revealed that six other gallery owners had similar thoughts to Golden, and they have moved their galleries out of state since 1990.  And 34 of the 96 galleries have relocated within Illinois, often remaining in Chicago.

49 galleries from the original list are now closed.  That’s just over half of the total.

To survive the change in the economic climate in the past 20 years, some gallery owners say they have expanded their inventory into other areas. While they still consider their businesses galleries, they have other interests.

Karen McCauley is the manager of Gallery Genesis, located on the South Side.  It’s one of seven galleries to stay in its same location since 1990.  McCauley credits the business’ success to a shift in focus.  “We’re more of a church goods and religious supply store now, than anything else.  But we are still a gallery.  We keep artwork on display upstairs, and we do sell it.”

She said the gallery was successful with its original focus on religious art until the early 2000s, and then it just wasn’t bringing in enough money in its current form.

“We’re in a niche that’s very small and specialized, it’s definitely hard,” McCauley said.

Gallery 1633, located on the Northwest side, is one of the nine galleries from the 1990 list that has closed in the past five years.  It closed in 2007 when co-founder, and then-owner, Montana Morrison decided to move it to Red Bluff, Calif.  Bill Dixon, husband of the late Morrison who died in late 2009, said that the gallery was affected not just by the artistic market in the area, but by the neighborhood as a whole.

“It just wasn’t like it used to be, wasn’t the same experience to live or work there,“ said Dixon.  “It was overcrowded, generally.  It wasn’t a comfortable place to shop, or to live.”

Others thought the prevailing issue was the lack of visibility for the gallery community in Chicago by the public at large.  And that’s a problem for a business in an industry where so much relies on word of mouth.

River North’s Center for Contemporary Art closed in 1996.  According to Cheryl Pelavin, who worked at the gallery in the 1990’s, the reason was clear: “Lack of prestige,” she said simply.

For many gallery owners, these issues meant that their love of art dealing often took them away from the city they called home, as they found the market increasingly difficult throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Golden of the Compassrose Gallery now owns his own gallery, Deven Golden Fine Arts, in New York.

“In the ‘90s, we sold 60 percent of our art to people outside of Chicago, “ he said of his work at Compassrose.  “I don’t think we were alone.”

Golden said that for many international clients, it was often easier to get to New York from Europe.  The Big Apple also created a certain experience for these collectors, which Chicago simply didn’t have, he said.

“Collectors like to go to New York,” said Golden.  “When people were starting their collections, they’d go to Chicago, and it’d be fine.  But when people started to buy enough, suddenly it would matter and click, and they ‘d move on.”

At the end of the 1980’s , the gallery scene was on its way up,  Golden said.  At that time, he thought it might meet the success and prevalence that theater now enjoys in Chicago.  But that would have required more substantial backing from the city.  “We never got to the critical mass that we needed.  It just didn’t happen,” he said.  “The city had a lot of trouble forming its own identity as an art community.”

And Golden said he wishes that weren’t true.  “I could’ve stayed in Chicago.  But I liked the gallery thing. I thought to myself, ‘I want to have my own, and in Chicago, it’s just very difficult to do.’”

The declining climate for galleries isn’t specific to Chicago, though. Golden owned a gallery on Manhattan’s 57^th Street for five years, and in the early 2000’s, he lost his backer, and had to close that gallery.

He’s now opened a new one, but he sees it as more of a side business that supplements his work at Artsystems, where he designs software for art dealers.

Yet others have made it work in Chicago. One such gallery owner is Cheryl Pertl, whose A.E.S Gallery has persisted in Chicago since 1990.   The business has moved three times, but has always stayed within the city limits.  “We go where the customers are,” she said.  She added the key is being flexible as the market shifts.  While she previously focused on mediums, such as painting and sculpture, now she carries works across media but only covering one topic: McDonalds. She said that attracts a specialized, and dependable, client base.

Pertl now also owns the Ogilvie-Pertl Gallery, which opened in 2000 in the River East Art Center.  As opposed to the modern incarnation of A.E.S., it has a broader specialization.  Her tip for success is to recognize that treating a gallery as a sole source of income may not be feasible.  “I make my own art, too.  If you think you can just exist on the money you make from a gallery in Chicago, well, it’s not that you can’t, it’s just extremely difficult.”

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The study says that the greatest issue journalists have is a lack of time.  Study stories replace the issues, as editors push for quick turnarounds.  This prevents journalists from doing in-depth analysis and taking the time to contextualize the story.  And it’s all very easy to sit in a classroom, or typing at a keyboard, and say that journalists should go more in-depth, but as we push for faster news, how do we get this done?

I would imagine magazine writers have more time than newspaper writers.  But for the next ten weeks, I have been given more time than any of that.  In one of my classes this quarter, the whole point is to do in-depth stories, tell the untold — health and science information that people need.  I hadn’t realized what a true gift this course was, until I recognized that it is, in its essence, what the majority of journalists cite as a serious problem in their work environment today.  And then, after the ten weeks, on to the normal journalism schedule.  I may not have time to do these type of stories again, but I’ll have the skills.  Couple with that a smattering of passion, and obsessive dedication with some of us youngsters, and maybe we can make up for in gumption what we don’t have in experience.

My main challenge for this quarter is to convey these stories in not only comprehensible ways, but interesting ways.  I plan on using animations, videos, charts, to make that happen.  And lots of buttons for people to press, I know I’m always more likely to click through something when I do at my rate.

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• October 16, 2010 -- We must understand our news content as data
• March 3, 2010 -- Persistence of Chicago Art Galleries

Good point.  It doesn’t make me want to do less with diagrams, but if another piece of media can do a better job than original content could, why push it?  I thought this reflects nicely on the fact that while user-generated content can bring interesting perspectives to the news, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some things still best left to journalists operating in the traditional way.

Twitter can be great for getting the pulse of what people think about the issue, but that’s in the Twitterverse (I need a better word than that).  Journalists don’t have to reinvent stopping people on the street asking for their thoughts.

It’s a calming, but scary, thought.  Take it too far, and there will be no reinvention of journalism, and obviously the status quo is not without fault.

But for someone who errs on the side of a hyperactive overzealous obsession for journalism (it’s a good thing, really!), maybe once in a while it’s time to relax and use what is already out there.

Oh, and my solution to the picture issue – find medical research at smaller labs.  It’s working out well so far, but I’ll keep you posted.

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Whatever happened to accountability for fact errors in journalism? Yes, as a practicing journalist I realize just how easy it is to make a fact error accidentally. And every time a journalist writes anything, her byline and reputation is on the line. In the Internet age, that’s scary. Every word I’m writing right now is posted under a domain bearing my first and last name, it’s more than a little frightening.

But that’s no excuse for what I see from too many news organizations, which is corrections being issued by simply correcting the text in the article, and making a minimal mention of the fact that there is a correction, if it is mentioned at all.

Back in the old days of journalism, and by old, I mean mere years ago, a page was devoted to setting the record straight. The way things are now may be easier for journalists, but they are not serving the readers and viewers, who deserve the truth, as well as they could be served.

I believe corrections should be made in as public a way as the original content, making a maximum effort to make sure that all who received the misinformation, receive the correction to that information.

Not all publications have this problem, thank you Slate and it’s been getting better in the past year, but it’s still something I would like to see worked on as a community. Of course, a bigger and better change might be figuring out how to make a profit off Internet content. We can’t do that because users — myself included — like the comfort of not paying for things. Likewise, I as a journalist like having more obscured corrections pages. But that doesn’t make it right, for either issue.

So I threw myself under the bus, I can’t help it. I take ethics VERY seriously, perhaps sometimes too seriously, even when it causes me inconvenience.

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And before I get going, make no mistake.  I love Medill. I learn more there in a day than in any day of the rest of my life.  I work harder in a day there than any other time in my life.  And I love it more than I previously loved any day in my life.  I tell my journalism friends that they must go, receive intimate critiques of their work, ask all the questions in the world, meet fellow journalists searching for a place in this so-called “dying industry.”

But no institution is perfect, and any institution that takes risks is going to make mistakes.  Here’s Number 47:

After spending much of the weekend perusing my reporting syllabus, one requirement perplexes me.  We are assigned to do an “alternative storytelling” piece. The example is a “Q&A”, AKA a question and answer piece.

I take issue with this because this  means “Don’t use any writing style, just write down your questions, and their answers.  Now sigh happily, and revel in the joy of finishing an article.”  If you ever find me writing a Q&A, pinch me.  If you ever find me writing a Q&A and calling it an alternative format, claiming that it’s innovative, drag me away from the keyboard, and do something worse than pinching me.  Don’t kill me though, because then I’d be dead, and that sounds a lot less fun than living.  But no Q&As. Ever.

If a journalist wants to show interviews to the reader, great!  Use audio and video to do it!  Let them see whichever parts they want of the interview, and use as many senses as possible.  I advocate this — journalists are the eyes of the public.  Let others see what we see!

However, this stance means I need to think about what I view as alternative storytelling.  To have an alternative, you need something common.  In Web 2.0, if something is common, it’s gone the way of the typewriter.  Originality is the name of the game, and that’s the new common form.  So what’s the alternative to originality?  Reverting to copying others?  Not for this reporter.

Which brings me back to my original problem.  I’m not a reader, so I don’t know what’s interesting to the reader.  But by the end of the quarter, I’m going to think of  a new way to convey a story.  A story about medical research, because that’s my beat.  In the mean time, I’m leaving the alternative storytelling box on my syllabus unchecked.  I’ll start with the slide show requirement, because I get slide shows.  Arty, informative, visually appealling — that’s much more my thing.   Maybe the answer will come to me in a dream.

In the meantime, any ideas on how you wish journalists would tell stories?

Note: This post is actually the worst form of storytelling, a long dry boring post on the web.  Can I make it up by pointing you to a riveting NOVA documentary on a trial dealing with the teaching of intelligent design in schools?  I think they are much closer to alternative storytelling than this entry is.  I expect more of myself by the end of March.

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