Each year, at this traditional time of review, it has been the pleasure of the Arts & Entertainment staff of the Tribune to single out those individuals in the arts who have made significant contributions to their community over the last 12 months.
This year, in our 14th annual selection, there are 23 such persons, from artists to entrepreneurs, working in the fields of music, theater, dance, architecture, literature, the visual arts, film and television. Some are veterans, whose accomplishments hit a new peak; others are newcomers, who created a stir with a fresh burst of talent. All are persons who, we believe, advanced, not only their careers, but the fields in which they work.
The Tribune Arts writers and reviewers who took part in this celebration of achievement are: Alan Artner, Richard Christiansen, Allan Johnson, Blair Kamin, Greg Kot, Achy Obejas, Howard Reich, Sid Smith, John Von Rhein and Michael Wilmington.
FOLK MUSIC IMPRESARIO
It would be overstating the case to say that only a few years ago the future of folk music in Chicago depended on Jim Hirsch. But in spearheading the fundraising campaign for the Chicago Folk Center–which opened last September on Lincoln Avenue–the executive director of the Old Town School of Folk Music certainly had his work cut out: Nothing less than guiding one of the city’s most treasured institutions into the next century.
That he succeeded spectacularly was confirmed when the new space was officially opened with a performance by Joni Mitchell, her first Chicago appearance in 15 years. Mitchell’s luminous concert took place in a bilevel, 425-seat theater that is an aesthetic triumph–the finest listening room in the city for non-classical events. It’s the crown jewel of a $9 million, 43,000-square-foot facility that took four years to build, in the space formerly occupied by the Hild Library.
The Chicago Folk Center dramatically punctuates the growth of the Old Town School, a 41-year-old enterprise that served as Ground Zero for the Midwestern folk scene and gave rise to such performers as the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, Bonnie Koloc, John Prine, Bob Gibson and Steve Goodman.
But Old Town’s glory days seemed long gone by the time Hirsch took over as executive director in 1982; indeed, its very survival was in grave doubt. Under his guidance, however, Old Town enjoyed a startling revival, its budget climbing from $240,000 to more than $3 million and class enrollment quintupling to more than 3,000 students. With the school’s longtime Armitage Avenue facility becoming more cramped by the week, Hirsch marshaled public and private forces to make the Chicago Folk Center a reality–a four-year project culminating in the largest facility of its kind in the country.
But Hirsch’s financial and organizational acumen is more than just a business story. A longtime guitar teacher at the school, Hirsch was a recording artist before he became a fundraiser, and he has always understood profoundly what was at stake ever since he took over the director’s job. Folk legend Peter Yarrow preceded Mitchell on stage opening night, and when he invited Hirsch on stage to accompany him for a song it was only fitting. Hirsch obliged with a guitar solo that spoke more eloquently than any speech, toast or dedication could have. With his heart and his fingers, Hirsch affirmed that it’s all about the music.
— Greg Kot
BIG-HEARTED ROCK STARS
It is the me-decade in rock ‘n’ roll. Ticket prices haven’t just gone through the roof, they’re orbiting Mars. In a few weeks, the Rolling Stones will roll into the United Center and charge consumers as much as $300 for the privilege of seeing them play. From John Mellencamp to U2, megatours now cost megabucks, becoming elitist events on par with attending “Cats” and Bulls games. Didn’t rock used to be a populist art form once?
The Smashing Pumpkins haven’t forgotten that it was. Billy Corgan, James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky were primed to make a major killing on the concert circuit after consistently selling out arenas on their 1995-96 tour and becoming one of the most popular new bands of the decade. Instead, the Pumpkins did the unexpected for their ’98 tour: They handed every dollar of profit–more than $2 million–to charity. After a show at the New World Music Theatre in Tinley Park on July 7, the Pumpkins handed over $500,000 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Northern Illinois, the largest single contribution the charity has received in its 12-year history.
In explaining why his band would not only derail the gravy train but willingly lose more than $1 million to make the charity events work, Corgan simply said, “We’ve all made more money than we’ll ever need . . . It’s time to take responsibility for our generation and subsequent generations.”
To call such idealism a rarity in these cynical times would be an understatement. Coming from a major band, it’s revolutionary–never has a superstar act so spectacularly put its money where its mouth is. Like Pearl Jam with its losing battle against excessive service fees a few years ago, don’t expect any bands to follow the Pumpkins’ example. But for one glorious summer, the Pumpkins did themselves proud. Instead of succumbing to Wall Street logic, Corgan, Iha and Wretzky followed their rock ‘n’ roll hearts.
— Greg Kot
CONTEMPORARY COMPOSER
This was a watershed year for the 33-year-old composer and for local audiences who have found their understanding and appreciation of what is happening in today’s music heightened because of her influence.
Since beginning her three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence in 1997, Augusta Read Thomas has exerted a significant impact on the local musical scene, especially with regard to raising the general consciousness regarding contemporary music.
Autumn brought a major premiere–Thomas’ latest orchestral piece, “Orbital Beacons,” which had its first performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under principal guest conductor Pierre Boulez at Symphony Center. The work, which subdivided the orchestra into various concertino groups and reseated the musicians in semicircles, proved as luminous, kinetic and involving as its title suggests.
Also under Thomas’ initiative, the CSO launched two new explorations of music in the waning century–a series of chamber concerts in Buntrock Hall titled “MusicNow,” and a three-year retrospective of major contemporary works, “Roots and Branches.”
Thomas also was responsible for the year’s most unusual “environmental” composition, “Seahorse Serenade,” which she wrote for the “Seahorse Symphony” exhibit at Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium. The work was commissioned by the aquarium and recorded by musicians of the CSO for performance as continuous accompaniment for the exhibit, running till Jan. 3, 2000.
Through her music, her words about music and her teaching (she presently serves as an associate professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.), the commuting composer has attempted to reach out to a broad community of listeners and involve them in what is for her an essentially emotional experience. Her primary concern, the 33-year-old Thomas has said, is to create music that speaks on some level to every listener, regardless of his musical knowledge, training or background. The positive response audience members have shown her works thus far locally indicate she is making headway in her quest to bring willing new ears into the music of the present.
— John von Rhein
ARTIST AS WORDSMITH
As the French always claim great Belgian artists as their own, so do Chicagoans claim Kay Rosen.
After all, the Texas-born resident of Gary had her first group exhibition here, at the old Moming Dance Center, as well as her first museum show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. And during the next 21 years, she enjoyed six important solo exhibitions in Chicago, the most recent just months ago at the Ten in One Gallery.
That show presented all-new paintings and drawings, which was perhaps a sign of commitment to a Chicago audience, for Rosen also was preparing for the biggest exhibition of her career, a 25-year retrospective — of more than 50 pieces — jointly organized by the Otis College of Art and Design and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Such recognition would be a boost for any artist, but for Rosen it perhaps counts just that little bit more, as her conceptually based work remains challenging to many viewers, being made entirely of painted or drawn words.
Unlike other contemporaries who use text, however, Rosen trained as a linguist and knows how we perceive words in visual art better than most of her colleagues. This has allowed a directness and playfulness unusual in work of our day, although despite such immediacy, it never is unclear that Rosen is a complex artist.
The high degree of her seriousness comes out in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get aesthetic that expresses everything in purely visual terms — through color, placement, type font and spelling.
Sometimes you have to sound out the text to catch wry twists in meaning, but all data necessary for deciphering a work is plainly visible on each surface.
This is not at all easy, though Rosen’s art remains easygoing. There’s nothing schoolmarmish or dictatorial about it. But neither is it buttoned-down or tight-lipped.
It’s a good year whenever a major museum exhibition increases the possibility of seeing art as sharp as Rosen’s. The L.A. show, continuing through Feb. 14, acknowledges a body of work that has been at once personal, daring and life-affirming.
— Alan G. Artner
LAKEFRONT REDESIGNERS
For years, the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive sliced between the Field Museum of Natural History and the John G. Shedd Aquarium, rendering a portion of Chicago’s lakefront an urban no man’s land of screeching tires and smelly exhaust.
Since the early 1980s, when Chicago thought it might put on a world’s fair in 1992, the city’s planners dreamed of moving those lanes off the lakefront to create a cultural campus uninterrupted by highway traffic.
It finally happened in 1998.
Two years after the Drive’s northbound lanes were placed west of Soldier Field in 1996 and space was cleared for new lakefront parkland, the Museum Campus made its dazzling debut.
Uniting the Field, the Shedd and the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum on a single greensward while adding 36 acres of usable parkland to the lakefront, the Campus drew millions of visitors.
Some Chicago dealmaking made possible the Drive’s relocation and the campus, which cost a total of $110 million. The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority provided most of the money in exchange for community groups’ support of a third exhibition hall at the McCormick Place convention center. That building was completed in 1996.
But the success of the campus is equally attributable to those who designed and built it.
They are Chicago architects and engineers Teng & Associates and the Chicago Department of Transportation, which supervised the project.
Teng’s team consisted of urban designer John MacManus, who has since opened his own firm, as well as project engineer Michael Stirk and project manager Robert Stern. The city’s effort was spearheaded by Richard Kinczyk, now a first deputy commissioner at the transportation department.
Their collective effort demonstrates a dramatic shift in thinking that has taken place since the national highway building binge of the 1950s and 1960s.
What many municipalities have found is that these paragons of “progress” are, as often as not, disruptive eyesores, blocking the movement of people to treasured natural assets.
If we want to move highways to improve our quality of life, we possess both the ability and the artistry to do so.
That is the humanistic lesson of the Museum Campus.
— Blair Kamin
THEATRICAL SALESMAN
The year did not begin well. “Griller,” the new drama about a disastrous family gathering in suburbia, and one on which he had worked closely with playwright Eric Bogosian, proved less than sensational in its January premiere at Goodman Theatre. Yet, by the end of 1998, Robert Falls, Goodman’s artistic director since 1986, was riding a high wave of acclaim and excitement, in the midst of the biggest year of his career.
The prime factor in this turnaround was Falls’ revelatory revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which opened in late September to ecstatic reviews, played to capacity houses and, before its run had ended in November, was booked for a Broadway opening in February.
Falls had not expected it to be that way. “Salesman” was a chance to work again with Brian Dennehy, the actor who had famously starred at Goodman in Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo” and Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” And there was a strong supporting cast, including Elizabeth Franz as the devoted wife of the doomed salesman and Kevin Anderson as his oldest son.
But this re-examination of Miller’s 50-year-old American masterpiece turned out to be more than a respectable tribute by a respectable cast. Falls’ staging, daring and innovative, revivified the drama, setting Willy Loman’s story in a symbolic, surrealistic environment that transported the drama to a new level of imagination.
Thanks in large part to the attention his inventive direction for “Salesman” had received, Falls closed off 1998 by agreeing to direct “Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida,” the new Disney megamusical heading for Broadway.
A native of Illinois and a graduate of the University of Illinois, Falls made his professional debut as a director here in the 1970s and went on to become artistic director of Wisdom Bridge Theatre, which he turned into one of the liveliest of the city’s many small Off-Loop groups.
At Goodman and in productions at other resident theaters across the country, he has racked up an impressive record of directing plays and musicals.
This year, however, was special for him. Besides staging “Salesman,” he presided over groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Goodman Theatre complex due to open in the North Loop in 2000, and he saw his theater receive a $1 million grant for artistic development from benefactor Hope Abelson.
He is on a roll.
— Richard Christiansen
CULTURAL ACTIVIST
Because she doesn’t play an instrument or otherwise appear before the public, South Side cultural activist Josie Childs is unknown to most Chicagoans. Yet the feat she accomplished in 1998 — with the help of a small army of friends and colleagues–has changed our understanding of jazz history.
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Until this year, jazz devotees presumed that Duke Ellington’s nearly forgotten musical, “My People,” never would be heard or seen in its entirety again. Though Ellington’s most overtly political show made news during its world premiere engagement in McCormick Place in 1963 (marking the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation), the piece never was staged again. Like all Ellington’s musicals, it did not receive a fraction of the acclaim or national recognition it deserved.
When Childs decided to remount the show this year, for a Duke Ellington conference in Chicago, she had no idea that the score had disappeared. Eventually, she located a previously unknown, reel-to-reel tape of the complete piece, commissioned a new transcription and arranged for “My People” to be staged at the New Regal Theatre in May — for the first time in 35 years.
Thanks to this production, several superb Ellington compositions were returned to the repertory, including the brilliant orchestral overture “Jungle Triangle” and the beguiling songs “Blues at Sundown” and “Walkin’ and Singin’ the Blues.” Equally important, the show demolished the myth that Ellington avoided issues of politics and race, as some of his critics have contended.
When “My People” is staged in various cities next year to mark the centennial of Ellington’s birth, the rest of the country will learn what Chicagoans now know: “My People” establishes once and for all that Ellington placed himself at the forefront of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.
Though many gifted musicians and energetic volunteers were essential in reviving “My People,” Childs was the visionary who led them all and, in the process, saved a work that will deepen listeners’ understanding of Ellington’s role in American life and culture. That Childs did so for no remuneration and at personal financial risk renders her achievement even more heroic.
— Howard Reich
CLUB OWNER
In 1995, when impresario Marguerite Horberg announced that she was temporarily closing HotHouse — her eclectic, North Milwaukee Avenue arts club — skeptics said she never would reopen it. Their reasoning seemed persuasive: If HotHouse couldn’t survive after several years of building an audience for avant-garde jazz and other experimental forms of performance, how could the club possibly succeed in an unfamiliar new location?
The passing years in which there was no sign of a new HotHouse seemed to underscore the point, but last summer Horberg defied the odds and reopened the club. Further, the new place — at the southwest corner of Balbo Drive and Wabash Avenue — was bigger, more comfortable and considerably more appealing to eye and ear than its predecessor.
Clearly, Horberg had used the time away well, gathering financial support from the MacArthur Foundation (among other organizations), creating a board of directors, establishing a paid staff as well as a long list of volunteers and otherwise turning a one-woman operation into a legitimate arts organization.
That’s not to say that the journey has been easy or smooth. Though the club is packed to capacity on some evenings (particularly when ethnic and pop-tinged acts perform), on other nights HotHouse can be nearly deserted. But the size of the crowds during successful bookings and the glowing press coverage that the new venue has generated represent a promising start.
In addition, the re-emergence of HotHouse has increased musical activity in the South Loop, afforded a prominent stage to local and visiting avant-gardists and added an unusually attractive room to the city’s perpetually expanding music scene. The welcome dance floor, the view of the elevated trains rolling nearby on Wabash Avenue and the spectacular vistas of Chicago’s nighttime skyline make HotHouse one of the most appealing spaces in the city.
All of this owes to the tenacity of Horberg, who stands as one of the shrewdest arts presenters in the city.
— Howard Reich
CHAMPION FOR TAP
You’re not likely to mistake Lane Alexander for a cast member of “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring ‘Da Funk” or the burly, blue-collar “Stomp.”
His boyish, all-American face is ever-plastered with a beaming smile, and his soothing, methodical voice belies his Texas upbringing. He is, in that sense, not exactly in sync with the grungier look of the tap dog movement. He caught tap fever, in fact, before he dropped out of law school.
But he has doggedly mounted his annual Human Rhythm Project celebration of tap for nine years now, and this year’s 11-day installment in July proved the glitziest and the best, offering a crowded and varied lineup, a wealth of unexpected delights and genuine star power.
Savion Glover, for instance, came to accept an award–and demonstrated in a fiery, improvisational segment why he’s the greatest tap dancer alive. But Glover’s brief and brilliant turn was only the culmination of a festival showing off old and new, classic and punk. Luke Cresswell, an original founding member and lead from “Stomp,” came for a rare appearance, leading the audience through one of his patented handclap routines and linking the art of tap with the art of percussion.
Stylists who specialized in soft-shoe, Broadway, hip-hop and comedy were all on the bill, from Mark Mendonca, whose speed and endurance give Glover a run for his money, to the inimitable team of Ernest “Brownie” Brown and Reginald McLaughlin, the former a veteran vaudevillian still nimble in his pratfalls at age 82 and the latter a thirtysomething, one-time subway musician. Classic stylists such as Dianne Walker shared the lineup with the likes of Michael Conley, an experimentalist who (amazingly) marries tap and solo saxophone playing.
The diverse range of talents Alexander always accumulates is part of the message. Key veterans who’ve retired played emcee and, with their stories, linked the current tap revival to the neglected past. Alexander, an energetic tap soloist in his own right, has created an event once ignored and now a hot spot on our annual calendar.
Not everything connected with the fest came off like clockwork. There’s a breezy, almost amateurish off-handedness to it all, though that’s often refreshing. Ballyhooed plans for a commercial a la “Riverdance” collapsed embarrassingly at the last minute.
But 1998 is definitely the year in which Alexander’s effort to help tap regain its prominence and draw attention to forgotten practitioners paid off big time.
— Sid Smith
HOMETOWN HERO
If all Jeremy Piven did was get the producers of ABC’s “Cupid” to base the series in Chicago, he would be considered a higher being–ironic, since it’s not known whether the character Piven plays in the romantic comedy-drama is actually the god of love, or possibly a mortal whose quiver is short a few arrows.
But the 33-year-old, part of Evanston’s celebrated Piven acting clan, has done more than simply fix it so that he can get home cooking after a long day’s shoot (the series is shot entirely in Chicago, interiors and exteriors). Piven has worked to make “Cupid” one of the most unique television shows in recent years.
Piven plays Trevor Hale, a man who says he is a powerless Cupid who must hook up 100 couples before he will be allowed to return to Mt. Olympus (Hale is under the watchful eye–and enjoys a battle of wits–with psychiatrist Claire Allen, played by Paula Marshall).
Piven, who is also credited as a producer on the show, has infused the character with a reckless charm, overbearing, wisecracking manner, over-the-top personality and rapid-fire patter. Because of Piven’s full-bodied performance, the is-he-a god?/is he a loon? question that remains unanswered, and the delightful 1990s slant on relationships and romance the series takes, “Cupid” is one of the bright spots of the 1998-99 television season.
The network has given the show a 22-episode commitment. Mired on Saturdays, “Cupid” will move to Thursdays at 8 p.m. starting Jan. 7, which isn’t so daunting a time slot now that NBC’s “Seinfeld” is gone.
Piven, who with John Cusack created the New Criminals experimental theater troupe in 1988, and may be best known for playing Ellen Morgan’s (Ellen DeGeneres) cousin Spence on ABC’s “Ellen,” went out of his way to ensure “Cupid” could be filmed in Chicago, taking a video camera around the city and scouting out various areas for location shooting.
“During the taping I kind of like put myself on,” he says, “saying, `Look, you guys, just so you know, this doesn’t happen all the time. I mean, when’s the last time someone like (“Northern Exposure’s”) Rob Morrow actually climbed the bell tower in a Polish church to do his own location scouting for his television show?’ “
During “Cupid’s” stay here, Piven has been making like the king of Chicago: He hosted a Chicago premiere of his latest movie, “Very Bad Things,” at the McClurg Court Theatre; he rides a Zamboni ice-smoothing machine for a Chicago Blackhawks commercial; and he was the grand marshal of this year’s Field’s Jingle Elf Parade.
Hopefully, ratings royalty will be next on Piven’s list.
— Allan Johnson
DANCE VISIONARY
If you build it, the theory might go, they will dance. For years, Chicago dance troupes struggled in cramped, secondhand quarters, lucky if they could get a palatable performance space, let alone decent rehearsal studios.
But this year, if any remaining proof were needed, Lou Conte demonstrated that his Hubbard Street Dance Chicago is an institution on par with any arts organization in the city. Hubbard’s spacious, inviting, highly useful and state-of-the-art studios at 1147 W. Jackson St. (the result of a $3 million purchase and renovation of an old car dealership) not only provides that talented company with a wonderful home.
It demonstrates that dance, too, can be a vital and equal partner in the economic life of our arts scene–Hubbard’s studios now rank among the top five in the country. Its 35,000 square feet seem destined to be an inviting training ground and open canvas for dancers and choreographers for generations to come.
Meanwhile, Conte would not be nearly so praiseworthy were he devoting all his talents to real estate. Not content to rest on the laurels inspired by the troupe’s long investment in the work of Twyla Tharp, Conte has begun to look to the future, bolstering the ranks of the dancers with some promising young faces and introducing new works by new choreographers that both continue Hubbard’s appealing tradition and show off tantalizing talent.
Increasingly, this exuberantly all-American troupe is turning to Europe. Last spring, Hubbard unveiled its version of another work by Spanish-born Nacho Duato, “Jardi Tancat,” or “Enclosed Garden,” and it instantly became one of the company’s most striking, complex and beautiful pieces. Contrast that to a modern classic newly acquired by the company, Czechoslovakian-born Jiri Kylian’s outrageously satirical, pseudo neoclassical “Sechs Tanze.” But Conte continues to hunt up and find interesting new American choreographers too, adding former Hubbard dancer Mario Zambrano’s sexy “Lind” and Ohio-based Susan Hadley’s “Blue Grass,” a layered study in conflict and community set to Mark O’Connor’s glorious fiddle playing.
— Sid Smith
THE `GENIUS’
Any year in which you receive a $240,000 fellowship, no strings attached, is a big year. And this was that year for director/playwright/scholar/teacher Mary Zimmerman, who did indeed receive a highly prized “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The reasons for the grant were made clear by the work Zimmerman accomplished in her annus mirabilis. In one show after another, she demonstrated her unique ability to translate a written text into a vivid stage image.
First there was a reprise of her ingenious stage adaptation of “The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci” in the Goodman Studio Theatre. Then, in a student production, in collaboration with the Off-Loop troupe About Face, and with the help of funding from Northwestern University, where she teaches in the department of performance studies, she mounted “Eleven Rooms of Proust,” which, in taking took viewers through a tour of the Berger Park Mansion on Sheridan Road, immersed them in selected scenes from Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” And finally, rounding off the year, was “Metamorphoses,” created for Lookingglass Theatre, which transformed the myths of gods and men in the poetry of Ovid into a mesmerizing series of beautifully designed scenes and sketches set around a wading pool in the Ivanhoe Theatre.
The fact that the MacArthur grant came as a ringing endorsement of her achievements hardly phased Zimmerman. She went ahead with her work, unable to act the grande dame, painstakingly working with her actors and designers to create an alluring world of theater.
Raised in an academic environment (both her parents were university professors), she came of age as a professional in the rough-and-ready community of Chicago theater; and there she now stands, successfully straddling the worlds of scholarship and show business with a keen eye, a sharp mind and a generous spirit.
— Richard Christiansen
COMMUNITY LEADER
Carlos Tortolero loves the view from the broadcast booth at WRTE-FM. When he stands there — the young deejays playfully keep him away from the mikes, the mini-disks and the logs — he has a view of one of Pilsen’s busiest street corner: he intersection of 18th Street, Loomis and Blue Island.
“It’s perfect here, it’s so in your face,” he says surveying the buses, the passers by and the constant traffic. “It’s totally in-your-face, `We are young, we are Mexican, and proud and responsible.’ “
This has been a stellar year for the relentless, sometimes abrasive, Tortolero, a former teacher who believed it was possible to have a successful art museum in a working-class neighborhood. In 1998, under Tortolero’s guidance as executive director for all of its 12 years, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum’s budget hit $3 million, making it the largest Latino arts organization in the U.S. It is also a remarkably young organization: At 44, Tortolero is the second oldest staffer.
Of particular note this year, MFACM launched WRTE, aimed at the area’s young people, and formally opened Yollocalli Youth Museum, an arts education and career training program.
“We visited other art projects for youth around the country and realized many of the successful ones were for straight A students,” he explains. “But we decided we wanted to represent the diversity of our community, so our program is for everyone.” Tortolero, who points out that Latino median age is about eight years younger than the mainstream, is quick to add: “Let’s face it, we have no shortage of young people.” This year, MFACM has expanded collaborative projects with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (it brought in Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes for a special youth concert and workshop earlier this month) and the Goodman Theater.
Last month, MFACM also broke ground on a new $7.5 million expansion scheduled to open in the year 2000. It will give the museum more than three times its present space. “But the one thing we’re not going to do,” Tortolero promises, “is have our own cafe or restaurant. When people come to the museum, we want them to experience the neighborhood, to go out.” As he talks, the human parade continues beyond the windows at WRTE.
— Achy Obejas
TEACHER/PERFORMER
Ursula Oppens is Chicago’s gift to the piano world, new music and music education.
Since assuming the position of John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at the Northwestern University School of Music in 1995, the 54-year-old pianist has been carrying the city’s banner far and wide. She invariably brings home glowing reviews, not only for her superior technique, but also for her musical integrity and the penetrating intelligence and commitment she brings to her uncommonly wide repertoire.
Oppens has been typecast as a specialist in the contemporary piano literature. Given her natural affinity for new music and ability to dispatch the most knotty contemporary scores as if they were no harder than “Chopsticks,” it’s no wonder that so many composers have written works for her.
Still, as her achievements in 1998 proved, to classify her as a “modern music pianist” is far too limiting. Indeed, the same gifts that make her a splendidly probing champion of Elliott Carter’s music also make her a sensitive, discerning interpreter of the standard keyboard canon.
Perhaps Oppens’ crowning performance came Dec. 9 at Symphony Center’s Buntrock Hall, where she and the Arditti String Quartet gave the local premiere of Carter’s exuberantly inventive Piano Quintet, which is dedicated to her and the Arditti; all five musicians are been tireless advocates of the composer’s works.
Oppens took part in another premiere here May 12 under auspices of American Women Composers Midwest, that of Chicago composer Patricia Morehead’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Despite her busy touring schedule, Oppens maintains a heavy teaching load at Northwestern University and finds time to squeeze in chamber music performances as well as her solo and orchestral concerts. Last summer, for example, she joined the Emerson Quartet in a performance of the Shostakovich Piano Quintet at the Ravinia Festival.
The reasons why we are honoring this multifaceted artist as one of our Arts Chicagoans of 1998 are plain. Oppens is good for Chicago music, and Chicago music is good for Oppens. And the relationship is flourishing.
— John von Rhein
SHREWD VETERAN
Theater careers in Chicago sometimes come to an end when the lure of the bigger paychecks and greater fame in movie, television or Broadway possibilities means relocating to another part of the country. Amy Morton, a Chicago actress for the last two decades, has heard that siren song, and has worked to good effect in movies and TV outside the city. But through it all, she has stayed in Chicago, first as a member of the Remains Theatre of late, Off Loop fame, and most recently as a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble.
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Always a gifted stage performer, this past year she worked almost nonstop, racking up a memorable trio of portrayals in Chicago theaters. In Shelagh Stevenson’s “The Memory of Water” at Steppenwolf she was one of three sisters looking back on their family life with rue and nostalgia; in Jeffrey Sweet’s “Flyovers” at Victory Gardens she was a woman, desperate for money, who took part in a bungled blackmailing scheme, and, in the performance of her career so far, in Charles L. Mee’s “The Berlin Circle” at Steppenwolf, she was glamorous, trivial, artificial, profound, hilarious and deeply moving as a Pamela Harriman-type socialite who becomes, almost in spite of herself, a loving, caring mother.
In all of her work, Morton has brought a warmth and vulnerability that, combined with a veteran’s shrewd stage instincts, mark her as a highly skilled and appealing actress.
Made an artistic associate of the Steppenwolf troupe last August, Morton is headed into 1999 with a new acting assignment, in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” in February; and in May she will make her Steppenwolf directorial debut with Jon Robin Baitz’s raucous show biz comedy, “Mizlansky/Zilinsky, or Schmucks.”
— Richard Christiansen
ARCHITECT/CINEASTE
In the arts there is always some cross-fertilization, and people active in one art form are often just as active in others. But, as far as making a big multiple impact in several forms at once, few Chicagoans can match Dan Coffey, the affable president and CEO (and Principal for Design) of Daniel Coffey and Associates, LTD., and also, since 1996, Chairman of the Governing Board of Directors for Cinema/Chicago and the Chicago International Film Festival.
It’s a double job in which Coffey shines — and in which, in the last few years, he has made major contributions to Chicago’s arts landscape. In his day architectural job, Coffey has been responsible for the elegant restoration of the Chicago Theater on State Street and the Oriental on Randolph (new home for the Ford Center for the Performing Arts), with a similar ongoing project on the Palace Theater to be completed in 1999. All three of these renovations mark a significant and successful effort to restore the luster of the old theater district.
Other major projects at his firm, include designs for DePaul University’s Performance Place Tower (for their new Music and Theater Schools), Gallery 37 for the Visual and Performing Arts in the Loop and New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
Just as significant are Coffey’s achievements as board chairman of the Chicago Film Festival. On a board heavily embattled when he took over, Coffey has been able to renovate the festival as well. Through his consensus-building approach, he has been able to restore unity, purpose and financial stability to Chicago’s most important film fest.
With the 35-year-old International Festival now on a firm footing, it’s perhaps fitting that their new headquarters are located on Randolph Street, in a building adjacent to one of Coffey’s other great reclamation projects, the Oriental Theater.
— Michael Wilmington
MUSEUM CURATOR
Every museum curator who organizes a major exhibition wants it to give a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Richard Townsend, curator of the department of African and Amerindian art at the Art Institute of Chicago, fulfills that desire more often than not.
Six years ago he mounted “The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes,” the most comprehensive show of pre-Columbian art — 300 pieces from 17 cultural traditions — ever mounted in the United States.
In 1998 he presented “Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archeology of the Unknown Past,” the largest of the four exhibitions that have treated such material and the only one that offered an in-depth exploration — more than 225 objects — to a city east of Los Angeles.
The show’s 308-page catalog, which Townsend contributed to and edited, has essays by 17 scholars; it’s the single most complete source on ancient West Mexican tomb sculptures in the English language. And this is a considerable achievement, given that the work has been a subject of study for about a century.
All the sculptures on view had been buried in tombs in the modern Mexican states of Jalisco, Colima and Nayarit more than 2,000 years ago. An absence of major architectural sites and monumental stone sculptures caused most scholars to think the areas were defined by the culture of simple villages, and they turned their attention to the great empires of the south and east.
Townsend, however, was different. His family had moved in 1947 to the city of Guadalajara, and from childhood he had a sense, bolstered by occasional discoveries of obsidian points and shards of pottery, that something mysterious was embedded in the landscape. “It remained for me a kind of unanswered question,” he said, and the show was “a way of retrieving memories both personal and of the kind that’s carried by the landscape of early human occupation.”
Everything on view in the exhibition was humanly scaled and accessible. So viewers felt the thrill of discovery as well as a strong, immediate personal connection. Those who could not attend in Chicago have another chance, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through March 29. Those who did see it already know why we cite the curator today for an extraordinary — and extraordinarily beautiful — effort.
— Alan G. Artner
PERFORMANCE POET
Two years ago, Reggie Gibson was just a rumor. He’d seen a poetry slam or two, gotten up on stage a couple of times, and that was that. In 1997, people were talking but he didn’t even make it on any of the dozens of Chicago teams that competed for the national slam championship.
In 1998, however, Gibson became a force of nature. Suddenly he was everywhere.
For starters, he skipped Chicago and helped put together a poetry slam team in Bellwood that led him to the national title. And it was no cakewalk: This year’s slam, the ninth ever, was also the biggest, with more than 200 teams vying for honors.
Since winning the title, Gibson’s gone into poetry full-time. He hosts a Sunday night of readings at Rituals, the South Loop jazz club, which has begun to offer mean competition to the Green Mill’s sacrosanct slam nights. And Mondays, he’s at the Africa West bookstore on the West Side, a tiny shoebox of a place that draws mostly from the neighborhood.
“It’s a way to bring hope,” says Gibson, an affable, impeccably polite young man who speaks with a honey sweet voice. “And it’s really good for my soul.”
Watching Gibson on stage is a something of a religious experience. What he does with poetry is more visceral than literary. While he turns phrases, pumps metaphors for all they’re worth, and piles image upon mid-bending image, Gibson also scats, sings, chants and plays in a way quite unlike anyone else. He borrows freely from jazz, punk, rock ‘n’ roll and African griot traditions. Upon hearing him at a Steppenwolf event, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., wrote him a laudatory note in which he called him “rare and charismatic.”
While he doesn’t have a college degree, Gibson has also emerged as a teacher this year. His favorite gig? Teaching creative writing to single mothers at the Head Start Teaching Center at National Lewis University. He also does a regular gig at the Bobby Wright Community Mental Health Center. So far this year, teaching and reading have taken him all over the country and seven times to Europe.
Next year’s looking good already: His book of verse, “Storms beneath the Skin” will be published by Nappy Head Press in January. “The Church of the Phunky Word,” a performance piece about how music shapes us, will premiere at the Guild Complex in February.
And next March, Gibson will kick off the South by Southwest Music Conference by performing his “Tribute to Jimi Hendrix,” a note-splitting, gut-wrenching celebration of genius that feels more like an exorcism than a mere dramatic performance.
— Achy Obejas