Walking through the Hyde Park Art Center shortly before its big “Artists Run Chicago 2.0” exhibition opened early this month, Ciera McKissick was thrilled.
“It’s so nice to see everything together,” said McKissick, the center’s public programs coordinator. “There’s so much art in this building right now.”
She’s not the show’s curator, but she’s put together the mostly virtual public programming for it. And she knows, knows of and even has worked with many of the artists and independent, artist-run spaces that are in the 50-organization show.
“The entire building has been completely taken over by art,” she said, “our major gallery spaces, into the hallways and even the bathroom and kitchen spaces as well. So I don’t think there’s a crevice left that hasn’t been taken over.”
The show is, in a sense, a metaphor for her short but notable career in Chicago, which has been marked by a bold move into opening her own space, AMFM, which is in the exhibition; by putting on events; by moving into steady work at an established arts organization; and by trying to find time to pursue her own, text-based art, currently through a residency at Chicago Art Department, another of the groups in the show.
“She just wants to do it all,” said Kamilah Rashied, the director of education for Court Theatre and a friend and mentor of McKissick’s. “She has a lot of great ideas, and she wants it all to be realized. She’s just prolific. Not everybody has the energy or the know-how or the taste to be that prolific.”
McKissick is also “genuinely interested in artists of color, in centering, in making space for them,” she said.
And her personability and personal style help, too. (Indeed, a search for her in Tribune photo records turns up shots where she was photographed for her look at Pitchfork Music Festival and at a gallery opening.)
“I’ve been out gallery walking with her,” said Rashied, who got to know McKissick because part of her previous job, at the Art Institute, was seeking out and working with young Chicagoans who were on that cutting edge. “Everyone knew her. Everyone. We could not get a foot down the street without five people running up, ‘Hey, Ciera!’ So part of it is that people like her.
“And she always looks really cool. She has impeccable style. And she knows what is on the verge. She knows in Chicago who’s the person to know, who’s doing the very cool thing at that time.”
One of McKissick’s secrets, said Jane Georges, an artist who has known and worked with McKissick almost from the time the latter moved here from Milwaukee in 2014, is that her achievements are not random.
“A thing to know about Ciera is she has a vision board,” outlining her goals for the coming year, Georges said. “As long as I’ve known her, she’s crossed almost everything off that list every year.”
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McKissick may be soft-spoken and sunny in disposition, Georges said, but don’t be fooled: “She may have a quiet voice, but she does not have a quiet voice.”
As Georges said this, she was standing on a ladder on the second floor of the art center, drill in hand, installing her “Pink Tape Wall” that has become a signature piece for AMFM. The acronym stands for Art Music Fashion Magazine, and what McKissick now calls “a brand for artists and people” began more as a magazine, an independent study project in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied journalism and mass communication.
After school, she moved to Sacramento, Calif., for a time, then returned to her native Milwaukee, keeping AMFM going and being involved in the local art scene the whole time. She moved to Chicago six years ago, because, she said, “I wanted to really think about the next steps and continue to work in a larger way.”
The plan was to be here a year, “but I really felt in love with the arts community here and just the hustle and drive of the people,” she said.
She spent the first year essentially in the audience, seeing art and music and making connections. “Wherever I go, I look for where the artists are,” said McKissick, who’s now 33. “I would look for flyers and things that were going on. I would go to shows and open mics and really just observe and talk with people about their work and get to know folks and whatnot. So I don’t think I threw my first show until about a year after I moved here.”
After that little period on pause, it’s been fast-forward since, from the sound of things. To support herself, she worked at a middle school and then a marketing agency. “And then things started to ramp up,” she said. “My focus was elsewhere. So I needed to take the leap of faith and go full time and run my space.”
She quit her steady job and opened AMFM as a gallery/events space in Pilsen and for two years put on shows and events there. It won Best New Gallery in the Reader’s 2017 Best of Chicago survey. “We were booked every weekend with shows and whatnot,” said McKissick, but there developed what she termed “irreconcilable differences with our landlord” and she had to close.
After some soul searching, she decided not to open another space right away, she said, noting that “sometimes things happen before you know why they happen.”
Instead she landed last October at the established Hyde Park Art Center. “I was really interested in professional development and learning about sustainability and how nonprofit institutions work,” McKissick said. “Most of the things I was doing with AMFM over time were self-taught, and I was just kind of trying things and winging it. I wanted to work in a space and get insight on how things worked from the inside as well.”
There was a lot of time to be inside, of course, because the pandemic hit in March, just as planning was ramping up for the original planned launch of the “Artists Run Chicago 2.0” show the next month.
Reopening HPAC with the “2.0” show has McKissick grateful to be welcoming the public back but also a little wistful about the programming she had planned that is moving to virtual. But she just adapted to the new realities, she said, and tried to make the best of it.
“She’s really talented and has a strong vision for how the art world in Chicago could evolve,” said Mike Nourse, a colleague as the director of education at HPAC and also executive director at Chicago Art Department, which has given McKissick two residencies now.
“I could really see her helping to lead new and innovative programs for institutions here in Chicago like she’s doing for HPAC now but at a more prominent level,” he said. “I could see her as a prominent artist, a prominent administrator, a prominent curator. Maybe the world will help her decide, but she’s definitely destined for some important work — and important work for all of us.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson