Arts & Politics
TOM TRESSER'S WORK IN ARTS ORGANIZING & POLITICS
Read a detailed history of Tom's work in creativity and civic engagement.
In 1990 I organized Greater Chicago Citizens for The Arts, a membership organization dedicated to electing candidates who supported the arts and freedom of expression. GCCA was a political action organization and we worked to get arts workers involved in the electoral process.
We were very active for three years...
We actively recruited members in the arts and creative community. Dues were $30.00 and were not tax deductible. We eventually had some 400 dues-paying members.
We trained over 60 artists to register people to vote.
GCCA deputy registrars registered over 1,200 people to vote. We did this in theater lobbies, at arts festivals, in front of post offices and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
We worked with candidates for Alderman, State Representative, U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate to draft arts and culture policy statements. These statements contained both background statements about the impact of the arts in society as well as specific policy points that the candidate would pursue in the areas of arts support, arts in education and arts in the broad agenda of urban renewal.
We wrote the arts policy statements for candidates for local and federal office. We created a policy statement for Judy Erwin's first campaign for State Representative from Chicago's 11th District, which includes the Loop. She won that race and has been re-elected four times. We co-authored the arts policy statement from the campaign of Carol Mosley Braun for the U.S. Senate. Read the essay, "The Arts Need to Get Into Political Action." (WORD doc)
We endorsed candidates for office (22 candidates in the 1992 election cycle) and worked to get them elected. We helped to raise money (over $25,000 for the Braun campaign), we collected signatures for our candidates at arts fairs, we sent volunteers to campaign offices, we printed and distributed over 12,000 pro-arts slate cards urging arts patrons to vote for our ticket and we held several public events to spotlight our candidates.
Tom served as a connector to the Braun campaign
to the Illinois arts and culture community, volunteering
one day a week at the campaign HQ for six months.
We endorsed and passed endorsement literature for then Alderman Luis Gutierrez, who was running for Congress. We hosted a reception at a local gallery and the candidate spoke at our rally at the Royal George Theater and was a keynote speaker at our Politics 101 Conference and Exhibition at the Randolph Street Gallery. After his election, GCCA organized a town hall meeting for the arts at The Chopin Theater on Division Street, attended by over 150 people. We then went on to organize the 4th Congressional District Arts & Culture Advisory Council.
I spoke out at meetings and arts conferences in Chicago and across the country on the need for the arts community and progressives in general to organize politically and create a unified vision for civic action. I tracked the progress of the Radical Right, including the Christian Coalition, which I felt was becoming alarmingly effective in organizing its base, mobilizing resources and getting people elected.
We produced events in arts spaces and theaters that combined elements of performance, education and political action. We printed and distributed literature, newsletters, candidate endorsement cards and curated publications and exhibits.
The Christian Coalition was founded following fundamentalist
evangelical Pat Robertson's failed 1988 bid for the Republican
nomination for President. By 1991 it had a well organized
and publicly announced political strategy for grassroots organizing
at the county level in every state. It distributed tens of
million voter's guides in the 1992 election cycle. 
The power of the Religious Right has grown since then and
has successfully inoculated the entire American political
system with its values and agenda. Read
more...
I wrote a bi-weekly column on arts and politics for PerformInk, a Chicago-based newspaper serving the entertainment industry here. Here's a column from 1993 reporting on the defeat of pro-arts Illinois Congressman John Cox by Ron Manzullo with the help of the Christian Coalition.
GCCA disbanded in 1994 as I turned my attention to a new full-time job. My efforts in organizing creative people to participate in civic and political work were rewarding and productive. But I think we only scratched the surface of the resources and power that can be unleashed from the creative community on behalf of progressive candidates for public office.
2004-2007. Ten years later circumstances have called me back to this work. I am frustrated by the success of the Far Right in mobilizing their constituents, electing officials at all levels of government and steering this country to a place of intolerance, ignorance and fear-mongering. All, sadly, as I had predicted in 1991. I attempted to organize a nonpartisan, but progressive and creative response. I called it The Creative America Project. It’s purpose was to help establish creativity as a national value for policy and political engagement by encouraging and training creative professionals to run for local office. By creative professionals, I mean anyone who makes their living from their creative work – artists, performers, designers, educators, scientists, researchers, nonprofit managers, community organizers and activists. This was to be a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. I recruited an impressive list of board members and an advisory council and applied for nonprofit status in July of 2004. As of Spring 2007, despite responding to six different sets of questions from two different IRS examiners and repeated calls from my Congressman’s office, no determination has been rendered and the organization has dissolved. Over the three years I spend organizing this effort, I was invited to speak to a number of arts service organizations about the idea of artists and cultural workers as leaders. The responses of attendees were thrilling. People seemed to be genuinely surprised and inspired by my message that – basically, they were already leaders and that America desperately needs their creative values and skills in the public sector. Unfortunately, these offers to speak were the only encouragement I got from America’s arts service industry. I did publish op-eds in the official magazines of the nonprofit theater community and America’s nonprofit performing arts organizations. So, in early 2007, with no official tax status rendered, no funding possible, and no encouragement from any national arts or creative organization, the Creative America Project has folded.
I produced events at The University of Oregon, the Louisville Arts Council, The Guild Complex, Victory Gardens, the Opt-In Artists Exhibit on social change and Around the Coyote.
March 2004 -- I attended Camp Wellstone, a 2 1/2 day training session for progressive, grassroots activists and candidates.
April 2004 -- I was elected to the Local School Council of the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Lincoln Park.
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April 2006 - I started teaching "How To Be A Cultural Activist" at DePaul University's School for New Learning. Other classes I've since developed and taught include "Who's Lying To You Now?" for DePaul. Coming up: "The Politics of Creativity / Creativity in Politic" for DePaul's Political Science Department and "The Artist as Activist" for Loyola University's Theatre Department.
