A SHORT HISTORY OF TOM TRESSER'S WORK IN ARTS, POLITICS, CREATIVITY AND PUBLIC POLICY
1990
Summer 1990 - As Managing Director of Pegasus Players, I urged the League of Chicago Theatres to respond to the threat to the National Endowment for the Arts. The Culture Wars were under way and we were loosing - we weren't even suited up for battle! The League is the trade association for Chicago's theater industry.
Fall 1990 - The League creates is first action/policy effort, The Advocacy Task Force and Roche Schulfer, Executive Director of The Goodman Theater, becomes its chairman. I resigned from Pegasus Players to become the staff person for the League's Advocacy Task Force. The Task Force organized a wide range of activities: voter registration in theater lobbies, getting program inserts printed and distributed with house managers giving curtain speeches, a rally in Daley Plaza and an unprecedented 10,000 piece political mailing using the mailing lists of 10 theaters. For a look at the materials we produced and distributed, click here.
At the same time, I approached the MacArthur Foundation for funding to start organizing a proactive response to the attack on the arts. I received funding to travel to six cities to examine what artists are doing to empower themselves and what the city and business community is doing to support the arts.
I visited New York, Boston, Washington DC, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco to learn what artists were doing for themselves in terms of innovative support and what was being done for them by business and government. I found a wide range of exciting programs - in Boston, artists had financed and built a number of fabulous live-work spaces in converted warehouses, in Milwaukee I found a United Way type of funding drive for the arts that raised millions anually, in San Francisco I learned that the city arts granting program was funding by their hotel tax and was several times larger than the comparable program run by Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs. Read the summary of the types of programs I encountered (PDF document).
The idea behind this research was to compile models and exemplary programs and present them to Chicago's cultural community and see what types of programs we might want to adopt for ourselves. What types of creative arts support existed in other cities? Our goal was to then help facilitate a process to learn and move the requisite civic action forward to enact programs for Chicago. This sort of proactive research would be part of an ongoing strategic planning effort for Chicago's cultural community.
The MacArthur grant also covered community organizing training for a dozen arts leaders from The Midwest Academy. This training was led by Jackie Kendall and Steve Max. Participants included Alton Miller, Mayor Washington's Press Secretary, Peter Taub, then Artistic Director of The Randolph Street Gallery and Matthew Brockmeier, then Executive Director of the Chicago Music Alliance. Alton now teaches at Columbia College and is a consultant for The Illinois Arts Alliance. Peter is Director of Performance Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Arts here and Matthew> went on to direct the expanded Chicago Dance and Music Alliance.
The most startling experience I had on the research trip was at a women's arts space in San Francisco. During one of my interviews I learned of an organization called the San Francisco Arts Democratic Club. Apparently political clubs are the way that local Democratic politics gets done in San Francisco - where candidates for local office cut their teeth on grassroots efforts and whose support all area candidates seek for funds, endorsements and campaign workers. The Arts Democratic Club was meeting that night at a local arts space to hear from candidates running for City Council (in Chicago, we call them Aldermen).
I went to this meeting with a great sense of curiosity and excitement. The space was on the upper floor of the arts space which I recall as being fairly open and had an exhibit up. There were a number of chairs put out and about 20 people in attendance. This was 12 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy - but I distinctly remember three candidates present, two men and one women, one being African-American and one being Asian-American. Each candidate was given about five minutes to speak and hand out literature. The candidates were very serious in seeking the organization's endorsement and each offered to work with the Club on policy and related matters and to meet with them regularly. I was astonished. Here were office seekers coming hat-in-hand to a group of artists to ask for their help in return for promises of future cooperation and mutual advantage. I tried to imagine such a meeting in Chicago with Aldermanic candidates coming before a group of Chicago artists and asking for their support. At that time, Chicago's City Council was still reeking from the racist odors of the infamous Council Wars that marred Mayor Harold Washington's early years in office. In addition, a number Alderman had been jailed for assorted crimes. The group politely heard from the candidates and the coordinator discussed the follow-up actions with the attendees, with a formal endorsement session scheduled for the near future. [The image to the right is from a September 2003 forum in San Francisco where six candidates for Mayor came to a forum co-sponsored by the Arts Democratic Club. Over 500 people attended].
When I got home I was resolved to try to duplicate this organization for Chicago. After all, politics is a participatory sport here, we have a long history of community organizing and people-powered institutions and there were hundreds of arts organizations in the city. It seemed like a natural.
