Once a giant, 30-year-old Art Chicago now is just big
With year-round, global competition, the longtime fair is larger than some prefer


People attend Art Chicago at Navy Pier in 1985. (Tribune file photo / May 9, 1985)



Thirty years have come and gone since Art Chicago was born. Which is a noteworthy accomplishment, especially considering the drama of 2006 — the year that Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. swooped in to bail out the financially burdened fair.

Depending on whom you ask, the fact that Art Chicago has soldiered on for three decades is either a no-brainer or a miracle. Its longevity is admirable. Its financial stability, especially now that it's in the hands of a trade-show giant, is undeniable. But the questions remain: Do we still care about one of the longest-running art fairs in the United States? And why, when so many gallerists have expressed displeasure with what they see an increasing focus on quantity over quality, do they continue to exhibit year after year?

"I don't know."

That's the short answer from Chicago gallery veteran Rhona Hoffman, who has owned her namesake gallery for 34 years and exhibited at Art Chicago since its inception in 1980. She expands: "Because I've been asked to fly the flag and I'm flying the flag. You can't ask people from out of town to come to the art fair if people in Chicago don't participate." And once again, Hoffman is exhibiting this year. She confirmed as much over a recent telephone call, but not before exhaling a long, audible sigh.

It's a sigh of surrender. Art Chicago, to be sure, has changed significantly even in the past four years. The year after taking over the fair, Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., or MMPI, launched Artropolis, and under that moniker runs the whole kit-and-kaboodle: Art Chicago, an antiques show, the NEXT show of emerging art and related programming.

"The national reputation Chicago enjoys through its art is helpful to our branding," says Christopher Kennedy, president of MMPI. "Chicago is the center for art and design. For us, art, design, architecture, building products, furniture — they go together. It's a continuum."

That continuum, the Artropolis umbrella under which art, design, architecture and furniture are meant to live happily ever after, is not the ideal for many of the gallerists who attend Art Chicago year after year. Some of the loyal locals such as Carl Hammer, who has attended the fair since 1981, would rather see a return to the Art Chicago of yore, when it was a single, must-visit event.

"It's not the show that all of us wanted it to be," Hammer says of Artropolis. "I believe the Merchandise Mart tripped or stumbled on their own feet by trying to do too much. … They just watered it down to a point where no one knew where the real show was, and those of us that had paid full price for our booths saw others walking around thinking the main fair was on a different floor, and so on. That spoiled it for us last year."

Still, there almost wasn't a last year, when four years ago Sunday, turmoil struck Art Chicago. It was a Tuesday, and the decades-old art fair produced by Thomas Blackman Associates was slated to open two days later under a small village of white exhibition tents at Grant Park's Butler Field. But that morning, the would-be load-in day for hundreds of exhibitors and their millions of dollars worth of art, the field was vacant, save for the tents.

Hammer remembers. "I woke up that morning … when a colleague of mine called me up and said, ‘Carl, get your butt over to the tent. You are not going to believe it.' I drove over there, and of course the wind was flapping the empty tents, and there were no workmen there at all. It was like a ghost town. It was shocking."

More than 100 gallerists from Chicago and the rest of the world held their collective breath that day as details began to surface: Art Chicago organizer Blackman was in financial trouble, and rumors were confirmed of recently sought loans and even a desperate, last-minute attempt to sell his namesake firm. "We realized that things were going south weeks ahead of time," Blackman recalls. By early evening, news of Art Chicago's stalemate had reached Mayor Richard Daley. That night, Blackman made a phone call to Mark Falanga, senior vice president of MMPI.

"He said, ‘Look, I'm really in a bind here,'" Falanga recalls. "‘It doesn't look like the fair can go on over at Butler Field in Grant Park. Can you help us out here? Can we figure out a way to produce the show?'"

Falanga and Kennedy accepted the challenge, cobbling together Art Chicago with the Chicago Antiques Fair, scheduled to open that weekend at the Merchandise Mart. Hundreds of street banners, tens of thousands of e-mail messages and dozens of redirected tourist shuttles later, Art Chicago 2006 opened on time for its Thursday media preview, and then Friday's public opening. Weekend attendance neared 42,000.

The drama of 2006 is just one of the festival's many bumps. Founded in 1980 as the Chicago International Art Exposition by Michigander John Wilson and his Lakeside Group of creative entrepreneurs, the fair has changed hands a half-dozen times and been staged at nearly as many locations. In the early 1990s, the popularity of Wilson's fair spawned two competitors; for a time there were three fairs. History repeated itself in 2005, by the time Blackman was running the premier fair, and two more newbies emerged.

Nowadays, the competition is global and year-round. Hoffman says those factors have helped weaken Art Chicago's ability to attract galleries and collectors.

"There was this big gap between the end of the Navy Pier show and then the fiasco of the tents (at Butler Field), and then the picking up of the corpse by Chris Kennedy, which was really good of him to do," Hoffman says. "But in that time frame, Art Basel Miami was born and became really successful; the Armory Show in New York sprouted up and became really successful, and both became huge competitors. While we were sleeping, they were doing really good things."

Art Basel Miami, the young, sunny spinoff of the 41-year-old Swiss art-fair mainstay, is regarded by some as the new Art Chicago, with its trendy vibe, airy warehouses full of collections and open-house parties thrown by wealthy collectors. New York's Armory Show turned 11 this year, but especially in tandem with the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial, with which it aligns every other year in early March, it's a must on important collectors' calendars.

Incidentally, the Armory Show is owned by MMPI. It was acquired in 2007 along with Basel's Volta show (and counterpart Volta New York) on the heels of MMPI's first year running Art Chicago. The following year, MMPI acquired the Toronto International Art Fair. It would seem that MMPI's 2006 rescue of Art Chicago has inspired an empire.

But can Art Chicago keep up with the Basels? It all depends upon whom you ask.

"Art Basel is one of the oldest shows and has more prestige with the dealers, but outside of that I think there's a place for what we have," says Lois Weisberg, who has been commissioner of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs since 1989. "It's still different; it's still Chicago."

Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, says Art Chicago is "absolutely in line with the best of the fairs" that she attends, in terms of "energy, new information and progressing my knowledge base forward."

Armory Show executive director Katelijne De Backer, though technically under MMPI's managerial umbrella, didn't vouch for Art Chicago's international significance, calling it an important event "for the middle of America" and for Chicago.

Blackman, who continues to produce fairs, is hopeful.

"Chicago still has incredible attributes that can make for a great fair," he says, "but I think like any organization like (Art Chicago), it needs to reconstitute itself along the way."

Gallerists such as Hammer and Hoffman are nostalgic for the fair's return to its simpler, more concentrated past, but like everyone else, they're hopeful.

"I think the show can and will come back," Hammer says, adding that in his world travels to other fairs, "I can't tell you the number of galleries that have expressed their hope that one day the major world-art fair would return to Chicago or that Chicago would rise again. It's quite evident that this is the ideal location for such a fair to take that role of prominence or leadership."

Art Expo founder Wilson, now 75 and retired to a leisurely life of pottery-making in Benton Harbor, Mich., has been invited back to Art Chicago as an honored guest every year since MMPI took over. His only complaint about his fair's legacy is the size of the current incarnation.

"Chris (Kennedy) doesn't know that art means quality, not quantity," Wilson says. "If he could really get it concentrated, the whole world will come there."

Art Chicago 2010 opens as part of Artropolis Friday through May 3 at the Merchandise Mart, main lobby and the 12th floor, 312-527-3090; artchicago.com. Admission $20 for one day, $25 for multi-day.