Feb. 06--Laurie Glenn, a Chicago public policy activist and founder of the politically minded arts group ThinkArt, dropped her leather bag into a chair. We met in a conference room of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a grant-making foundation on Wacker Drive with an eye on social justice issues. Glenn, who also runs the social justice-minded consulting firm Thinkinc., was there for a strategy meeting, "to talk influence-building." I was there to steal her for a second, to look at the artwork she would be installing in River North's Josef Glimer Gallery.
The show's theme was familiar:
Youth violence in Chicago.
Deangel Graves, 15, said her piece was about a 3-month-old girl who died in the line of gunfire. "When Miss Mullkoff said we were doing this, I said it was depressing. 'Do we have to remind ourselves about dead people?' Then I thought that girl's parents would be proud, that someone understood her life wasn't nothing."
As Mullkoff reminded me, the project was never intended for an audience, "just to empower (the students) to think about how violence affects them." The Glimer show, which was going to be called "Too Young to Die" until organizers learned of a photo exhibit on the same subject with that title, came about when Mullkoff ran into Glenn at the Victory Gardens Theater production of "The Gospel of Lovingkindness," playwright Marcus Gardley's story about the cycle of inevitability and heartbreak that defines gun violence in Chicago.
Now, part of that cycle is art, a lot of art.
And the usefulness of any art, about anything, is never clear.
Hallie Gordon, director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, told me that before her group created the 2013 show "How Long Will I Cry? Voices of Youth Violence," it went into communities that had experienced a lot of violence and based the script on interviews with residents, who were often overwhelmed by and appreciative of the finished work. And yet, she said: "Throughout the whole process I got really flustered because, naively, maybe, I started to realize I wasn't going to solve anything here. As a somewhat privileged white person, I wasn't a credible messenger to offer a solution, but, ultimately, I could offer support to voices who were." (Next season, Steppenwolf's youth theater will take as its theme what it means to be an ally.)
But if the only outcome for art about this is empathy, that may not be enough, either. Reading Tribune Newspapers reporter Jill Leovy's engrossing new "Ghettoside," a nonfiction account of murder investigations of young black men in LA, I came upon an almost tossed-off idea that I thought should be pasted up across Chicago's North Side: "Take a bunch of teenager boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens."
Shaming, though, would expend the genre even faster.
So I called Gardley, who lives in Chicago and based "Gospel" partly on his experiences growing up in West Oakland, Calif. He didn't know if this was becoming a little too routine either. "That's a hard question, but we need to raise it," he said. "If there's not change, and there's a lot of art about (youth violence), is this art just not doing its job? If you are moved by traumas but not moved to create change?"
You're describing stasis, I said.
Exactly, he said, and told me about the "Gospel"-based community outreach sessions that he had on the South Side last summer. "The people I was talking to, they knew how to engage, they knew how to say the things I wanted to hear, as an artist, about gun violence. They watched the show, then were like: 'Enough of this. We don't want to talk about violence. We want another vision here.' They wanted to see beyond this stuff. They wanted to know how to get onstage! I thought, 'Of course. Because that's where the power is.'"
cborrelli@tribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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