Aiding Chicago’s arts community

A year into the pandemic, we’re seeing the resilience of our arts and cultural community in Chicago. In spite of widespread closures, our sector continues to find ways to bring joy, connect, challenge and inspire — with outdoor performances, open galleries, museums and creative mutual aid programs. You can’t stop artists from making, and they have helped us all get through these times.

As much as we appreciate what large events like Taste of Chicago and the Air and Water Show do for tourism and our economy, we urge our fellow residents and city government to remember the creative assets embedded in every neighborhood. These workers and small businesses need direct investment to stay afloat and should be prioritized for relief and recovery funding. They will not only contribute economically to the city — nonprofit arts and culture groups contributed $3.2 billion in economic impact, according to the last Arts Alliance Illinois report before the pandemic — but just as important, the arts will be a critical part of the city’s civic recovery.

We in the arts are as enthusiastic as anyone about a return to a vibrant cultural life. We are in the business of creating meaningful experiences for large groups; we were the first to close, and we will be the last to reopen.

There is no takeout model for our industry, and we need audiences at scale in order to open successfully. Chicago’s creative industries have experienced over $4.7 billion in lost revenue and over 86,000 lost jobs since March 2020, according to a recent Brookings Institution study.

We must invest in joy, solidarity, innovation and the ways artists contribute to our city beyond stages, galleries and the tax base: through education, violence prevention, community development, public health and more.

If we agree that the arts are critical to the lifeblood of this great city’s vitality and its future, we also need to agree to invest public resources to support this work.