New Black arts leaders coming to Chicago
Ken-Matt Martin, one of many, is new artistic director at Victory Gardens
On Wednesday, Victory Gardens Theater announced that it has hired Ken-Matt Martin, currently an associate producer at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, as its new artistic director.
Martin, a 32-year-old native of Little Rock, Arkansas, who holds a graduate degree from Brown University, said he will take up his new position in April. He’s a relative newcomer to Chicago, hired at the Goodman only about 18 months ago. But he says he is eager now to hear more from the artists in the community.
“We have to navigate our way out of the pandemic,” Martin said, in an interview Tuesday wherein he spoke of his desire to conduct “a listening tour” of the city’s artists.
“I’m excited,” Martin said, “to get in there and start doing the work to figure out what’s necessary for the theater to reopen.”
Martin, whose hire follows much internal dissent and soul-searching at the long-standing Lincoln Park theater following the departures of its former artistic and executive directors, respectively Chay Yew and Erica Daniels, is the latest example of a surely unprecedented wave of incoming Black artistic talent with the challenging task of leading the Chicago theater and dance communities out of a bruising pandemic.
In November, Jon Carr was hired from Atlanta to be the executive producer in creative charge of The Second City. In February, Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell was hired from Baltimore to be the new artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. In March, Lanise Antoine Shelley, who grew up in California and trained at Harvard University, among other places, became the new artistic director of the House Theatre of Chicago.
Those hires, which encompass most if not all of the major artistic vacancies in the city in recent months, follow upon other shifts during 2020 at smaller Chicago institutions, including the arrival of Regina Victor as artistic director of the ambitious Sideshow Theatre Company last summer.
For most of its history, Chicago theater had few artistic directors of color leading major arts institutions, notwithstanding such pioneers as Jackie Taylor at the Black Ensemble Theater and Chuck Smith and Douglas Alan Mann at the Chicago Theatre Company. That’s not a complete list, but the current wave of hiring is notable, nonetheless.
This new group of artistic leaders is, of course, diverse in all kinds of ways. But it’s striking how many of them can legitimately be described as multihyphernates, to use the industry parlance referencing artists whose careers cross traditional boundaries. Victor, for example, is both an artistic director and a critic.
It’s also striking how many came to the field as performers: Fisher-Harrell danced with Hubbard Street and Alvin Ailey; Shelley trained as a classical actor at the Stratford Festival of Canada; Carr has been an improviser in Atlanta.
And Martin was a successful child actor who worked on shows for Nickelodeon, where he had a development contract and worked on “All That,” the popular sketch-comedy series on the cable network aimed at kids.
Also notable is the departure from the traditional geographic insularity that often has afflicted Chicago theater and, to a lesser extent, dance.
While there are some connections to the city (Shelley has been acting here and Martin has those months producing work at the Goodman), none of this new group of artistic leaders was born here, nor did they emerge from one of the city’s many training programs, a traditional source of artistic leadership for the city. This is another departure from previous generations of leadership: for example, Victory Gardens’ long-serving former artistic director Dennis Zacek grew up in Chicago and graduated from DePaul University and Taylor famously grew up in the Cabrini-Green housing project and has pursued a career that has been both in and all about the city of her birth.
As a group, and by contrast, these newly hired leaders have a raft of national experience. Despite his youth, Martin already has worked at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, one of North America’s most prominent summer theaters, where he helped negotiate the contracts for two Broadway transfers, including the Tony-nominated production of “The Sound Inside,” as directed by David Cromer.
They arrive, it hardly needs to be said, at a most difficult time for the city’s arts organizations. The road to recovery remains murky, if no longer blocked, and many of their institutions have been through periods of financial distress, with staffers furloughed and artists put on ice: In Carr’s case, he has to lead a Second City that has a new, out-of-town owner likely to want to broaden the reach of an institution that is part of the cultural DNA of the city of its founding. Others have similarly major challenges.
Many of these leaders are heading up institutions that have boards of director who have said they wanted to engage in wholesale reinvention, while also bringing all their present constituencies along.
That is never easy, of course, especially in an era when earned income has atrophied and audiences will need to be reengaged. But desired change usually needs to start at the top.