Entry #7: Zg Art Party, 4/20/2011

Last week, as a pseudo-sign-off to my Engage Chicago project, I went to Zg gallery after my internship for an early evening art soiree. A friend of Martina's was surprising her husband by bringing him to the gallery to pick out one of Martina's paintings for their home. We had some wine and cheese and I felt like I was finally graduating after of my studying Chicago galleries, museums, and studios. Little sapling artist Sarah was being invited to art parties for grown-ups! I was in.

As a college student who sometimes feels overwhelmed by the possibilities of the professional world, I am very interested in why and how people get to doing the jobs that they do. Call it my Turkelian (yes, I just made that word; I've been reading a lot of Studs Turkel's Working lately) curiosity, but it led me over to gallery owners Meg Sheehy and Myra Casis (and the brie and gouda, let's be honest) to talk about how they came to operate Zg. I first asked about their undergraduate experiences and whether they imagined themselves working in a place like this. Maybe their vision wasn't as specific as a "Z" and "g" appearing atop an artist's Sinai somewhere in rural Illinois...but something like this was always on their radars. They met in college, where Myra was majoring in Studio Art and Business and Meg in Studio Art and maybe something else but I can't remember, so you'll have to live with that horrific cliff hanger! Stop asking about it!

Myra was the one who articulated their mutual realization that it was just not humanly possible to keep up a personal studio practice and also own a gallery. There isn't enough time in the day for both, so they chose the business side--chose to facilitate the sale of other artists' work so that those artists could spend their time worrying about the making and not the selling. (Of course, this is really only a half truth, because as I learned through Martina, a huge part of being a studio artist is constantly marketing yourself even when you feel like just holing up with your paintings.)

Well, we all chatted for a while about the various characters who buy paintings: the locals, the tourists, the crazies who stash Nehrlings under their beds, and the mysterious collector-callers who turn out to be insanely affluent art divas with Rembrandt sketches hanging by their toilets. Not fair. But we all laughed it off and continued to look around at the gallery, talking about how impressive it was that M&M (Meg and Myra, of course) manage to take very disparate styles of art and weave them together in a colorful but seamless collection. And this art conversation resulted in a happy realization for me: looking at galleries and museums is worth nothing if it doesn't bring you some sort of pleasure. And for me, the pleasure is in knowing that there are certain things I will always be blind to, things that other viewers can point out to me and make me appreciate. (And vice versa for them I hope.) Art should be a conversation, and this makes me wish that more people wanted to talk about art like I do. I do! But  Chicagoans are certainly on their way, and I am so happy to live in this cultural reservoir, alive and ENGAGING, if only for the semester.