Supposedly the idea came to Mayor Daley one day last summer, while he was thinking about the Museum of Contemporary Art’s long-delayed plans to move to a new location.
Administration officials plead for calm.
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“First of all, the proposal to move the MCA there is only a proposal; the MCA doesn’t even know if they want to do it. They have to see how much it would cost,” says Avis LaVelle, press secretary to the mayor. “If they do move there, we are confident that a lot of what happens in the Cultural Center will have a natural home in the new Harold Washington Library. So I would advise the artists who are so upset to stop screaming.”
Still, city officials worried about what would become of the building when the library collection moves south. The building costs as much as $5 million a year to secure, heat, and maintain, according to some estimates. Officials feared an outcry once the public learned that so many tax dollars were being spent on a building used only for art.
True, most of our major museums–like the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry–receive funds from the Park District, which owns the land they sit on. But the money spent to cultivate, develop, and display local artistic talent is minuscule. And Daley’s across-the-board budget cuts forced Cultural Affairs to sever $150,000 from its grants-to-artists program. (Although it should be said in Daley’s defense that the decision to cut the grants program was Harris’s. According to administration officials, she could have taken the money from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which unlike emerging artists has many wealthy patrons who could have made up the difference.)
Harris will not comment on the matter. But through friends she has let it be known that she opposes plans to move the MCA into the Cultural Center. And in an interview with television reporter Andy Shaw, she denounced the $150,000 budget cut as unfair “to small and emerging arts organizations.”
“Moving to the Cultural Center probably won’t save us any capital expenses,” says one MCA insider. “But you have to love the location. We could do great on Chicago Avenue; it’s an affluent area. But very few people from the south or west sides would be able to make it there. If we moved to the Cultural Center, we’d be exposing modern art to people who had never experienced it. And that would be great for the city.”
