EMPTY (PROJECT) SPACE NavtaSchulz, gescheidle and giftshop vacate 1039 W Lake St.

Photo: Lauren Weinberg

Chicago lost five galleries in June: NavtaSchulz, gescheidle and giftshop project space in the West Loop; Lisa Boyle in West Town; and Dubhe Carreño in Pilsen. Are they victims of the recession, or are other forces at work?

Britton Bertran, who closed his own gallery 40000 in December, believes the turnover is natural, given that galleries tend to have a lifespan of only five years. Rents here are much lower than in New York, but sluggish sales still make them unaffordable. Like most of the gallerists we interviewed, Lisa Boyle says she was breaking even. She paid $700 per month to rent space at 1821 West Hubbard Street, which is more than 1.5 miles from the West Loop’s major cluster of galleries. When Boyle’s neighbor, Western Exhibitions, moves to the more centrally located 119 North Peoria Street in September, founder Scott Speh expects to pay somewhat less than $2,000 per month for a space. “No one’s going to make a living being a gallerist in Chicago,” he warns.

Our art market isn’t the only one that’s suffering. “In Boston, Florida and Seattle, galleries are [also] closing left and right,” Bertran says. “But not in New York or Los Angeles, [where] they’re able to sell work and put down a crazy amount of money for art fairs—that’s where the collector base is.” At Artropolis 2008, an Art Chicago booth cost $40 per square foot and a NEXT booth, $22 per square foot. Ryan Schulz of NavtaSchulz estimates that most gallerists thus paid between $8,000 and $15,000 at Art Chicago; Speh says his NEXT booth was more than $7,000.

Other gallerists say that art fairs contributed to this wave of closings. Wendy Cooper, who closed her eponymous gallery in February 2007, has witnessed three decades of art-world trends. “My gallery lived through the years where you could live through your shows, but then the art fairs became the focus of sales,” she explains. “That doubles or triples [gallery] expenses.” The shift has been disastrous for the many gallerists who sell little at the fairs but feel compelled to show up to get exposure, attract new collectors and maintain their reputations. According to Schulz, if gallerists admit to artists or collectors that they didn’t attend Art Basel Miami Beach or its satellite fairs, for example, “it doesn’t look good.”

“I’ve spent so much time researching for art fairs, going to art fairs and applying to art fairs that I feel like a traveling salesman,” Boyle complains, calling the art world “oversaturated” with fairs. “You take your artists’ work, hang it in some shitty, half-assed booth with 400 [other] booths. It’s not conducive to showing the work.”

Yet Schulz suggests there’s more to the closings than the art-fair problem. He contends Chicago cultural institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art don’t give enough support to local emerging artists—and Chicagoans don’t buy as much art as people in New York and Los Angeles. “The younger people who should be collecting, aren’t,” he says. “They’d rather go on vacation, have a big flat-screen TV or own a Hummer.” Without a strong collector base between the ages of 25 and 40, Schulz says it’s impossible for Chicago’s art market to flourish.

But even as commercial galleries close, the nonprofit project space Swimming Pool prepares to open in a few weeks in an Albany Park storefront. Smaller galleries—some nonprofit, some run by artists, some carved out of apartments, and often all of the above—proliferate here to an extent that would be impossible in space-starved New York. Speh says this phenomenon is 20 years old. “Chicago is a place where emerging galleries will always happen—they aren’t afraid to take risks,” adds Cooper. “That’s a sign of a great market in a city, but it’s not a meter for commercial success.” For better or worse, future Chicago gallerists may need to keep their day jobs.

gescheidle and giftshop project space close Saturday 28.