The open studio is the most honest format in visual art and the least respected, because it declines the thing a gallery exists to provide — a finished room with the labour removed. Third Fridays, which runs the third Friday of every month from seven until ten and was free all year, puts two art centres on the same Bridgeport block into that format simultaneously.
One cannot open a working studio to the public without exposing the labour a gallery exists to conceal. Bridgeport Art Center at 1200 West 35th Street holds three curated galleries, artist studios, a Fashion Design Center, the Chicago Ceramic Center, a Sculpture Garden Gallery and the Skyline Loft. Zhou B Art Center sits at 1029 West 35th. One street, two buildings, twelve nights a year.
The Smell Of A Working Floor
Wet clay. Linseed. Sawdust. Fixative. Photographic chemistry, in one studio, which almost nobody still uses.
The photographer David M. Wong opened a new studio in the building this year, which is the detail that tells you what these nights are for: not an audience development exercise but a leasing mechanism, in which the public walks past empty units and somebody eventually takes one. The Chicago Ceramic Center is the strongest thing in either building and gets the least attention, because glazed work photographs badly and ceramics has never recovered from being called craft.
Programming around it has multiplied. The Bridgeport Music Collective runs a Third Friday Concert Series of chamber music inside the complex, and The Creative Outlet runs a Third Friday Artist Spotlight. A free monthly open studio has acquired satellites, which is what happens when a format works and nobody owns it.
What A Neighbourhood Was Before
Bridgeport sent five mayors to City Hall and spent most of the twentieth century with a reputation for making outsiders unwelcome, which is a thing residents will tell you themselves. The building at 1200 West 35th was a factory. That both facts are now footnotes to a monthly open studio is the most consequential change in this neighbourhood's cultural life and it happened without a single press release.
Who Comes In
They come in families, which does not happen at galleries. The behaviour in a working studio is different in kind: visitors ask what something is made of rather than what it means, and the artists answer, and the conversation is technical and unembarrassed. In the Sculpture Garden Gallery almost everybody walked the perimeter once and left. In the ceramics studios they stayed, and several touched things they should not have.
These are not galleries with the doors open. They are workplaces that tolerate an audience, and the tolerance is the hospitality.
Cover image: 35th and Halsted, Bridgeport / Wikimedia Commons