What’s Around the Coyote if it’s no longer around the Coyote? And what’s the Flat Iron building without it? Two weeks ago, ATC, longtime champion of Wicker Park’s emerging artists, pulled up stakes and moved out of the Flat Iron building at North and Milwaukee after 19 years. ATC traded its gallery and office across the street from the iconic Coyote tower for smaller quarters, minus the gallery, in the Splat Flats, 1815-25 W. Division. That left the Flat Iron, home to 50 artists’ studios, seriously flat. With its year-round exhibitions and high-profile festivals, Around the Coyote had been the major marketing engine for the building. In its absence, a new group, the Flat Iron Artists’ Association, led by painter Kevin Lahvic, is scrambling to re-create a scene.
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The uprooting was a shock, but not a surprise. Flat Iron owner Bob Berger says he tried to work with ATC to keep them there, but they had “lost interest, lost focus” during Stites’s four years as executive director. He was offended by the near absence of recognition for the Flat Iron building as a major supporter in ATC’s official history, and by what he perceived as its snubbing of Flat Iron artists. Then, he says, last fall, when ATC moved the second of its two annual festivals off-site, he was incredulous. How could a festival that had brought tens of thousands of visitors to the Flat Iron and other Wicker Park venues be held in rented quarters in the West Loop?
By late February 2008, Lahvic says, “we all kind of knew something was up. There had been rumors that they were going to leave the neighborhood, but we were having trouble getting a straight answer from them. They kept saying, ‘We’re not sure what we’re doing.’ We had a meeting with Allison, and she finally said that she was taking the festival out of Wicker Park. Their corporate line was that they had outgrown the neighborhood, there weren’t enough venues in the neighborhood. But the show they ended with could have been contained in the Flat Iron building alone. We got the distinct impression they were trying to distance themselves from the Flat Iron.”
A group of tenants who’d held a couple of small, off-season shows in the building formed the Flat Iron Artists Association, and they’re now doing regular Wicker Park-Bucktown “First Friday” events, and a three-day “smARTshow” every season, the next one coming up in June. “What I tell everybody is, except for the name, you’ll recognize this show more as Coyote than what the Coyote’s doing,” Lahvic says. More than 100 artists participated in the February smARTshow (the artists pay $50 and keep the proceeds of their sales), and the FIAA is planning its first membership drive for the fall.
The foundation says this will allow it to “reallocate financial resources throughout the world,” as it continues to “foster understanding of the historical art of the United States.” While the foundation’s headquarters remain in Chicago, it’s also opening a new office in Paris.
