- Buying
Carol Briggs came to art collecting more or less by chance. It was the early 80s. She was a school nurse, working with pregnant and parenting teens, and her young son played in a baseball league in Hyde Park. They lived in Chatham. Briggs wasn’t allowed into his practices, but neither were they long enough that she could simply drop him off and go home, so she spent the time wandering around the neighborhood. She had two favorite spots, both on 53rd Street: a jeweler and an art gallery.
“The rest” refers to 30 years and nearly every inch of wall space in Briggs’s Chatham home. In 2003 she became one of four cofounders of Diasporal Rhythms, a group of south-side Chicagoans who collect the work of contemporary artists of the African diaspora, most also from the south side. They’re marking a decade this month with a show at the Logan Center, as well as tours of the homes of some constituent collectors—membership is now up to about 60. Briggs’s home isn’t on the tour, which focuses on South Shore, but it has been on regular south-side art tours since the group’s inception.
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Briggs made further entree into the art world when she met Dayo Laoye, an artist she ended up dating for seven years. His paintings now line the staircase of her home—”Dayo’s wall,” she calls it. It was Laoye, a longtime fixture of the south-side art scene, who brought together the four originators of Diasporal Rhythms, organizing them into an art collectors’ panel at South Side Community Art Center in 2002. Briggs had gone on to work at Dixon Elementary School under Joan Dameron Crisler, who, as principal, oversaw the development of an astonishing art collection mounted on the school’s walls, made famous in the 2012 documentary The Curators of Dixon School (which screens at the Logan Center on October 27). On the panel, Briggs and Crisler joined two others, Patric McCoy and Daniel Parker, who were better known as individual collectors in the south-side art community.
But he finally came to embrace it, thinking of collecting as nothing more than an elaborate sort of fandom. This is the subject on which McCoy grows the most animated: “If a person has a music collection, you never, ever say, ‘Well, did you go to school to study that? Did you get a degree in it?’” Yet he says there’s a perception that art collecting is more rarefied, which hampers people’s appreciation of it—and consequently restricts the audiences artists might otherwise have access to. A democratizing impulse undergirds Diasporal Rhythms’ mission, and so the requirement for joining at the most modest level is the ownership of original pieces by at least seven artists of African descent. “And that number is totally arbitrary,” McCoy says, with a loud laugh. “But we wanted to have something. What we find is that when we say that, you can see people start to count in their heads. ‘Oh, I’ve got seven—I’m an art collector!’”
Diasporal Rhythms honors five contemporary artists with a biannual show; the new exhibit at the Logan Center collects work by all honorees so far. Briggs says, “You read all the stories about the people who have struggled and starved because of the lack of exposure, and then at the time of their death somebody gets a hold of their collection and then all of a sudden there’s value. That’s not right.” The organization also sponsors tours of collectors’ homes; it provides publicity for the artists it chooses to honor; and McCoy says it’s “adopted” a Kenwood school, King College Prep—artists give workshops to students there, and students visit their studios in turn.
Briggs says she can only think of one or two people qualified to appraise the artists she has in her collection. “My insurance company said to me once, ‘Take it down to New York Life at 5 South Wabash.’ And I’m thinking, ‘There’s probably no African-American person who works at New York Life at 5 South Wabash.’” Diasporal Rhythms holds seminars for members on topics like art insurance.
Reception Fri 10/11, 6-9 PM; tours of collectors’ homes Sat 10/12, 9 AM and 1 PM Through 11/9 Logan Center for the Arts 915 E. 60tharts.uchicago.edu free
