Mayor Emanuel’s new culture chief knows Chicago

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Michelle T. Boone, whose new office is housed at the Chicago Cultural Center, believes the bustling landmark could be a resource for the large population of arts-oriented students in the Loop. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Updated: September 3, 2011 12:34AM

Michelle T. Boone, who will assume the position of Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and Special Events on Monday, is a woman of many talents.

In a pinch, you could ask her to oversee the installation of a basic water and sanitation system, or to assist a team of midwives in a remote African village. You also could count on her to engineer a television show, from sound to graphic design. And (under extreme duress only), she might even agree to promote a list of promising recording artists.

Of course these skills, all part of her resume, are not the ones that put her in line for the job that will make her a guiding strategic force on Chicago’s arts and entertainment scene — the person who must oversee everything from that beehive of activity, the Chicago Cultural Center, to the far-reaching arts and education and neighborhood development initiatives talked about by her boss, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, to the wide array of festivals and parades that bring so much zest (and so much traffic) to the city’s streets.

What earned Boone her new title were her two previous jobs. She rose through the ranks to become director of Gallery 37, the award-winning job training program in the arts for Chicago youth that was created in 1991 by Maggie Daley and Lois Weisberg, Cultural Affairs commissioner for the past 22 years. And for the past seven years she has been a senior program officer for Culture at the influential Joyce Foundation, where she oversaw the distribution of nearly $2 million in grants annually to arts organizations in Chicago, as well as Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Cleveland and Indianapolis.

“It’s a big job,” said Boone, as we chatted recently at the Cultural Center, where her office will look out onto a magnificent view of Millennium Park. “I was very happy at the Joyce Foundation, but I was sought out for this job.”

In fact, Boone was one of the 13 people who served on Emanuel’s arts transtition team, so when the two eventually sat down for an interview, it was what Boone described as “an unusual” exchange.

“Obviously I had a clear sense of what he had in mind for the arts because I had helped craft the plan,” said Boone. “So there was a delicate line I had to walk, because I didn’t want to start spewing other people’s ideas, though I was mindful of the ideas that had been prepared.

“It turned out to be a really pleasant conversation — very comfortable, with lots of laughter. And because so much of the work I’ve done at Gallery 37 and the Joyce has been about neighborhood collaborations, I think I had a strong sense of how the Department of Cultural Affairs could be a conduit between community arts organizations and the city’s neighborhoods.”

From Weisberg, who retired just as Daley merged her department with his Office of Special Events, Boone received “a lovely note of congratulations, with advice I probably should keep to myself.”

Hallie Gordon, director of the Steppenwolf for Young Adults program and artistic director of the Chicago Park District’s Theater on the Lake series, has collaborated with Boone on arts education projects. “Michelle’s greatest asset,” she said, “is the depth of her knowledge of the arts scene and the neighboborhoods of this city. She is just fundamentally tapped into the Chicago community and has an authentic personal investment in it. Unlike an outsider who might have been brought in for the job, she knows the details of everyday life here. She really has a sense of the city’s heart.”

For Boone, the challenge is this: “I think we can be more creative in how we use all our resources — in the whole cross-section of the city government — and not necessarily just bang on the table and say ‘more money for the arts.’ And anyway, artists are already masters of doing more with less. The crucial connection between the arts and audiences is a given in this city and will continue to be vibrant. The staff at the Cultural Center already oversees much of that. I want to forge new connections.”

Boone has studied how a city’s cultural plan can be woven into city development as a whole.

“But Chicago hasn’t had a specific plan for 20 years,” she said. “And that’s a priority for me, along with getting community input. We have to think more broadly about artists and non-profits, as well as the role of for-profit arts, and focus on the role they can play in economic development and jobs. There is such value in the creative industries.”

As an example, Boone points to the proposed Cermak Road Creative Industry District, an area of abandoned warehouses on Cermak and the Chicago River, between Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport and the South Loop. The project would involve a partnership between the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Housing and Economic Development.

“With some rezoning, these big, open, beautiful spaces, which have access to public transportation, could be such a great area for the housing of architecture and design firms, art galleries, artists’ studios, fashion industry facilities, film and recording studios,” said Boone. “It was already in the early planning stages when the economy tanked, and it’s something I would really like to see happen.”

Creative Industries is just one initiative Boone hopes to drive forward. Her other priorities include expanding the whole gamut of the city’s arts and education programs, and identifying and creating cultural hubs throughout the city — everything from a Dance Corridor that would link the Joffrey Ballet studios in the heart of the Loop to the Dance Center for Columbia College in the South Loop, to a nexus of music facilities in Uptown and beyond that would build on the mayor’s favorite example of how the Old Town School of Folk Music became such a catalyst for the Lincoln Square neighborhood.

Before creating a full cultural plan, however, Boone wants to do “a complete audit” of her department.

“There is so much programming going on under its auspices,” she said. “And we have a merger on paper of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, but I’m not sure there has been a merger of cultures yet. We also need to see how the outsourcing of certain activities is working.”

Boone, 49, was born in Chicago but moved with her family to Gary, Ind., to attend junior and senior high school before heading to the University of Indiana for a degree in telecommunications. She returned to Chicago and worked at the local outlets of all three major networks, including ABC, where she was involved in Oprah’s launch. After returning to Indiana to earn a certificate in arts administration, she became intrigued by the Peace Corps.

It was a bit of a shock when she was assigned to Chad, one of the poorest nations in Africa — a former French colony where her own French proved useless (“the village where I worked spoke the local dialect”), and where male laborers had no interest in taking orders from a woman, and where her wearing of jeans raised questions among the women about her gender. But she spent 21/2 years there in the early 1990s. And she counts it as an invaluable experience.

Now, in the Chicago Cultural Center on any given day, Boone can see tourists snapping photographs of the architecture, an overflow lunchtime crowd gathering for a Latin-infused band playing in the lobby, or locals strolling through first-rate art exhibits .

“When I was growing up here, museum admission was mostly free, and my friends and I made the Museum of Science and Industry a destination point for just hanging out,” said Boone. “Now, within blocks of the Cultural Center — which, by the way, has Wi-Fi — there is a huge population of 18 to 25-year-olds who attend the School of the Art Institute, Roosevelt and DePaul and Columbia College — all places where careers in the arts are crucial. But I don’t think we’ve made a connection with that population.

“One of my goals is to encourage programming that will be exciting, interesting and appealing to them, and that will tap into the virtual experiences they feed on so that this becomes a great meeting and hookup place. It’s really not about just mailing out brochures anymore.”