The Show Goes On

Two years ago, Christopher Kennedy, the president of the Merchandise Mart and an heir of the iconic clan, rescued the city's leading art exhibition from last-minute ruin. This year, it opens with more exhibitors, four satellite shows, and world-class expectations.

By Marcia Froelke Coburn

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The show under way at the Mart in 2007, with a sculpture by Barry Flanagan in the foreground

The original art fair, called the Chicago International Art Exposition, was the creation of John Wilson, a print dealer and publisher who gathered a team of commercial entrepreneurs under the name The Lakeside Group to produce trade shows. It was held at Navy Pier in 1980, and it helped legitimize a new form of art retailing, in which consumers would buy quality work at a show rather than through galleries or auction houses. During the first two years of Art Expo, The Lakeside Group incurred losses of $127,000 and $80,000. (Revenue comes from booth rentals and ticket sales.) But by its third year, Art Expo was making money. On its tenth anniversary, The New York Times called it "one of the best and biggest art fairs in the world."

But when Navy Pier started renovating its space in 1989, Art Expo lost its home. Chaos ensued; the contemporary art market tanked, and by 1994 two of Wilson's top lieutenants, Thomas Blackman and Mark Lyman, had split from the group. (Wilson now lives in Lakeside, Michigan, where he runs a small art-prints gallery.) Lyman spun off to create SOFA (the Sculpture Objects & Functional Art show), an exhibition held in Chicago in November. Blackman, in turn, produced Art 1993 Chicago (later just Art Chicago), a contemporary art show and a direct competitor of Art Expo's.

What became known as the Art War Years in Chicago ensued. Businessmen from Palm Beach and Cleveland also launched art shows here on the same days as Art Chicago and Art Expo. Instead of one large definitive show, in 1993 there were multiple fractured ones—and none with a defining niche. Costs for the exhibitions rose, and prices for the artwork were driven down.

Blackman's Art Chicago outlasted the other fairs. But by 1995 it was competing with quality international shows that had been influenced by the Chicago Art Expo model: Art Cologne in Germany; the FIAC in Paris; and the Armory Show in New York City, as well as the long-standing Art Basel in Switzerland, which began in 1970. All the shows became genuine forces in the art world, but the Art Basel show had a singular organizing principle. "It was launched by a public-private partnership whose mission was to create tourism for Basel," says Kennedy. "They saw the production of an art show as a tool for economic development." In 2002, a regional version of the Swiss show opened in Miami. The result: Chicago was no longer a dominant contemporary art market; the quality work was going elsewhere. "Art Chicago was hip once, then it wasn't," wrote the Chicago Reader last year.

By 2006, Blackman was facing a severe money crunch (the costs of trade shows are usually incurred before the event begins and the fees come in). Three days before the opening of Art Chicago, then being held in Grant Park, the tents had no floors and no lights. "I was spending 20 hours a day racking my brain about how to pull the show off," Blackman says.

"Blackman was phoning me, asking for a quarter of a million dollars so the show could go on," says Howard Tullman. "He had pissed off the unions, so they wouldn't finish the job. Gallery owners were flying into the city, and these half-finished tents were pitched next to mounds of fertilizer for the flower show in Grant Park. It was going to be the worst thing you could imagine for the city's reputation."

When Blackman phoned with an SOS request, Kennedy agreed to host the art fair at the Mart, which was also showcasing the Chicago Antiques Fair that same weekend. Mart dock employees worked 27 hours moving in the art exhibitors; MMPI carpenters clocked 35 straight hours setting up the show. The Mart's marketing and communications group sent out 40,000 e-mails to prospective visitors and printed 15,000 show directories. "Within 24 hours, there was a complete turnaround from total failure to salvation," says Rhona Hoffman.

Before the 2006 Art Chicago closed, Blackman had transferred the ownership of the show to MMPI. In a speech at the City Club in March 2007, Kennedy called Blackman "a visionary [whose] depth of understanding of the art market is almost limitless. . . . [But] without deep pockets and lacking a large infrastructure, Blackman suffered the vagaries of the marketplace." The transfer deal included some nifty structuring—Blackman gave MMPI his trademarks, mailing lists, and rights to ticket sales; he was still responsible for debts incurred under his management. And the agreement also gave Blackman a consulting job at the Mart, albeit one that ultimately prohibited him from assuming any high public profile in the 2007 MMPI art fair. "Tom had wonderful institutional knowledge and historical context," Kennedy says. "And he was a great mentor to the younger staff there." Blackman left the job in mid-May 2007. "I was told my services were no longer needed," he says.

Today Blackman is consulting with the organizers of smaller fairs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as staging parts of Art Basel Miami Beach. "The Mart has a tremendous amount of resources," says Blackman, "and there are great possibilities for what they have in mind."

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Photograph: Merchandise Mart Properties Inc.