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On their way to making Chicago the first major city with a cultural participation map, the researchers collected 1.4 million electronic records from the dozen big institutions for 2004. The institutions were chosen according to the size of their budgets ($8 million was the minimum) and ranged from the Art Institute to the Joffrey Ballet. The researchers tracked 600,000 participating households in the 14-county metropolitan area and sliced and diced that information with data from the 2000 census. And here’s the main thing they found out: it’s mostly about money. The best predictors of participation in the city’s large cultural institutions are education and income level. Wealthy neighborhoods along the lake on the city’s north side and in the suburbs (New Trier Township, along with River Forest to the west) turned out to be the hot spots. Those are also areas with relatively few African-American and Latino residents. The city’s cultural participation map and its racial and ethnic distribution map turned out to be inverse images of each other.
Museum of Science and Industry vice president Valerie Waller, offering a response to the research, said she sees evidence of the lack of diversity nearly every time she eyeballs the crowds on the museum floor. She thinks communication, price, hours, and transportation are factors that could be addressed, and says it may be more realistic to focus on turning orange areas to red, rather than trying to stretch for the blues. The mapping project also included limited research on 49 smaller cultural organizations, including some geared to specific ethnic groups. (Nearly 500 such organizations were invited to participate; all but the 49, perhaps lacking data, failed to respond.) The researchers found that many of these smaller entities are tapping audiences that have little overlap with the participants at the big organizations. For those folks and a lot of others, the daunting dozen–those pricey, tax-supported, mostly lakefront playgrounds for the affluent and the tourists, with their displays of Girodet and performances of Shakespeare–may just be off the map.
Area’s offering an alternative in the form of a blank pullout map of Chicago in its current issue. Readers can fill it in with locations they think are significant, then submit it for inclusion in an online archive, a planned book, and upcoming exhibitions, including one that opens at Polvo gallery in Pilsen on April 28.
