The Inside Man
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Fortino says it was in a couple of classes at Columbia College, where he wound up in his mid-20s, that his affinity for photography clicked. But his feel for the medium goes back earlier than that, to his teenage years, when his brother was fighting in Vietnam. Instead of writing letters, John Fortino sent home images he took with two 35-millimeter cameras he’d purchased at the PX. “He would send two or three packs of slides every other week,” Fortino says. “That became part of my high school ritual. I looked forward to going downstairs, turning on the slide projector, putting on some music, and looking at those pictures, trying to figure out–with much mixed emotion because of what was going on in the culture–my place in relation to those pictures, and my brother’s place. Trying to figure out what the heck was going on in those pictures, because he didn’t include letters that explained them.”
Fortino graduated from Columbia in 1980 with a liberal arts degree, just after he’d started attending the academy. His photography career remained on the back burner, and by ’92 he was back at Columbia, teaching photography part-time and thinking about grad school. In ’98 he enrolled in the master’s program at UIC–with trepidation, he says, about “going back to school in my late 40s with 25-year-old artists.” But UIC gave him a course to teach, sharpened his focus, and opened a bunch of doors. After the first year, faculty member Peter Hales suggested a portfolio review at the Art Institute. “I dropped off a box of my pictures at nine o’clock on a Tuesday, and when I picked them up at five o’clock there was a letter inviting me to participate in an ongoing commission for the Park Hyatt Hotel,” Fortino says. The hotel wound up purchasing 21 images, in editions of 3 to 15. He was also chosen for the CITY 2000 show, where he attracted the attention of Shashi Caudill, now his dealer.
The MCA’s been hosting First Friday mixers since the museum moved into its Chicago Avenue fortress in 1996, but in the last year extracurricular activity at the museum has taken an uptick. Amy Corle, director of internal marketing and a 17-year MCA veteran, is responsible for a series of Tuesday-night events that’s had folks heading there for readings, gourmet dinners, speed dating, and stitch ‘n’ bitch. Corle says she was looking for a way to get people into the cafe after the end of the summer jazz series and was inspired by an employee’s knitting club that was clacking away in the conference room at lunchtime on Fridays. Like the First Friday events, these free programs are attempts to draw new patrons into the building, and Corle says they’ve been attracting about 70 people each week, with a nice crossover from the knitting group to the museum’s yoga class. But it might take more than that to bolster the MCA’s attendance: last year it dropped to just under 212,000–a couple thousand less than the previous year, down 30,000 from 2002 and 2003, a third less than the 312,000 logged in 2000, according to figures provided by the Chicago Office of Tourism. MCA marketing director Angelique Williams says the drop since 2004 is due to a change in the way the museum has to report attendance figures since joining Museums in the Parks. Maybe it’ll get a goose from the Warhol “Supernova” exhibit, opening March 18, which drew about 50,000 viewers in Minneapolis, where it originated. Or maybe Warhol’s had his 15 minutes.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea, Shashi Caudill Photography & Fine Art.
