Who are artists and why should we care?
On the eve of Walk for a Creative City in Windsor on May 18th, Jim Chambers is a photographer in Hamilton, Ontario, ask the very same questions we artists in Windsor are asking. I present his column in full here.
According to industry statistics there are 5,700 steelworkers currently employed by Stelco (albeit on layoff) and Dofasco at this time; there are 13,000 artists working and living and paying taxes in Hamilton.
We are painters, photographers, musicians, actors, designers, and many more. Most of our income from our art falls below the poverty line, which is why most of us do other things. I am a teacher and commercial photographer; others work in restaurants, are labourers etc. We do our art because it is an itch that has to be scratched … it is our passion and it is a way for us to contribute to the community we work, play and live in.
I come from a proud Hamilton working class background. My grandfather worked for Stelco, as did numerous uncles and cousins. My father worked for the American Can Co. for 45 years. The first job I had when I left high school was a two-year stint at Stelco as a brick mason’s labourer in the open hearth, an experience I will never forget.
Art is not elitist, it is not a luxury — it is a necessity and it is a viable and rich asset to our society, economically and spiritually. Try to picture a world without art. It would be a pretty grey and mean place. The desire to create is within all of us. Psychologist Carl Jung called it the “play principle.’ That is certainly the truth for my partner, ceramic artist Colleen O’Reilly, and me — we play a lot and that’s part of the problem when we are trying to be taken seriously by some of our more sober minded municipal bureaucrats who have “real jobs”.
When I moved back to Hamilton seven years ago after having lived in Toronto for 35 years, I felt I was finally and truly home. I bought a 100-year-old building on James St. North for the same price a garage would cost me in Toronto and I put a lot of money and sweat into creating James North Studio & Gallery; something my friend Bryce Kanbara had done three years earlier when he opened the You Me Gallery next door. Over the past five years, numerous galleries and related venues have opened on James North, helping the longtime merchants bring the street back to the way I remember it when my mother would take me shopping there 55 years ago — and it is happening all over the city.
Barbara Milne and Gary Santucci have turned a derelict factory on Steven Street into a centre for the arts, which now includes Judith Sandiford and Ron Weihs’s groundbreaking Artword Theatre company, which ran for over 13 years in Toronto. There is Sky Dragon Centre on King William Street, the Transit Gallery and others on Locke Street, The Tiger Group on Barton. The list goes on and on.
And here’s the real mystery that puzzles the bureaucrats - most of us make very little money from these labour-intensive ventures, so why in the hell are we doing this if we can’t make money doing it?
Hamilton has received attention from the national media due to the efforts of a variety of art groups and individuals — Barbara Milne’s Art Bus, the James North Art Crawl. Realtors now refer to the “burgeoning arts community on James Street North.”
In the seven years since I returned to Hamilton I have witnessed a cultural renaissance. I have seen decaying buildings turned into galleries, and neighbourhoods once the domain of drug dealers and prostitutes alive with families visiting shops and events that would not exist without the vanguard of artists leading the way.
This is not a new idea. Jane Jacobs outlined the problems of urban renewal and the gutting of city centres in her 1961 book The Death And Life Of Great American Cities and author Richard Florida, 43 years later, in his book The Rise Of The Creative Class explains how artists are helping to rebuild the downtowns of cities.
Toronto artists ask me weekly, “Is Hamilton a good place to set up business?” I give a qualified “yes” but after witnessing the recent roadblocks the city’s bureaucrats have thrown in the path of enterprises such as the Pearl Company with its arcane and punitive zoning laws I really wonder if Hamilton has the “political will” necessary to reinvent itself in a time of downscaled heavy industry.
Some municipal governments — from Toronto’s Queen West and Chicago’s waterfront to the inner cities of Pittsburgh and Cleveland — have revitalized their decaying city centres by embracing and working with arts organizations. These success stories were created by a concerted municipal will and the creative and flexible thinking of politicians willing to work with small artist-run centres and galleries that since the 1960s have been the vanguard of inner city revitalization.
I still have hope for the future of Hamilton’s inner city. It’s why I returned to Hamilton and why I bought a building in the North End and it’s why Colleen and I live and work in the North End of Hamilton — we have hope.
Let’s hope the politicians and bureaucrats share the vision of Hamilton’s artists who, without financial assistance from the city, have invested their time, effort and money in this dream of a vibrant and exciting downtown.
Jim Chambers is a photographer and media professor and the owner/operator of James North Studio Gallery in Hamilton.
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