3/21 Meeting Notes

History of culture/Math and The visualist

Artist service organization, culture/MATH was founded in 2018 by Meg Duguid and Michael Thomas. Both of us had worked in the arts in Chicago and elsewhere for sometime and thought that Chicago was missing vital resources. Our core belief, that the basic needs of artists’ have to be met in order to keep our creative communities healthy. Artists require tools to maintain financial stability, they need access to healthcare and childcare, as well as a well maintained, easily accessed public archives. Finally, they require advocacy and support through political action.  

As we were putting our plans in motion, the cofounders at The Visualist were stepping away from their project. We felt that The Visualist could be more than just a gatekeeper guiding people already in the know through art party spots in the north and west sides. To us, we saw its potential as an archive. It could continue being a week to week destination for upcoming exhibitions, talks, and performances, but once we removed the curatorial aspects, The Visualist would also function as a collective document of our communities and their shared identity as cultural producers in and around Chicago.

In 2011, Jenny Kendler, Chad Kouri, and Steve Ruiz began The Visualist, which in turn followed the calendar project, On The Make developed by Karly Wildenhaus. Which was preceded by Spaces.org before that. culture/MATH assumed responsibility for the project in 2016 and has been administering it ever since.

Labor breakdown and operations

The labor of running the Visualist consists of approximately 40 hours of weekly research, coordination and data entry as well as event editing and final approval prior to publishing. The Visualist also produces its weekly newsletter in this time and maintains partnerships with Bad at Sports and Sixty Inches from Center that require additional research and editing responsibilities. 

Annually, the site will post upwards of 3500 events that will happen across Chicagoland. While our submit button is certainly our strongest tool, events are also gathered through ongoing research that we conduct. We follow a multitude of galleries, spaces and projects through websites, newsletters, instagram. We follow community newspapers such as Southside Weekly, New City, The Chicago Reader, F, Hyde Park Herald, and The Chicago Defender among others. Again, our desire is to gather the most complete picture of what is happening in Chicago’s visual arts community at any time.     

After review events on The Visualist are approved. To be clear, this doesn’t mean curated; instead they're reviewed to ensure they're not spam, that artists names are tagged and every image file is properly uploaded. Events are approved multiple times throughout the week. With our ongoing partnerships with Sixty Inches From Center and Bad at Sports, we also oversee the monthly Art Picks list as well as the weekly Top V (Top Five or Top Vee).

Along with our weekly newsletter, ongoing website maintenance and the continuing work of tracking business and tax filings, grant writing and maintaining adjacent projects through culture/MATH, our small working board and until recently, our lone researcher are very busy.   

Site issues

The infrastructure of The Visualist is outdated, it houses a large amount of data in the form of individual entries and image files. Its database was built in 2011 with a leaner sense of purpose and not much foresight for its continued growth. In this time, the site hasn’t had major upgrades. Many of its systems are dated by comparison to current standards. The site’s backend needs to be completely overhauled with a more efficient database being brought into place. Without this happening, the site’s stability will continue to erode, causing disruptions. 

In recent years, we have rebuilt the submit button, upgraded its servers—which itself caused a splendid arc of magnificence, leading to multiple cascading failures throughout the site —working around outdated plugins, or working to keep the site functioning in a world where bots are constantly crawling the site and creating traffic issues is an outsized task.

Attempts have been made to improve the site, but with limited resources, it’s been difficult for these efforts to take root. We’ve relied heavily on the beneficence and technical know-how of our community to help us through trying times, but it's clear that with the site’s basic functions leaning heavily into workarounds for so many outdated technical bits there is a massive technical failure somewhere on the horizon. Without the financial capacity to address critical problems with The Visualist this is not a matter of if, but when.

Financials

Since incorporating as a 501c3 in 2018, culture/MATH’s primary project has been The Visualist. While the site is widely used by the community, individual financial support has remained minimal. At most, bringing in $1,200 per year in individual donations. Grants flesh out our remaining budget. Prior to Covid, our largest expense was site maintenance and security. With costs for these continuing to rise in the intervening years. Before the pandemic, we gathered a small team of volunteer researchers. But following health and safety guidelines in March 2020, we released these researchers. The ongoing oversight of The Visualist and its research fell to one unpaid board member for the next few years.

As we came out of the pandemic, we were able to stabilize things briefly. A funder provided a $10,000 grant, and through contracted work on the Living Wage project, we brought in an additional $13,000. This allowed us to hire a part-time researcher, covering about 10 hours of work per week (approximately $13,000 annually), which meaningfully shifted the ongoing research workload away from unpaid board members.

With this added capacity, we were able to complete the Living Wage project and launch our weekly newsletter. For a short period, we had an operating budget of around $25,000 per year.

However, that period was temporary. That funder only supported us for two years before shifting away from arts organizations—a loss that has affected many groups, not just ours. At the same time, the Living Wage project concluded, and with it, the funding that supported our researcher. After three years, we’ve returned to an unpaid board member being responsible for ongoing operations.

Currently, there’s enough funding to keep the site operational, with an annual budget of $4,000, but not enough to remunerate any humans working on it.

What are our options for next steps

We’ve outlined three possible paths forward: close the site down, make it work, or give it away.

There was strong agreement that shutting the site down would be a significant loss to Chicago and the art’s community at large. While transferring it to another organization—such as CAC or Sixty Inches From Center—could be explored, it feels premature and potentially irresponsible to do so without first addressing the site’s underlying technical issues.

As a result, most of our conversation focused on what it would take to make the site work.

In the immediate term, a full overhaul of the site is critical and needs to happen within the coming months. Beyond that, we need additional volunteer support to research and input events to keep the site active and useful. We also need to expand the board with people who can help raise funds and build long-term sustainability, so the project is not dependent on a small number of volunteers carrying the bulk of the work alongside full-time jobs and caregiving responsibilities.