Chicago artists create amid crisis

Traversing down a dark, narrow gangway in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood on the night of Monday, Nov. 17, 2025, one finds themselves at the end of the tunnel met with the extravagantly reflective, mosaic-tiled turquoise door to artist and musician Diane Christiansen’s studio. 

Inside, the space lights up with boldly illuminated scraps of color: whimsical paintings, sketches and supplies lining every wall and casting color across the floor. 

Christiansen, however, breathes an air of uncertainty and confesses recent struggles with creative motivation and, as a practicing psychotherapist, cites similar sentiments among her patients and loved ones.

“I’ve never, never in recent history had to make myself work, and now I’m making myself, and my collaborator for animation has just had such a tough time emotionally,” Christiansen said reflecting on her past several weeks of creation. 

“It feels like the creative people I know are just constantly trying to strike the light and get their fire started again. It’s like a soaking wet blanket, and we’re trying to light our flame underneath it,” Christiansen said. 

Amid sharp cuts to federal arts funding, layoffs at top institutions, long-time gallery closings like the flattening of Goldfinch and Rona Hoffman and the federal government's targeting of Chicago with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement occupation, uncertainty spreads amidst independent artists and collectives alike. 

At larger institutions like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, similar tensions are felt as teaching artists face unexpected layoffs and resource cuts like those at the Video Data Bank. 

Corey Smith, performance artist, musician and professor at SAIC, said pressures are especially high on international and first years students, making it harder to create work. Higher arts institutions increasingly encourage “interrogating yourself and not the world around you,” a particular challenge as hostility rises, Smith said. 

“The institutions around us are failing in ways that they hadn’t been before, and I wonder what that means not about today, or tomorrow, but about like, five years from now. Is the destruction or reevaluation of these institutions something that we can know the impact of?” Smith asked. 

The Chicago arts scene, however, is no stranger to turmoil. The city’s creative community has deep roots with political tensions and activism dating back to the 1960s, when the arts flourished within smaller communities amidst social imbalances and civil rights issues.

Jim Duignan, expert on arts in city neighborhoods at DePaul University, who founded his own community arts practice – The Stockyard Institute – in 1995 said that Chicago is the “center of civically engaged work.” 

“Chicago has a different power to social practice, to building these sort of democratic solutions to difficult questions,” Duignan said. 

Local artists and creatives have been steadily building principle, thriving arts practices since his entrance into the scene in the 1980s and Duignan even witnessed programming in small, independent collectives like his grow since recent crises like the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic despite turbulent changes and ruptures in their formation and development. 

“What (The Stockyard Institute) did, was, we had no overhead. We would squat in buildings, and I guess we were making a trend. We were bringing in resources from our jobs. We were sharing things. We were bartering for things,” Duignan said. 

Duignan said this, and the sense of community established along with it, is the key to artistic survival in times of turbulence. As the Stockyard Institute grew in the 1990s, he saw other practices around him quickly humbled in their attempts to grow without mitigating the costs and risks of running larger operations.

“I thought, you should work slower and more intentionally and let that happen naturally. I saw a lot of places leaving that couldn’t handle that,” Duignan said. 

“We had a different approach which was slow, involved a lot of friends, a lot of just collaboration with spaces as roving artists around the city,” Duignan said of the Stockyard Institute. 

From higher academia to eccentric groups of Chicago creatives and independents, artists like Duignan, Smith and Christiansen repeatedly point to the same necessities: collaboration and connection. 

“It feels sort of like we have sort of an epidemic of meaninglessness, and loneliness…I often think of man’s search for meaning, you know, we have to continue to support this in ourselves and in each other and to really applaud anything that comes out now, because it’s so important,” Christiansen said. 

Christiansen, above all, advises artists to reject the ever-growing urge to isolate and build community with other creatives, even if just to “show up for other people.” While many make great work being hermetic and isolated, Christiansen said, it is just “not the only thing to do now.”

“Nothing builds solidarity like realizing you’re on the Titanic and you’re in steerage, which is where artists are,” Christiansen said. 

 “Collaborate and join with others, no matter how bummed out you are, no matter how sad you are, be in community. There’s a lot of talk about joy and how important it is and if there’s an opportunity to feel joyful or feel connected to not squander it,” Christiansen said. 

Among audience members and supporters of the arts, Christiansen said people express a similar desperation to feel something and for connection, an observation echoed by performing artists like Smith. 

“I feel more on edge and impatient as an audience member. I am more excited about extravagant failures and big risks and big swings that may or may not pull anything off. If the arts have a place to play, we have to be experimenting and pushing our aesthetics as hard as our politics,” Smith said. 

Smith said artists also need to get comfortable with discomfort and confusion, especially as funding shrinks and “scrappiness” becomes a requirement. 

With uncertainty looming over even long-established, seemingly “untouchable” institutions, grassroots movements, smaller community networks, galleries and collectives become ad-hoc stepping stones for experimentation and development. 

“Being an artist in this environment is confusing. It's confusing to know what to do, but, also, I fundamentally believe in what I do. There’s something beautiful in the fact that I believe in art, I believe in artists. It feels important to do this,” Smith said.