Heidi Stevens: In a city where culture sets our pulse, one school’s struggle shows how arts education is at risk
A few cold weeks ago, when spring felt around the corner and also like it may never return, my son and I spent a Saturday morning walking around the Art Institute of Chicago.
I needed to look at things that are exquisite and things that try to make sense of the human experience and things that were made in 40 B.C. It helps right now to be reminded how much humans have endured and also, how much beauty human hands can create. I hoped to be reminded with my son at my side and, happily, he was game.
The painting “Paradise Lost” took Calcutta-born Raqib Shaw two decades to complete, we learned. Georgia O’Keeffe painted “Sky Above Clouds” in her garage in 1965 when she was 77 years old, we also learned. She was inspired by looking out airplane windows. How generous, I thought, to turn your mid-flight musings into a masterpiece.
Later that night, hungry for more beauty and hope, I went to the Jazz Showcase to hear the Isabella Isherwood Quartet perform. After the show, I lingered a bit to chat with the band and learned that Isherwood, a stunning vocalist at age 23, graduated from The Chicago Academy for the Arts — a performing arts high school I’ve visited and written about several times over the past decade.
It’s a small school — fewer than 150 students in total — but academy alums pop up a lot if you’re even a casual patron of the arts.
Case in point: I first became acquainted with the school in 2017 when I profiled Zachary Jeppsen, a ballet dancer who commuted three hours each way from a farm in Wisconsin to be trained by the academy’s teachers and, importantly, welcomed by its students.
“My initial feeling when I came here was, ‘Oh my gosh. I fit in,’” he told me at the time. At his previous school, he was mercilessly bullied.
Now he dances for the Martha Graham Dance Company, the oldest dance company in the United States.
“A very common story you hear from students is that this school saved their lives,” head of school Melinda Zacher Ronayne told me this week. “This is my first year here and I hear that story over and over.”
I was on the phone with Ronayne because I had just received a news release about the school working to close a significant funding shortfall. “Chicago arts school fights to stay open,” it read.
I called to learn more.
Ronayne took over after previous head of school Jason Patera left last year to run a school in Charleston, South Carolina. The academy, Ronayne explained, has been operating at a deficit for years. Sixty percent of its operating budget is covered by philanthropy — a setup meant to alleviate the tuition burden for families. And while donors have generously kept the doors open for 50 years, Ronayne said, it’s unsustainable.
They’re working to expand their summer and middle school programs, both of which are open to the public. They’re examining their tuition model. And they’re turning to the community.
On April 17, the school will present a 90-minute showcase from all of the school’s disciplines — dance, music, visual arts, theater. Songwriter Justin Tranter, an academy alum, will perform. Tickets are available at chicagoacademyforthearts.org.
The audience, they hope, will see what’s possible when you immerse young people in art — and, importantly, what’s lost if you don’t.
“The arts give meaning to our lives,” Ronayne said. “The human touch, the human interactions, the handmade … I think people are craving that right now but maybe not understanding how much it’s at risk.”
The day after we spoke on the phone, Block Club Chicago reported that an AI school with no teachers will be opening in The Loop this fall.
“Using only software, no textbooks or homework,” Melody Mercado reported, “the classrooms are also purged of traditional teachers and replaced with ‘guides’ who are instructed to motivate students as they complete their virtual lessons.”
Talk about underscoring the risk.
“People love to go to the ballet,” Ronayne said. “People love to go to art museums. Arts schools are the pipelines. Without arts education, everything is threatened. The ripple effect is huge.”
That hit me, especially given my recent (successful) hunt for beauty.
On his way out last year, I asked Patera what he was most proud of about his time leading the academy.
“I’m proud to have been part of a place that cultivated in young people a drive to test the limits of what they thought was possible and go on to do pretty extraordinary things,” he said. “Most of our culture dramatically underestimates what young people can do, and every one of us in this building has been watching over and over again as young people shatter those impressions. That gives me a lot of hope.”
I told him to be proud, also, of giving those young people a safe space to be extraordinary.
“I didn’t create that,” he said. “I don’t deserve that credit. Forty-five years ago, a bunch of kids who didn’t fit anywhere else, in fact it might have been dangerous for them anywhere else, came here and formed this culture. I’ve always seen it as my job just to protect that. To find the threats to that and try to work against those threats. I hope I’ve been successful.”
I hope that success — that safe space that benefits the people within it and the people outside it equally — gets to live on.