CHICAGO -- Camille Billie said when she first moved to Chicago from her reservation in Wisconsin in 2018 to start studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she felt “lost and overstimulated coming from Oneida Nation.”

Through school, she found and signed up for the Native American Student Association and, from there, was able to connect with the city’s greater Native American community. That community provided Billie with the support that she was looking for, from giving her rides to places she needed to go to cooking extra meals to share.

“That network is huge to me,” Billie said. “I think it would have been a lot harder for me to pursue this field also without those support systems. When it comes to funding and grants and there being a wider diversity in access to acquiring those things, I think it’s happening, but I wish it would happen faster and more widespread.”

While there has been work done to increasingly support artists of color around Chicago and widen the scope of American art, some in the arts community feel there is still much more that can be done, from helping artists who are new to the city to connect with the right resources to providing funding for more than just the artwork.

Billie is the artist-in-residence at the nonprofit art gallery Center for Native Futures and also works at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian. The Center for Native Futures is a nonprofit art gallery that opened in 2023 and focuses on fine arts and “making sure Chicago has a better understanding of contemporary Native arts,” co-founder and co-director Monica Rickert-Bolter said.

Supporting artists from communities of color is also beneficial for larger institutions in the art world, she said.

“By incorporating more of a variety of artists, you’re definitely going to get a more diverse audience when people actually see themselves reflected in art in a good way,” Rickert-Bolter said.

To provide opportunities, there has to be an understanding of the varying needs of artists from different backgrounds, Billie said, but something almost everyone has in common is trying to survive while also upholding a good quality of life.

Billie said one way to better support artists of color is to not only provide greater access to grants but also fewer restrictions on what the funding is used for, like allowing dollars to go toward “general functions like paying rent and other bills.”

“I think more places should help artists cover basic needs because then they can actually use more of their mind capacity around creativity and direct that towards their art,” Billie said. “That was something that really stressed me out while I was in school and that did put me behind a lot in some areas like focusing on classes and completing projects. I graduated, but the cost was high.”

Billie added that mainstream media’s view of art is “very narrow,” and it can be a lot harder for an artist to break through if they don’t feel seen.

“Thinking back to experiences in college, it can be isolating and you kind of end up in these environments where people just genuinely don’t understand your art,” Billie said.

The Terra Foundation for American Art is a grant-making entity based in Chicago with a focus on American art, and Art Design Chicago is a grant-making initiative within the foundation that supports museums and cultural centers across the city. With about 75 different cultural partners, including the Center for Native Futures, South Asia Institute, Puerto Rican Arts Alliance and more, a somewhat newer goal of the initiative is to expand narratives of American art by investing in organizations and projects that are working to tell a “more truthful story of American art,” Eva Silverman, project director, said.

“There has been an increasing shift towards supporting these projects that really affirm that American art is inclusive of all people, all cultures and can really be found in every pocket of Chicago,” Silverman said.

Over the last roughly five years, around 125 grants totaling about $6.8 million have been given under the Art Design Chicago initiative, Silverman said, and some 93% of the dollars awarded are supporting exhibitions or other projects that feature artists of color.

Shaurya Kumar, originally from Delhi, India, is a tenured professor in the department of print media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the chair of faculty and the faculty adviser for the South Asian student group.

America is a diverse country, he said, with different perspectives and approaches that continue to challenge the preconceptions of what American art is.

“All the major museums are now collecting international and immigrant artists’ work more actively, which is great, but that needs to happen a lot more so people can start to understand American art better,” Kumar said.

Kumar said being in academics, he sees many young artists coming from all across the world but struggling to find opportunities beyond school.

“It’s artists who migrate to Chicago, even from within the U.S. but definitely internationally, it’s harder to make connections outside of a structured, institutional level,” Kumar said. “Mentorship is important, and smaller scale mentorship opportunities do exist, but if it could be enhanced and made available to everyone, that would be very helpful.”

Networking and socialization are not universal concepts, Kumar said, and there is no one way to approach them successfully. Breaking into the art market of Chicago becomes a “huge burden to an individual sometimes.”

Kumar said with the increase in funding for artists of color in Chicago has come “more and more acknowledgment of the work that’s happening globally,” and many regional or ethnic museums and spaces have been created “that showcase art from all over,” whether it’s South Asian, East Asian or European. Artist-run or nonprofit spaces do help, but those spaces still need more support to further their programming, Kumar said.

“Chicago is very unique,” Kumar said. “It is such a city of immigrants. There’s an incredible diversity of people, and I think the city provides the opportunity for all its communities. It has the interest and, of course, a great roster of artists.”

He added that assimilation can also be more inclusive by not focusing on a particular demographic or one culture, country or continent but rather on how much of the work found in the different areas actually “lives within each other,” he said.

An artist himself, Kumar has collaborated with the South Asia Institute several times for different programming there, from mentoring to organizing student exhibits. He also had some of his work featured in a recent exhibit at the institute.

The South Asia Institute is a nonprofit organization that opened in 2019. The space is four floors and includes exhibition space for mostly visual art and event spaces used for different programming, said Shireen Ahmad, co-founder of the institute along with her husband, Afzal Ahmad.

Ahmad and her husband have been art collectors for over 50 years. Having moved to the U.S. in the late ’60s and early ’70s and brought art from their home country of Pakistan, Ahmad said the couple realized “how underrepresented our South Asian artists are in mainstream institutions here.”

“It was important for us to take charge of that narrative, which has really not been represented correctly or the way we wanted it to be,” Ahmad said. “It was also important for us to have our own space where we can promote our work.”

Still, Ahmad said organizations dealing with artists of color are “way inequitable and have a lot of work to do” to level the playing field.

“People like to talk about there being equity and funding, but if you talk to the folks on the receiving end, it’s not anywhere near equitable,” Ahmad said.

Interest has grown, though, Ahmad said. More mainstream museums are exhibiting South Asian artists’ work and more collectors are choosing South Asian art.

“There’s a whole slew of South Asian artists who are doing excellent work and telling wonderful contemporary stories, their immigrant stories, their experiences,” Ahmad said. “It’s important work that needs to be shown.”

Silverman said, “Trying to reverse decades upon decades of structural racism isn’t going to just happen in half a decade.”

While there is “much more work to be done, the direction seems positive,” she added.

For Billie, she said she hopes to keep creating and sharing her memories and lessons from being raised in Oneida through her art. When someone can connect to her work even if they have never been to Oneida or know much about the nation, Billie said her heart feels “really big.”

“A lot of people who uphold mainstream concepts of American art have to do a lot of unlearning and also listening, especially to people who work in this field and are historically excluded from the table, like listening to the artists who are trying to be successful in this field,” Billie said. “It’s really nice to see people connecting with your work and feeling relevant to anyone and everyone.”

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