On the first Saturday of each month, Evanston Made holds a citywide art initiative where the many local talents can display their creations to the public.
LISA DEGLIANTONI: We would love people to once a month make part of their spending, or their energy or their time really dedicated to supporting the arts, specifically in Evanston.
That was Lisa Degliantoni, the founder and co-director of Evanston Made. Evanston Made is a membership-based organization that started as a community arts initiative promoting visibility and awareness for Evanston artists.
DEGLIANTONI: We wanted to make art consumption, in all of its forms, as easy and fun as possible.
Since 2014, Evanston Made has continued to host more and more programs each year to support its mission of connecting artists to a growing audience of friends and patrons of the arts. First Saturdays Evanston is just one of the group’s many events in support of that mission.
DEGLIANTONI: What we always encourage people is, there are artists and makers in every single community and bringing them visibility through events and programs that are free and open to all. Doesn’t just benefit the artist, it really benefits the community at large, because it’s such a wonderful thing to unite on.
But partnerships play a key role in uniting people.
DEGLIANTONI: We need businesses to step up and hang art and showcase an open house. We need the city of Evanston to get on board and put it in their, you know, annual or their monthly city newspaper. We need a lot of partners.
To be able to pull off an art initiative scaling throughout the city, partners like Allie Payne are really important.
ALLIE PAYNE: My name’s Allie Payne and I’m a realtor at Compass, and we have a storefront on Dempster.
Payne hosted an art reception at her Dempster storefront on Saturday, March 1st.
PAYNE: It’s a good location, and we wanted to just open it to the community and make it a space where people feel comfortable to step in, even if it’s not about real estate, and art is a good way to do that. Art is a good way to meet different people.
Payne reached out to Evanston Made to see if it knew any artists who would want their art to be showcased. That’s how she began working with Deyaneira Rodriguez.
PAYNE: Deya, she was so young, so vibrant. She’s just like a young girl who has a regular job, but she uses this as her creative outlet.
DEYANEIRA RODRIGUEZ: I am a student at Arizona State University online and I’m also a photographer and I work in regulatory affairs for a medical device company. I found Evanston Made online because I was looking for events and there’s really nothing around where I live, there’s like no art community. So I was really happy to find Evanston Made and their art community is just amazing, and it’s awesome to see my work, you know, on their walls and being exhibited by them, it’s just a great feeling.
Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican artist whose work is inspired by tropical climates, the political landscape of Puerto Rico and her love for the environment, which draws back to her degree.
RODRIGUEZ: I um study environmental science, and so I get to kind of explore or express my love for the environment by creating these paintings of like landscapes, beaches, and things like that.
Rodriguez’s art reception is one of many events happening during First Saturday. There are also art galleries and showcases, along with a sketching event that offers guidance from Jim Parks.
JIM PARKS: This sketch at sketchbook and what it is is you go in, you order a beer, you sit down, we talk, we jabber, we sketch each other, we sketch what’s on the walls, we sketch what’s out the window and basically have a good time. A lot of time people come in and they have never drawn before and they’re a little intimidated maybe, I don’t know. So my job is to make them feel welcome, offer them any instruction if they want just to get the ball rolling.
Parks has lived in Evanston since 1959 and has been an avid artist working with lots of different mediums throughout his artistic career since his retirement about nine years ago. Which is something he has in common with parts of the Evanston creative community.
PARKS: Evanston is teeming with artists and We’re all sort of, sort of retiring people but we do find the social, you know, connection, and it it’s encouraging. It’s sort of like the Impressionists in France. They encouraged each other, they helped each other, they gave each other ideas, they inspired each other.
Which is the whole point of these events.
DEGLIANTONI: I think really the focus is community building through the arts. I know there’s a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic, and there’s a lot of talk about not feeling, like, really connected to your community in a way that you feel supportive of it. And if you think about what brings people together really easily, it’s often music, it’s often food, it’s often an art exhibit, public art. It’s usually culture. Culture is absolutely a glue that helps a lot of people connect and what we have found is that when we host events, whether it’s a planer painting festival or a maker’s market, we always hear from people.
And because First Saturday is a self-directed event, people are free to embrace this culture however and whenever they want.
DEGLIANTONI: You can learn to sketch at 1 o’clock, you can go to an art opening at 3 o’clock, you can go get some bits and bites at [Evanston] Pour and be surrounded by art. Like, you really build your own art experience.
This flexibility and plethora of opportunities make it easy for anyone to engage with the Evanston art world. Whether you’re deeply immersed or experiencing it for the first time.
PAYNE: If you’ve never gone to see art in your life, this is the time.
For WNUR News I’m Sydney Gaw.
And I’m Karrah Toatley.
Low murmuring sound effect by freesound_community from Pixabay
Music by Oleksii Kalyna from Pixabay
