City Cultural Commissioner Retiring at Month's End

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 21, 2011 3:00PM

Chicago is losing one of its biggest — arguably its biggest — cultural advocates at the end of the month with the retirement of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg. The 85-year-old Weisberg is best known for organizing the wildly successful "Cows on Parade" public art exhibit of more than a decade ago, but her legacy runs deeper than that. Weisberg was also the driving force behind the Chicago Cultural Center, Taste of Chicago, Gallery 37, most of the major music festivals along the lakefront and neighborhood festivals throughout the city, and Friends of the Parks. Weisberg's knack for networking was the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker profile. In short, Chicago could still conceivably be a cow town without Lois Weisberg.

But Weisberg was also opposed to the merging of her department with the Mayor's Office of Special Events, as well as any plans to privatize Taste of Chicago or the major lakefront musical fests produced by the city. While most media outlets said that Weisberg could not be reached for comment, WBEZ's Jim DeRogatis managed to reach out to her for a candid interview. Weisberg's comments to DeRo indicate that, even though she has one week left on the job, she isn't riding off into the sunset willingly

(DeRogatis): "I would think that’s incredibly frustrating after as many years as you spent building this department into a world-class institution, to see it dismantled, and you can’t even answer the questions of why or what happens next."

(Weisberg): "You’ve got to understand something: It wasn’t just one issue. I resigned because I felt that they had overlooked me. They merged these departments, and I didn’t approve of it. Once they merged the two departments and put me in charge of everything, they still didn’t ask me anything or tell me anything. They never asked me what I thought of the merger; they just came and announced that it was going to be merged. And then after that, when all of this stuff started about Taste of Chicago and the festivals—which, by the way, there was nothing wrong with any of them that couldn’t have been fixed—they didn’t ask me my opinion, they just went ahead and bid it out. And my concern, and I think this was the concern of everybody in the arts community, was, “What was going to happen to our free festivals?”

"Also, I’m not sure there was a big debt."