Millions From Heaven
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Charles is a man who wants to give something back to the arts,” explains Don Oberg, a choral singer who serves as artistic director and general manager of the institute. If all goes according to plan, the Beck Institute will hand out close to 100 grants each year, ranging from $500 to $5,000, to emerging artists in dance, theater, music, visual arts, and other creative disciplines. Beck–who still presides over his Schaumburg consulting business, C. Beck & Associates–expects at first to spend between $500,000 and $1 million of his own money annually to underwrite the institute’s activities.
The institute, also based in Schaumburg, has placed ads in the Reader, Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily Herald, and Daily Southtown soliciting grant applications, with a cutoff date of March 31 and awards to be announced this summer. Beck is assembling a panel of some two dozen consultants in various arts disciplines to evaluate the proposals; among them are playwright David Sinker, dancer-choreographer Donna Jagielski, classical musician Frank Winkler, and Tony D’Angelo and Bill Pullinsi of the now-defunct Candlelight Dinner Playhouse. Beck thinks he and his panel could wind up sifting through as many as 4,000 proposals in the first year alone.
Chicago’s visual arts scene has suffered in the past year: Feigen Incorporated and Phyllis Kind, both prestigious, cutting-edge galleries, have shut their doors to concentrate on their New York locations. But the city’s artistic community may soon be getting a shot in the arm. Last month about a dozen local scribes convened to organize the Chicago Art Critics Association (CACA); so far the group includes writers from New Art Examiner, the Reader, the Sun-Times, Artforum, and Art in America.
