Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, out of anger that he wouldn’t produce her play/manifesto Up Your Ass. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, out of anger at the senator and presidential candidate’s support of military aid for Israel.

In Jean Stein’s 1982 oral history of Warhol’s Factory It Girl, Edie (as in Sedgwick), Barbara Rose, the wife of artist Frank Stella, recalls her husband’s prediction of the outcome of these two events: “Bobby’s going to die and Andy’s going to live. That’s the way the world is.” He was of course correct. (Rose also maintains that “the shooting was a suicide attempt; [Warhol] provoked it.”)

Andy Warhol in Iran Through 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions, audio description, and touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 (students $15, subject to availability)

The messy nexus of celebrity, politics, and personal trauma forms the spine for Brent Askari’s speculative two-character play, Andy Warhol in Iran, now receiving a scintillating production at Northlight under BJ Jones’s direction. As Reader contributor Jack Helbig wrote about in our winter arts preview issue, Northlight’s staging is one of two current plays riffing off real events in Warhol’s life in the Chicago area right now—the other is Vince Melocchi’s Andy Warhol’s Tomato, featuring a young Warhol (or “Warhola,” as he was then still known) at Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at College of DuPage. 

The Warhol we meet in Askari’s play, set in 1976, is several years post-shooting. After not painting for a few years following the failed murder attempt, he’s back making very lucrative silkscreen portraits for celebrity clients, in part to support his magazine Interview. And he’s come to Iran to take Polaroids for such a portrait of Farah, Empress of Iran and third wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

That part is all based on fact. The fiction comes in when Warhol (Rob Lindley) warily answers the door to room service (caviar is dirt cheap in Iran, so who can resist?), only to find himself facing a handgun and an angry revolutionary, Farhad (Hamid Dehghani), disguised as a waiter. From that point on, Askari’s play shares some glancing characteristics with Katori Hall’s 2009 play, The Mountaintop, in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spends his last night on earth at the Lorraine Motel, where a maid turns out to be a harbinger of King’s fate.

Askari’s play is a highly watchable and often quite funny piece. Of course, we know Warhol didn’t die in Iran. Instead, he died at 58 of complications from gallbladder surgery in 1987—a surgery made complicated by the earlier damage caused by Solanas’s bullet. 

According to Taylor Mead, a writer and performer in Warhol’s films who was also quoted in Stein’s book: “Andy died when Valerie Solanas shot him. He’s just somebody to have at your dinner table now. Charming, but he’s the ghost of a genius. Just a walking ghost.”

That certainly feels like an apt description of Lindley’s Warhol at first. He enters through the audience, and tells us, “Oh hey, I don’t really like talking in public. I’d rather just sit and watch—like you.” Lindley, who rocks the artist’s famous silver wig (designed by Natalia Castilla) nails Warhol’s air of fey distraction, the affected manchild who, even after years as an art world superstar, seems starry-eyed himself about things like having dinner at the Ford White House (which is where he made the connection with the Shah and Empress in the first place).

He’s also about as apolitical an artist as you can find, telling his would-be captor, “I find politics abstract.” But that’s part of his appeal as a target for Farhad, who tells Warhol, “You’re the most decadent artist alive.” “Oh, thank you,” Warhol responds, without a speck of irony. There is irony, however, in the fact that Farhad’s group doesn’t really want much more out of the kidnapping attempt than publicity, which is something Warhol understands quite well. (And really, what was Solanas’s attack but a reaction to being denied a slice of Warholian superstardom?)

As is de rigueur in two-character, one-set plays of this nature, the point of the story is that both these men will reveal more to each other (and thus to the audience) than they intend, and may in fact find that they are less far apart psychologically and emotionally than they imagined.

Warhol and Farhad both carry literal scars of their trauma. Lindley’s Warhol pulls up his shirt to show the surgical map Solanas’s attack left on his torso (along with the girdle he has to wear to hold his battered internal organs in place), while Farhad’s back carries deep indentations and welts from the torture he endured at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police force. Despite Barbara Rose’s assertion to Stein, the Warhol we meet in Askari’s play seems not so much in love with death, but afraid of a painful life. (And given Solanas’s radical politics—she created the SCUM Manifesto, allegedly standing for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—it’s not surprising that Warhol would shy away even more from anything with a hint of political revolution.)

For Warhol, falling out of favor with the old Factory gang is also painful, as is being blamed for his muse Sedgwick’s death by overdose a few years earlier. Mike Tutaj’s projections cleverly mimic the repetitions of Warhol’s own prints at the top of Todd Rosenthal’s faded-but-luxurious hotel-room set. They also provide a handy way to give us a visual timeline of events and people in Warhol’s life, as well as images depicting the history of Iran. Yet paradoxically, Lindley’s Warhol also shuns the public eye, preferring to stay holed up in his room. (This too, according to Interview editor Bob Colacello, tracks with the real Warhol.)

Both men in Askari’s play also lost their fathers at a young age. It seems that art became Warhol’s surrogate daddy, while Farhad seeks to avenge the death of his own dad and free his country from the grip of the Shah’s dictatorship. That Iran would end up facing another kind of authoritarian regime after the 1979 revolution doesn’t go without mention, though Dehghani’s character breaks the fourth wall to deliver a quick and dirty history of the ways that his country has been subject to coups, invasion, and exploitation by Western powers and corporations (i.e., oil companies) for decades. (Askari’s own father is Iranian and Shiite Muslim, and his mother, as he told Helbig, “was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp.”) 

Askari has fun inserting Warhol’s own observations on himself, such as “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Yet as the 90-minute play progresses, both Lindley’s Warhol and Dehghani’s Farhad unpeel their layers. 

The latter has studied literature in the United States, which Warhol takes as a sign that he cares about art at least as much as politics. And he’s far from a cliche of revolutionary rage. Dehghani, who is a veteran of Iranian theater with an MFA in directing from Northwestern, shows us the fear and uncertainty driving Farhad. He doesn’t really want to hurt Warhol, but he knows that failure will make him a target of both the Shah’s police and his revolutionary cohorts. 

It’s clear that neither can feel fully alive without investment in something bigger than themselves: art (and, sure, the access to celebrity glamor it provides) in Warhol’s case, and the quest for justice in Farhad’s. These are literally the only things keeping them going in the face of so much emptiness and despair and loss around them.

Farhad quotes T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” but Andy Warhol in Iran ends neither with a bang nor a whimper. Instead, the image of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died under suspicious circumstances in September after being arrested by the “morality police,” takes over at the end of the play. (In his program bio, Dehghani dedicates his performance to “the first female-led revolution in history.”) It’s a sobering way to close out a play about two people who start out invested in the power of fame to change their worlds, yet find a fleeting moment of quiet empathy through surprisingly similar personal circumstances.

Read More

In her first campaign for mayor, Lori Lightfoot was something of a cipher, someone Chicagoans could project any number of feelings or impressions upon. 

She was an experienced lawyer who had undertaken a few public-facing roles. She tapped into popular discontent with the politicians running against her and won in a landslide.

Lightfoot is more animated on the stump talking about neighborhood investments than she is about any other issue, even if, as the Tribune reported, many of the largest initiatives of her signature Invest South/West initiative were planned after she took office.

And it is meaningful and important that Chicago elected a gay Black woman to lead its government after decades of homophobic, racist, and chauvinistic politics. But her tendency to repeatedly say things that simultaneously alienate both sides of an issue, compounded by the often-displayed harshness of her personality, her inexperience managing the staff and bureaucracy that manage the nation’s third-largest city, and the inescapable difficulty in connecting with the public have made her reelection anything but certain. 

Despite how removed elected officials are from people’s daily lives, Lightfoot is no longer a cipher. Chicago will soon see if voters give her another term.

The Reader interviewed Lightfoot on Jan. 13, after she hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr. 

Gettinger: You faced an unprecedented confluence of crises in your first term: the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, a restive City Council, just to name a few. How do you navigate that as a new mayor?

Lightfoot: Very carefully. Look, it has been unprecedented. We’ve had a lot of headwinds, some of which were clearly unexpected and beyond our control, top among them a global pandemic that turned everything that we understood as our role upside-down. There’s no playbook for that.

Luckily, we have a very well-prepared Department of Public Health. Luckily we built a very good, strong team—not just subject matter experts but people who are truly committed to service. And we have grown together. We as a mayor’s office, we as a city government, but we as a city—we’ve been through life together. Every facet of it in these past four years.

My primary focus in the early days of the pandemic was really focused on three big buckets. One was to make sure that our healthcare system didn’t buckle, because at that time we were seeing what was happening in China and other parts of Asia. We were seeing what was happening on the West Coast and starting to see what was happening in New York and the surrounding area. 

So I was very concerned that we did not have a health care system that buckled and was not able to manage itself to manage the patients who were in need, because that was one of the dire predictions that was resonating across the media in that early time. So the health care system and making sure that that didn’t happen was very much on my mind. And not surprisingly, another area of focus was health care workers and first responders. Your health care system is going to fail if the workers are not safe and protected. So we did a lot in those early days to make sure that we were shoring up those vital essential workers: first responders, police, fire, EMTs. That was also really important. 

And then also in our city, making sure that our most vulnerable residents: our seniors, our homeless, the people who were not connected to health care—those most vulnerable residents were the worry of many of us, me included, and making sure that we were doing everything that we could right away to reach out to them. That’s why we decompressed homeless shelters. That’s why we worked hand in hand with Sheriff Dart to ensure the Cook County Jail didn’t become a leading COVID hotspot. 

And then fanning out from there, as we started seeing data from testing rolling in and understanding who was getting sick, who was dying—I’ll never forget for the rest of my life—in early April learning about the fact that Black people in this city were dying at seven times the rate of every other demographic. That was the ultimate call to action. 

The election of a Black lesbian was historic, and you were elected with a lot of support from the LGBTQ community. Can you talk about the policies you’ve enacted to make Chicago more welcoming to the LGBTQ community?

Well first of all, I think that it’s important that I lead by example and that I’m unapologetic. You know well that over the arc of our history there have been prominent leaders from our community who never say the words, “I am gay.” That’s not me. And so I think that part of it is really important.

I cannot tell you the number of parents who come to me, usually pulling me aside and whispering in my ear, “My son/my daughter has come out. We admire you.” Because, look, I think a lot of straight parents who didn’t have that vision for their child, didn’t know that that was a possibility. When they learn—even if they’re accepting—they’re worried about: “What kind of life is my child going to have? Are they going to be happy? Are they going to be able to have a family? Will they be accepted? Will they have the kind of life that I envisioned for them?’”

And what I hope is, through me as a role model, that I’m able to show, “Yes, yes yes”—the answer to all those questions. Vanquish those fears, because there is, in this moment in our time, even as we’re in this tough time—and I don’t underestimate that, for our community that is under siege, particularly our trans brothers and sisters—that those parents who are out there and particularly our children see that there are people like me who’ve fought that fight, come out on the other side of it, and are better for it, frankly. And that they can now walk in the path that was blazed for me and that I am hopefully blazing for them.

In your 2018 framework for LGBTQ Chicago, there was a promise or a proposal of shelters for LGBTQ kids in the city. That hasn’t happened. What have you done to address homeless LGBTQ youth?

I think the thing that we have done is make sure that we are supporting those existing places, both with beds but, importantly, programming in places of connection. Because when I was campaigning back in 2018 for example, I went to a shelter up on the north side, just north of Addison on Ashland, and remember thinking, “These folks need help and resources.” And what I heard from the people who ran the shelter and employees is that young people, and particularly young people of color, were coming from all over the city because those resources weren’t there.

Now I’m not going to tell you we’ve done everything yet. We haven’t. But we have made sure that resources are flowing, that supports are there, even though this is a very tough time. I’m very painfully aware that a certain percentage of the people who are living on the street are the people from my community, LGBTQ youth, who left their homes or were thrown out of their home because they sought to live their authentic life. I think there’s still a lot more work that we must do, and I am 100 percent committed to doing it.

Particularly funding—I think of it as earmarks for transgender Chicagoans and that kind of stuff. What is your administration doing to address the high rates of unemployment, off-market employment, homelessness—particularly for trans people in Chicago. What are you guys doing to invest in that community?

First and foremost, we have to start with a values statement. We have to recognize and say, “Our trans brothers and sisters deserve the same access to the benefits of this city as everyone else.” The values statement is critically important, then we have to back it up with real, concrete, tangible actions. Again, making sure that, for example, on my advisory committee, that we have members of the trans community that are front and center.

Who’s on it?

It’s a pretty diverse group, and they’re not shy. But making sure that I’m hearing directly from them about the continuing challenge of their community. I’m, obviously, a lesbian, but I’m not a trans woman or man, and I don’t get to pretend that I have captured and understand fully the unique challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis. Making sure that I am present in those communities and that people see me with my trans brothers and sisters. 

And then again, it’s about putting your money where your mouth is, making sure that we are putting money into resources. It’s also about raising the necessity with other institutions within city government who need to be there to support the trans community, notably the police department. We can’t live in a world where trans lives don’t matter. We can’t live in a world where trans women in particular are getting assaulted and murdered and those cases are falling by the wayside. 

One of the things I’m proudest of is increasing the number of liaisons from the police department to the LGBTQ+ community and making sure that we are focused on supporting trans lives. We have a member of our community who is a senior leader in the police department in a community policing role. So making sure that our presence is noted, that this is a priority for me, and that we are holding ourselves, each and every department, accountable to be responsive to the needs of that and other vulnerable communities in our city.

Do you think the relationship between you and the Chicago Teachers Union can be repaired? 

If I see, and they articulate, a commitment to putting our children first, a commitment to respecting the voices of parents as the first principles, the core principles around which they rally, then absolutely. I think there’s ample opportunity for us to reach common ground because that’s where I’m at. That’s where I’ve always been at. Our kids come first. Creating safe, nurturing environments for them has to be the primary work that we’re about. And we would love the partnership of the CTU, but I think we’re, right now, on different planets.

Another historic first is the fact that civilians will be elected to police district councils. How do you intend to engage with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the district councilors to improve public safety, both in terms of crime and police misconduct?

I think that their primary focus should be, as embedded in the ordinance, to help decipher the various levers of accountability and to be a voice for community members who need constitutional policing. An emphasis on “constitutional,” because they need a police department that sees them and respects them. They need a police department that understands the most-important tool that officers have is being a champion of a community. And I think, to me, that’s got to be the primary focus and work of the commission. 

And I’ve said it to the interim group of commissioners. I’m going to say it again, over and over again, because I believe that, to me, is their highest calling.

How can the city address homelessness and ensure we’re comprehensively and sustainably getting people the homes they need to survive and thrive?

I think we have laid the groundwork for that in these first four years. Our relentless work on closing the gap in affordable units across our city is critically important, and that goes to address the issue. I think our seven-fold increase in the amount of services that are now available to residents of our city at no cost is a part of it. I think our monumental investments in substance abuse addiction treatments are a big part of it. Because you know as well as I do, people are on the street for a variety of reasons. Some of it’s financial, some of it’s mental health, some of it’s substance abuse, and sometimes it’s all of the above. 

So we’ve done, I think, important work and brought the biggest investments in the city’s history, but we know that there’s more work to do, and this is a very complicated problem. We are fortunate that we don’t see the proliferation of homeless people on our streets like we see in other cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast and the Northwest Coast, despite sometimes the hyperbolic language that we hear from some. 

But we got a challenge, and I firmly believe, particularly as we sit here in January—it’s not as cold as it usually is this time of year, but none of God’s children should be living on the streets in cold weather, hot weather, or in any weather. It’s not a life that supports them in what I hope are pursuits to live out their best lives and to really be a part of the fabric of our city. It pains me when I go by and see the encampments. It pains me when I see the way in which people are suffering. 

But it’s not just about “do I have enough units?” It’s about making sure that we’re forming a relationship with the people, that we have the wraparound services to help them see the virtue in moving through the various stages of housing to get to a place of independent living.

In the next four years, what will you do to improve CTA reliability, frequency, safety, and comfort?

The reason that we’ve made progress and we’ve seen the numbers of violent incidents of crime go down in the last few months of 2022 was a number of things that we put in place. Number one is that we sat and listened to the frontline workers: the bus drivers, the people who work in the rail section of CTA. And they told us what they felt like they needed to feel safe. That’s important. In the dark old days of the summer of 2020 when we heard from Amalgamated Transit Union members: “We don’t feel safe. We don’t want to come to work. We don’t feel like we’re going to be protected.” We have to be constantly listening and engaging with them because the people who are closest to the challenges are closest to the solutions.

The other reason we made progress is because what we heard from those workers, from riders, is we want more police on the CTA. We want uniformed officers to be present. Heard it loud and clear. We’re delivering that. 

The CTA also, frankly, has to step up its game, and it has. You can’t just issue rider alerts; you’ve got to go out to communities. You also have to listen. You’ve got to be part of the solution. You’ve got to bring the non-uniformed security personnel. And you’ve got to keep being diligent all the time.

Read More

In her first campaign for mayor, Lori Lightfoot was something of a cipher, someone Chicagoans could project any number of feelings or impressions upon. 

She was an experienced lawyer who had undertaken a few public-facing roles. She tapped into popular discontent with the politicians running against her and won in a landslide.

Lightfoot is more animated on the stump talking about neighborhood investments than she is about any other issue, even if, as the Tribune reported, many of the largest initiatives of her signature Invest South/West initiative were planned after she took office.

And it is meaningful and important that Chicago elected a gay Black woman to lead its government after decades of homophobic, racist, and chauvinistic politics. But her tendency to repeatedly say things that simultaneously alienate both sides of an issue, compounded by the often-displayed harshness of her personality, her inexperience managing the staff and bureaucracy that manage the nation’s third-largest city, and the inescapable difficulty in connecting with the public have made her reelection anything but certain. 

Despite how removed elected officials are from people’s daily lives, Lightfoot is no longer a cipher. Chicago will soon see if voters give her another term.

The Reader interviewed Lightfoot on Jan. 13, after she hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr. 

Gettinger: You faced an unprecedented confluence of crises in your first term: the pandemic, the George Floyd uprising, a restive City Council, just to name a few. How do you navigate that as a new mayor?

Lightfoot: Very carefully. Look, it has been unprecedented. We’ve had a lot of headwinds, some of which were clearly unexpected and beyond our control, top among them a global pandemic that turned everything that we understood as our role upside-down. There’s no playbook for that.

Luckily, we have a very well-prepared Department of Public Health. Luckily we built a very good, strong team—not just subject matter experts but people who are truly committed to service. And we have grown together. We as a mayor’s office, we as a city government, but we as a city—we’ve been through life together. Every facet of it in these past four years.

My primary focus in the early days of the pandemic was really focused on three big buckets. One was to make sure that our healthcare system didn’t buckle, because at that time we were seeing what was happening in China and other parts of Asia. We were seeing what was happening on the West Coast and starting to see what was happening in New York and the surrounding area. 

So I was very concerned that we did not have a health care system that buckled and was not able to manage itself to manage the patients who were in need, because that was one of the dire predictions that was resonating across the media in that early time. So the health care system and making sure that that didn’t happen was very much on my mind. And not surprisingly, another area of focus was health care workers and first responders. Your health care system is going to fail if the workers are not safe and protected. So we did a lot in those early days to make sure that we were shoring up those vital essential workers: first responders, police, fire, EMTs. That was also really important. 

And then also in our city, making sure that our most vulnerable residents: our seniors, our homeless, the people who were not connected to health care—those most vulnerable residents were the worry of many of us, me included, and making sure that we were doing everything that we could right away to reach out to them. That’s why we decompressed homeless shelters. That’s why we worked hand in hand with Sheriff Dart to ensure the Cook County Jail didn’t become a leading COVID hotspot. 

And then fanning out from there, as we started seeing data from testing rolling in and understanding who was getting sick, who was dying—I’ll never forget for the rest of my life—in early April learning about the fact that Black people in this city were dying at seven times the rate of every other demographic. That was the ultimate call to action. 

The election of a Black lesbian was historic, and you were elected with a lot of support from the LGBTQ community. Can you talk about the policies you’ve enacted to make Chicago more welcoming to the LGBTQ community?

Well first of all, I think that it’s important that I lead by example and that I’m unapologetic. You know well that over the arc of our history there have been prominent leaders from our community who never say the words, “I am gay.” That’s not me. And so I think that part of it is really important.

I cannot tell you the number of parents who come to me, usually pulling me aside and whispering in my ear, “My son/my daughter has come out. We admire you.” Because, look, I think a lot of straight parents who didn’t have that vision for their child, didn’t know that that was a possibility. When they learn—even if they’re accepting—they’re worried about: “What kind of life is my child going to have? Are they going to be happy? Are they going to be able to have a family? Will they be accepted? Will they have the kind of life that I envisioned for them?’”

And what I hope is, through me as a role model, that I’m able to show, “Yes, yes yes”—the answer to all those questions. Vanquish those fears, because there is, in this moment in our time, even as we’re in this tough time—and I don’t underestimate that, for our community that is under siege, particularly our trans brothers and sisters—that those parents who are out there and particularly our children see that there are people like me who’ve fought that fight, come out on the other side of it, and are better for it, frankly. And that they can now walk in the path that was blazed for me and that I am hopefully blazing for them.

In your 2018 framework for LGBTQ Chicago, there was a promise or a proposal of shelters for LGBTQ kids in the city. That hasn’t happened. What have you done to address homeless LGBTQ youth?

I think the thing that we have done is make sure that we are supporting those existing places, both with beds but, importantly, programming in places of connection. Because when I was campaigning back in 2018 for example, I went to a shelter up on the north side, just north of Addison on Ashland, and remember thinking, “These folks need help and resources.” And what I heard from the people who ran the shelter and employees is that young people, and particularly young people of color, were coming from all over the city because those resources weren’t there.

Now I’m not going to tell you we’ve done everything yet. We haven’t. But we have made sure that resources are flowing, that supports are there, even though this is a very tough time. I’m very painfully aware that a certain percentage of the people who are living on the street are the people from my community, LGBTQ youth, who left their homes or were thrown out of their home because they sought to live their authentic life. I think there’s still a lot more work that we must do, and I am 100 percent committed to doing it.

Particularly funding—I think of it as earmarks for transgender Chicagoans and that kind of stuff. What is your administration doing to address the high rates of unemployment, off-market employment, homelessness—particularly for trans people in Chicago. What are you guys doing to invest in that community?

First and foremost, we have to start with a values statement. We have to recognize and say, “Our trans brothers and sisters deserve the same access to the benefits of this city as everyone else.” The values statement is critically important, then we have to back it up with real, concrete, tangible actions. Again, making sure that, for example, on my advisory committee, that we have members of the trans community that are front and center.

Who’s on it?

It’s a pretty diverse group, and they’re not shy. But making sure that I’m hearing directly from them about the continuing challenge of their community. I’m, obviously, a lesbian, but I’m not a trans woman or man, and I don’t get to pretend that I have captured and understand fully the unique challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis. Making sure that I am present in those communities and that people see me with my trans brothers and sisters. 

And then again, it’s about putting your money where your mouth is, making sure that we are putting money into resources. It’s also about raising the necessity with other institutions within city government who need to be there to support the trans community, notably the police department. We can’t live in a world where trans lives don’t matter. We can’t live in a world where trans women in particular are getting assaulted and murdered and those cases are falling by the wayside. 

One of the things I’m proudest of is increasing the number of liaisons from the police department to the LGBTQ+ community and making sure that we are focused on supporting trans lives. We have a member of our community who is a senior leader in the police department in a community policing role. So making sure that our presence is noted, that this is a priority for me, and that we are holding ourselves, each and every department, accountable to be responsive to the needs of that and other vulnerable communities in our city.

Do you think the relationship between you and the Chicago Teachers Union can be repaired? 

If I see, and they articulate, a commitment to putting our children first, a commitment to respecting the voices of parents as the first principles, the core principles around which they rally, then absolutely. I think there’s ample opportunity for us to reach common ground because that’s where I’m at. That’s where I’ve always been at. Our kids come first. Creating safe, nurturing environments for them has to be the primary work that we’re about. And we would love the partnership of the CTU, but I think we’re, right now, on different planets.

Another historic first is the fact that civilians will be elected to police district councils. How do you intend to engage with the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability and the district councilors to improve public safety, both in terms of crime and police misconduct?

I think that their primary focus should be, as embedded in the ordinance, to help decipher the various levers of accountability and to be a voice for community members who need constitutional policing. An emphasis on “constitutional,” because they need a police department that sees them and respects them. They need a police department that understands the most-important tool that officers have is being a champion of a community. And I think, to me, that’s got to be the primary focus and work of the commission. 

And I’ve said it to the interim group of commissioners. I’m going to say it again, over and over again, because I believe that, to me, is their highest calling.

How can the city address homelessness and ensure we’re comprehensively and sustainably getting people the homes they need to survive and thrive?

I think we have laid the groundwork for that in these first four years. Our relentless work on closing the gap in affordable units across our city is critically important, and that goes to address the issue. I think our seven-fold increase in the amount of services that are now available to residents of our city at no cost is a part of it. I think our monumental investments in substance abuse addiction treatments are a big part of it. Because you know as well as I do, people are on the street for a variety of reasons. Some of it’s financial, some of it’s mental health, some of it’s substance abuse, and sometimes it’s all of the above. 

So we’ve done, I think, important work and brought the biggest investments in the city’s history, but we know that there’s more work to do, and this is a very complicated problem. We are fortunate that we don’t see the proliferation of homeless people on our streets like we see in other cities across the country, particularly on the West Coast and the Northwest Coast, despite sometimes the hyperbolic language that we hear from some. 

But we got a challenge, and I firmly believe, particularly as we sit here in January—it’s not as cold as it usually is this time of year, but none of God’s children should be living on the streets in cold weather, hot weather, or in any weather. It’s not a life that supports them in what I hope are pursuits to live out their best lives and to really be a part of the fabric of our city. It pains me when I go by and see the encampments. It pains me when I see the way in which people are suffering. 

But it’s not just about “do I have enough units?” It’s about making sure that we’re forming a relationship with the people, that we have the wraparound services to help them see the virtue in moving through the various stages of housing to get to a place of independent living.

In the next four years, what will you do to improve CTA reliability, frequency, safety, and comfort?

The reason that we’ve made progress and we’ve seen the numbers of violent incidents of crime go down in the last few months of 2022 was a number of things that we put in place. Number one is that we sat and listened to the frontline workers: the bus drivers, the people who work in the rail section of CTA. And they told us what they felt like they needed to feel safe. That’s important. In the dark old days of the summer of 2020 when we heard from Amalgamated Transit Union members: “We don’t feel safe. We don’t want to come to work. We don’t feel like we’re going to be protected.” We have to be constantly listening and engaging with them because the people who are closest to the challenges are closest to the solutions.

The other reason we made progress is because what we heard from those workers, from riders, is we want more police on the CTA. We want uniformed officers to be present. Heard it loud and clear. We’re delivering that. 

The CTA also, frankly, has to step up its game, and it has. You can’t just issue rider alerts; you’ve got to go out to communities. You also have to listen. You’ve got to be part of the solution. You’ve got to bring the non-uniformed security personnel. And you’ve got to keep being diligent all the time.

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For immediate release

Chicago-area media strategist and nonprofit executive Solomon Lieberman has been hired as the new CEO and publisher of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism (RICJ), which operates the 51-year-old newspaper, Chicago Reader. He will take the reins mid-February from Tracy Baim, who announced her intent to leave last summer.

Lieberman, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, most recently worked as founding executive director of the Institute for Political Innovation, a national think tank that researched and advocated for nonpartisan election reform. Previously, he served in several capacities at the nonprofit Better Government Association in Chicago, most recently as vice president of strategy and civic engagement. He has a bachelor’s of arts in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We are very excited about the media savvy, passion, and business-development acumen that Solomon brings to this job,” RICJ board chair Eileen Rhodes said. “He has worked in nonprofit Chicago journalism, and built a successful nonpartisan organization with national reach. Our hope is that he continues to grow the RICJ nonprofit, strengthening the infrastructure needed to lead this legacy newspaper for the next fifty years.”

“I keep pinching myself,” Lieberman said. “I get to follow Tracy Baim’s lead, serve a beautiful, interdependent community of makers, members, readers, leaders, business owners and donors, and support community journalism at its finest.”

The nationwide six-month search for the leader of RICJ was conducted by the Morten Group, LLC. The board of directors of RICJ interviewed the top candidates, and made the final decision. Morten Group, a national consulting firm based in Chicago, focuses on executive placement and transitions, and racial equity integration and strategic planning.

“The past four years have been more than challenging,” said Baim. “When it became independent from the Sun-Times, we first had to rebuild the business side of the organization. The next challenge was surviving during the early phase of the COVID pandemic, and most recently, in May 2022, we were finally able to obtain full nonprofit independence. Now it’s time for the next phase, bringing in more resources to stabilize and thrive. I am excited for what Solomon will bring to this equation. I am also very confident in the incredible team we have built at RICJ and our Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) project. I am proud of the work I have done to build both the Reader and our local media ecosystem, and I plan to continue to advocate for community media.”

“We can’t thank Tracy enough for her passion and dedication to saving the Chicago Reader—several times over the past four and a half years,” said Rhodes. “Tracy, who has been doing community journalism for 39 years, including as co-founder of Windy City Times, was the right person at the right time. I have been so happy to work by her side, as board treasurer and then chair, as we met the incredibly difficult challenges of keeping the Reader alive.”

Since Baim took over as publisher of the Chicago Reader in 2018, the organization has moved to strengthen its infrastructure and has diversified its revenues, distribution, leadership, and staff. It has tripled in revenue, more than doubled its number of employees, and has expanded its print and online readership. In 2018, there was one person of color on the team. Current leadership consists of 57 percent people of color, 57 percent LGBTQ+, 15 percent disabled, and 86 percent female, nonbinary, or trans. Of the overall staff, 47 percent are people of color, 33 percent LGBTQ, 8 percent disabled, and 67 percent female, nonbinary, or trans.

For more information on RICJ and the Chicago Reader, see www.chicagoreader.com. For CIMA info see www.IndieMediaChi.org.

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