End of the N.A.M.E. Game?
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A former assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a recent graduate of the master in arts administration program at the School of the Art Institute, Sulyok admits the N.A.M.E. board didn’t paint a rosy picture when he applied for the job, but he says the situation proved even worse than he was led to believe. “There was no transition from the previous director when I arrived,” he explains. He was shown his office and left to examine the files. He was appalled by what he found. “It was a disaster, with thousands of dollars in outstanding bills from the previous year,” he says.
Since assuming the helm, Sulyok has zeroed in on the reasons for N.A.M.E.’s problems. Chief among them, of course, is cash. “Less money is coming in than what is being spent,” he says. Housed in a 4,000-square-foot space at 1255 S. Wabash, N.A.M.E. is saddled with a costly long-term lease that it can’t get out of, short of declaring bankruptcy. Sulyok says the gallery pays $1,400 a month in base rent, plus another $200 a month for six months of the year to cover property taxes, part of the gallery’s agreement with its landlord. So far, attempts to restructure the lease agreement have proved futile. Sulyok says various other insurance and security expenses bring the total cost of maintaining the gallery space to approximately $20,000 a year, a hefty chunk of its $70,000 annual operating budget. About $30,000 of the annual budget comes from earned income, with the rest being provided by foundation and government grants. But those grants have been increasingly hard to get–and the amounts awarded are often smaller than they were in previous years. Sulyok says the organization has tried to make ends meet in recent months with two general operating grants totaling $20,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
With a $15,000 deficit, the 12-year-old Zebra Crossing has opted to shut down and try to pay off its debt rather than continue producing, says managing director Bill Endsley. The high cost of maintaining its own space appears to have been a major factor in the group’s demise, though several years ago conventional wisdom held that smaller companies needed their own theaters to survive. With an annual operating budget of only $50,000, Zebra Crossing was paying $3,000 a month in rent and utilities to stay in its small 70-seat facility, which it first occupied in the summer of 1994. When the company had a hit show–which wasn’t often–the rent wasn’t a problem. But most of the time Zebra Crossing found it hard to make ends meet. Renting the theater to others wasn’t nearly as lucrative as hoped. Artistic director Marlene Zuccaro parted ways with the company earlier this year, and her position was left vacant. The board also had dwindled from seven to four members.
