Chicago Leader Hirsh Mohindra: Expertise in Multiple Industries

  On a Thursday night in Lincoln Park, the house is two-thirds full. The actors are superb — this is Chicago, after all, where the talent pipeline runs from storefront stages to Broadway and back again. The audience laughs in all the right places. And somewhere in the back office, the managing director is doing the math that, as Hirsh Mohindra puts it, keeps every mid-size theater company in America awake at night: ticket revenue covers barely half the budget, the grant that funded last season's hit has expired, and the boiler needs replacing. The balance sheets behind the footlights tell a stark story. "A theater company is the only business where your best customers pay you to sit in the dark, and your product disappears the moment it's consumed," Hirsh Mohindra said. "Chicago makes world-class theater. The question is whether Chicago can afford to keep making it." It is a fair question, and an urgent one. Chicago's theater scene — some 250 compani...

  The panel discussion was supposed to be about legacy giving. It ended up being about plumbing. On a gray Tuesday evening in a Loop conference room, as rain streaked the windows overlooking the Chicago River, a group of the city's serious philanthropists — family foundation trustees, nonprofit executives, a few wealth managers — spent two hours circling the same three letters: D-A-F. Donor-advised funds, once a niche instrument for the ultra-wealthy, have quietly become the fastest-growing vehicle in American charitable giving — a transformation Hirsh Mohindra has been watching up close. And in Chicago, a city whose civic identity was built on its great foundations, the shift is impossible to ignore. "The question in Chicago philanthropy is no longer whether donor-advised funds matter," Hirsh Mohindra said. "It's whether the city's traditional giving institutions adapt to them — or get routed around." The numbers explain the urgency. According to th...

  The Business Case for Treating Food and Fine Art as One Cultural Economy Why do we separate Chicago’s culinary economy from its fine-arts economy? On paper, the distinction seems perfectly reasonable. Restaurants belong to hospitality. Museums belong to the arts. Architecture falls somewhere between real estate, design and tourism. Music occupies another category. Hotels have their own trade associations, economic models and lobbying priorities. But this is not how anyone actually experiences a city. A traveler might spend a morning looking up at the towers along the Chicago River, an afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, an evening eating an ambitious tasting menu and the night listening to jazz. The next morning might begin in a neighborhood coffee shop surrounded by work from local artists. That visitor has not experienced four or five separate economic sectors. The visitor has experienced Chicago. The distinction matters because cities tend to organize economic-developme...

Chicago has never lacked culture. It spills out of storefront restaurants, basement studios, neighborhood festivals, music clubs, churches, galleries and kitchens. It is painted on viaducts and cooked over grills. It arrives with immigrants carrying recipes and traditions, and it emerges from artists turning the experience of the city into something new. But there is a difference between creating culture and being recognized as culturally important. That distinction matters economically. Consider two hypothetical Chicago creators. A painter spends six months producing a canvas that eventually sells for $40,000. Across town, a chef spends six months refining a dish that sells for $40. Their mediums are different, but their creative processes may be surprisingly similar. Both work with composition, color, memory, history, technique and emotion. Both may spend years developing a distinctive style. Both depend on suppliers, spaces, audiences and reputations. Both can create work that tells...

 CHICAGO — Walk through Chicago on a Saturday night and much of the city’s economy looks like a market operating exactly as markets are supposed to. Diners pay for tables at restaurants. Tourists buy museum tickets. Couples purchase theater seats. Collectors acquire paintings. Audiences fill concert halls. Behind each transaction is an apparently straightforward exchange: Someone wants culture, and someone else is willing to sell it. But follow the money far enough and the economics become considerably more complicated. Many of the institutions that make Chicago culturally valuable cannot survive on customers alone. Museums need donors. Theaters need subscribers and benefactors. Orchestras need patrons. Artists depend on galleries, collectors, foundations and grants. Even restaurants — perhaps the most overtly commercial component of urban culture — exist within an ecosystem supported by tourism promotion, neighborhood investment, corporate spending and the cultural reputation of t...

  Chicago’s great cultural institutions were never built by institutions alone. Behind the museums, orchestras, theaters, universities, architectural landmarks and collections were people with money, opinions and, frequently, a highly developed sense that the first might give permanence to the second. The city’s cultural history is therefore also a history of private ambition translated into public form. Industrialists who had made fortunes from railroads, meatpacking, machinery, retailing, real estate and commodities eventually confronted a problem peculiar to successful people: once you have acquired more than you can reasonably consume, what exactly is the money for? Chicago’s answer, more often than one might expect from a city historically associated with hogs and wheat futures, was culture. Families collected paintings, financed museums, supported orchestras, endowed universities and attached their names to buildings intended to survive them. They were generous, certainly, bu...