Naperville Art League's new leader has big plans

Inside its mural-adorned building at 5th Avenue and Center Street, the Naperville Art League is drawing up big plans.

The 56-year-old league this fall hired new Executive Director Erin Schneider and tasked her with leading a strategic planning process, marketing the organization to create a larger donor base, adding a wider variety of art classes and considering whether the gallery space needs to expand.

"She's very enthusiastic and has lots of ideas," Linda VanderKolk, the art league's board president, said about Schneider, 38. "She has great dreams - that's one thing we enjoy about her."

Schneider is a career nonprofit administrator with a passion for art. VanderKolk says she has the marketing chops to find new sponsors, more members and more money for the organization, which exists to support and sustain all forms of art in the Naperville area.

A Naperville resident herself, Schneider said she wants to recruit more art teachers, art enthusiasts and art creators to join for a $50 yearly fee, and to let people other than just Metra commuters know the league exists north of the Naperville station and a couple blocks east of Washington Street.

As she launches into her work leading the league forward, the Daily Herald sat down with Schneider for a talk about art, the league and the future. Here is an edited version of the conversation.

Q. What's your background in art?

A. I started in chalk. It was cheap. It was easy because I just took the chalk from the chalkboard at school. I grew up in Michigan with my mom working three jobs raising three kids on her own.

During class, I'd take the chalk and just draw and put it back when I was done. I was dyslexic, so I spent a lot of time during math class drawing until I got help.

In high school, I did a lot of abstracts, pouring different paints and using different techniques, having white space. In high school, I also got into photography.

But I got married right after high school, moved to Germany, had my son (now 16) and didn't have a chance to continue doing it. Now I have a 4-year-old who loves to color and draw, and I want to learn digital mixed-media for photos.

Q. What's next for the Naperville Art League?

A. We want to start offering pottery and metalworking. We've had a lot of requests for photography classes. We just don't have the space. We're going to really start focusing on bringing in funds so we can do renovations and add another classroom, put in kilns and really give the community what it wants.

We want to start after-school programs in collaboration with other nonprofits that want to add art to their programs, such as cartooning and comic books. We're bringing in members for focus groups to develop a strategic plan so members (there are 164 now) get a say in how the organization moves forward.

If members want to expand the gallery (at 508 N. Center St.) we'd have to figure out where to put parking. If we expand, we'd have to go up, but that would cost $2.5 million to $3 million and would be a 3- to 5-year campaign to add an upstairs for offices and classrooms, so the whole downstairs would be the gallery.

We also have to replace the gallery walls, which will be the purpose of our next fundraising event. And we need new cabinets in the classroom to hold more art supplies and partitions to divide the space up into two classrooms.

Q. What's in store for the Riverwalk Fine Art Fair?

A. It absolutely will continue. We've brought in Debbie Venezia (former art league executive director who is now executive director for the DuPage Foundation's Arts DuPage) as a contractor for one year to show us how it works. She's a wealth of knowledge.

We were up to 135 booths this year. Last year we had 130. We're working with the city to expand the permitting so we can have a larger space.

So the festival is not going anywhere. We've done it for 32 years. We have so many artists who are repeats, and because it's a juried process, you have the ability to get new people in constantly - even people from all over the country and overseas.

Q. How will you bring more art into the community?

A. Each month our gallery displays art by members focused on a theme. This month's theme is "Steampunk Revolution."

Steampunk is the grunge of everyday life, the inner workings of everything.

Each month we have judges give awards, and we host an event with artists, live music and food. We also have an off-site exhibit program where we have restaurants and businesses and real estate agents that display the artwork for three months at each location.

We have about 15 locations now and artists can rotate their work at different spots for the whole year. We want to give more opportunities for members to sell their art and get their stuff out there.

We'll be redesigning the website and redoing the marketing of it so more people can see the galleries and what artwork is here.