Mayoral Arts Forum Report What Chicago Cultural Plan

How important are the arts in the upcoming Chicago mayoral election?

Here’s who showed up: Gery Chico, Lori Lightfoot, Toni Preckwinkle, Paul Vallas, and Willie Wilson.

Over the course of a 90-minute session in which each candidate got a minute and a half to answer a series of questions put by the moderators, Chicago Humanities Festival artistic director Alison Cuddy and WBBM Newsradio political editor Craig Dellimore, Gery Chico repeatedly called for “a plan for the arts in this city” as if it were a brand-new idea.

Here’s some of what else they had to say:

Wilson: He would “invest in the young people,” run the arts as a business, put a lobbying office in D.C., open marketing branches in other countries, lower taxes, and “investigate corrupt people and lock them up.”