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This summer, After School Matters turns the page on an important chapter in our history. After more than two decades of operating programs within Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, ASM will transition all Downtown programming to our Orleans Teen Center in the Cabrini community, and other locations in the Downtown area.
While this transition is bittersweet, it provides an opportunity to reflect on the extraordinary role Gallery 37 has played in shaping our organization, our city, and generations of Chicago teens. As we celebrate the 35th anniversary of ASM, we are filled with gratitude for the people, partnerships, and possibilities that started here – and for the future they helped make possible.
For more than two decades, Gallery 37 has been at the heart of After School Matters.
Before After School Matters was a citywide organization serving nearly 20,000 teens each year, before our programs reached all 77 community areas, and before our network grew to hundreds of locations across Chicago, there was a bold idea in the middle of downtown: give young people a place to create, learn, work alongside experts and professionals, and see themselves in Chicago’s future.
That idea began with then-Chicago First Lady Maggie Daley and Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Lois Weisberg in 1991. On an undeveloped Block 37, 260 teens gathered under tents for a groundbreaking summer arts program that would start it all. Mrs. Daley and Commissioner Weisberg’s vision quickly became a model for what happens when Chicago invests in its young people, trusts their creativity, and gives them space to discover who they are and who they want to become.
In 2000, Gallery 37 at 66 East Randolph Street, a City-owned building that we were grateful to lease, became the organization’s first dedicated teen programming facility. For generations of teens, it was more than a building. It was a studio, a classroom, a stage, a workplace, a gathering place, and a second home. It was where young people from neighborhoods across Chicago came together downtown to paint, dance, design, perform, build, write, film, sculpt, and imagine. It was where they met mentors who saw their potential. It was where many earned their first paycheck, found their voice, built confidence, made friends, and began to understand that their ideas mattered.
Gallery 37 helped shape After School Matters – and, in many ways, modern Chicago – into what it is today.
The lessons learned within the walls of Gallery 37 – that teens deserve inspiring spaces, caring adults, high expectations, real-world experiences, and opportunities that honor their talents – became part of ASM’s DNA. Gallery 37 showed us the power of a place designed with and for young people. It helped inspire a long-term vision for teen-centered spaces across Chicago, from the Michael and Karyn Lutz Center for After School Matters, to After School Matters at Gately Park, to the recently opened After School Matters at Orleans.
Each of these spaces carries forward something that Gallery 37 helped prove: when teens have access to safe, welcoming, creative environments, they thrive.
As After School Matters celebrates its 35th anniversary this year, we are reflecting with deep gratitude on the people, places, and partnerships that have made this journey possible. Gallery 37 is central to that story. Its legacy lives in the alumni who first discovered their creative spark there, the instructors who poured their talent and care into generations of teens, the families who watched their young people grow, and the partners who helped bring programs to life.
We are deeply thankful to the City of Chicago for its partnership and for the role Gallery 37 has played in strengthening arts, culture, and educational opportunities for young people.
And while we turn the page from this chapter, the story that in many ways began at Gallery 37 is still being told.
Today, After School Matters continues to meet the moment for Chicago teens through paid, high-quality programs in the arts, communications and leadership, sports, STEM, and more. We continue to believe, as Gallery 37 taught us from the very beginning, that Chicago’s future is brighter when teens have the space, support, and opportunity to create it.
Gallery 37 will always be part of who we are. With gratitude for all it has made possible, we carry its legacy forward into the next 35 years of After School Matters.