“Soon after graduating from the Art Institute, I moved to the Austin community, on the West Side of Chicago. I moved within a few blocks of Madison and Central which to a building we called the Public Art Workshop. A couple blocks away from there was a progressive realtor. I’m sure you never heard of such a configuration! But there was Harry Gaynor, and I said, “Harry, you know Lester Wickstrom, who was this WPA artist and I and his wife Esther Wickstrom have been talking about a community mural center. The building would be idyllic,“ and it was at 5623 W. Madison Street. After about six months my friend Harry, got a chance to "represent the building." The asking prices was $25,000 and because of the number of code violations, we got it for $11,000.

When we got the keys to the building, there were broken windows and there was snow on the dining room floor. Covered in heavy plastic was a heavy couch and a marching desk (which I still have 40 years later). I brought a number of folks together to fix the building violations and to repair the walls and to paint. The second floor had beautiful wall trim--in mint condition.

The first floor was where classes took place. I lived on the second floor and shared the space with a international mural resource center. Barbara Russum came to our door, referred to me by an artist I knew from Joliet. Barbara had worked for a number of years and offered to work without pay, saying that she had saved considerably in her job with the government. She asked what would be a meaningful job and the tasks of organizing the resource center fit her perfectly.

All of the archive is at the Chicago History Museum, and it is finally (after 15 years), available to the public. For years I kept calling the CHM, and I said, “what's new?", “where is it in line?” "Carol Moseley Braun just bought two hundred boxes of crap from her different campaigns or, “oh! Studs just died, now we have a ton more stuff.”

We kept track of murals around the world. It contains our bookkeeping and it shows our proposals that we wrote. We got National Endowment for the Arts NEA grants-- we were this freaking tiny hole in the wall; we had Comprehensive Employment Training Act, CETA people for 6 or so years. We wrote to the NEA and they wrote back and they said, “you're exactly the kind of a center we want to fund,“ and they added, “change this and change that.” We got it back to the NEA the same day! So OK, our interests were of serving the community. It was a 100% black community, except for me. The community used to be Ukrainian and Jewish, and then as the landlords let the properties go in terms of repairs, it became a black community. There were times when I was in my old apartment, I could stand on the back porch and look into the alleys and see moving vans--night or day. Diagonally across from the Workshop was an the Robert Emmit elementary school. They had just lost their art program, and so we wanted to do things both within the school and at our shop.

At that point, I was employed by Urban Gateways. They brought artists to schools or schools to concerts. It's still alive and they do well, a very, very, excellent program for decades. So I went to classrooms in five counties through that program, and I was either doing workshops for students or workshops for teachers. I liked the teacher workshops even more because you knew they could affect more within the schools. We built a five enlarger darkroom and taught photography. A woman named Jerri Zbiral came to us and wanted to teach photography for the deaf and so we had made changes within the darkroom. we even raised a couple pipes so that people wouldn't deck themselves (which I had done).

We also painted some murals. We did one mural called Break The Grip Of The Absentee Landlord. We did some murals in our neighborhood and that was the main area that we painted in. We also developed the concept of portable panel murals. I brought one portable panel mural to an international festival in East Germany. We developed in the mural manual step by step guidelines for how to do the portable panel pieces and be able to move them from site to site. These were with Masonite, etcetera. “ Never the Same - Interview with Rebecca Zorach