past acheivements- hothouse

About HotHouse

In 1987 Marguerite Horberg established both the for-profit venue HotHouse, and the non-profit Center for International Performance and Exhibition primarily to organize concerts, dance and spoken word performances, film/video, and exhibitions of visual arts. The mission was to showcase artists who were working in non-commercial genres, whose work was experimental, or from populations who were under-recognized and disenfranchised by either other arts institutions or the commercial marketplace. In 1995, the organizations merged as one non-profit organization. Under Horberg’s ongoing direction, the organization built and successfully developed two renowned cultural centers which offered a multiplicity of cultural events not replicated elsewhere in the regional market. The first location was in Wicker Park and the second in the South Loop. HotHouse hosted over 7,000 programs that nurtured an array of emerging artists and provided much needed meeting space at low cost for hundreds of social service providers and other grassroots community activists. Through her nearly twenty years tenure as the Founder and Executive Director, Horberg developed HotHouse into a $2M organization (85% earned income) employing 45 people.

Nearly a fourth of HotHouse’s calendar of 500 annual events featured programs curated by artists, or was created by social service organizations or other community specific entities that addressed particular cultural concerns unique to their identity. These connections to community specific or ethnically located organizations positioned the organization to be of service to one of the most diverse populations in the country. The New York Times wrote: “Few clubs anywhere offer a wider range of first-rate world music, from wildly vibrant Afro-pop to avant-garde jazz, than HotHouse.”

HotHouse had, through its breadth of programming and outreach to diverse communities been able to attract racially and economically diverse audiences who looked to the facility as a community resource. HotHouse was at the forefront of supporting international arts exchanges and developing audiences for many unknown artists before they gained wider acceptance. It was one of the few cultural institutions in the city with international visibility, whose audience was multi-racial, multi-generational, and diversified across economic classes, and who lived throughout the entire metropolitan area.

In 2006, it became apparent that there were inherent business growth opportunities that HotHouse was not capturing and Horberg began to articulate these development concepts in written plans that became the basis for the new organization. After twenty years building HotHouse, Horberg was locked out of the facility while away on a business trip. Further disagreement about the mission and direction of the organization in addition to numerous violations of the by-laws and other serious transgressions taken by a board faction resulted in the majority of the Board members leaving the organization shortly thereafter. Within months, HotHouse closed, and former stakeholders recognized an opportunity to expand upon the original business model and exponentially increase the impact of its achievements. portoluz was founded to capture these opportunities. To this day members of portoluz (and hundreds of additional members of the community HotHouse served) contest the legitimacy of the current “HotHouse” as well as their right to the property and assets appropriated when Horberg and others were locked out. Ongoing issues related to this appropriation of resources (archives, mailing list, furnishings, artists contacts and other assets), a very public misinformation campaign about Horberg’s tenure and other confusion surrounding HotHouse’s demise have persisted.