Heather Ireland Robinson has been executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago for less than a month, having officially replaced the long-serving Lauren Deutsch on March 1. But she’s been working as an arts administrator for 20 years, most recently lending her expertise to the Beverly Arts Center, where she served as executive director from 2014 to 2017. She previously worked for the South Side Community Art Center, Marwen, After School Matters, and Gallery 37, among other institutions—and from 2002 to 2004, she was the Jazz Institute’s education and community coordinator, helping lay the foundation for its Jazz Links program. Ireland Robinson has now become the first black person (and thus first black woman) to lead the JIC.
What was it in your professional resumé that got you the position? This year marks my 20th year in arts administration. I started in 1998 at the Chicago Park District in the cultural programs department. That was one or two years out of graduate school for theater. At graduate school at DePaul, I taught a theater class to bilingual first graders—and to me, it instantly became my mission. I loved being onstage, would have loved to be in commercials at some point, but I really wanted to give people the opportunity to learn and do what I did. I wanted to give young people and artists a chance, and so that really set me forward in working with After School Matters. It was about creating the structure and the vision—that needed spreadsheets or whatever it may be—so that artists could shine.
Looking back on what you learned from working at the South Side Community Art Center, is the jazz community in Chicago segregated? I hate to say it, but it can be segregated. We’ve got a lot of jazz music on the south side and there’s music on the north side, and so I would love to see more people kind of crossing boundaries and traveling to see music on both sides of Chicago. We are traveling north or downtown for the arts, whether it’s museums, whether it’s theater or anything. A lot of that is happening on the south side too: We’ve got the DuSable Museum, we’ve got Room43 and other places that have jazz music, but in general we’re kind of going downtown for the bigger names. I’d like to see that migration flow happen the other way—people from the north side going beyond the University of Chicago to see and hear music, and to really find out where these things are happening.
The Women’s Jazz Leadership Initiative meets at the Jazz Institute one to two times a month, which is an amazing thing. Do you think that women’s jazz events help inclusiveness, or would you like to see women being added to general jazz bills more frequently in the future? I think we need both. But I think right now, and I would say the same for black people, sometimes we need our own. Sometimes we need our own unique voices to be heard, because you can find those all-male or male-driven revues or events more easily. And there are differences.
