I’d been thinking about Silk Road Rising, the mission-driven performing arts company founded by Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani in 2002, before I got an e-mail from Khoury last week.
According to Arts Alliance Illinois (citing a survey by Americans for the Arts), 42 percent of Illinois arts organizations “are not confident they will survive the impacts of COVID-19.”
On September 13 last year, Khoury told me, Gillani, then 49 years old, collapsed with a heart attack in the 150 N. Michigan Avenue building that houses the Silk Road office, and was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A week later, still in the hospital, he was hit with a life-threatening stroke that left him unable to use the right side of his body or to speak. After 55 days of hospitalization (at Northwestern and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab), and months of intensive outpatient therapy, a lot of the paralysis is gone and his mind is intact, Khoury says, but the speech will take time to recover.
