Sector 2337, the bookstore, gallery, and performing arts venue, closed its doors December 14, marking the end of what its founder and executive director, Caroline Picard, says was intended as a five-year experiment at 2337 N. Milwaukee. Before it became a staple of the Logan Square arts community, it spent nine years in Wicker Park, where it began as the Green Lantern Gallery and Press.
In 2007, two years after Picard’s first exhibition, she followed in the footsteps of Threewalls and decided to register Green Lantern as a nonprofit. Other galleries tucked into private spaces with limited resources were also developing at the time (although not necessarily with the intention of becoming nonprofit entities like the Green Lantern). Among them were Vonzweck, which was started inside the living room of Philip von Zweck’s Humboldt Park apartment in 2005 and stayed open for three years; 65Grand, which opened in Bill Gross’s space at 1378 W. Grand the same year and continues programming today on North Avenue; and ArtLedge, an exhibition space resting at the top of a spiral staircase in Caleb Lyons’s apartment, which exhibited work curated by Lyons and Brandon Alvendia from 2004 to 2006.
“All of a sudden we had different kinds of insurance, different licenses, liquor licenses,” Picard says. “It was the other extreme.” She and King once again lived in the same building as the space, this time in the apartment above the gallery.
