Cities are messy. Everywhere you look, there is buildup: of information, of people, of things.

There are those who work to order that mess, to clean it up, to correct it. Those people have a vision of a sanitized city, of a whitewashed city, of a city that is homogenized and pasteurized, safe for consumption.

Then there are those who accept the city for what it is and, instead, work to document its detritus. It is a labor of civic duty and of historic implication, but most importantly it is a labor of love.

Daniel X. O’Neil is among the best of these civic collectors. Over decades he has amassed collections of Chicago’s outputs, both official and unofficial.

As one of the early leaders of what is now known as the open data movement, DXO was instrumental in collecting and sharing the hidden data behind the software that run modern cities. DXO’s work to find, document, and open up the various databases that make a city work is legendary.

Less well known is his work documenting the street art of the city. Over years he has amassed a collection of work that tells a different story about how the city works. It is, in the way that DXO works with everything, deeply organized and chronicled.

The story it tells is one of life on the margins, of the poetry of the streets (sometimes literally), and of the art made by those whose only place to display it outside..

Collecting this work is important because it is, by its very nature, ephemeral. Street artwork has enemies on all sides: the wind and rain and snow that makes Chicago the stuff of legends is a natural enemy of this work; the agents of change that try and peel it off, paint it over, and push it out is the man-made enemy. The civic collector steps in and saves this work before it is gone forever.

As Chicago continues to slide into an ever-more homogenized city, one far richer and far whiter than it ever has been before, the civic collector’s role is ever more important.

This work, this story of a city, and this collection is one that reflects DXO’s deep loves: of Chicago, of art, and of the people who connect those two dots. Arte Agora is the first time that he’s sharing this particular dataset, but it’s one that I hope we get to see more of.

Dan Sinker

2/25/19