Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now 9780226313146

Citation preview

ART I N CHICAGO

ART

IN

CHICAGO

ART IN CHICAGO A History from the Fire to Now EDITED BY

Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino J U D I T H R U S S I K I R S H N E R , C O N S U LT I N G E D I T O R ERIN HOGAN, SIDEBAR EDITOR

THE UNIVERSIT Y OF CHICAGO PRESS   —   CHICAGO AND LONDON

INTRODUCTION M A G G I E TA F T AND ROBERT COZZOLINO

1

CHAPTER 3

THE MEANING OF PLACE 1933 – ­1956 M A G G I E TA F T

CHAPTER 1

CHICAGO RISING 1855 – ­1912 WENDY G R EENHOUSE

7

95 s i de ba r s William McBride, Art Collector / Maggie Taft / 101   ­Hyde Park Art Center mission statement / 112   ­The Great Ideas of Western Man / Lara Allison / 118   ­The Taller de Gráfica Popular / Victoria Sancho Lobis / 122 

s i de ba r s

 ­Bebop Artist Gertrude Abercrombie /

Finding Alice / Thomas McCormick / 25 

Donna Seaman / 130

Hull-­House Arts / Heather Radke / 35  Field Trips / Tony Jones / 38 

CHAPTER 4

“Art for the Masses” / Wendy Greenhouse / 45

RAW NERVES

CHAPTER 2

ROUTES TO MODERNISM

1948 – ­1973 ROBERT COZZOLINO

13 5 s i de ba r s

1913 – ­1943

Chicago Experimental Music, Part I /

JENNIFER JANE MARSHALL

John Corbett / 142 

57 s i de ba r s The Lane Tech Murals / Sylvia Rhor / 61   ­Small Wonders / Erin Hogan / 67   ­Little Rooms / Liesl Olson / 72   ­The Better Homes Institute / Erin Hogan / 90

 ­Vivian Maier / Pamela Bannos / 154   ­Hef and LeRoy / Travis Vogan / 163   ­The Fate of Regional Exhibitions / Studs Terkel / 171

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 7

MAKING SPACE

CHICAGO SPEAKS

1961 – ­1976

1990 – ­P RESENT

REBECCA ZORACH

281

1 87

Karen Reimer and Diane Simpson / 283 

s i de ba r s Art Criticism in Chicago / James Yood / 195   ­57th Street / Max Grinnell / 204   Rhona Hoffman Gallery / Rhona Hoffman / 222   ­On Henry Darger / Nathan Lerner / 228

 ­Matt Witkovsky on Dawoud Bey / 288   ­Nick Cave and Anne Wilson / 291   ­Stanislav Grezdo and Cesáreo Moreno / 297   ­Gregg Bordowitz / 301   ­Faheem Majeed / 304   ­Dan Peterman and Michael Rakowitz / 309   ­Kay Rosen and Tony Tasset / 314 

CHAPTER 6

ALTERITY ROCKS

 ­Hamza Walker with Tempestt Hazel / 319   ­Chris Ware / 326   ­Julia Fish and Judy Ledgerwood / 330   ­Mary Jane Jacob and

1973 – ­1993

Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle / 335 

JENNI SORKIN

 ­Caroline Picard and Temporary Services / 341 

233

 ­Matthew Metzger and Richard Rezac / 348   ­Maggie Taft on Amanda Williams / 352 

s i de ba r s

 ­Michelle Grabner / 355 

Curating Chicago / Lynne Warren / 239 

 ­John Corbett / 357 

 ­How often are you at home in an exhibition? /

 ­Theaster Gates with Rebecca Zorach / 363 

Anthony Elms / 252   ­Chicago Experimental Music, Part II / John Corbett / 262 

 ­Lin Hixson and Peter Taub / 368   ­Kerry James Marshall / 375

 ­A Lovely So Real / Michal Raz-­Russo / 272   ­Cool, Conceptual, Controversial / Kathryn Hixson / 277

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S   37 7 N O T E S   379 C O N T R I B U T O R S   397 I L L U S T R A T I O N C R E D I T S   401 I N D E X   403

How many people pick up a car’s hood to study the flow of its energy? How many people pick out a place on a pretty picture map and know the power of it? How many people really know that Chicago is a powerhouse of the American people? Newsweek, 1954

INTRODUCTION M A G G I E TA F T A N D R O B E R T C O Z Z O L I N O

Today, a bronze bust of  Jean-­Baptiste Pointe DuSable looks north onto Michigan Avenue from the Chicago River, the city’s first thoroughfare. Heroic in scale, Erik Blome’s sculpture commemorates the Haitian-­born, Afro-­Caribbean trapper who, in the 1780s, arrived on the land where the city now stands. He was the area’s first nonnative settler. For fifteen years DuSable lived in a wooden house he built himself  and ran a thriving trading post. Then he went south, selling the house and all its contents to a French trader, Jean La Lime. Among DuSable’s possessions were luxury objects rarely found on the frontier — ­mirrors, French walnut cabinets with glass doors, a feather bed, and two paintings.1 The bill of  sale makes no mention of what the paintings looked like or what they depicted. But it shows that there was art in Chicago from the beginning. In 1933 and 1934 the Century of  Progress International Exposition, Chicago’s second world’s fair, featured a groundbreaking display that recognized DuSable as the city’s founding father, but it represented his dwelling as a primitive log cabin in a wilderness, scraggly and smelly like the wild onion plants — ­shikaakwa in Miami-­Illinois — ­from which the city took its name. There were no French walnut cabinets in the exhibition. There were no paintings. A tendency to overlook the presence of  art profoundly influenced the city’s sense of itself  until at least the middle of  the twentieth century. Locals were anxious about the role of culture in Chicago, an industrial city emerging from a devastating fire and to some East Coast observers forever associated with the frontier. Generations of  artists have shared that anxiety, eloquently addressing the challenges of  living and working in Chicago, but artists have just as often used adversity as a platform for change. Some have expressed frustration, feeling alienated from the art world’s economic centers, while others have enjoyed the freedom of  working beyond the shadow cast by New York’s vast international art scene. Artists in other big cities — ­Paris, London, New York — ­may assume they are in exactly the right place to make art, but in Chicago artists have never taken place for granted. Indeed, they tend to be reflective, even preoccupied with what it means to work in their midwestern metropolis. A constant questioning of  Chicago and its working conditions has prompted some artists to leave and others to dig in, making the artistic population and the character of Chicago art fluid. The city has always been less a destination than a crossroads. As historian Donald L. Miller writes of  the city’s early years, “A major railroad center that was still a frontier town, Chicago was always filled with people passing through: tourists, farmers, immigrants, and businessmen.”2 For innumerable artists, the city has been but a way station, leading to the perennial refrain that Chicago’s talent will eventually flee. But viewed another way, Chicago’s revolving doors have made the city a bustling arts hub, enticing those with a venturesome spirit and constantly pulsing with new ideas, new connections.

1

MAG G IE TAF T AND ROBE R T C OZZOLINO

Art in Chicago offers the first history of Chicago art from the nineteenth century through the twenty-­first. While ours may be the first volume to present such a long view of the city’s art and artists, it does not aspire to be encyclopedic. Instead, what we offer is a rich history that surveys the many ways artists have made art in Chicago, rebelled against its institutions, expressed anxiety about place, asserted independence from New York, transformed their communities through collaboration, and changed the places to which they subsequently moved with practices learned in Chicago. The first six chapters offer histories of  particular periods but spill over into one another, overlapping and picking up recurrent themes. They are complemented by sidebars on topics relevant to the period, such as music, publishing, or artists like Henry Darger who worked outside of  Chicago’s “art world.” And when it comes to describing the past thirty years, we invited artists and curators to tell the story themselves — ­to describe the scene and reflect on why they are here, what about the city may have influenced their practices, and what challenges remain. We understand Chicago’s complex art history to be fluid and alive and have attempted to bring forth a book that conveys that. At the outset of this project, many curious supporters (and naysayers) asked us whether we could assert specific qualities that have made Chicago’s art unique. What, if anything, distinguishes art-­making in Chicago? In the field of  American art history, cultural centers outside of New York have long been underplayed. Recently, though, writers who look closely at a broader range of parallel and interconnected art worlds have begun to reveal a more accurate history of art in the United States. In the case of Chicago, we find a resilient and independent culture generating ideas and artists that have proved critical to modern and contemporary art. As Wendy Greenhouse points out in chapter 1, the city had an active art community even before the Fire of  1871. Chicago’s art world was anchored in the robust education offered by the School of  the Art Institute. Founded in 1866 as the Chicago Academy of  Design, it has been an enduring pillar, enrolling young artists from Georgia O’Keeffe to Claes Oldenburg, employing recognized instructors from sculptor Lorado Taft to video artist Gregg Bordowitz, and establishing Chicago as an international center of art education. From early on, the school accepted female and black students, a fact consistent with two other features of Chicago’s art scene from the nineteenth century to the present day: female artists, curators, and collectors have consistently had educational and leadership opportunities in Chicago’s art world that they were denied elsewhere, and African American cultural institutions have flourished, contributing to the Black Arts Movement and beyond. Women like curator Katherine Kuh, feminist collectives like Artemisia, institutions like the South Side Community Art Center, and artists like AfriCOBRA members Barbara Jones-­Hogu and Jeff  Donaldson have been instrumental in shaping Chicago’s art world. The history of  art in Chicago is distinguished not only by gender and racial diversity but by the character of  the work made here. Artists in Chicago have been collaborating with communities and creating participatory art since long before such activity was formally recognized by the art world and christened “social practice.” From Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull-­House, founded in 1889, to Theaster Gates’s twenty-­first-­century Rebuild Foundation, artists and organizations in Chicago have mobilized art to serve community development and urban transformation. Even the city’s largest and oldest collections and institutions have their origins in civic ambition. In the nineteenth century, women’s clubs built significant art collections, and titans of  business and industry like Chicago Board of  Trade member Charles D. Hamill and department store entrepreneur Marshall Field had a hand in organizing what

2

I NTRODU C TION

eventually became the Art Institute of  Chicago and its affiliated school. These society men and women shared the notion that Chicago needed art and culture — ­Hamill, for instance, was also instrumental in drumming up support for an orchestra — ­to provide relief  from the dingy environs and a moral antidote to the rough-­and-­tumble streets. More recent forays into cultural activism, such as Dan Peterman’s Experimental Station, have conceived of art less as an antidote than as part and parcel of  a cultural infrastructure capable of serving local needs. Artists and patrons throughout the city’s history have shared a belief in the civic function of  art. In Chicago, the city that works, so too does art. Indeed, since the nineteenth century the city has fostered unusually close relations between art and industry. As “Art in Chicago Business,” a 1966 brochure from the now-­ defunct Fairweather Hardin Gallery explains, “It was in Chicago . . . that the use of fine art in business was pioneered.” The brochure was referring to the Container Corporation of America’s innovative concept of hiring famous artists to design its ads beginning in the 1930s. But as Hamill and Field’s support of an art school and museum suggests, the partnership is far older. For nineteenth-­century business leaders, art was civilizing, a way to turn a frontier town into an impressive metropolis that would attract more commerce and citizens of  means. Having creative artists on the payroll also helped Chicago industry develop more attractive products — ­textiles, radios, and wallpaper, to name but a few. In return, Chicago artists received financial support, materials, and workspace, if not a wealth of  exhibition opportunities — ­the city’s collectors have generally been more interested in the vetting offered by New York dealers and museums. Together, these characteristics — ­the strength of  art education, the prominence of women in the arts and the flourishing of  African American cultural institutions, the constancy of  activism and social practice, and the close partnering of art and industry (not to mention an openness to individual quirks) — ­have drawn countless artists, patrons, and professionals to Chicago. This book tells their stories, the successes and the failures, the innovations and the resurgences, the possibilities and the problems. At the beginning of  our story, Wendy Greenhouse examines the ways in which Chicago’s burgeoning art scene grew with the development of the city and its infrastructure. Civic leaders, with the input of  artists, recognized that a major city needs a cultural presence to support and expand the world of  its citizens. She traces the emerging art world through the World’s Columbian Exposition and into the Armory Show of  1913. In chapter 2, Jennifer Jane Marshall explores the expansive network that characterized Chicago’s artistic identity in the early part of  the twentieth century. The “global visions, local loyalties, translocal travels, and inter-­neighborhood connection” she describes include Chicago’s first glimpses of abstraction in the incendiary Armory Show and the work of  local artist Manierre Dawson, the significance of  the Arts Club’s importing work from overseas and bohemian enclaves for cultivating local communities, Chicago artists’ predilection for the American Southwest, and the variety of  innovative projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. In chapter 3, Maggie Taft reveals how, in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, local artists frustrated by their exclusion from the international art world developed alternative methods for disseminating their ideas and their work, using untraditional media like fabric design and photography, and developing innovative artist-­run education programs that trained new generations of artists and new art audiences. In chapter 4, Robert Cozzolino describes a defiant postwar art scene sparked by the rebellious, student-­led Exhibition Momentum and independent artists fascinated by the

3

MAG G IE TAF T AND ROBE R T C OZZOLINO

many ways the body could provide meaning in a complex and increasingly uncertain world. In chapter 5, Rebecca Zorach explores the intersections and clashes of  politics and art in Chicago during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s. Among other things, she looks at the highly politicized role of  public art, from the rise of  the mural movement on the South Side to the mixed reactions to the installation of Picasso’s gigantic gift to the city in Daley Plaza. In chapter 6, Jenni Sorkin examines the alternative spaces, like Randolph Street Gallery, Artemisia, ARC, and N.A.M.E., and organizations, like the New Art Examiner, that anchored the city’s advanced art scene and cultivated local talent during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. In the final chapter, a chorus of  artists, critics, and curators explain what’s happened in Chicago from the 1990s to now through a series of  conversations, interviews, and reflections. We felt it best to leave this recent history to some of  those who have lived it. What is the legacy of  Chicago’s art? What can we learn about its present-­day identity through an exploration of  its past? Rather than pretend to deliver the final word on the history of  art in Chicago, Art in Chicago offers a starting point. We hope it will inspire debate and curiosity, moving other scholars to study Chicago, plumbing its depths even further. As DuSable’s mysterious collection suggests, art in Chicago has been robust since the start. There are still many stories to tell.

4

Chicago life means a hurly-­ burly-­skurry for money. When one has time to think of art it is time to take a train to New York and the steamer for a trip abroad to “hunt for blossoms in other fields.” “Studio Life as It Is,” Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1890

In fact, the artistic sense has always existed among us surreptitiously. Elia W. Peattie, “The Artistic Side of Chicago,”

Atlantic Monthly, December 1899

CHAPTER 1

CHICAGO R ISING 1855–­1 912 WENDY G R EENHOUSE

When in 1892 Lucy Monroe surveyed “art in Chicago” for the New England Magazine, she devoted much of  her account to the holdings of  Chicago collectors — ­and by extension to the fledgling Art Institute of  Chicago.1 Monroe listed significant artists who had worked in the city in the past, ruefully noting that many had since departed. It was in terms of the evolution of  elite taste, however, that Monroe measured the progress of art in Chicago. She capped her account with a description of  the Art Institute’s grand new building and an acknowledgment of  the internationally famous — ­that is, nonresident — ­sculptors whose works would soon grace the World’s Columbian Exposition. Her hopes that Chicago would attain a position of  “eminence” in art were based, that is, on evidence of its participation in the international art world, not on the vitality of  local art production. For Monroe, the art of   Chicago was almost peripheral to “art in Chicago.” The creative tension between the two was a defining theme of Chicago’s art life in its early decades. The struggles of  Chicago artists for recognition and patronage reflected the city’s insecurity about the worthiness of  homegrown production measured against a venerated external tradition that put the young boomtown at a signal disadvantage. Chicago was perennially torn between pride in its own and eagerness for acceptance. Fleetingly, around the turn of  the twentieth century, local boosters entertained the illusion of  congruence between the conflicting goals of  belonging and leading: for the moment, Chicago seemed destined — ­by virtue of  its vitality, wealth, and native authenticity — ­to become the capital of  a national art expression that appeared finally to be coming into its own. But the role of  anxious ingénue arriving late to the feast would persist as a feature of  the city’s cultural self-­identity for decades to come, even when this self-­deprecating perception was at odds with actual achievement.2 This attitude explains much of  the continuing neglect of  the early history of  fine art in a city whose architectural, literary, and musical legacies are internationally renowned.3 Another cause is the unavoidable fact that this history, at least as documented in surviving records and the artworks themselves, is almost entirely a story of  elite taste and values; of  practitioners and patrons who, with a few important exceptions, shared conditions of social and racial if  not economic privilege; and of  artists for whom success was measured in terms of  marketability rather than modern values of  individual self-­expression. This is, to a great extent, a story of  cultural conformity as peculiarly expressive of Chicago.

7

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

From the outset, Chicago was a place of flux and change, a crossroads where people, ideas, and practices as well as things arrived and departed, invariably altered by the place and by the migratory experience itself. Culturally, Chicago’s inherently provisional character stimulated tension and conflict as well as accommodation. It was the source of  much of  the richness, vitality, and diversity of the city’s art life but also of  its chronic anxiety. Whether artists and art-­making could flourish in Chicago, what they could do for the city, and how they in turn would be shaped by the city were vital, defining questions from the moment the squalid overgrown trading post began to take on the character of a great metropolis in the making. This city, wrote the immigrant artist Albert Fleury in 1900, was “one of  the most characteristic in the world, and a typical American production of the nineteenth century.”4 Wondrous and attention-­worthy in itself, late nineteenth-­century Chicago seemed a concentrated essence of  urbanism realized in all-­too-­material form; it represented all modern industrial cities in their horrors and wonders, if  on an unsurpassed, grotesquely exaggerated scale. Its early art history is likewise remarkably unremarkable, more typical than not of  art activity in newer American cities of the time, from Pittsburgh to Omaha.5 All shared an eagerness to establish a local art life, in tension with a yearning for cultural acceptance; a safe, conservative approach to making, collecting, and thinking about art, in contrast to a boldly innovative spirit in practical endeavors; and a concern about the role of art, its very utility, in the modern city. This chapter focuses not so much on how these themes uniquely define Chicago as on how they played out in the peculiar conditions of this city, setting precedents that unfold throughout the longer period addressed in the following chapters.

Before the Fire The Great Fire of 1871 has long provided a convenient starting point for narratives of Chicago history, a clean break that “marked the end of the wilderness, the mud, the ‘old city’” and “cleared the ground for our ‘modern era,’” as printer Ralph Fletcher Seymour wrote in 1945.6 Yet for art activity as for Chicago itself, the Fire represented not so much a break as a check on forward momentum. Already manifest were local conditions and attitudes that would shape the role of the visual arts in the city into posterity: Chicago’s image and self-­identity as a place of dizzying change, mind-­boggling contrasts, and inexhaustible superlatives; its commercial, pragmatic, impatient nature; the notorious insecurity born of its position as a latecomer in relation to the great cities of the East; and its dependence on elite patrons, who Monroe and Seymour agree were the founders of art in Chicago. Art had a place in Chicago from its origins as a place of  settled habitation.7 As the trading post and frontier garrison grew into a commercial center and rough-­and-­tumble boomtown, many of  the migrants who swelled its population brought with them portraits and other cherished mementos of home or brightened their transitory new dwellings with inexpensive prints issued by East Coast publishers. Art was thus the product of  a remote metropolitan culture. For art standards, ideals, and validation as well as for art objects, Chicago’s habit of  looking eastward — ­to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, if  not to Europe — ­was built into the circumstance of  late arrival. Artists too were from somewhere else. Chicago’s long-­standing tendency to lose resident artists as easily as it attracts them reaches back as far as the 1830s and 1840s, the era of  the itinerant artist in America. The fledgling city hosted a stream of  peripatetic painters and

8

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

sculptors — ­or at least limners and modelers. Turning out portraits and other images in a range of  mediums, they might linger for several months or even a few years, perhaps conducting drawing classes and holding studio receptions, before departing for more promising grounds. Even Samuel Marsden Brookes, who has been described as Chicago’s first resident professional artist, worked there only intermittently over the span of a dozen years.8 Brookes’s work encompassed landscape, portraiture, copies of  Old Master works, and “fancy sketches,” but his willingness to paint whatever might find favor with Chicago buyers went unrewarded. In 1845 he disposed of  his unsold stock by lottery and went abroad. The instability of  the artists’ community was typical for the period nationally, but it seems peculiarly expressive of  Chicago, a place of  constant transformation founded on economies of  mobility and mutability — ­on the business of  exchanging, transporting, and transforming things. By 1840 the city had already gained a reputation as a place of  “magical changes,” one conspicuously dedicated to moneymaking, speculation, and fortunes won and lost on bases as flimsy as the hastily constructed wood buildings, sidewalks, and bridges that comprised its contingent materiality.9 Until the 1850s, according to A. T. Andreas, who a quarter century later compiled the first serious history of  Chicago, the city was “too deeply engaged in commercial enterprises of  every description to bestow more than a passing thought upon Art,” for “the struggle for wealth engrossed alike the mental and physical activities of its citizens.”10 Around midcentury, however, some victors in that struggle turned to art collecting, gathering paintings, drawings, engravings, and statuary on excursions to Europe or eastern art centers and occasionally commissioning a portrait or buying a landscape or still-­life painting locally. More than an expression of  economic achievement or social arrival, art collections, like personal libraries, were hedges against impermanence and redemptive outlets for acquired wealth. Largely experienced at a remove from the public sphere, visual art was a domestic commodity, a complement to the fine, well-­furnished “villas” and luxuriant gardens that visitors to Chicago reported — ­typically with a telling note of revelation. As late as 1867, a “surprising taste for decoration” was observed by the Atlantic Monthly’s James Parton, who further astonished his readers with the claim that “it is more common to see good engravings and tolerable paintings in the residences of  Chicago than in those of  New York.”11 In the face of  the city’s relentless pursuit of mammon and material and its whirlwind pace of  change, fine art objects, with their pointed lack of  utility, their pretentions to beauty, and their subject matter removed from immediate reality, helped define the home itself as a place apart — ­and art as mostly a female concern. Before long, however, art also assumed a public dimension in Chicago as some of its prominent citizens began to understand the city itself as a home, a place “fit to live in” and not just a “grand depot, exchange, [and] counting-­house.”12 In 1848 the simultaneous arrival of  the railroad and completion of  the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which connected Chicago and the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River, heralded Chicago’s destiny as the transportation center of  the nation, ensuring its ascendance over rivals St. Louis and Cincinnati as the principal city of  the West. As Chicago became an unavoidable stopping point or natural destination for many, its rapid population growth and uncontrolled physical expansion threatened to make it uninhabitable just as it seemed destined to become a great metropolis. While civic leaders wrestled with solutions to such urgent problems as epidemics, poor public sanitation, polluted water, and endless mud, William B. Ogden, the city’s first mayor, was among those who asserted the equally urgent need for culture and beauty, lest Chicago “become a town of mere

9

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

traders and money getters; crude, unlettered, sharp, and grasping.”13 Resident artists and art production, as well as exhibitions and collections, were among the marks by which Chicago would qualify as a real city, one measured by quality of  life rather than quantity of  dollars. Awareness that, from outside, the city was judged by this standard, and judged harshly, would haunt its self-­identity in perpetuity. Visiting Chicago on the eve of  the Great Fire of  1871, Frederick Law Olmsted observed that art collectors like Ezra McCagg and his wife Eliza, who then ranked at the top of  elite society, “are rather sensitive about the West & Chicago, lest anyone should think that people are not likely to be as well informed and cultivated there as elsewhere.”14 Chicago could soon boast that it was a place of discriminating taste as well as opportunity when it attracted its first resident artists with established international reputations. Invited to Chicago by Ogden in 1855, the Paris-­trained painter George P. A. Healy had previously portrayed European and American statesmen and dignitaries for French king Louis Philippe. Sculptor Leonard Wells Volk arrived two years later, fresh from study in Rome funded by Stephen A. Douglas, Illinois’s senior US senator and a relative by marriage. Both artists were instrumental in raising standards and expectations for art in the city. By his very reputation, Healy galvanized the local art community and boosted Chicagoans’ confidence in their city’s ability to support a native art life — ­even if, or perhaps because, his years in Chicago were punctuated by frequent trips to New York, Washington, DC, and Europe to execute major commissions. Volk was active in organizing exhibitions and as a teacher who could pass along the lessons of  his European training. Notably, however, both artists devoted their practice to portraits, the only genre that assured local patronage. Indeed, they were swamped with commissions: Healy is said to have painted members of  Chicago’s civic, social, and business elite by the hundreds before returning to Europe in 1867, reportedly to escape the press of  orders.15 His 1860 self-­portrait (fig. 1.1), one of many, communicates the suave sophistication and professional confidence that, along with his technical skill, made Healy the darling of the Chicago antebellum art world. In 1859 Healy and Volk worked with members of  the city’s elite to organize Chicago’s first dedicated art exhibition, heading the list of exhibiting artists.16 Naturally the event was a showcase for the city’s private collections, but its stated aim was civic betterment — ­“to elevate the public taste of the community,” with proceeds from sales of twelve thousand admission tickets and numerous catalogs dedicated to “the furtherance of art in Chicago.”17 Already a sense of  civic obligation had begun to infuse, perhaps to rationalize, local art collecting. Several major collectors had occasionally opened their art treasures to public view, beginning with Alexander White, a onetime decorative painter turned paint merchant who erected the city’s first art gallery adjacent to his Wabash Avenue home.18 The ideal statuary, Old Master paintings (often spurious or copied), contemporary European works, and American Hudson River School landscape paintings in Chicago’s early exhibitions were expected to inspire local artists as well as consumers and to model academic technical standards if  not high ideals. Chicagoans developed an exaggerated respect for art sanctioned from far away, mingled with a taste for accessible subjects, such as the American “types” sympathetically portrayed by sculptor John Rogers. In Chicago the first of Rogers’s tabletop “groups” found enough success to encourage him to set out for fame in New York — ­not the first, or the last, to do so.19 As pre-­Fire Chicago became the nation’s nexus of  exchange between the seemingly limitless resources of  the West and the great markets of  the East, its booming economy and

10

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

1.1  George Peter Alexander Healy, Self- ­Portrait, 1860. Oil on canvas, 30 1⁄8 × 25 ¼ in.

Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 1949.6.

appetite for art also made it a national center for exhibiting art. Modeled on New York’s American Art-­Union, the short-­lived Chicago Art Union mounted exhibitions that featured, along with the cream of  Chicago’s private collections, a selection of  artworks for distribution by lottery, many of  them landscape paintings submitted by eastern artists. In 1863 artists from across the North sent paintings to Chicago for the first of  numerous US Sanitary Commission fairs, organized by women’s associations in several cities to raise relief funds for

11

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

wounded Union soldiers. While Chicago’s leading men typically understood the exhibiting of  art in market terms, as yet another economic activity in which their city could successfully compete, women saw these events as charitable undertakings and thus a natural extension of  “women’s work” — ­the work of  nurturing and healing — ­from the domestic sphere to society as the “family” of  the whole. In both patronizing local artists and harnessing art to social welfare, the Sanitary Commission fairs anticipated Chicago women’s organized leadership in art matters three decades later.20 The star of  Chicago’s second Sanitary Commission Fair, in 1865, was Albert Bierstadt’s acclaimed painting Rocky Mountains (1863). Its grandeur of  scale and perspective, exacting detail, and celebratory approach to American nature were hallmarks of  the Hudson River School of landscape painting, a taste for which was evident when serious art collecting began in Chicago around 1850. A landscape painting by one of  the school’s leaders, Asher Durand, commissioned by William Ogden in 1852, may have been the first original work of  art by a major contemporary American artist brought to Chicago.21 American landscape paintings owned by Ogden and fellow collectors dominated the city’s first major art exhibition, in 1859. By then, a few artists had settled in the city to cater to this appetite, although they had to travel far for subjects. John H. Drury, Henry Elkins, and others built reputations on panoramic images of the exotic West (fig. 1.2), while Daniel Folger Bigelow and Junius Sloan painted conventionally idyllic pictures of admired locales in the Northeast, the native region of many Chicagoans. Always popular in Chicago, romantic pictures of a stagily wild West or of  a settled but still pristine Northeast reinforced local aesthetic disdain for the flat, open, seemingly featureless midwestern prairie. Such landscape images may have had additional resonance for affluent Chicagoans, whose fortunes often sprang from their city’s role as the essential link between the resource-­rich West and the nostalgically remembered home country — ­and markets — ­of  the Northeast.22 On a visit to his family’s rural Illinois home in 1866, Sloan created perhaps the first serious fine art treatment of  the modest prairie landscape, the native terrain of Chicago itself  (fig. 1.3). This proved to be only a passing diversion from the New England imagery on which his career in Chicago depended, but it anticipated the next generation’s embrace of  local scenery, in the 1890s. Art not only typically pictured the faraway, it mostly came from there. When Martin O’Brien and other early dealers ventured from selling prints, frames, and art supplies to dealing in works of  art, they sensibly focused on what Chicago collectors were already buying on their travels to the East and to Europe. The city’s “utilitarian” character, wrote George B. Carpenter (later secretary of  the Art Institute) in 1871, had made it always “a profitable and attractive home” for artisans, while “artists shrank from its poor and comfortless charity as a beggar from a miser’s door.”23 Yet remarkably, two hundred paintings were sold at what a contemporary described as the city’s first exhibition of “exclusively home pictures,” at the Jevne & Almini Gallery in 1864.24 With growing recognition of the many kinds of  support needed to attract and retain a resident artist community, the short-­lived Vincennes Gallery combined a private club for artists with a commercial gallery, McVicker’s Theater hosted exhibitions, and Uranus Crosby’s ambitious Opera House included not only a magnificent theater but also, as its founder insisted, a permanent art gallery and studios for visual artists as well as musicians.25 In a fitting acknowledgment of  art’s dependent status in a city notoriously devoted to business, Volk sculpted for the Opera House’s exterior marble figures personifying music, painting, sculpture — ­and commerce.

12

1.2  John H. Drury, Rocky Mountain Scenery, 1871. Oil on canvas, 43 × 66 in. 1.3  Junius R. Sloan, Cool Morning on the Prairie, 1866. Oil on canvas, now on Masonite, 17 ¼ × 34 ¼ in. Gift of Percy H. Sloan, 53.01.070. Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University.

13

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

The beginning of  an artistic community in Chicago has long been identified with the incorporation of  the Chicago Academy of  Design in 1866.26 Founded by artists, it was the city’s first serious organization focused on improving prospects for local artists rather than on importing art to Chicago and elevating public taste. The Academy proved “its absolute utility as an educating influence in this community” by offering rudimentary, antique, and life drawing classes, the foundation of  a training to be completed abroad, and by developing a collection of  the “suitable casts” of  antique statuary considered essential to artistic education, as well as modern works of  art.27 Following the example of  mature eastern and European institutions, it soon also became an academy in the traditional sense, with an exclusive elected membership that defined professional achievement. Annual exhibitions of  works by established eastern artists as well as the academicians themselves modeled what constituted high art. Premised on the notion of  a universal standard for artistic value, the Academy was by definition resistant to change. Its pedagogy and exhibitions reinforced the standards of an artistic tradition local artists were eager to join. Art, painter John Antrobus told the Academy’s assembled members in 1868, was the “Great High Priest of  the True, [and] the Beautiful,” whose “tendency was to lift up the mind from the grosser things of  life, to a purer region.”28 There could be no more appropriate setting in which to realize art’s high purpose than this city unabashedly dedicated to the pursuit of  the “grosser things of life,” a place where achievement tended to be measured in statistics  ­or dollars. In 1870 the Academy erected its own building complete with classrooms, a lecture hall, a gallery, and, notably, artists’ studios, on Adams Street near State. The fledgling institution’s rising fortunes mirrored the prospects for local artists, whose numbers were swelling with new arrivals. In the first exhibition in its new premises, reported Carpenter hopefully, “Home Artists,” with the exception of portrait painters, were poorly represented, “owing, we understand, to the demand upon their time to fill orders taken during the summer.”29 The vitality of  local art activity had justified the launch in 1867 of  Chicago’s first dedicated art publication, the Art Journal, in which reports on studio visits and biographical sketches about “Our Home Artists” were featured alongside national and regional art news. The founding of  an academy to promulgate standards and of  an art press with a national scope seemed to demonstrate that, just as art belonged in Chicago, Chicago artists belonged to a wider world of  art, their productions undifferentiated by the happenstance of studio address.

Out of the Ashes: Making Chicago a Home for Art The Academy’s splendid new building, along with Crosby’s just-­renovated Opera House and other structures dedicated to art, were swept away when the Great Fire of 1871 leveled much of Chicago’s central business district and residential North Side. With studios and their contents gone, art suppliers and galleries burned out, significant private collections in ashes, and patrons overwhelmed with the pressing concerns of recovering businesses and homes, many artists decamped. A year later, however, the Chicago Tribune could report that the “wanderers” were returning, having discovered that “there’s no place like home.” Several portrait and landscape painters were said to be already at work on new commissions.30 A Fine Art Institute was established, offering a free primary drawing class.31 More significantly, Lucy Monroe later argued, the Fire had effected a “broader outlook” among the city’s elite, with “new impulses of liberality and of zeal for the public good.”32 Chicago’s character was thenceforth defined more

14

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

by what the city might be than by what it was, but in this too it was representative, as cities across America in the post–­Civil War era competed to be the “American Athens” — ­centers of culture as well as commerce.33 To the world, business Chicago signaled its resurrection and return to productivity in 1873 by launching the annual Interstate Industrial Exposition (IIE) in a dedicated structure on the lakefront where the Art Institute’s 1893 building stands today. At these trade shows, extensive art displays were a major draw.34 Like the Civil War–­era Sanitary Commission fairs, the exposition hall’s bespoke art gallery combined the potentially conflicting functions of  museum exhibition and marketplace, although with a frankly commercial rather than benevolent purpose: “to make the art exhibition the great picture sale of  the Northwest,” where prospering Chicagoans in particular could rebuild lost collections according to current taste.35 The organizers, businessmen-­patrons of  whom many would have close ties to the new Art Institute, also saw the IIE art exhibitions as a means of bolstering their own cultural values in a city inundated with new working-­class immigrants. They understood the exhibition series not only as a marketplace but also as “a perennial art academy” for Chicago and the region that would shape middle-­class viewers into a sophisticated art market.36 In the 1870s special displays of  ambitious pictures on historical themes were intended to encourage a taste for what was then considered the most elevated type of  painting, and selections of  casts were offered to inculcate an appreciation of antique sculpture.37 When it came to contemporary art, the organizers of  the first IIE art exhibition had to look beyond the still-­decimated ranks of  local practitioners and private collections. By taking their direction from New York artists, the National Academy of  Design, and later the progressive Society of  American Artists, they established the national, and then the international, scope of  the exhibitions and maintained Chicago’s habit of  looking eastward for cultural guidance. Ostensibly the art exhibitions, like the IIE as a whole, aimed to present the latest productions without regard to geography. By the late 1870s they charted a national shift from a homegrown, nationalistic art, exemplified by the Hudson River School, to the Eurocentric, cosmopolitan mode pursued by growing numbers of  American artists studying or working abroad, notably in Munich and, increasingly, in Paris. The IIE’s “American Salon,” thanks to curator Sara Hallowell, brought the latest works of Americans artists in Paris and Munich, as well as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, to diverse viewers estimated at between seven and ten thousand a day. For the moment, it was the nation’s foremost regular exhibition of  current American art, as well as a place where Americans could see contemporary European art firsthand; the last of  these shows, in 1890, featured the vivid paintings of  Claude Monet and other French Impressionists.38 The IIE exhibitions contributed significantly to making Chicago a leading forum for national and even international art, a role later adopted by the Art Institute. But they were not alone. In 1888 progressive dealer W. Scott Thurber had given Chicagoans their initial glimpse of French Impressionist paintings in one of the first US showings of this radical new art. The following year Bertha Honoré Palmer, one of  the city’s most prominent society women, began assembling her renowned collection of  French Impressionist works, setting a precedent for adventurous collecting that forward-­thinking Chicagoans would follow in the new century. Although pathbreaking in her taste, however, Palmer followed the practice of earlier Chicago collectors, much lamented by local dealers, of making her purchases elsewhere — ­in her case, Paris, where she was advised by Hallowell and by expatriate American Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt.39

15

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

Along with dealers, the IIE exhibitions brought new and returning artists to the city and introduced others, such as still-­life painter Cadurcis Plantagenet Ream and portraitist Ralph Clarkson, to the city they would eventually call home. Chicago artists were represented in proportion to their modest numbers, their works indistinguishable in style and subject, if  not quality, from those of their contemporaries elsewhere.40 Many, such as James Farrington Gookins, Arthur J. Rupert, and the young Frederick W. Freer, claimed the prestige of  European training and experience — ­advantages leveraged against Chicago’s notorious reluctance to patronize its own. Indeed, many of  the sales at the exhibitions were made by East Coast dealers, to the chagrin of the organizers.41 Just as the expositions reified commercial Chicago’s central position in national and international markets, the IIE art exhibitions reinforced local consumers’ cultural conformity. “After all,” observes the newly made social doyenne Mrs. Granger Bates in With the Procession, Henry Blake Fuller’s 1895 novel of contemporary social life in Chicago, “people of  our position would naturally be expected to have a Corot.”42 For Chicago’s elite patrons, hometown loyalty meant bringing good art to their city; it did not necessarily mean buying there, much less buying the works of Chicago creators. When the young Charles L. Hutchinson, future president of  the Art Institute, purchased a number of works by Chicago painters in the late 1870s, this represented only a passing phase in his early career as a collector, a symptom of  temporarily meager resources, if not undeveloped artistic taste.43

An Art Center for Chicago As Chicago’s artists struggled for patronage in the post-­Fire years, the revival of the Academy of Design seemed all the more vital for nurturing a resident artists’ community and elevating its prestige. Yet the Academy, troubled from the start by shaky management and a contest for control between artists and patrons, never entirely recovered from the blow dealt by the Fire and the subsequent departures of many artists. It was further undermined by the national business slumps of 1873 and 1877. By 1879 it had ceded control to its creditors, a group of businessmen who appropriated its collections and personnel for a new organization, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, which continued the old academy’s classes with virtually no interruption.44 In 1882 the fledgling institution was renamed the Art Institute of Chicago, signaling its departure from the structure of the traditional artist-­run academy with its exclusive membership of practitioners. To the Academy of Design’s paired goals of teaching and showing art, the Art Institute added a third that was both less specific and more ambitious: “the cultivation and extension of the arts of design by any appropriate means.” Supporting artists and their work was now part of a larger project to extend art into society, one that could perhaps only have been undertaken by lay supporters rather than practitioners, as observers emphasized.45 Where artists saw an academy’s collection as a set of  carefully selected models for students and its gallery as a place for artists to show their works, the Art Institute’s organizers envisioned a museum and school that together would directly serve the public at least as much as artists. They were determined to improve the city through cultural, educational, and social philanthropy that was both self-­interested and genuinely idealistic.46 According to founding president Hutchinson, the institution’s value would be “measured by the services it renders to the Community in which it stands.”47 The pairing of  museum and school served an inherited artistic culture in which achievement was by definition a cumulative, progressive process, with both artists’ training and public

16

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

support built on appreciation for the great art of the past.48 Thus in its early decades the Art Institute’s collection, like that of  other art museums in Gilded Age America, was dominated by cast-­plaster reproductions of  Classical and Renaissance sculpture and architecture, the drawing of  which traditionally constituted the first stage of  artistic training. Galleries were not only adjacent to classrooms and studios but functioned as teaching spaces, with students drawing from casts, copying paintings, or otherwise engaging with sanctioned examples.49 The Art Institute’s hybrid organization was typical for the time, if  more effectively realized there than elsewhere: like Chicago itself, the institution was remarkable mainly for its scale.50 Measured by enrollment, its school was by the mid-­1890s the largest in the nation, a fitting complement to Chicago’s new status as the American metropolis second in population only to New York. Even before the museum amassed significant collections of its own beyond the obligatory casts, its annual exhibition of  American art made the Art Institute a national showplace. The inaugural 1888 show, for example, featured a significant number of paintings from the outstanding private collection of New Yorker Thomas B. Clarke. By 1899 the Chicago journal Brush and Pencil could boast that the museum’s annual attendance was the largest of  any in the nation, while the dollar value of its collections (a measure any Chicago businessman could appreciate) was surpassed only by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.51 The Art Institute’s success both mirrored and could be attributed to the striving spirit of  the city’s “men of  affairs,” who brought to the encouragement of art in Chicago “the same energy that has built the city and made it famous,” in Lucy Monroe’s view.52 It stood out from comparable institutions of  the time not so much for the originality of  its pedagogy, its exhibitions, and its collections, or for the artistic values these projected, but for the position it almost immediately assumed in relation to its city. It was the monolithic hub of  the local art world around which all fine art activity, and much else in the cultural life of  Chicago, revolved.53 More than a school and a museum, it was an “institute,” where temporary exhibitions, lectures, meetings, and receptions supported an expansive understanding of  creative endeavor, from landscape gardening to newspaper illustration, from pottery to literature. It was truly a center for art in Chicago.

“The Best Place in the World to Begin an Art Education” The Art Institute’s rapidly growing school did much to swell the city’s creative population. “The best place in the world to begin an art education,” as a local newspaper boasted in 1895, it drew students from throughout the vast central section of the nation, where (in contrast to the several art schools concentrated in the Northeast) it was unrivaled in size and prestige.54 Large numbers of students were attracted by its modest entrance requirements and a wide-­ranging program adapted to the realities of artistic employment.55 In addition to the elementary fine art curriculum for aspiring painters and sculptors, the school soon offered courses in applied and commercial art practices, fields in which Chicago itself promised abundant opportunities for work. These included china painting; book, magazine, and advertising illustration; decorative design; and newspaper illustration (starting in 1895), as well as elementary and secondary school art teaching and, in partnership with the Armour Institute, architecture.56 In post–­Civil War America, women flocked in unprecedented numbers to art schools and into various art-­related pursuits, amateur and professional.57 But the Art Institute’s applied

17

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

arts courses, coupled with employment opportunities generated by Chicago’s advertising, retail, and publishing industries, particularly attracted female students. The mediums and techniques of  these fields, the cooperative nature of  production, and the relative invisibility of  the individual applied arts worker all corresponded with traditional women’s amateur art practices; moreover, preliminary training could lead directly into work, in contrast to the costly study abroad with which fine art students ideally capped their studies at the school. As portrayed in the local press, the stereotypical art student in the 1890s was an earnest, apron-­ clad young woman, often spotted in the museum’s galleries with notebook or sketchbook in hand.58 Dominating the ranks of  fine art students in the school’s first two decades, women all but eclipsed men in the applied arts and teacher-­training courses. The telling exception was architecture, commonly regarded as an inherently masculine pursuit.59 At least one writer “deplored” the high proportion of women training for careers as fine artists because of  the likelihood that female graduates would abandon their careers for marriage.60 Art Institute instructor Lorado Taft, who particularly encouraged women to become sculptors, “was always having faith in different girls,” his sister Zulime recalled, “but just before the big accomplishment, she would get married.”61 This drain of  female talent compounded a general concern that women’s disproportionate participation undermined the seriousness of  art as a professional pursuit. Despite such prejudice, women professionals were prominent, and women practitioners numerous, in Chicago’s art world. The Art Institute’s own faculty included women as early as 1881, when Alice Kellogg (later Kellogg Tyler), a graduate of  the school, was hired. Within a decade, women comprised nearly one-­third of  the faculty, not counting assistants and lecturers. The museum’s second-­ever solo exhibition, in 1887, was a memorial show for painter Annie C. Shaw, the first woman elected to the Chicago Academy of  Design.62 And in the 1890 annual exhibition of  the Art Students’ League of  Chicago, held at the Art Institute, women contributors outnumbered men six to one.63 While women artists, particularly in applied arts, were growing in numbers in many American art centers, Chicago seems to have been a particularly sympathetic setting for them in the late nineteenth century.64 Before the local flowering around 1900 of  the Arts and Crafts movement, which greatly elevated the status of  handicraft, the difference in gender breakdown between the school’s fine and applied arts enrollments underscored the hierarchical relation between the two.65 Fine art study (more likely if  not predominantly undertaken by men) was regarded as more serious and ambitious than the applied arts training to which women flocked. In practice, however, the populations were thoroughly intermixed. Would-­be fine artists attended classes in practical fields, notably illustration and graphic design, on which most would eventually depend for employment. Conversely, many of  those enrolled in the foundational fine arts classes of  antique and life drawing “are engaged in some sort of  business in which a further knowledge of  drawing, modeling, or engraving is necessary or indirectly beneficial.”66 The evening school’s antique and life drawing classes, reported Art Institute director William M. R. French in 1887, was composed chiefly of  such workers, including lithographers, draftsmen, and graphic designers.67 In 1895 an all-­male group of  them founded the Palette and Chisel Club for mutual support of  their higher artistic ambitions: students in the Art Institute’s evening classes, they gathered on Sundays to paint a hired model under daylight conditions. What Chicago lacked in patronage of  local fine artists it made up in opportunities for applied arts workers. In the 1880s young painters Edgar Cameron, Frank Peyraud, and William

18

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

Wendt worked for the Lowell Art Company churning out “buckeyes” — ­cheap, rapidly painted landscapes produced for the mass market, for which Chicago was the national capital of  production.68 The city also was a major center for the production of  cycloramas, large-­scale in-­ the-­round paintings that constituted a popular form of  mass entertainment just prior to the birth of  the motion picture. Born in Switzerland and trained in Paris, Peyraud arrived in Chicago intending to practice architecture but found work instead painting a cyclorama of the Battle of  Gettysburg as part of  a thirty-­man team that also included Chicago native Oliver Dennett Grover and the newly arrived Charles Abel Corwin (both of whom had already studied in Europe), along with Cincinnati native John Twachtman and Arthur B. Davies, then a student of  Kellogg’s at the Art Institute.69 Women were particularly numerous in the fields of graphic design, illustration, and, with the rise of  the Arts and Crafts movement in Chicago, decorative arts. In 1899 Martha Baker, Pauline Dohn, and Blanche Ostertag, although fully qualified as fine art professionals with study in Paris and participation in Art Institute annuals to their credit, were still busy as graphic designers, numbering among Chicago’s “clever poster girls” notwithstanding recognition that their “specialty lies along some other artistic line.”70 Dulah Evans (later Krehbiel), who studied illustration while following the fine art curriculum at the Art Institute, honored the ambitions of  female aspiring painters in her 1904 cover art for The Sketch Book, a student publication, while demonstrating her command of the Art Nouveau style then sweeping the field of  graphic design (fig. 1.4). In 1902 local demand for commercial art instruction was such that the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (the second institution of that name) opened to provide a more technically oriented alternative to the Art Institute’s program. The intimate relation between high art ideals and application fostered in the commercial city rewarded its business interests as much as it served the artists’ economic needs. “Constant proof  of  the worth and use of  art education comes in the continued demand made to the [Art] institute for skilled draftsmen, designers, drapers, illustrators, and modelers,” according to the Tribune: “Today the manufacturer cannot live without the artist.”71 Nor indeed could the artist live without the manufacturer. While practical work was the reality for most Art Institute students and graduates, a majority of  its faculty members claimed the prestige of  having trained and exhibited as fine artists in established eastern or European institutions. Grover had an appointment to teach at the Art Institute when he returned home from Europe in 1885. Charles E. Boutwood, who had studied and exhibited at the Royal Academy in his native England, was only passing through Chicago when the Art Institute hired him. It also quickly recruited Lorado Taft fresh from study in Paris, where he had exhibited in two Salons. When Kellogg and fellow instructor A. J. Rupert both took leaves from the Art Institute’s faculty to study abroad in 1887, director French observed that “nothing can be more wholesome for the Institute than this interchange with European schools.”72 Later, official visiting instructors included the likes of  William Merritt Chase, Alphonse Mucha, and Joaquin Bastida y Sorolla, internationally celebrated artists whose presence further polished the school’s — ­and the city’s — ­reputation for world-­class artistic sophistication. The Art Institute both connected Chicago to the national and international art scene and provided a center for its resident artists’ community, a place to study and teach, exhibit and meet. To support the institution, its early premises in the heart of the commercial downtown included studios rented to artists, as well as meeting rooms for such civic bodies as the Chicago

19

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

1.4  Dulah Evans Krehbiel, cover design for The Sketch Book, September 1904.

Ryerson and Burnham Libraries Book Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.

Woman’s Club, thus bringing artists into direct contact with potential patrons. The Art Institute lent its galleries for exhibitions and gatherings of  artists’ organizations, beginning with the inaugural exhibition of the all-­women Bohemian Art Club (later the Palette Club) in 1883, the same year the Art Institute inaugurated its “permanent museum.”73 In 1888 it launched two influential annual juried exhibition series, one for American paintings (later expanded to include sculpture) and the other for watercolors (with pastels later added), where the productions of  Chicagoans might be judged as equal to those of  American artists anywhere. In 1897, partly in response to complaints of  prejudice against hometown artists, the Art Institute added a regular exhibition for painters and sculptors from Chicago and vicinity, although it did not commit to making it an annual show until 1914. Importantly for a city where few dealers represented local artists, these annual exhibitions, along with the shows the museum hosted for artists’ organizations and individual artists, were sales events at which Art Institute staff  acted as agents.

20

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

A degree of  tension was built into the relationship between the artists and the institution, however. “For the public, not for a few,” in Hutchinson’s words, the Art Institute’s mission was pointedly to elevate the tastes and aesthetic sophistication of  the community at large.74 It would transcend Chicago and the very qualities that defined it, opposing the city’s incessant motion and grasping materialism with timeless and universal values.75 “In Chicago but not of  it,” as George Ade observed, the Art Institute purposefully encouraged Chicago to look above and beyond itself. Beginning in 1893, this lofty attitude was embodied in the dignified “civic classicism” of  a new building conspicuously sited on the east side of Michigan Avenue, opposite the city’s commanding temples of  commerce.76 The museum might host brief  exhibitions for such local organizations as the Chicago Art League, the Western Art Association, and the Palette Club, but most of  its galleries showcased treasures from elite private collections (earmarked for future donation) that by the 1880s reflected a thoroughly cosmopolitan, Europe-­oriented taste. Meanwhile, Chicago artists were sidelined from the juries for the Art Institute’s annual American art exhibitions, despite protest.77

“Admiration Is One Thing and Patronage Another” Typical of a young city, Chicago’s lack of confidence in its own artistic, literary, and social judgments was, in the frank assessment of writer Joseph Kirkland, “a conspicuous and unmistakable mark of provincialism.”78 It equally reflected easterners’ expectations that in Chicago, “everybody is fighting to be rich, is then straining to be refined, and nobody can attend to making the city fit to live in.”79 Resident artists labored against prejudice from within and outside just as Chicago’s elite cultural institutions did: by transcending local identity and maintaining strong ties to the larger American and international cultural scenes to which the IIE and Art Institute exhibitions were emphatically oriented. Local newspapers recorded a constant flow of artists between Chicago and points east (and later west) as they traveled to study, to work, and to participate in prestigious national and international exhibitions. Having followed training at the newly established Art Institute with study in Munich, Lawrence Carmichael (L. C.) Earle, for example, divided his time between Chicago and the East throughout the 1880s. Those “exiles” who returned to the city were greeted as conquering heroes, all the more enthusiastically as Chicago acknowledged how many of  its own did not come back. Discouragement met many who did. Having learned that “admiration is one thing and patronage another,” Grover was reported in 1885 to be ready to abandon his hometown, a year after returning in triumph from Florence.80 Home from study in Paris, Lorado Taft found local newspapers eager to publish his accounts of living and studying abroad, but as a working sculptor he could find commissions only for such pedestrian works as portrait busts, war memorials, and decorative bronze firebacks, rather than the ideal sculpture he aspired to create.81 In 1882, in the hope of “inducing more than one discouraged artist to try Chicago another year,” the Illinois Club created the short-­lived Illinois Art Association to purchase works for the club’s collection, for which purpose it reserved a fund to buy works from the club’s annual exhibitions.82 Such deliberate effort by a patrons’ organization to support Chicago artists was not seen again until the late 1890s, however. The city’s collectors were notorious for purchasing paintings by Chicago artists in Boston, New York, or Europe, while the same works “seem to become unsaleable the moment they are offered in Chicago,” as a local newspaper grumbled in 1892.83 Walter McEwen, a native Chicagoan considered by locals their most famous artist,

21

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

“lives in Paris that Chicago may the better appreciate him,” demonstrating his hometown loyalty by showing his latest Salon paintings in Chicago.84 To remedy this sorry situation, in 1892 streetcar titan Charles T. Yerkes established a prize for a work exhibited in the Chicago Society of Artists’ annual salon. Ironically, Yerkes himself  collected mostly Old Master works, art by current European academic artists, and, “determined to keep in touch with new movements in art,” a few works by French Impressionist painters (although “without in the least admiring them,” in Lucy Monroe’s judgment).85 To the century’s end and beyond, “apathy,” a “lack of sympathy for the guild of  resident artists,” and “a coldness which has so frosted ambition and zeal as to have driven them to more kindly latitudes” continued to be a lament about the state of art patronage in Chicago. Characteristically, it was often mixed with buoyant optimism — ­fed by the city’s inexhaustible capacity for explosive growth and astounding change — ­that Chicago’s arrival as an art center was almost within reach.86 Chicago not only failed to patronize its own artists, but its relentlessly utilitarian, commercial character was hostile to that equally essential if less tangible commodity, “art atmosphere,” without which, some predicted, its “modest attempt at being an art center” was doomed.87 Artists returning from Europe as well as transplants from the East were acutely aware of  this shortcoming. In the 1880s they founded several organizations to supply a “home” for members of  the beleaguered creative community or, more concretely, to meet the need for fellowship, mutual assistance, and especially exposure through exhibitions.88 The Chicago Art League, the Chicago Art Club, and the Western Art Association were short-­lived, but the Chicago Society of  Artists (CSA), formally instituted in 1888, is today the nation’s oldest continually operating artists’ organization. The CSA’s mission, “the advancement of art in Chicago, and the cultivation of  social relations among its members,” asserted the high ideal of  service to the city over the mere interests of  its artists — ­or perhaps the wish that the two be more closely allied.89 An offended sense of  marginalization based on hometown identity was built into the founding of  the CSA, an event some attributed to resentment over local artists’ exclusion from the recent IIE art fairs and the Art Institute’s inaugural annual exhibition.90 Rare, however, was the Chicago professional artist with no ties to the Art Institute, whether as a former or current student, an instructor, or an exhibitor in some capacity. Indeed, several members of  the school’s faculty, such as Grover, Boutwood, and John Vanderpoel, were original members of  the CSA, which did not scruple to hold its exhibitions at the Art Institute when invited to do so in 1890, in tandem with the Palette Club. The artists’ community was small enough and the Art Institute large enough to make the Chicago art world a complex of interwoven and overlapping memberships, affiliations, and informal and institutional relationships — ­with the Art Institute always at the center. The sensitivities of  the local artists reflected an identity as Chicago practitioners that was in a sense forced upon them — ­by real or perceived public indifference, by the slights of  elite collectors and their institutions, or by the palpably inhospitable character of the city in relation to art. To be an artist in Chicago was to be an artist almost despite Chicago. Apart from sharing this somewhat embattled situation, Chicago’s artists were by no means a unified or uniform body, particularly given the constant flux that was the city’s most salient feature. When in 1892 a rival new organization, the Cosmopolitan Art Club, attempted to poach the membership of  the CSA, resentment focused on the fact that the new club was largely

22

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

composed of  fresh arrivals to the city, attracted by the chance for work decorating buildings for the upcoming world’s fair. The Yerkes Prize’s requirement of a minimum one year’s residence in the city was “most reasonable,” opined the Chicago Tribune, “otherwise any stranger could reside here and call himself a Chicago artist.”91 While the CSA was committed to building an artistic community rooted in Chicago, the new club chose a name that reflected the need to transcend civic identity — ­or, by implication, Chicago parochialism. Neither group advocated for the city’s artistic production to be particularly marked by Chicago — ­certainly not by its reputation as a “noisy marketplace.”92 Naturally, then, the most lauded artworks produced by Chicagoans in this period were invested with what were perceived as qualities of  timelessness, universality, and idealism. Even landscape painting should evince a “poetical element.”93 Figural art was expected to reflect academic pictorial values imbibed in European academies: the fully modeled and anatomically correct, if  idealized, representation of  the body; a high degree of “finish” without a too-­literal rendering of  surfaces; a clearly articulated narrative — ­filtered through a peculiarly American concern for decorous morality; and in painting, harmonious, understated color. One particularly successful embodiment of  this formula was The Mother (1889; fig. 1.5), the most ambitious work of Alice Kellogg’s short career. Its universal mother-­and-­child theme, modern but generic domestic setting, and soft, penumbral tones evinced current aesthetic strategies while fulfilling conventional expectations for the stimulation of elevated sentiment. In its “grace and protective tenderness,” it also satisfied expectations for what a woman artist should do, or rather, for what only a woman artist could do.94 Painted near the end of Kellogg’s two years of  study in Paris, The Mother was included in the 1891 exhibition of  the Society of  American Artists, the New York–­based organization of progressive artists of which she soon became the first midwestern member. In 1893 the painting was exhibited in the official United States section of  the art exhibition at the World’s Columbian Exposition. It then found a home at Hull-­House, the social, educational, and service center established in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in Chicago’s impoverished West Side immigrant neighborhood. In that setting, The Mother not only expressed the institution’s mission of  nurturing families and fostering community in the hostile environment of  the city, it also exemplified the power of  art to contribute to that essential work. Chicagoans’ typically conservative taste and indifference toward local artists discouraged innovation and depressed prices, subjects of complaint that persisted well into the 1890s.95 In 1892 members of  the Palette Club resorted to painting small pictures, with appropriately modest prices, in a deliberate effort to stimulate sales in a sluggish market.96 A number of  women artists, notably Martha Baker, enlarged their practice to include miniature painting. For male artists, on the other hand, large-­scale decorative painting offered expanding opportunities. Cyclorama painting, which called for advanced skills in perspective and in the enlargement of  figures and landscape backgrounds, gave many artists experience in monumental painting even before the world’s fair brought abundant opportunities for mural decoration. While developing his reputation as a landscape and figure painter, Grover shifted from cyclorama work to theater decoration and stage-­set painting, less prestigious lines of work that nonetheless gave him an entrée into the more respected field of  mural painting.97 In 1889 he assisted Albert Fleury, a French artist invited expressly from New York, and St. Louis artist Charles Holloway on murals in the new Auditorium Building, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.

23

1.5  Alice Kellogg Tyler, The Mother, 1889. Oil on canvas, 44 7⁄8 × 38 7⁄8 in.

Jane Addams Hull-­House Museum, University of Illinois at Chicago.

24

Finding Alice THOMAS MCCORMICK

So how did the life’s work of Alice, labeled in her Chicago Chronicle obituary as the foremost woman artist in the West, wind up in chicken crates in a mobile home in the flinty hills of northern Arkansas? Tyler died young — ­at thirty-seven, in February 1900 — ­ from complications of kidney disease. Her family preserved her studio until the early 1950s, when the old home was sold. At that point, her paintings and drawings, as well as her career and legacy, were packed away and given to John Kellogg Rich, her favorite nephew, who lived in northern Arkansas not far from Eureka Springs. When Rich died in 1974, his possessions went up for auction, a sale Laura and Dale intended to visit as they were frequent bargain hunters and visited estate sales often. Come the morning of the sale, they decided to sleep in and skip it. But then they both heard a loud and insistent voice: “Dale, Laura . . . this is the Lord . . . wake up, go to the auction, buy the paintings!” Being devout Christians, they jumped out of bed and scurried to the sale. There, amid lamps and bedsheets displayed on hay wagons in the yard, were boxes of artwork. Some had already been sold; the couple recalled that a college student had bought several to cover broken tiles in her bathroom. The average price was around 27 cents per picture. The Nichols didn’t have much money — ­in fact less than $300 in the bank — ­but they began bidding on the pictures and did not put their hands down until they had spent every last cent. So there we sat, in the cozy kitchen — ­Laura, Dale, Melissa, Tom, and Alice. What to do? We wanted to make an offer to buy the whole thing, but there was a lot to consider: the Nichols were super nice people and we wanted to do right by them; we were super nice art dealers, but not foolish or wealthy. No one knew who Alice Kellogg Tyler was. And of course, the Lord was watching. We made them a cash offer of $15,000 for everything. They said, no thank you. We could see in their faces how hard it was to turn the money down. But a higher power had sent Alice to them, and they felt an obligation to see that she was given her due respect. So we cut a deal to take everything on consignment and do our almighty best to bring Alice back to life. After tearful hugs, we returned home and had the works cleaned, restored, and framed, while Melissa, a brilliant researcher, set to work on a catalog publication. And through an act of sheer luck (or divine providence) we met Joanne Bowie, Alice’s great-­great-­niece, who had been tirelessly working on her own, researching the details of Alice’s life.

It was a crisp, promising morning in 1986 in Eureka Springs, a Victorian-­era spa town in northern Arkansas, the sort of place one used to go to “take the waters.” I was there with my business partner/girlfriend, Melissa Williams, to “work on our relationship” and look for paintings to buy. In search of a breakfast spot and simultaneously deep in an argument on the sidewalk, we both suddenly noticed the window of an antique store. There on a little easel was a perfectly perfect impressionist painting of a woman hanging laundry that captivated both of us. Suddenly a car skidded to the curb and a frantic woman raced into the shop with us in hot pursuit, desperate to learn about the painting. “No, no, we’re closed. I’m just here to grab something,” she protested. Her name was Laura, and she told us that she had many more of these paintings, all from some female artist’s estate. But she had to run. An address was given and an appointment made to meet later that day, and then she was gone. Laura and Dale Nichols — ­hard-­working people of modest means, church people — ­lived in a mobile home in a lovely meadow outside of town. They welcomed us with refreshments and small talk, but our attention was fixed on several unruly chicken crates containing artworks. As we finally began to examine the art on the kitchen table, they told us how they came to possess the estate of Alice Kellogg Tyler, a Chicago painter then unknown to pretty much everyone. As we exhumed treasure after treasure, some no larger than a cigar box lid, with goose bumps and trembling hands, we learned that Tyler was from a large family in the Chicago suburb now called Evergreen Park, where her father was a physician. She had a rich educational pedigree: studies and teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, which became the School of the Art Institute; studies in France beginning in 1887 at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi. She thrived in Paris — ­showing in the Salons of 1888 and 1889 and the Exposition Universelle of 1889 — ­and in Chicago, when she returned in 1889. She was awarded membership in the New York Society of Artists and began teaching at Hull-­House and the Art Institute. She was asked to paint a mural for the Woman’s Building at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and had her work displayed at the Palace of Fine Arts. She was a leader in Chicago’s turn-­ of-­the-­century arts community, with none other than Lorado Taft reporting, “While we picked each other’s work to pieces and railed against fate and the unappreciative Chicago public, she painted and thanked God for a world of beauty.”

25

were offered along with a prayer of thanks for all our good fortunes. The Nichols were as unchanged as the Arkansas hills, although Dale did have some nice new power tools in his workshop. And now you can Google “Alice Kellogg Tyler” and see what all the fuss was about.

Soon the paintings began selling like crazy. Eventually we sold a single painting for $15,000, and it became clear that the Nichols had made the correct choice. We returned one day to Eureka Springs and sat again in the small kitchen with Laura and Dale. I believe fresh cookies

Alice Kellogg Tyler, A Sunny Corner of the Veranda, 1898. Oil on panel, 7 × 10 in.

An Arrival of Sorts: The World’s Columbian Exposition Notwithstanding the dizzying pace of construction in Chicago, opportunities for public art were rare until after the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.98 The first large-­scale realization of a coordinated plan in which the “allied arts” of architecture, landscape design, mural painting, and monumental sculpture “worked together and in harmonious proportion,” the fair powerfully influenced art and design in Chicago, and across the nation, for decades to come.99 Primarily educational rather than commercial in its aims, the event celebrated the triumph of Western civilization and of America as its culmination and leader into the future. As an announcement of its host city’s coming-­of-­age, the exposition offered mixed messages. Along with Chicago’s wealth, its phoenix-like rise from the Fire of 1871 convinced many skeptics of its capacity to create virtually overnight the ideal city that was to be the fair. While affirming its leadership in engineering and construction, however, the fair demonstrated the

26

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

city’s cultural and aesthetic conformity. With the startling exception of Adler and Sullivan’s polychrome Transportation Building, the grounds, buildings, and embellishments of the so-­ called White City reinforced European academic tradition in the New World — ­in pointed contrast to the colorful displays of “primitive” cultures and popular entertainments in the separate sphere of the fair’s lively Midway nearby. Such elite cultural and aesthetic values as beauty, transcendence, timeless universality, and idealism dictated equally the design of the White City and the mission of the Art Institute, reflecting their overlapping leadership. Chicago architect Daniel Burnham was charged with the overall design of  the fair, but New Yorker Frank D. Millet supervised its decoration. Not surprisingly, the choicest assignments for murals and sculptures went to eastern and expatriate practitioners, including such current stars of the American art world as Mary Cassatt, Daniel Chester French, and Frederick MacMonnies.100 Of  Chicagoans, only Taft, Earle, and the nonresident McEwen were prominent in the decoration of the fair’s buildings and grounds.101 The interior decoration of  the Illinois Building, however, was handed over to the Palette Club, whose leading members executed murals on the general theme of  “what Illinois women can do in arts and industries.” Allegorizing such abstract themes as Youth, Enlightenment, and even Industrial Art in decorous arrangements of  idealized, classically draped female figures, the artists brought their work into line with most of the White City’s murals, eschewing any reference to Illinois or to modernity.102 Of  all the artists identified with Chicago, Taft probably profited most from his work on the fair. In addition to creating sculpture for the exterior of  the Illinois Building and modeling lavish exterior decorations for the vast Horticultural Building, he undertook the less glamorous work of  enlarging and duplicating other artists’ designs for sculptural decorations throughout the fair.103 To complete this ambitious undertaking in time for the opening, Taft turned his numerous assistants and students, many of them women, into a veritable “art sweat shop.”104 A formative experience for such budding sculptors as Julia Bracken (later Wendt) and Bessie Potter (later Vonnoh), this work did much to further Taft’s ambitions to be Chicago’s chief  creator of  monumental sculpture. And in Chicago and across the country, the fair ushered in a new era for public art in sculpture as well as mural painting. In the White City’s Palace of Fine Arts, European art dominated the exhibition of  art on loan from private collections, curated by Sara Hallowell, in which the French Impressionist paintings owned by Chicago’s own Potter and Bertha Palmer drew considerable attention. In the official art exhibition in the same great hall, works by Americans represented one-­third of  the nine thousand objects on display. Even so, one foreign visitor could conclude, “What we see here was what we might have expected in Paris: and what we saw in Paris was all we expected here.”105 Chicagoans, along with artists from the rest of the Midwest, the South, and the West, found themselves overshadowed by northeastern and expatriate painters and sculptors, prompting Lucy Monroe to predict “disastrous” consequences for the city’s ambition to be an art center.106 Another reviewer, however, reproved disgruntled Chicagoans and congratulated the jury (which included Chicago painter Frederick Freer) on the steadfast judgment it exercised in excluding the many second-­rate submissions symptomatic of  Chicago’s artistic immaturity. Among those who passed the jury’s stringent standard was Oliver Dennett Grover, whose ambitious figure painting Thy Will Be Done (fig. 1.6), which had secured the first Yerkes Prize the year before, exemplified the combination of  melodramatic sentiment and academic “finish” that many Chicagoans, and Americans, expected of serious art.107

27

1.6  Oliver Dennett Grover, Thy Will Be Done, 1892. Oil on canvas, 70 ¾ × 34 in.

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

If  comparatively few local artists benefited directly from the fair, it marked a turning point for art in Chicago in several respects. Anticipation of  the event had raised expectations for the city to become not only an American art center but a center for American art. The promise of  working on the fair had attracted new artists to Chicago, notably Charles Francis Browne, Alfred Jansson, Edward Kemeys, Hermon Atkins MacNeil, and Roberto Rascovich, and brought home such exiled natives as Richard Bock, Elbridge Ayer Burbank, William Clusmann, Frederick Freer, and Alfred Juergens. Although prospects for patronage dimmed during the long economic depression that began just as the fair opened in May 1893, optimism that art could flourish in Chicago strengthened in the course of  the decade. True to local tradition, however, it was tempered with concern over the number of artists abandoning the city for lack of  support, or at least of  sales.108 “After the close of  the exposition,” recalled MacNeil, “I stayed in Chicago for three years and almost starved to death.”109 Discouragement was nothing new, but the years following the fair saw concerted efforts to better conditions for artists in Chicago.

A City for Art, Art for the City Concerned that a dearth of affordable workspace was one cause of artistic exodus, in 1894 Judge Lambert Tree and his wife Anna Magie Tree constructed a block of studios behind their North Side mansion on Wabash Avenue at Ohio Street, expanding the complex in 1912 and 1913. Tree Studios quickly became an urban art colony housing painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and other arts practitioners, setting the stage for the emergence of the near North Side as an artists’ enclave more than a decade later.110 In 1898 business acumen rather than philanthropy prompted the Studebaker Brothers company to convert its Michigan Avenue carriage factory and showrooms to a complex of artists’ and musicians’ studios, along with theaters and a banquet hall, in response to a surge of cultural activity in the city.111 The resulting Fine Arts Building, just down the street from the Art Institute, was cultural Chicago’s most prestigious address, with Browne, Taft, and Ralph Clarkson, a Paris-­trained easterner who quickly became Chicago’s most prominent portrait painter, among its first tenants. And studios were furnished at Hull-­ House for the artists who, from the start, numbered among its community of reformers. Nearby, Jane Addams later wrote, artists could find “something of the same spirit . . . as the French artist is traditionally supposed to discover in his beloved Latin Quarter” — ­a comment that perhaps better reflects Chicagoans’ hankering for “art atmosphere” than any resemblance between the impoverished West Side immigrant neighborhood and the Parisian artists’ mecca.112 Even more than space and fellowship, patronage for local artists, long decried as shamefully insufficient “in this bustling, commercial, dollar-­chasing town,” emerged in the wake of  the world’s fair as a distinct cause.113 In contrast to the average businessman, the city’s well-­to-­do women had already taken a philanthropic interest in art matters of  many kinds through their organizations. In the 1890s interest became activism as American women’s organizations generally shifted their focus from members’ self-­education to community service.114 Their efforts to reform American cities socially, physically, and eventually politically, a challenge to women’s traditionally limited sphere of  action, were framed as “civic housekeeping,” with the city understood as a home for all.115 Given the traditional gendered associations between craft, beauty, and homemaking, it was natural that making a home for art in Chicago was among the issues now addressed by Chicago’s women’s clubs.

29

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

In 1895 the recently formed Arché and Young Fortnightly Clubs each inaugurated a competitive annual exhibition for Chicago artists, launching a veritable crusade on behalf  of  local art among Chicago’s civic-­minded society women.116 In 1897 more than a dozen women’s groups together organized the Chicago Art Association. They were joined in 1899 by the male-­only Union League Club, which had been collecting art for more than a decade with no particular attention to Chicago creators, but, as Taft remarked, “it is needless to say that the [Association’s] active members are mostly women.”117 With the express goals of  promoting popular interest, encouraging exhibitions in Chicago, and creating a demand for the work of  local artists, the Association pledged to expend twelve thousand dollars on purchases from the Art Institute’s just-­inaugurated Chicago artists’ exhibition in the form of  purchase awards, with the Cosmopolitan Art Club sponsoring a prize medal.118 In 1898 the Association began comanaging the annual exhibition with the museum, and individual clubs’ opening receptions became major society events, abundantly covered by the press.119 Thus, by 1899 Chicago’s art life could be described as “peculiarly dependent upon the women’s clubs of  the city.”120 If  sometimes resented by the artists, long jealous of  the power of  patrons over local art life, this organized patronage was widely hailed as both a catalyst for and a symptom of Chicago’s imminent cultural “renaissance.”121 Making this renaissance a reality, many agreed, would require municipal reform on multiple levels. The pristine, orderly, and harmonious White City of the World’s Columbian Exposition had modeled what cities could be, implicitly rebuking the ugly, dirty, and chaotic reality of  its host metropolis. The international City Beautiful movement the fair inspired reached its fullest expression in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of  Chicago, an ambitious proposal to remake the layout and architecture of  Chicago’s lakefront and downtown business district according to classical principles of  order, rationality, and decorum. Before that point, however, art was already being called into service to combat the city’s ills. In 1901 the Municipal Art Society, instituted in 1899 by Clarkson, Taft, Cameron, and a galaxy of  notable architects and art patrons, merged with the Chicago Art Association to form the Municipal Art League, whose broad agenda of  civic beautification transcended support of  local artists for its own sake.122 Chicago had long been regarded as a place in urgent need of the beauty and spiritual uplift that were the unquestioned foundation of  high art. In the late nineteenth century the conviction that city dwellers’ psychic and spiritual health were directly affected by the aesthetic quality of  their surroundings galvanized the patronage class. “The more artistic and refined the external surroundings, the better and more refined the man,” argued railroad car magnate George Pullman, justifying the drive for control over his labor force that inspired the “ideal” community he developed for his factory workers on Chicago’s far South Side.123 More than the refining influence on the citizenry that had already motivated public activity on behalf of  art in Chicago, art — ­objects as well as ideals — ­could be a means of  reforming the city itself. From abolishing the “nuisance” of  industrial smoke and commercial billboards to beautifying urban parks and other public spaces with works of public art, the Municipal Art League targeted the visible shortcomings that both symbolized and tangibly constituted Chicago’s failures as a collective home. Assuming joint management of the annual Chicago artists’ exhibition with the Art Institute, the League funded a purchase prize by which it began a public art collection for display at far-­flung public sites such as schools and park field houses, with the hope of inculcating an elevated aesthetic standard in the populace.124

30

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

The League’s purchases constitute an index of  aesthetic taste in Chicago’s conservative establishment of  the early twentieth century. With their decorous subject matter and suavely facile technique, these paintings and sculptures spoke in an assumed shared language of  beauty and uplift, in service to cultural unity and social harmony. Favored artists were typically those who had finished their training abroad, had secured their status by exhibiting in prestigious European and American venues, and were associated with the Art Institute as alumni, instructors, or jurors. Such was the widely successful Martha Baker, whose fashionable but safe In an Old Gown (fig. 1.7) had recently won honorable mention at the important Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh when the Municipal Art League added it to the collection in 1905. Its loose brushwork, compressed vertical composition, and tipped-­up perspective (a nod to Japanese prints) were signatures of the modern that in no way undermined the legibility of  its fashionable subject, a pretty young female model whose old-­time attire vies for attention with her form.125 Not only works of  art but also their creators were considered a force for healing in the city. In American literary realism beginning in the mid-­1880s, Chicago became a frequent setting and the artist a common character, often figuring as a foil to the city and embodying moral conscience, humanistic values, and other qualities threatened by urbanism, industrialism, and mass culture.126 Likewise, artists and art-­making were integral to Hull-­House’s mission of  combatting the social ills that urban living inflicted on the city’s most vulnerable citizens.127 Kellogg, Taft, Enella Benedict, and other Art Institute instructors and students practiced as well as taught in the settlement house’s studios, thereby enacting the Art Institute’s wide-­ ranging mission of  public service. They displayed their works in the Butler Art Gallery, opened at Hull-­House in 1891, which also showed pictures loaned by wealthy Chicagoans, including Charles Hutchinson.128 The role of  art and artists at Hull-­House thus initially reflected the rarefied ideal of  artistic practice as a top-­down endeavor, with artists as beings from an exclusive sphere. This was soon challenged, however, along with the implicit hierarchy that privileged the “higher” mediums of  painting and sculpture over applied arts. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, a British import that was sweeping the nation, Ellen Gates Starr in particular embraced the radical concept of  an authentic art springing from the needs and experience of  ordinary people. Starr herself  became an accomplished bookbinder, and handicrafts of  many kinds were eagerly taken up by workers and residents of  Hull-­House, where the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society was created in 1897 to promote “a just sense of  beauty.” The Society aimed to improve the working life of  immigrant laborers indirectly, by educating the public to the necessity of  beauty in consumer goods and “insisting that the machine no longer be allowed to dominate the workman and reduce his production to a mechanical distortion.” 129 Yet just three years later, the Hull-­House Labor Museum opened to validate the innate creativity of  immigrant workers and their native craft traditions. The influence of  this democratic art culture could be seen within a couple of  decades in the work of  Chicago artists and designers whose engagement with modernism drew on ancestral folk traditions cultivated at Hull-­House.130 The progressive vision for art at Hull-­House nonetheless remained grounded in an oppositional relationship between art and urban life. Beginning with the first exhibition in the Butler Art Gallery, Addams recalled, each picture was chosen for its “beauty and the escape it offers from dreary reality into the realm of  the imagination,” or for what Starr termed

31

1.7  Martha Susan Baker, In an Old Gown, 1904. Oil on canvas, 62 × 33 in.

32

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

“elevated tone with technical excellence.”131 In their belief  in the ameliorating effect of  beauty and the power of  art to improve the inner life of  the poor city dweller, female reformers at the turn of  the century sought not only to bring art into wage earners’ everyday spaces but also to bring every citizen up to its lofty ideals. As a supplement to the Municipal Art League collection, the Klio Club, for example, created the Altrua Library Association, where women of  every social class could attend lectures on art and borrow from a library of  art books, casts of  sculpture, photographic reproductions, and even original paintings.132 The mission of  such endeavors rested on the unquestioned premise that all segments of  society could meet on the common ground of  an elevated culture, one that transcended not only the fracturing, alienating effects of  urban and industrial society but also the cultural diversity of  the city’s polyglot immigrant population. In Chicago as in other American cities such as Boston and St. Louis, women’s clubs targeted the decoration of  public school classrooms to reach the impressionable young en masse. Painting classroom walls “according to the most artistic and approved scientific idea of  color,” so as to make school interiors “homelike” as well as pleasant, was just the beginning.133 The Public School Art Society (today Art Resources in Teaching), launched at Hull-­House in 1894 in partnership with the Chicago Woman’s Club, brought reproductions and original works of  art into classrooms and published lists of  prescribed reproductions (and where to obtain them) to “quicken the sense of beauty, which is so sorely blunted in our city life,” and to “satisfy the romantic and idealizing tendency.”134 An early emphasis on art with historical, literary, or patriotic associations yielded after 1900 to a more fundamental concern with exposing receptive young minds to the colors and forms of  nature, if  only secondhand.135 If  nothing else, this early introduction to art might form industrial workers into producers of higher-­quality goods, for, as the journal Arts for America intoned, “Industry without art is like a man without a soul.”136 No artist took up the cause of uplifting Chicago’s citizenry through art with more determination than Taft, who proselytized art with the same passion “to help blind, groping humanity” that had motivated him to work with a Protestant mission in Paris when he was a student at the École des Beaux-­Arts.137 Rhetorically querying the artist’s place in the modern city, Taft declared, “There never was a time when he was needed so much as now: there never was a time when he was permitted to do so little.”138 In his public sculptures executed beginning in the late 1890s, Taft hoped to model an art that was at once pertinent to Chicago and universal, one that actively addressed the city’s needs through timeless expression. In 1899 he began The Solitude of  the Soul (fig. 1.8). The first major work of  his long career, it was based on his own conception rather than drawn from a text and developed independent of  any commission. The work’s four idealized nudes, connected by touch yet unable to see one another, figure an allegory of  the individual’s existential loneliness that had particular resonance for Chicago, often considered a symbol of a social and psychic alienation endemic to city life.139 Taft’s monumental sculpture embodied the power of art to challenge and ameliorate that condition both symbolically and experientially: enlarged to life-­size in marble on commission from the Art Institute’s new Friends of  American Art in 1911, The Solitude of  the Soul requires viewers to circle its mass in order to view the sculpture fully, thus enacting community as they engage with the artwork. It is effectively a work of social practice avant la lettre, albeit in a form few would recognize as such today.

33

1.8  Lorado Taft, The Solitude of the Soul. Modeled in plaster, 1901;

sculpted in marble, 1914. Height, 91 in.; base, 51 × 41 ½ in.

34

Hull-­House Arts H E AT H E R R A D K E

It’s early summer in 1891 on the corner of Halsted and Polk. Jane Addams is wearing a hat of wood violets, welcoming guests into her home. This is the poorest district in Chicago and one of the most crowded places in the world — ­an immigrant neighborhood, within walking distance of the train station, that has become home to more than a dozen ethnic groups. The people who live here have fled poverty and pogroms in Europe to look for opportunity in Chicago, and they’ve found themselves living in tenements, working in sweatshops, sick with typhoid. Addams comes from money — ­she went to college, she has traveled in Europe — ­and she has now let a house here with her friend Ellen Gates Starr to see how they might be of use to the people who live on the near West Side. They’ve been working at it for a couple of years, teaching English classes, leading book groups, helping to care for their neighbors’ children. But they want to grow; their vision is seemingly boundless. At its height, their project will encompass thirteen buildings, including a gym, a kindergarten, a theater, and a communal dining hall. Hundreds of reform-­ minded men and women will come to live at Hull-­House as residents, doing their best to serve their neighbors. It will be called the most famous address in the world. But that is still decades away. On this hot June day Addams and Starr are taking their first step toward their expansive vision of social change. They are opening an art gallery. During the seven decades that Hull-­House was open, art was one of the three central components of the reformers’ vision for social change, along with direct social service and policy change. The residents taught painting and sculpture, opened a bookbindery, innovated in music and art education, and helped to create improv theater. Addams and Starr had had profound experiences looking at the great works of canonical art in Europe, and they wanted to make that beauty available to the people of their neighborhood. For them and the other residents of Hull-­House, cultural rights were a critical part of human rights; they believed that the immigrants in the Hull-­House neighborhood deserved not only fair wages and better working conditions but also access

to beauty and creativity. Butler Art Gallery, which opened just two years after Addams and Starr moved to the neighborhood, was the first serious attempt to integrate art into the Hull-­House project. They painted the walls of the gallery chocolate brown and hung artworks that depicted English landscapes, Greek statuary, and a Dutch girl knitting, all borrowed from a London patron. It was the most basic of democratic impulses, an attempt to share the art that brought meaning and joy to Addams and Starr. But they soon realized that the gallery would never be enough. If they were going to democratize culture, they would need to democratize taste as well, upsetting top-­down notions of what made art “good.” The European masters had painted Madonnas and Dutch villages, but who would paint the apple carts and tenements that surrounded Hull-­House? It was in this spirit that Hull-­House opened the Labor Museum, which celebrated peasant handicrafts, and later Hull-­ House Kilns, which provided jobs and creative autonomy in the 1930s to Mexican immigrants hand-­making stoneware that blended modernism and traditional Mexican design. From the earliest days, Hull-­House residents taught art classes to their neighbors, providing instruction in ceramics, painting, textiles, book arts, and many other mediums. The work produced at Hull-­House portrayed the conditions of the neighborhoods and homes of the immigrant artists, and it helped to form an aesthetic of community responsiveness that has been consistent in Chicago art ever since; today’s social practice impulse, for example, in part emerged from the legacy of art education at Hull-­House. None of these efforts were perfect: most had tinges of cultural appropriation or “rich white lady knows best.” But the brilliance of the Hull-­House art program was the brilliance of Hull-­House generally: the reformers lived their questions. What role did art play in social change? The question would never be answered with certainty, but they would try over and over to figure it out, always challenging themselves to think more critically and listen more carefully in the hopes that they would make the world better.

35

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

Toward an Art of Chicago Taft’s ideal of art as “something to give us greater solidarity — ­to put a soul into our community — ­to make us love this place above all others” was widely shared in Chicago’s cultural community at the turn of the century.140 The 1890s saw the blossoming of a movement to forge a regional cultural expression grounded in local conditions, an effort only galvanized by the international spotlight that the world’s fair turned on the city. Chicago’s cultural immaturity, its deplorable lack of what Taft termed “background,” could also be interpreted as an asset. Brash and energetic, Chicago seemed destined to be the national as well as regional art capital by virtue of the youthful freshness and authenticity that distinguished it as much from long-­ established midwestern cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis as from the old East, with its ties to Europe. Evincing “the quickening breath of Western enthusiasm,” the innovative design of Louis Sullivan and other Chicago architects was held up as a model for fine artists, as well as poets and musicians, for “expressing our thought instead of imitating foreign schools.”141 Sullivan looked to nature, specifically plant forms, for a distinctly American, democratic design vocabulary; Albert Fleury sketched the scenery of the Wisconsin Dells and Chicago’s North Shore in preparation for painting the Auditorium Theater’s landscape murals, which were inspired by Sullivan’s own poems on spring and autumn.142 Nothing more clearly evoked national identity than the American Indian. Incongruously situated among the white faux-­marble “palaces” of  the World’s Columbian Exposition, the sculpted forms of  Native Americans as well as native animal species such as bison proclaimed the nation’s ascendance even as historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in an address at the exposition, questioned the implications of the “closing” of  the American frontier for the national character so decisively shaped by its seemingly limitless possibilities.143 References to the West reinforced the identity of Chicago in particular as the “proud metropolis . . . of the vast Northwestern empire,” in the words of  Lambert Tree, who in 1894 purchased Cyrus Dallin’s bronze Indian sculpture A Signal of  Peace (recently displayed at the world’s fair) for installation in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where it remains today.144 Following the fair, sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil set the course of his future fame as a sculptor of  the Indian when he headed to New Mexico, in company with landscape painter Charles Francis Browne and writer Hamlin Garland, to assess the possibilities of  its native inhabitants as artistic subjects. In 1895 the decorative program of  the new Marquette Building directly linked the Indian with the earliest history of  Chicago in a lavish ensemble that included MacNeil’s relief  sculptures of  historical scenes and Edward Kemeys’s bronze bust portraits of  Native Americans associated with Marquette’s expeditions. Around the same time, the young Frank Lloyd Wright, working his way toward a regionally appropriate modern expression in architecture, commissioned designer Orlando Giannini to paint images of  romanticized Plains Indians on the walls of his bedroom in suburban Oak Park. Thus, decades after Native Americans had been forcibly removed from Illinois as “dusky nuisances” who posed “the first obstacle to the growth of Chicago,” Chicagoans avidly adapted Indian imagery, design motifs, stories, and names for a developing vocabulary of distinct local cultural identity, not least in the work of the numerous Arts and Crafts designers working in Chicago in the first decade of  the new century.145 Members of  the Cliff  Dwellers, the exclusive club founded by Garland in 1907 to bring together artists, writers, architects, musicians, and patrons, admired a mythologized Indian life, seeing in its vaunted spiritual connection

36

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

to nature and wholesome physicality an antidote to the ills of modern city living.146 The evocation of  Native American heritage was a means of  celebrating Chicago as an authentically American place and also of  feeding the antimodern nostalgia that was one response to urbanism, but it did not acknowledge Native Americans as actual citizens of  modern Chicago.147 When in 1897 the Chicago-­based painter Elbridge Ayer Burbank went west to paint his naturalistic portraits of  individual Native Americans in their traditional clothing and body art, he adopted an approach consistent with the emerging practice of what is now termed salvage ethnography. In such portraits as Chief Black Coyote (fig. 1.9), Burbank maintained his era’s romantic “othering” of the exotic Indian in a guise of scientific objectivity.148

1.9  Elbridge Ayer Burbank, Chief Black Coyote, ca. 1899. Oil on canvas, 13 × 9 in.

Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

37

Field Trips TONY JONES

in particular, the Field was a gold mine of novelty ores. Objects from the Orient, the Pacific Northwest, Oceania, China, and the jungles of Africa or South America were imbued with exactly the kind of mystery that inspired Chicago illustrators like Allen St. John as he crafted the color drawings that were lapped up by readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books and the adventure novels of H. Rider Haggard. The Field’s ethnographic collections also contributed to a sea change in the way art history was taught. Helen Gardner, author of the iconic Art through the Ages and for decades an instructor at the School of the Art Institute, increasingly wove non-­Western arts into her influential texts and teaching — ­the masks and totem poles of the Pacific Northwest, the tipis of the midwestern nations, the clothing of the Inuit, the ceramics and jewelry of the Southwest. In the mid-­1960s a very different group of viewers studied the same material, namely, the Chicago Imagists. The “outsider art,” the art brut of the untaught or so-­called primitive artists that fascinated them, is all found in the Field’s collection. Things today remain the same as they did in the nineteenth century — ­the large displays and the less-­seen holdings are used by artists and illustrators on a daily basis, and the Field continues to inspire and provide source material and endless visual stimulation.

In the Field Museum’s legendary history, one aspect of its extraordinary impact may have been underreported: that it has been, from the day it opened, a cornucopia of inspiration for Chicago’s artists. For the already curious, it was a vast cabinet of curiosities into which artists seeking source material could plunge with abandon, often making new things through unlikely combinations. In its early years it was especially critical to the students of the Art Institute, who were directed there by the powerful teaching of two titans of Chicago art: sculptor Lorado Taft and painter John Vanderpoel. Both stressed an artist’s need to understand how skeletons support muscle mass, and how skin or pelt covers it all. For these teachers, visits to the Field were about studying the many layers of natural history, but especially skulls and skeletons; perhaps this is where Vanderpoel’s star pupil Georgia O’Keeffe first studied bones — ­triggering an interest that never left her. Taft and Vanderpoel are well known, but in their shadow was the equally important instructor Frank Millet, who launched the design program at the Art Institute. While Taft and Vanderpoel stressed close observation and realism, Millet encouraged abstraction. In the mid-­to late nineteenth century, art ranged from the botanical obsessions of Arts and Crafts practitioners, expressed as wallpaper, carpets, and textiles, to the etiolated whiplash curves of Art Nouveau, to the floral-­derived work of Tiffany, Sullivan, and Wright. Throughout these movements, the forms of nature were a dominant force. Alphonse Mucha, who taught at the Art Institute, used nature as a basis for his highly stylized poster designs, and Scottish and Austrian applied art designers did the same. This influence was fully understood by Millet and his students. The Field, for them, was a treasure house to be plundered, the deep source of what was called “phyto-­zoo-­ morphic décor,” where abstractions rooted in the simplification of leaves and tendrils, fruits and flowers, and stylized animal forms led to repeat-­pattern printed textiles and decorative glazes on ceramics. Millet’s revolutionary design program looked to botanicals but also to ethnographic materials; his students used the Field as a laboratory to study how people of other cultures made things and from what materials. The Field had the real evidence, the real things. The Field was also filled with “novelties,” the mysterious, the exotic — ­things that came, as the song says, from “far away places with strange-­sounding names.” For illustrators

Elmer S. Riggs (right) in the Field Museum of Natural History’s Paleontology Lab, ca. 1899.

38

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

The search for a common local culture also encouraged Chicago’s landscape painters to see the pictorial potential of home scenery, long dismissed for its aesthetic monotony by artists and patrons conditioned to a scenic ideal defined by the Northeast’s varied terrain. The then-­radical mode of  Impressionism, introduced to the American art world only in the mid-­ 1880s, helped legitimize local subject matter by prioritizing immediate experience over narrative content.149 Impressionism’s fresh color, bright natural light effects, loose brushwork, disregard for surface finish, and contemporary subject matter had created a sensation in 1890 when the Art Institute hosted an exhibition of  the progressive New York–­based Society of  American Artists. A local reviewer praised the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Dennis Miller Bunker, Theodore Robinson, and William Merritt Chase as “homemade” art, evidence of “a new school . . . that is American, and therefore eminently independent.”150 The association between Impressionism and national identity remained, even as the paintings of  those artists who had “come out into the sunlight” were shown in an international context at the World’s Columbian Exposition. There, Impressionist paintings by American and Swedish as well as French artists offered a dramatic contrast to the somber tones and exotic or retrospective narrative themes that largely dominated the official national art displays. In particular, Garland praised the “unblushingly local” works of  a group of  Indiana landscape artists who found in “the most unpromising material . . . floods of  color, graceful forms and interesting compositions everywhere.”151 Excited by the possibilities for celebrating regional identity in art, Garland and Taft spearheaded the creation of the Central Art Association in Chicago in 1894. For the next six years, this “missionary organization” used traveling exhibitions, lectures, and an illustrated journal to promote in the midwestern hinterland a “native” modern American art for which they believed Impressionism to be the natural idiom.152 Even before the world’s fair, some of  Chicago’s younger and more progressive artists, notably members of  the Cosmopolitan Art Club and the Palette Club, had experimented with Impressionist techniques, including painting en plein air. Challenging sanctioned studio methods, Impressionism disturbed many observers as a dangerous privileging of  technique over “the substance, the inspiring theme, the moving story.”153 In a symptom of  how far the new mode had infiltrated, “works of  the impressionist school . . . in which a summary treatment and eccentricities in drawing and color take the place of  intelligent selection or arrangement and conscientious study” were decreed ineligible for prizes in the 1892 annual exhibition of  the relatively conservative Chicago Society of  Artists.154 Meanwhile, the Vibrant Club, a short-­lived informal gathering of  artists recently arrived in Chicago to work on the world’s fair, was open to any painter who “indicated his allegiance to the new school by painting in spots and iridescent color.”155 In 1895 the Art Institute, ever ready to present new art developments, if  not to endorse them, became the first museum anywhere to host a solo exhibition for  Monet. When, a decade later, it became the first American museum to acquire a painting by Monet, such leading Chicago collectors as Martin Ryerson and Charles T. Yerkes were already following the example of  Bertha Palmer by purchasing works by Monet and other French Impressionists. Its merits and hazards hotly debated, Impressionism was “the influence of  the hour” in Chicago in the mid-­1890s, as evidenced in exhibitions of  the Cosmopolitan and Palette Clubs, the Art Students’ League, and even the conservative Chicago Society of  Artists, as well as in the Art Institute’s American art annuals. Reviews suggest an elastic understanding of  the mode. Critics noted the brilliant sunshine, blue and purple shadows, and “lovely atmosphere”

39

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

in “impressionistic” landscape and outdoor figure images by such artists as Harry Wallace Methven, Leon Roecker, and Svend Svendsen.156 The 1896 inaugural exhibition of  the new Society of  Western Artists, formed by artists of  Chicago and five other midwestern cities, was dominated by interpretations of local scenery in a variety of styles, “but, as a rule,” noted a Chicago reviewer, “the pictures are painted after varying methods of  impressionism, so called.”157 Even Art Institute instructors Charles Boutwood and John Vanderpoel, guardians of  academic standards, had students in their summer class in picturesque Delavan, Wisconsin, paint models in “radiant out-­of-­doors” light, in which (in contrast to the shadowy studio interior) “color is intensified by the reflections from surrounding sunlit objects.”158 In the end, radical technical experimentation for its own sake was but a momentary diversion. Charles Francis Browne reminded readers of Brush and Pencil that the end of  true art was to transport viewers “to a region where noise has ceased, where dirt and grime are absent, where the soul sports in beauty, a delicious rest possesses us, and we feel that life is worth the living after all.”159 Chicago reviewers reserved their highest praise for a “valid Impressionism,” exemplified in the “poetic” and “elusive” images of  Frank Peyraud, such as his Sunlit Valley (Sunset) (fig. 1.10), purchased by the Union League Club in 1901.160 Here Peyraud applied Impressionism’s active brushwork and emphasis on transitory natural light to a romantic pastoralism, evoking not so much Monet as the late American artist George Inness, whose moody landscapes were enormously admired in Chicago. A darling of  the Central Art Association, Peyraud was lauded by its directors, Garland and Taft, as “among our most powerful and lucid painters of sunlit landscape.”161 Impressionism validated not only local nature but the city itself  as an artistic subject. Chicago had long been pictured conventionally in mass-­produced prints, but its chaotic, smoke-­shadowed streets, polluted waterways, and towering commercial architecture were almost unthinkable subjects for the fine art medium of the easel painting.162 Impressionism’s rapid, direct technique could capture the city’s ceaseless motion, while its emphasis on atmosphere, reflections, and the momentary effects of weather, season, and time of day could elide offensive details. That beauty or even poetry could be found in the Chicago cityscape came as a revelation when artists began to picture it in the late 1890s. “Beauty Spots Which Pass Unnoticed in Chicago” was the title of a series of  articles published in the Chicago Tribune in 1897, illustrated with wash drawings by watercolor artist Hardesty Maratta (later known for his art theories). The camera was inadequate to capture the spirit of  such characteristic but unlovely sights as rush hour in the Loop, Chicago from the rooftops, and the river, declared the Tribune’s unidentified writer: “They require the brush of  the painter and they are well worth his efforts.”163 While Maratta was a Chicago native, an outsider’s vision was thought a particular advantage in appreciating the city’s elusory artistic attributes. Albert Fleury was dubbed Chicago’s “resident French artist” in a review of  Picturesque Chicago, his well-­received 1901 Art Institute exhibition of  images of  the smoke-­wreathed river and crowded streets.164 “It has remained for an academician of  France to reveal Chicago’s picturesque side to her most patriotic citizens,” claimed the Chicago Journal.165 Yet James Bolivar Needham, an outsider of  a different kind, had begun a decade earlier to paint intimately scaled views of the urban river, using a plein air naturalism apparently informed by Impressionism (fig. 1.11). Needham was an obscure African American painter with perhaps little formal training who brought to this subject matter his personal experience as a deckhand on Great Lakes vessels. Briefly

40

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

1.10  Frank Charles Peyraud, Sunlit Valley (Sunset), 1899. Oil on canvas, 28 ¼ × 26 1⁄8 in.

championed by the Central Art Association for his “sincerity,” he was “the house-­painter, who has found inspiration in the Chicago River.”166 In the wake of  Fleury’s Picturesque Chicago, the interpretation of  characteristic Chicago became a measure of  artistic vision, a subject that was all the more appealing because the city presented such obvious challenges to pictorial proprieties. As the Chicago Post’s Lena McCauley noted, “The idealization of  the commonplace lead[s] us along untrodden ideas.”167 “Chicago Will Be Idealized” proclaimed the headline of the Tribune’s front-­page report on the Palette and Chisel Club’s intention to devote its 1905 summer excursion to painting the city instead of its usual bucolic destination.168 Even the pestilential Chicago River could be aestheticized if  “interpreted by the skill of an artist, with the too realistic details left out and the general effect softened and chastened.”169 Alson Skinner Clark took such an approach to his native

41

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

1.11  James Bolivar Needham, Untitled (Chicago River No. 2), 1905.

Oil on canvas wrapped around panel, 10 × 14 in.

city in 1906, but only after painting urban and industrial scenes in Paris, London, and Watertown, New York. The Coffee House (fig. 1.12), Clark’s prizewinner in that year’s American art annual at the Art Institute, is both a frank representation of  the city’s looming architecture seen through its ever-­present pall of  smoke and a carefully selected view in which the blurring effects of  atmosphere and light transform this familiar scene into a decorative composition. Chicago artists’ enthusiasm for the urban had its parallel, of  course, in other American cities around the turn of  the twentieth century, but it was peculiarly shaped, or limited, by local standards. These were offended by the radical urban realism of  the eclectic New York group The Eight, whose first exhibition at New York’s Macbeth Gallery in February 1908 traveled to the Art Institute later that year. For Chicago reviewers, the “sensational” paintings of  Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and William Glackens not only vividly pictured the grimy disorder of  city streets but seemed to frankly celebrate the vulgarity of lower-­class life. Crudely rendered in raw color and brushwork, theirs were “sordid scenes without a ray of  sunshine” that “tell no bare truths or point morals.”170 The Chicago Record-­Herald lampooned the urban realism of  the so-­called Ashcan School in a cartoon labeled “View of New York” in which the view is obscured by lines of drying laundry.171

42

1.12  Alson Skinner Clark, The Coffee House, Winter 1905–­1906. Oil on canvas, 38 × 30 in.

43

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

By contrast, when adventurous younger artists in Chicago began exploring the immigrant “ghetto” around Hull-­House in the early 1910s, they portrayed the “picturesque” and “exotic” rather than the actual, using the more permissive, informal mediums of drawing, watercolor, and etching. Even progressive artists such as B. J. O. Nordfeldt, who interpreted Chicago in numerous etchings, wood engravings, and paintings between 1905 and 1912, tended to favor a broad perspective with a focus on architecture, thereby downplaying the rich social variety that lent Chicago both its “color” and its reputation for conflict (fig. 1.13). Of the paintings of  Chicago that Nordfeldt exhibited at Thurber’s Gallery in 1912, critic Harriet Monroe (sister of  Lucy) observed a “fierceness of  attack upon the subject”: jarring but expressive of the “intense nervous energy of  our age,” Nordfeldt’s Neo-­Impressionist style was redeemed by “a certain decorative effect.”172 The influence of  the Ashcan School would not be felt in Chicago’s creative community until the late 1910s and early 1920s, when three of its associates, George Bellows, Leon Kroll, and Randall Davey, were guest instructors in the Art Institute’s school. By then they were radicals no longer, offering their Chicago students not the example of  The Eight’s earlier shocking urban realism but broader values of  freedom, individuality, and vitality. The truly realistic depiction of  Chicago’s urban and industrial setting might offer “graphic power,” but it lacked any redemptive reference to humanity’s “upward thought,” and therefore, declared Lena McCauley, “we do not want it to hang in our homes.”173 For the time, Chicago’s fine artists declined to offer a pictorial equivalent of  the urban realism of  Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and other writers for whom the city’s built environment, although signally important, was ultimately only a setting and metaphor for the human story.

1.13  B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Chicago — ­The Pawnbroker, 1912. Etching on cream laid paper,

7 ¾ × 10 ½ in. (image/plate); 11 ¼ × 15 in. (sheet).

44

“Art for the Masses” WENDY G R EENHOUSE

“the pained air of one suffering from too many doughnuts” (Chicago Tribune). The Salon de Refuse exhibitions purported to offer “Art for the Masses,” a “masterly collection of the realistic school” (Chicago Inter Ocean) alongside satirical productions pointedly interpreting contemporary art trends via the baffled bemusement of the literal-­minded layman. As their Salon de Refuse high jinks suggest, the Palette and Chisel clubmen brought self-­deprecating humor to their serious high art ambitions and practical-­minded skepticism to their engagement with the new.

The first exhibitions staged by Chicago’s fledgling Palette and Chisel Club were the so-­called Salons de Refuse of 1898 and 1899, held in the Club’s rented quarters in the Athenaeum Building on Van Buren Street. Opening within two weeks of the Art Institute of Chicago’s recently inaugurated annual Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists, the Salons de Refuse consisted largely of “maligned masterpieces” (Chicago Chronicle) by club members rejected by the jury for the museum exhibition, along with parodies of its critical hits. The “salons” were widely covered in the local press, typically in a tongue-­in-­cheek tone appropriate to their spirit of burlesque. Accounts note that the Salons de Refuse were undertaken with special permits from the Garbage Inspector and that the 1898 jury, composed of the Athenaeum Building’s custodian and two elevator operators, was “evidently selected for its extreme haughtiness and the certainty that no person will question its decision”; the opening was described as the most important event in Chicago art circles since the acceptance of plans for the city’s sewer system (Chicago News). Clearly the newly constituted club was eager to show that it took neither itself nor Chicago’s art establishment too seriously. In deliberately invoking the Salons des Refusés exhibitions staged by French avant-­garde painters, including the Impressionists, beginning in 1863, the Palette and Chisel Club capitalized on the outsider status of its members. They worked in such practical fields as newspaper illustration, lithography, and decorative painting, and were “bohemians” only in relation to Chicago’s institutional art life. Their Salon de Refuse parodies of lauded works in the Art Institute shows were intended to skewer both the pretensions of idealizing “high art” and the fashionable eccentricities of artistic modernism, from the art-­for-­art’s-­sake philosophy of James McNeill Whistler to Impressionism’s hallmark use of unmixed color and broken brushwork. Takeoffs included the pseudo-­ Whistlerian A Knockturn in Prussian Blue and A Portrait in Six Printings and Gray Tint, while “various carpet ravelings and yellow-­brown-­purple daubs” (Chicago News) went into a caricature of an Impressionist pastel by Henry Charles Payne. The “metaphysical atmosphere” of Pauline Dohn’s ambitious figure painting The Seeker: I Sent My Soul through the Invisible (inspired by Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) was deconstructed in The Sinker, which projected

Announcement for the Palette & Chisel Club’s 1899 Salon de Refuse exhibition.

45

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

Accommodating the Modern Chicago’s reception of the gritty urban realism of The Eight fit an established pattern of engagement with the new typified in the Art Institute’s “always liberal” policy of temporary exhibitions.174 From the Impressionist paintings of the Society of American Artists and Monet to the challenging Symbolist works of contemporary Scandinavian painters such as Edvard Munch, the museum navigated a safe course between showing and endorsing. As it prepared to be the only museum to host the 1913 Armory Show, with its examples of Cubist, Fauvist, and Futurist art, the Art Institute congratulated itself on its willingness “to give a hearing to strange and even heretical doctrines,” confident of “the inherent ability of the truth ultimately to prevail.”175 In the fine arts at least, that truth seemed an absolute and self-­evident standard to which radical new manifestations could not conform. It was affirmed in the museum’s permanent exhibition galleries, where the conservative taste of most local major private collectors was on display in loaned or donated objects, along with the museum’s venerable collection of antique casts. The paucity of  American art in the Art Institute’s collection, an “accidental” result of  its meager acquisitions budget, spurred the founding in 1910 of the Friends of  American Art, which pledged to purchase works for the museum from the annual American artists’ exhibition. The Art Institute proudly proclaimed the group the nation’s first such organization, noting with satisfaction that it was modeled on a similar society in Paris associated with the Louvre.176 The Friends hoped its purchases would benefit not just the public but also American artists, particularly those of  Chicago. Indeed, in its first six years, approximately one-­third of  its sixty purchases were works by artists then resident in Chicago, including Clarkson, Grover, and John Johansen. Governed by many of the same patrons as the Art Institute, with Clarkson himself  the token artist, the Friends not surprisingly made unobjectionable choices, such as Taft’s Solitude of  the Soul. As permanent additions to the museum’s collection these were expected to pass the test of  posterity; however, a fair number of  the early selections were later deaccessioned as aesthetic values shifted with the museum’s growing acceptance of  modernism, beginning in the late 1920s.177 Standards were also affirmed in the fine arts program at the Art Institute’s school, whose faculty was dominated by established artists such as Vanderpoel, Taft, and Clarkson. The latter two might be described as “traditionalists with latitude” for their belief that art could progress in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary manner, expressing modern conditions within sanctioned proprieties of  style, technique, and subject.178 Like the museum’s slowly developing permanent collection, the school’s pedagogy remained premised on values of  “beauty and character,” truth and nobility, until at least 1910, when the progressive artist John Warner Norton was hired to teach decorative design and mural painting. An Art Institute alumnus, Norton would soon challenge the school’s traditional art pedagogy, notably the practice of  drawing from casts, as inimical to individual artistic development. His hiring also signaled the viability of  mural painting at the turn of  the century, when the decorated interiors at the World’s Columbian Exposition became a model for new public buildings across the nation. With its vigorous economy and institutional development, Chicago became a particularly active center for mural painting. “Men and corporations now erecting the large office, bank and public buildings are engrossed in the matter of  decoration” and “calling on local artists for mural paintings,” reported Arthur Hosking in 1905.179 He predicted that this experience

46

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

would soon teach Chicago businessmen “to give art a place in their homes as well,” to the benefit equally of  artists and of  the city. In semiprivate spaces such as club rooms, murals created what was deemed an appropriate ambience and reinforced an organization’s identity. In 1909–­1910 Norton painted an image of a Navajo family for the headquarters of  the Cliff  Dwellers. The murals in the grill room of  the Railway Exchange Building, painted around 1904 by Edgar Cameron, celebrate food and drink in scenes of ancient Rome. At the University of Chicago, Frederick Clay Bartlett (who would later become a major collector of Post-­Impressionist painting) decorated the walls of  the Gothic-­style Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium (donated in 1904 by his father) with scenes of  athletic games in the “age of  chivalry.” And beginning around 1900 several artist-­tenants of  the Fine Arts Building painted a series of  murals honoring the many arts whose practitioners had found a home there.180 In more public venues, art took on the serious task of building civic community in a city of  immigrants. Articulating what was wishfully intended as a common frame of  reference and shared ideals, artists cast Chicago’s own history as a triumphal narrative of progress and opportunity. Major events in the city’s development, from Marquette’s explorations to the World’s Columbian Exposition and the engineering of  the Illinois and Michigan Canal, were pictured in sixteen semicircular panels that L. C. Earle painted in 1909 for the Central Trust Bank. Bartlett’s ten symbolic images painted in 1911 for the City Hall council chamber illustrated the rise of  commerce in Chicago and were said to “typify the active, energetic, democratic spirit of  Chicago.” Cameron pictured twelve historical scenes expressing the “spirit of  Chicago” for the International Municipal Congress and Exposition held in Chicago the same year.181 Sculpture, however, was the primary public art medium, better suited than mural painting to outdoor display (if more limited in its subject matter). In 1905 lumber magnate Benjamin Ferguson left nearly his entire estate as a purchase fund for “monuments and sculpture” for Chicago’s parks — ­under the direction of  the Art Institute, naturally.182 Near the end of  his life, a tour of  Europe had sensitized Ferguson to Chicago’s dearth of public art, the inspiring example of  the White City notwithstanding.183 Intended to nurture patriotic sentiment as well as beautify public spaces, the fund supported the commissioning of eleven works before 1931.184 The first, dedicated in 1913, was Taft’s Fountain of  the Great Lakes (fig. 1.14). Placed next to the Art Institute’s building, this ambitious work married local subject matter to high art by personifying the five lakes as idealized women. Their graceful arrangement channels the fountain’s stream from one figure to the next in the order in which the lakes’ waters actually flow, from Superior in the west to Ontario in the east. Allegorizing the relationships between the lakes, Taft’s fountain pays homage to Chicago’s historical raison d’être as the great nexus of  American commerce, a crossroads of the national system of  water-­borne trade. Beyond this narrative, the figures’ interconnectedness served as an emblem of harmonious cooperation in a city notorious for competition and conflict. Much of  the social tension, as well as the vitality, of  Chicago could be attributed to its astonishing growth. As the city’s population doubled between 1890 and 1910, due largely to an influx of  immigrants, the Ferguson Fund was only one manifestation of an elite concept of  art as an essential tool for acculturation by means of fostering consensus and community. In 1902 the Public School Art Society and the Chicago Woman’s Club deepened their commitment to schoolroom beautification by commissioning the first mural paintings in school buildings.185 Five years later, the Art Institute joined this effort, for the benefit of  its own students as much as the public schools. In a mural painting class instituted in the 1907–­1908 academic year by

47

1.14  Lorado Taft, Fountain of the Great Lakes, 1907–­1913. Bronze. Height, 22 ft.

48

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

Thomas Wood Stevens, Art Institute students designed and executed murals — ­some ninety by 1913 — ­in schools and later also in park district buildings throughout the city.186 The children of  immigrants, Stevens argued, “must grope their way into American traditions, for the old world traditions of  their fathers and mothers do not long hold out against the hard attrition of  the American city. The children find in the paintings some hint of this America in the making.”187 Mural themes were drawn not only from America’s and Chicago’s history but also from literature and idealized Native American life, while Lane Technical High School was decorated, appropriately, with dramatic scenes of  modern industrial activity populated by muscular workers cooperating in a variety of  tasks. Styles ranged from the archaic, neogothic manner Bartlett used for his projects in the Bartlett Gymnasium and University Club building to the Arts and Crafts–­inspired mode of  Henry George Brandt’s Hiawatha murals, another series at Lane Tech (fig. 1.15). But none departed from the fundamental principles of legibility, idealization, and didacticism inherent in the era’s concept of  public art as creativity in service to community. Collectively, they represented the ideal of  a historically rooted common culture to which all Chicagoans might subscribe, according to elite aspirations for social harmony that stood in stark contrast to the class conflict and labor unrest of the industrial city. Like the historical pageants Stevens orchestrated in these years, they were “an expression of  the community ideal in art.”188 The alliance between the mural movement and progressive reform in the early years of  the new century coincided with a confidence that art had finally attained the status of  a “vital thing in the life of  Chicago,” for which reviewer Lena McCauley went so far as to credit the city’s resident artists.189 After a year of  travel abroad, Harriet Monroe (soon to found Poetry magazine) came home in 1911 to a city “surging with art activities and aspirations beneath its commercial surface.”190 Although the paucity of  dealers and their inability to sell the work of  Chicago artists to Chicago collectors remained a problem, Monroe was struck by the “respectful attitude of  donors and press and public toward painting and sculpture”: in contrast to poets, she found that “the minor painter or sculptor or architect was receiving every encouragement, from his art-­school days onward, to develop his art and become distinguished in it.” Abundant newspaper coverage of  local art life, particularly exhibitions, reflected this view. In 1910, when the Art Institute completed the second-­floor galleries at the back of  its 1893 building, it reserved (albeit briefly) two rooms for regular displays of  works by local practitioners, in addition to the Chicago artists’ annual exhibition, with its growing raft of  prizes. Department stores such as Carson Pirie Scott offered space for solo and small group shows; a few dealers, including Martin O’Brien, Albert Roullier, and W. Scott Thurber, occasionally mounted displays for Chicago artists; and women’s and civic clubs and patronage groups had institutionalized their tangible support of local artists. The city now boasted a range of artists’ organizations, variously reflecting the growing sense of  ethnic identity, patterns of  settlement in neighborhoods and suburbs, and specialization by artistic medium such as etching and miniature painting. Scattered throughout the region, from Wisconsin to Michigan, were seasonal art colonies Chicagoans proudly (or wishfully) dubbed midwestern Barbizons and Givernys, in nostalgic remembrance of working excursions in the French countryside. While the Palette and Chisel Club roughed it amid the mosquitoes at Fox Lake, Illinois, the city’s cultural and artistic elite gathered at an exclusive camp called Eagle’s Nest, overlooking the Rock River in Oregon, Illinois. There, Lorado Taft was photographed sculpting outdoors in a toga, and “nymphs” sometimes danced in the moonlight.191

49

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

1.15  Henry George Brandt, Hiawatha murals, 1913. Oil on canvas. Original stretchers

with molding frames, seven panels: six panels, 5 × 15 ft.; one, 15 × 30 feet.

On the public face of  Chicago’s art life, the gradualist agenda of  “progress and process” appeared a settled attribute by which any shock of the new might be safely defused and assimilated, as by the Art Institute’s policy of “giving a hearing.”192 Impressionism, for example, had evolved from a shocking repudiation of  fundamental artistic values to a fashionable manner of  pleasing color and decorative composition. The marriage of  Impressionist technique and the exaltation of  regional nature found its fullest expression after the turn of the century. In 1907 an Impressionist art colony took root when Chicagoans Lucie Hartrath, Adam Emory Albright, and L. O. Griffith joined Hoosier artists in Brown County, Indiana, to paint its bucolic scenery and quaint inhabitants for nostalgic city dwellers.193 And between 1909 and the outbreak of  World War I, Karl Buehr, Pauline Palmer, and Lawton Parker were among the Chicagoans flocking to the famous fountainhead of  Impressionism and home of  Monet, the rural Normandy village of  Giverny.194 Their richly colored paintings, focused on the female model posed at leisure in sun-­dappled gardens, demonstrated the arrival of  Impressionism as an unobjectionable modern mode safely removed from the radical formal experimentation of the European and American avant-­garde artists soon to shock Chicagoans in the Armory Show. More significant for the later development of Chicago’s homegrown modernism was the movement called Symbolism, another European import. Its focus on dreamlike images of  mythological or imaginary themes found an echo in Taft’s Solitude of  the Soul and in the mural program created by Frank Peyraud and Hardesty Maratta in 1896 for the new Peoria Public Library, in which classical female forms inspired by French mural painter Puvis de Chavannes were decorously arranged against an idealized vista of Illinois River scenery. Of  “the (crazy) Eight” whose works so offended many Chicago viewers in 1908, only Arthur B. Davies’s dreamy landscapes peopled by dancing nudes were enthusiastically received in Chicago (notwithstanding his “grotesque” rendering of  the female form).195 Local attraction to a poetic, elusive art also fed an appetite for Tonalism, with its unified tones and intimate, contemplative take on Nature. These qualities were epitomized in the much-­admired late landscapes of  George Inness, one of  the few American artists represented in the Art Institute’s permanent

50

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

collection before the founding of  the Friends of  American Art and the 1911 gift of  eighteen Inness paintings from Chicago businessman and Art Institute trustee Edward Burgess Butler (for whom Hull-­House’s gallery had been named). Inness’s style, in Harriet Monroe’s words, “responded delicately to the demands of a nature singularly poetic and profound.”196 Elements of  these modern romantic modes combined in the paintings of  William A. Harper to make the African American “janitor painter” one of  the most critically successful landscape artists in Chicago at the turn of  the century, as well as something of  an exotic curiosity.197 Rendered in thickly textured pigment, August in France (fig. 1.16) is one of Harper’s lyrical images of  rural scenes that evoke the French Barbizon landscape paintings long admired by Chicago art lovers.198 Reviewer Maude Oliver praised Harper’s paintings for their “virility and daring, coupled with a poetic sense of  decoration,” despite a “paintiness” that threatened to distract the viewer from the “message” of  his pictures.199 The conservative Union League Club acquired a Harper landscape in 1907, and the Art Institute may have once owned August in France.200 Oliver’s comment reveals an abiding concern with “the substance, the inspiring theme, the moving story,” a priority that seemed fixed on the comfortable surface of  Chicago’s art world in the early 1910s. Increasingly, however, new ways of  seeing and of  making art were undermining not only the conviction that artworks should represent uplifting subjects but the certainty that they represent at all. Nationally as well as locally, a shift in emphasis, from “message” and uplift to craftsmanship and beauty for their own sake, had begun to penetrate both the practice of  art and writing about it. In Chicago, where fine art had long been burdened with moral agendas, suspicion of  anything like “art for art’s sake” was waning under a combination of  influences introduced from outside thanks to a well-­established habit of  openness to — ­indeed, a fixation on — ­artistic innovation elsewhere.201 Perhaps the first stirrings of  modernism among Chicago’s own artists occurred in 1899 when Norton, then a student at the Art Institute, and others formed the short-­lived radical group known as the Beetles to defend the so-­called Pointillist style practiced by French Neo-­Impressionist artist Georges Seurat.202 As influential as such outside examples of avant-­garde practice in fine art were local developments in allied fields. From literature and theater arts to architecture and decorative arts, the city was a site of  innovation in which painting and sculpture noticeably lagged. Indeed,

51

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

1.16  William A. Harper, August in France, ca. 1908–­1909.

Oil on canvas, 36 1⁄8 × 36 1⁄8 in.

the slow birth of  artistic modernism in Chicago was partly dependent on developments in those allied fields. Writing in the Inter Ocean in 1905, Maude Oliver detected a breakdown of  the “old time exclusive barriers” between “arts ‘applied’ and arts ‘representative.’”203 Chicago critics’ comparatively sympathetic reception of the abstract pastels by Arthur Dove displayed at Thurber’s Gallery in 1912 has been attributed in part to a correspondence between Dove’s nature-­inspired motifs and the simplified, abstract design of Arts and Crafts decorative arts, of  which Chicago was an international center of production.204 Significantly, the most perceptive reviews of  Dove’s Chicago show came not from the usual ranks of  art critics but from poet Harriet Monroe and from novelist and playwright (and new arrival to Chicago) George Cram Cook, two of  the more progressive voices in an early twentieth-­century “renaissance” in which fine artists played at most a minor role.205 Chicago’s literary world, in particular, offered young artists inspiration for their pursuit of  anti-­academic values of  self-­expression and individualism. Before visual artists had a significant presence in the art colony that grew up among the abandoned sheds from the World’s

52

C HI CAG O R IS IN G , 1855 – 1912

Columbian Exposition, on 57th Street, it was a center for writers and intellectuals such as poet Vachel Lindsay and economist Thorstein Veblen. When Nordfeldt arrived in 1903, perhaps the only other visual artist there was Pictorialist photographer Eva Watson-­Schütze, a member of  the pioneering group known as Photo-­Secession, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in New York.206 At Chicago’s experimental Little Theater, where Nordfeldt designed productions, his former student Raymond Jonson, who had arrived in Chicago in 1910, emerged as a significant minimalist set designer. Jerome Blum, fresh from avant-­garde circles in France, also created stage settings there while working with Frank Lloyd Wright on the decoration of  the Midway Gardens resort on Chicago’s South Side.207 And architecture was the field that nurtured Manierre Dawson, whose independent development of abstract composition by 1910 emerged in part from his work as a draftsman in the firm of  Holabird and Roche (fig. 1.17). Thus, influences from outside the realm of fine art practice catalyzed the tentative beginnings of artistic modernism in Chicago. Meanwhile, the public face of  artistic “Bohemia” in Chicago was notable for its genteel character and for its affiliation with the city’s institutional establishment, elite patrons, and mainstream press. Its representatives gathered at the Little Room in the Fine Arts Building, the Eagle’s Nest camp, and Tree Studios socially, not to debate — ­much less to defy — ­the verities. In 1911 Chicago sculptor and Art Institute teacher Charles Mulligan, like Monroe just returned home from a stay in Europe, warned “against extremes in methods” and urged his contemporaries “to be true to the traditional, to be cautious, although generous, in accepting and making standards.”208 Most of  the Chicago art world had glanced at those “extremes” and seen little danger, blithely unaware of what lay just ahead.

Conclusion: The Power of Prepositions A scant sixteen years after Lucy Monroe surveyed “Art in Chicago,” writer and designer Gardner Teall returned to the subject determined “to make clear not only that there is art in Chicago, but that there is an art of Chicago.”209 His very assertion hints at the long-­embattled position of art-­making in Chicago and the compromised status of the artist of Chicago. From the inadequacy of the city’s ranks of dealers and the shyness of its collectors (an ironic failing for a place renowned as a marketplace and decried for its commercialism) to the instability of its often transient creative community (equally ironically, an accident of its superlative success as a place to train and launch young artists), Chicago was from the beginning a place for art almost despite itself. For a city of “magical changes,” these features of its art life, and a sense of combative insecurity, remained as tenacious as local habits of hyperbolic expectation and swaggering self-­congratulation. The extraordinary development of  Chicago’s art life from the 1850s to the 1910s thus reads as a contest over cultural validity that runs parallel to the city’s own shaping of  a distinct, legitimate identity as a modern metropolis. That art had a place in Chicago was constantly and consistently asserted. But what that meant — ­what forms it would take — ­evolved and expanded radically in the six decades that followed the birth of the idea of  Chicago as a real city: from merely having great art in Chicago to making great art there; from making Chicago a home for art and artists to remaking the city through art; from making art for Chicago to making art of  the city, a distinct expression of  locality. In the end, however, what most expressed Chicago was constant: the tenacious idea of art as something apart from, even

53

WE NDY G R E E NHOUS E

1.17  Manierre Dawson, Untitled, 1913. Oil on panel, 14 1⁄16 × 9 13⁄16 in.

remote from, the city, and thus all the more needed by it. As a decorous escape into beauty, an inspiration for moral uplift, or an experiment in pure, harmonious composition, the art cultivated in Chicago was unavoidably responsive to critiques of the innate character of  a city shaped by impermanence and instability both social and physical, and by its relentlessly commercial orientation, its spirit of  competition, and its cult of  the material. As it emerged into the new century, Chicago could still be likened to “a blustering young man” as it concealed “the nostalgia for beauty which yearns in its heart.”210

54

They were nearing Chicago. . . . Trains flashed by them. Across wide stretches of flat open prairie they could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward the great city. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900

Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare . . . They had traveled all the way from Lithuania to it. . . . Suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted — ­“Stockyards!” Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

In the distance a train whistled mournfully. “There goes the number fo!” “Hittin on all six!” “Highballin it down the line!” “Boun fer up Noth, Lawd, boun fer up Noth!” They began to chant, pounding bare heels in the grass. Dis train boun fo Glory Dis train, Oh Hallelujah . . . Richard Wright, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” 1936

Thea was surprised that she did not feel a deeper sense of leaving her old life behind her. It seemed . . . as she looked out at the yellow desert speeding by, that she had left very little. Everything that was essential seemed to be right there in the car with her. Willa Cather, Song of the Lark, 1915

I was conscious that the lights of Chicago, then of Englewood and of endless suburbs, were moving by, and then there were no more lights and we were out on the flatness of Illinois. The train seemed to draw in upon itself; it took on an air of being alone. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Short Trip Home,” 1927

He saw again in his mind’s eye . . . a picture of the map on the wall of the railway station  —  ­the map with a picture of iron roads from all over the Middle West centering in a dark blotch in the corner. . . . ‘Chicago!’ he said to himself . . . the rhythm of a word that said itself over and over in his mind: “Chicago! Chicago!” Floyd Dell, Moon-­Calf, 1921 1

CHAPTER 2

ROUTES TO MODER NISM 1913–­1 943 JENNIFER JANE MARSHALL

In the early twentieth century, odes to New York City were watery affairs. Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler approached it by boat in their 1921 film Manhatta. In 1917 Djuna Barnes toured the island by skirting it, in a ferry ride she recorded in “The Hem of  Manhattan.” And Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 photograph The Steerage summarized the city with a crowded ocean liner: well-­heeled up top, peasant class down below. If  New York had the boat, Chicago claimed the train. Literary descriptions of  the city routinely included scenes of railed transit, accounts that unfold in a reliable sequence. The flat expanse of yellow prairie. A slow accretion of suburban developments. At last, the city, announcing itself  in a series of  accumulating hints. Houses shrink and huddle closer together. Smokestacks rise and puff. Lights twinkle and signs flash  —  ­ signals floating upward, ascending the tower faces of a vertical downtown: “a city hung from above,” wrote Fernand Léger, after his visit in 1931.2 Here is Floyd Dell’s exclamatory “Chicago!”: its syllables matching the chuffing, chugging momentum of  its trains. Here is a northern city: the imagined “Glory” of  Richard Wright’s young southern blacks. Here is the way station to stockyard work: “Chicago,” the one English word on the lips of  Upton Sinclair’s immigrants. Here is the destination on which Willa Cather’s Colorado-­born Thea pins her hopes: a city she at first finds so shiftless that she despairs on her YWCA bunk, “as if  she were still on the train, traveling.” Here is a city that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s college boy had only passed through, taking lunch at the Blackstone, then heading out again on the “five o’clock train East.” Indeed, leaving is also a theme. The sequence of  prairie, suburbs, city then reverses — Chicago winking out in the distance on the encircling, flat horizon. In the first half  of  the twentieth century, Chicago brokered all kinds of  trajectories: coming and going, importing and exporting, gathering and redistributing, a sense of having arrived and the exhilaration of  finally going somewhere. These railed connections informed Chicago’s artistic identity, forging an art world that was as expansively networked and interconnected as the “iron roads” radiating from the city’s looped heart. Just as trains brought fictional characters to Chicago, they also brought living artists: tourists like Marcel Duchamp and Gertrude Stein; childhood transplants like Archibald Motley Jr. and B. J. O. Nordfeldt;

57

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

and passers-­through like Charles White and June Wayne, who treated Chicago like a chapter in a novel, a place to come of  age. Even natives like Ivan Albright and Eldzier Cortor would be on and off  trains, or sometimes buses, seeking new horizons for the expansion of  their Chicago styles. Creative workers understood the city’s value as a destination and a way station both: a vantage point that translated into a similarly double-­directed practice. On the one hand, as in earlier and later eras, interwar Chicagoans were keen to set down roots. They expressed cultural loyalty  —  ­not only to their city but to the smaller-­scale units of  neighborhood and demographic  —  ­through efforts ranging from institution building to urban reportage. On the other hand, Chicago artists pursued ways to connect local efforts to national and international movements, through extensive travel and exchange. In later years, this pattern of to-­ing and fro-­ing was sometimes experienced as a drain, especially when artists left for Los Angeles or New York and never came back. But the interwar years  —  ­before transcontinental flights became routine and cast the Midwest as “flyover country”  —  ­brought confidence and growth to Chicago. When asked his thoughts about its second-­city status, painter Harold Haydon said artists of  his generation hardly gave it a thought: “There were Chicagoans who said, ‘Let them try to match Chicago. It’s not that great in New York.’”3 Those Chicagoans had a point. The art scene in the 1910s, ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s was lively, populated by visionaries like Gertrude Abercrombie, Aaron Bohrod, Edgar Miller, Margaret Brundage, and Charles White. It was anchored by institutions like the Arts Club of  Chicago, the Art Institute, and the South Side Community Art Center and animated by bohemias in neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Hyde Park, and Towertown (now River North). Chicago’s art world was networked, and it was distributed both across town and overseas. Experience of  the scene itself  thus encouraged artists to understand the major movement of  their time  —  ­modernism writ large  —  ­as decentered and diverse. Chicago modernism borrowed from vanguards and traditions around the world, it engaged the provocations of  abstraction and figuration equally, and it continually positioned art practice as a form of social work. All of  these Chicago attitudes form themes of this larger volume. They were forged and tested in 1913 with a major event. It came, of course, by train.

A Circus Comes to Town In March 1913, 634 paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures arrived in Chicago and were installed at the Art Institute, where they appeared as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, attracting huge crowds and boisterous comment (fig. 2.1). Works by Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp  —  ­including his already infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)  —  ­challenged viewers with art’s cutting edge. The show’s original venue, New York’s Armory Building, had itself signaled the radical, even combative attitude of the avant-­garde — ­revolutionaries storming the Bastille. In Chicago, by contrast, the exhibition was welcomed into one of the oldest, most established art museums in the country. Well, not quite welcomed. Institutional support for the International Exhibition was mixed and halting. Chicagoans Arthur Taylor Aldis and Arthur Jerome Eddy clamored to ally with the Association of  American Painters and Sculptors, which had assembled the Armory Show. Both men had purchased works from it, adding to their sizable collections back home;

58

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

2.1  Installation view, Gallery 53, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Art Institute of

Chicago, March 16–­24, 1913. Institutional Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

and both were closely connected to the Art Institute, Aldis as a trustee, Eddy as a donor. In their efforts to bring the show west, however, they had to reckon with William M. R. French, director of  the museum since its founding in 1879. Historical memory likes to paint French as wholly resistant to the exhibition. Writers often cite his vacation to California, suspiciously coinciding with the Armory Show’s entire Chicago run, as proof, but to be fair, March in the Midwest has always been vacation season for elites. French’s privately recorded thoughts are in fact more conciliatory to the show’s content and motivations. He had toured the show in New York with one of  its organizers, Arthur B. Davies, himself  an alumnus of  the School of  the Art Institute, and on the long train ride home he recorded his impressions. Yes, he sounded alarms that the modernists appeared either “insane” or the perpetuators of “humbug,” but he came away feeling that the show was “a decided success,” even “eminently satisfactory.”4 While not precisely a convert, French was persuaded that the modernist polemic extended at least an important “appeal to curiosity”

59

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

and so fit the Art Institute’s educational mandate. He not only approved the proposal to hang the show in Chicago but went one better, declaring that the museum would invite only “the most extreme works, so that our public may know what they are.”5 When the works came, so did an entourage. On March 21, curators Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach arrived on the Twentieth Century Limited, the luxurious Pullman overnight from Manhattan.6 From their rooms at the Blackstone, they managed the show’s installation and publicity. The response was a wave of shock and bewilderment similar to what they had experienced in New York, but seemingly amplified. There were condemnations from the pulpit. An Evanston preacher shook his fist in warning against the show’s un-­idealized nudes. There was a hearing in the state legislature. The city’s vice commission declared the art no better than what an animal might paint, but just as harmless. A high school teacher sought to ban admission to schoolchildren, citing “lewd and demoralizing art.”7 Gossip columnists reported on a rash of  mock-­modernist gaieties. One high-­society club staged a facetious “Futurist Ball,” and the Cliff  Dwellers, the venerable, all-­male artists’ club, displayed wildly abstract works painted by its members — ­parodies, of  course, and each painted in under ten minutes.8 If  New Yorkers had been hesitant, Chicagoans appeared downright riotous. Chroniclers of  the Armory Show have construed the disparity as a sophistication gap between Manhattan and the Midwest. The reaction was what curators might have expected had they sent the show to “Paducah, Kentucky,” Kuhn wrote in a letter home. Chicago, he wrote, was a “Porky” city, a “Rube town” full of “self  advertisers and ignoramuses,” and the local press had turned the show into a “circus.”9 Looking at the record more closely, however, it seems Kuhn and his colleagues were hell-­bent on frustration, performing it publicly and often without cause. Even before the show opened, its New York publicist told the press, “Chicago has failed to appreciate. New York learned to appreciate.” Perhaps one local observer had it right in noting that the East Coast organizers had instigated the whole “Barnumized” affair.10 All of  this was out of  step with French’s high-­minded educational rationale for approving the show; or perhaps it played right into his hand. If French had wanted to give Art Institute students a chance to evaluate modernism — ­confident that their sterling academic training would lead them to reject it — ­he must have been at least somewhat gratified by the exhibition’s final, most incendiary affair. On closing day, students staged a mock trial of  “Henry Hairmattress,” a fictionalized Henri Matisse, who was indicted for art crimes and sentenced to death. They burned reproductions of  Blue Nude outside the museum’s Michigan Avenue entrance. The event was a burlesque, a tongue-­in-­cheek comedy that drew crass, if  unconscious, inspiration from both urban political protest and the era’s rising tide of  extralegal trials and executions, or lynchings.11 And it might also be called media-­savvy: the Chicago Examiner had earlier congratulated the Cliff  Dwellers for “outrank[ing] Gotham raillery”; perhaps the students only hoped to top them.12 The Armory Show was by no means the first time Chicago art lovers could have encountered abstraction. Experimental works of  that stripe had been exhibited — ­even created — ­within city limits before. Nonetheless, the exhibition serves as an important landmark. It announced a phenomenon against which traditionalists could rail, and it did for Chicago what it had also done for New York. It offered a common experience through which emerging, experimenting artists could find new confirmation. Such was the case for a number of  Chicagoans who had embarked on bold directions in the 1910s. And if  the Armory Show had come by train, many of  its more earnest and ardent fans would depart by the same conveyance.

60

The Lane Tech Murals SY LV I A R H O R

Visitors to Albert G. Lane High School at Addison Street and Western Avenue are often astounded by the wealth of original art. Monumental frescoes by a student of Diego Rivera, a canvas by well-­known African American painter William Edouard Scott, forty-­one panels from the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair, and Art Deco woodcarvings are just some of the works included in this “school museum.” Although Lane houses the highest concentration of murals in the Chicago Public Schools, it is not singular in the school system. In the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of original murals and artworks were commissioned for and donated to public schools throughout the city, making Chicago a leader in the national school decoration movement, with the collection at Lane at the forefront. Led by reformist women’s clubs, this movement not only promoted local arts production; it also intervened in and shaped public education in the city. Within a few months of its opening in 1908, Lane received four mural panels donated by the Chicago Public School Art Society (PSAS), established in 1894 by Hull-­House cofounder Ellen Gates Starr. The PSAS was dedicated to integrating art and art education into the physical environment and programs of city schools. It set out to beautify schools, originally with reproductions of Old Master works but, under the direction of Mrs. John B. Buckingham (Nellie, according to one source; numerous writers have confused her with Kate Buckingham, a prominent donor to the Art Institute), it began commissioning original murals, including Lane’s initial panels. Produced by advanced students at the School of the Art Institute and including the panel by Scott, the four panels depicted heroicized workers toiling in steel mills, on the docks, and in construction of the city’s skyscrapers. While the theme of industrial labor correlated with the school’s vocational curriculum, the mere presence of original art in a school devoted to training future laborers ran somewhat counter to that mission, which did not consider the arts important in educating future laborers. Nonetheless, these groundbreaking murals are at the center of Chicago’s citywide school decoration movement. In addition to the PSAS, local groups such as the Chicago Woman’s Club also contributed to the school decoration movement, effectively converting public schools into satellite museums. At a time when the arts were being disparaged as mere “frills” in the education of immigrant and working-­class students, the PSAS and likeminded clubs insisted on their inclusion in public education. By the 1920s the board of education had actively joined the movement, with then-­superintendent William McAndrew stating in 1924

that murals were a part of “normal school equipment,” on a par with textbooks and blackboards. He initiated a school building boom that designated spaces for such decorations, a boom that truly exploded in the late 1920s and 1930s, especially with the advent of the Federal Arts Project in 1935; FAP artists and administrators consulted the PSAS when cleaning existing murals or commissioning new ones. The Lane Tech collection, as an example, grew exponentially as a result of this changing patronage: the Century of Progress murals were added to the collection in the interwar period, and dozens of murals, sculptures, and carvings were produced for the school, including the monumental firescreen in the theater by John Walley and frescoes by Chicago’s best known muralists Edgar Britton and Mitchell Siporin. The Lane Tech art program, a national model in the early twentieth century, would become a model again in the late twentieth century, when it triggered a citywide art recovery and restoration movement. These efforts uncovered, among many examples, a monumental fresco cycle highlighting outstanding American women at Lucy Flower High School (the paintings, by Edward Millman, had been thought destroyed) and, at George B. Armstrong School, the only known mural by Marion Mahony Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s lead draftsperson and one of the first licensed female architects in the world.

Mitchell Siporin, The Teaching of the Arts (three of four panels), 1938. Fresco, each panel 15 × 3 ½ ft. Works Project Administration, Federal Art Project. Albert G. Lane Technical High School, Chicago.

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

After the Armory There are few things art history cherishes more than an artist with a diary. The only better qualities might be entrepreneurship or evanescence: being the first of one’s kind or having a career cut short. Manierre Dawson boasts all three. Scholars credit him with inventing an expressive form of abstraction: “the first Chicago artist, and probably the first American artist, to paint nonobjective works” — ­an “American Kandinsky.”13 Dawson kept a journal throughout his years of invention, a brief period during which he worked at Holabird and Roche as an architectural draftsman and took influential trips to New York and overseas. In 1914, however, Dawson left Chicago and his art career behind, in favor of lakeside life in Michigan. Dawson’s earliest abstractions date to 1906 and developed into something serious by 1908, preceding Arthur Dove’s better-­known innovations in New York by a few years. Significantly, they also predated the Chicago debut of  Dove’s nonobjective works, in 1912 at the W. Scott Thurber gallery — ­a show that proved popular with artists and lay observers alike. Chicago Tribune humor writer Bert Leston Taylor memorably enthused, “I cannot tell you how I love / The canvases of  Mr. Dove.”14 That Chicago audiences should embrace Dove’s challenging color-­field geometries but then nearly riot over the Armory Show the very next year suggests two things: that the latter event’s hysteria was indeed largely performative, and that Chicago — ­where architecture and craft had long been staples of local display and pride — ­was in fact a fertile environment for modernism’s decorative elaborations. Dawson’s abstractions developed precisely in this vein in the early 1910s. He distilled things to their tracery and their underlying patterns, and these efforts drew noteworthy approval. In 1910, during a trip to Paris, Dawson made a pilgrimage to Gertrude Stein’s salon. When he showed her a small painting on panel, she offered him two hundred francs for it on the spot.15 Dawson had been alert to the plans for the Armory Show from early on. Upon his return to New York from Paris, before taking the train home to Chicago, he had made a number of  East Coast contacts, including Arthur B. Davies — ­who invited the midwesterner to send works for exhibition. With characteristic diffidence, Dawson wrote privately that he had nothing to send; moreover, “the promoters would not particularly want me from way out here in Chicago.”16 When eventually the International Exhibition arrived “way out here,” Dawson happened to meet Walter Pach in the galleries; the curator followed up with the elusive Chicagoan in his studio the next day. There, he surprised Dawson with effusive compliments — ­and with the insistence that he take a painting with him to hang at the Art Institute.17 And so he did: Untitled (Wharf  under Mountain) (1913) went up in the American room, where it was the only nonobjective piece in sight (fig. 2.2). For Dawson, the Armory Show did not represent an expansion of his artistic perspective so much as its confirmation. “I had thought of  myself  as an anomaly,” he wrote. “[I] had to defend myself  many times, as not crazy.” No matter the response of the art students with their stunt on Michigan Avenue, Dawson was encouraged to find his own direction reinforced by the imported works on view — ­evidence, he felt of “the universality of art expression.”18 In an international movement so universally aligned, it turned out that being “way out here” did not disqualify one from being right at the center. For Raymond Jonson, the Armory Show was perhaps more catalyzing, a prompt to combine his many cultural passions into a forceful painterly vision. Born in rural Iowa, Jonson had traveled through Oregon during an adolescence with his Christian missionary father, then

62

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

2.2  Manierre Dawson, Untitled (Wharf under Mountain), 1913. Oil on canvas, 18 × 22 in.

Purchase, R. H. Norton Trust, 69.5. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL.

moved to Chicago to pursue art. He progressed through the ranks of  study and exhibition at the Art Institute and enjoyed fourteen fertile years in Chicago before moving to New Mexico permanently in 1924. Nonetheless, his adopted city continued to claim and support him throughout his career. In 1936 Katherine Kuh gave him a solo show in her influential gallery, which had opened the year before in the Diana Court of  the Michigan Square Building (540 North Michigan Avenue). Her other headliners at the time — ­Le Corbusier, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso — ­suggest both the importance of Kuh’s gallery as a site for contemporary modernism and Jonson’s contemporary stature. For his 1936 show, an art critic for the Daily Tribune, Eleanor Jewett — ­conservative-­leaning, frequent author of  zinged insults, and part of  Chicago’s art-­world matriarchy — ­had nothing but praise. She extolled his “gift for color and rhythmic pattern,” concluding, “His color sequences are among the most fascinating developments that cubism has given us.”19 This suggested not just the Armory Show’s lingering influence, but also its local improvement. While the Armory Show clearly affected Jonson, local theater was an equal if  not more important influence, a source of  inspiration to many Chicagoans of  his era. In 1913 Jonson began working in lighting and scenography for the Chicago Little Theatre.20 The first of  its kind in what would become a nationwide movement, the modern troupe then occupied quarters in the venerable Fine Arts Building (410–­412 South Michigan Avenue), a block south of 

63

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

the Art Institute and home as well to W. Scott Thurber’s progressive gallery and Margaret Anderson’s progressive literary magazine, the Little Review. Jonson’s affiliation with the Little Theatre confirmed his bohemian bona fides, but it also positioned him within Chicago’s vibrant experimental performing arts scene, which decisively shaped his “rhythmic” painting style. In 1921 the Chicago Opera debuted Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and there’s reason to believe Jonson saw it. The Tribune called the opera a “color marvel” typified by “enigmatic noise.”21 These words just as easily describe Jonson’s own compositions in paint. To wit: Rock at Sea (1920–­1922; fig. 2.3). Although painted during his Chicago years, the scene makes double reference to the artist’s experiences in the Pacific Northwest and at Ogunquit, Maine, where he summered in 1920. The canvas also typifies the aesthetic principles Jonson would advance as a founding member of  both Chicago’s Cor Ardens group and the Transcendental Painting Group, which he began later in New Mexico — ­undertakings that

2.3  Raymond Jonson, Rock at Sea, 1920–­1922. Oil on canvas. Unframed, 35 × 41 in.

64

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

perhaps drew from spiritual quests in his youth. But Rock at Sea also definitively derives its effects from Jonson’s experiences in Chicago’s experimental performance scene. In this way, it’s a canvas that points west, east, and south, even as it marks a modernist’s coming-­of-­age in Chicago: the urban hub at center. Much of  Jonson’s story betrays the influence of  his mentor, another twentieth-­century translocal modernist, B. J. O. Nordfeldt. Born in Sweden, Nordfeldt emigrated to Chicago with his family at age thirteen, in 1891. By 1899 he had enrolled at the Art Institute; in the early 1910s, he was a teacher there. He was also, by that time, a fixture of  the Hyde Park bohemian enclave along 57th Street — ­a creative ghetto that historian Franz Schulze characterized as a “group of  wonderful little painted shacks,” left over from the 1893 world’s fair.22 Margaret Anderson lived there, as did novelist Sherwood Anderson and poet Carl Sandburg. Nordfeldt’s apartment was sandwiched between two Dells — ­Floyd on one side, Margery on the other — ­a pair of  intellectuals and writers with a marriage on the rocks.23 Indeed, compromised monogamy was a colony theme. The economist Thorstein Veblen, whom Nordfeldt painted, there engaged in a passionate and public extramarital affair, “a needless piece of sex extravagance,” in the judgment of  writer and friend Charlotte Perkins Gilman.24 In this lively, gossipy circle, Nordfeldt was known for “‘pixie’ qualities,” including “upturned bristling eyebrows” and “green . . . Scandinavian eyes.”25 He was fictionalized twice by Floyd Dell, notably in the 1913 short story “The Portrait of  Murray Swift.” The story opens with a pair of  intellectuals strolling through the Art Institute’s installation of  the Armory Show, rolling their eyes at the “throng” of  visitors “uttering the same fatuous laugh” in front of  every painting — ­further proof  that not all Chicagoans experienced the show as a circus. Nordfeldt appears later in the work as “Nordberg,” “the greatest portraitist of  modern times,” whom the pair visit after their stroll among the crowds.26 They propose that Nordberg capture a likeness of one of  them, the titular Murray Swift (a stand-­in for Dell), soon to leave for New York with nothing in his pocket but a one-­way ticket and a one-­act play. The result of the sitting, which readers can imagine through reference to Nordfeldt’s actual Portrait of  Floyd Dell (1910s, now at the Newberry Library), disturbs Swift (fig. 2.4). It delivers him to himself, in the self-­reflective phrasing Dell employs in the story, “with something that was almost boldness in the eyes, something that was almost courage in the chin.” The effect of  it was a fantasy portrait in which Swift found himself “not there” at all. The fugitive character of Swift’s likeness was also true of Dell and his Chicago circle. Like so many of  his 57th Street neighbors, Nordfeldt would eventually board a train east. In 1914 he moved to New York and developed a summer routine of set design and performance with the famed modernist theater group the Provincetown Players. After wartime service, Nordfeldt moved to New Mexico, joining a southwestern art scene already well-­populated with Chicagoans. Though based there for about twenty years, until 1937, he continued to visit Chicago and other midwestern cities, taking teaching jobs where he could. Nordfeldt’s personal biography was thus regionally typical; he strung together an artistic itinerary of  locales and interconnected influences — ­from Chicago to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Being a Chicago artist in the interwar years entailed a fair amount of travel. Not that wandering hasn’t long been part of  artists’ preparation, but for Chicagoans residing in the middle of  a continent, the distances were longer and, perhaps, less obvious. If  New York artists saw themselves in a straight-­line transatlantic conversation with Europe, Chicagoans stood instead at the center of  a star, the points of  which led in every direction.

65

2.4  B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Portrait of Floyd Dell, undated. Oil on fabric, 48 × 37 in.

Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

66

Small Wonders ERIN HOGAN

The City of Big Shoulders, birthplace of the skyscraper, is also a leader in a curious artistic field: miniature rooms. In the 1930s and 1940s two Chicago women elevated “dollhouses” — ­domestic interiors in miniature — ­to new heights. Both worked with cool, painstaking precision, but only one produced tableaus that included bodies hanging from nooses or sprawled face-­down on the floor. Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who married Montgomery Ward retail heir James Ward Thorne, had been a collector of miniatures throughout her life, beginning with those sent to her by a beloved uncle when she was a little girl. This fascination grew into an inspiration, and by the 1930s Thorne was combining a collector’s obsession with meticulous research into American and European interiors and decorative arts. She began drawing up plans initially for European and American period miniature rooms — ­based on historical texts, illustrations, and displays — ­which were then constructed by architects and craftsmen short on work in the years following the Great Depression. The work proved so satisfying and popular that it continued into the 1940s and beyond. Now the Art Institute features sixty-­eight of these miniature rooms on permanent display, opening with an English Gothic cathedral and closing with a 1950s Southern California hall. The variety is stunning — ­a nineteenth-­century Shaker living room, a Louis XIV boudoir, “traditional” Chinese and Japanese interiors — ­and the research and craft scrupulous. The rooms remain one of the most popular attractions at the museum; film director Wes Anderson said in an interview, “It’s wonderful. . . . You kind of go all around the world looking through windows into these tiny rooms. . . . There’s something mesmerizing about them.”

At about the same time, another Chicago matron, Frances Glessner Lee, was also constructing tiny rooms. Unlike Mrs. Thorne’s, however, Lee’s were spattered with blood and replete with minuscule corpses. Lee was the daughter of the cofounder of International Harvester, a manufacturer of heavy agricultural equipment, and she grew up among the city’s moneyed elite on South Prairie Avenue. After her marriage ended and her parents died, she moved to her family’s home in New Hampshire and became deeply involved in the then-­new field of “legal medicine,” now better known as criminal forensic investigation. She had long been interested in criminology, but her father had discouraged the pursuit; after his death, Lee poured her time, money, and energy into the field. She established a professorship and library at Harvard Medical School, which trained doctors to become medical examiners, and she organized rigorous seminars for homicide detectives. Her “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” were developed as teaching tools for these seminars, replicating, in miniature, real crime scenes for discussion and examination. Like the Thorne Rooms, Lee’s recreations are meticulous: trash cans actually hold trash, beds are covered in knitted spreads, bodies are variously decomposed, high-­heeled shoes are scattered on the floor. These dollhouses of death represented, at the time, the leading edge in criminal investigatory training techniques, predating television shows like CSI by more than five decades.

left: Mrs. James Ward (Narcissa Niblack) Thorne, Virginia Kitchen, 18th Century, ca. 1940. Miniature room, mixed media. Interior, 10 × 20 × 20 ½ in.; scale, 1 inch = 1 foot. right: Corinne Botz, Kitchen (from afar), from The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004).

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

Southwestern Routes Both Raymond Jonson and B. J. O. Nordfeldt chose the southwestern route. Willa Cather chose it too, as did any number of other creative Chicagoans in these years. Painters like Emil Armin and Fred and Francis Biesel derived inspiration from New Mexico’s landscape and culture. Florence Dibell Bartlett — ­sister of Frederic Clay Bartlett and, like him, a major donor to the Art Institute — ­began making trips southwest in the 1920s; she was a collector in her own right and, in 1952, the founder of Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. The Southwest had been a popular tourist destination for midwesterners, traveling on the Santa Fe Railway, since the turn of the twentieth century. Likewise, imports from that region served as another significant source of influence and inspiration. Pueblo arts and culture saturated the Chicago art scene of the 1910s, disseminated through applied arts exhibitions at the Art Institute and programs held at its school. A show of Mexican and Diné (Navajo) blankets went up on museum walls in 1909, for example, and in 1916 students at the school staged a pageant dedicated to Hopi themes. These efforts were motivated in part by local Arts and Crafts reverence for both historical tradition and art imbued with natural materials and forms. 27 Pueblo mania would persist past the 1910s into interwar modernism, motivating the spare bone and desert paintings of  Georgia O’Keeffe, Wisconsin-­born and Art Institute–­trained, as well as Raymond Jonson’s color-­saturated abstractions, especially his Cliff  Dwellers series of  the late 1920s. With this title, Jonson ricocheted allusions back and forth between Chicago and its Southwest-­facing gaze. Henry Blake Fuller’s realist novel of 1893, The Cliff-­Dwellers, documents Chicago’s growth into sky-­scraping modernity. Cliff  Dwellers was also the name adopted, in 1909, by an elite club of  artists and intellectuals, including Daniel Burnham, Arthur Jerome Eddy, and Lorado Taft. The white, male Cliff  Dwellers membership — ­the same group that would have such fun at the Armory Show’s expense — ­communed with their romanticized vision of the indigenous Southwest every time they passed a painting they had commissioned for their headquarters, John Warner Norton’s Navajo (1909–­1910). In the 1920s Norton would go on to become one of  Chicago’s great public muralists and a beloved Art Institute instructor. There, student acolytes vigorously took up his ethos of  illustrative, graphic clarity. He perfected this style in large-­scale works, including his massive United States Map of  1927–­1928, a mural for the lobby of  the Chicago Motor Club Building (now Wacker Tower, 68 East South Water Street; fig. 2.5). With this work, Norton realized on a grander pictorial scale the kinds of  transregional connections toward which the Cliff  Dwellers had inclined in their earlier Navajo fantasy. However, United States Map imagines these connections differently, acknowledging a new kind of  conqueror. No longer train-­bound, as Chicago’s past elites had been, viewers of  the Motor Club map perused a vision of  automobile-­enabled independence. In his emerald-­ and silver-­toned Art Deco atlas, Norton placed Chicago at the top-­center of  a country completely available to all travelers.

The Arts Club While Chicago artists of the interwar period traveled into and out of the city, Chicago curators did their part to help artworks do the same. Acting alongside and often in tandem with the Art Institute, the Arts Club of Chicago was especially instrumental in this regard, expanding the

68

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

2.5  John Warner Norton, United States Map, 1927–­1928. Mural, 27 × 33 ft. Motor Club

Building, lobby of Wacker Tower, 68 East South Water Street, Chicago.

modernist beachhead established by the Armory Show. Founded in 1916, the Arts Club specialized in contemporary art exhibitions designed to develop audience understanding — ­and appetite. Indeed, in recollections of these years there is often particular emphasis on the Club’s afternoon teas, events staged between petit fours and Picassos. The Arts Club debuted in the most natural site for its progressive-­minded mission, the Fine Arts Building. As it expanded and moved north to new locations, the sumptuousness of  its galleries became a hallmark (fig. 2.6). In the Wrigley Building, where it opened in 1924 and remained for twelve years, it welcomed visitors to spaces appointed by upper-­crust interior designer Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, also then the Arts Club president. Even when Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett was unconvinced by the vanguard works on display, she was seduced by what she called “one of  the most attractive homes” for “any art organization in the country” — ­smitten by its “instant hospitality.”28 Indeed, in making a place for Chicagoans to encounter modernism and its forebears, the Arts Club became a hub — ­a cultural center to Chicago’s international scene. Alice Roullier joined Carpenter in the early 1920s as one of the Arts Club’s main movers-­ and-­shakers, most of  whom were women. Chair of  exhibitions and a “walking encyclopedia on the subject of  art,” according to the Herald and Examiner, Roullier was instrumental in securing a major show of Picasso drawings from Paris in 1923.29 Although the selection would first hang at Georges Wildenstein’s gallery in New York, Picasso himself  surely understood

69

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

2.6  Arthur Heun and Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, interior of Arts Club galleries, Wrigley

Building. Photograph, after 1924. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

that the Chicago dates presented the real landmark. Mounted at the Art Institute, in a gallery serviced by the Arts Club, the display was the first time any formal museum, anywhere in the world, had mounted a solo exhibition of the revolutionary artist’s work.30 The relationship cultivated in 1923 carried forward, as Picasso proved an Arts Club mainstay, most prominently in its hanging of  Guernica (1937) and nearly sixty other works in 1939 — ­a blockbuster event that had an impact on many Chicago artists, including a young Leon Golub. Picasso’s consistent visibility in the city in the interwar years, thanks largely to the Arts Club, built quietly toward a later twentieth-­century moment when he became a kind of  Windy City mascot: in 1967 the “Chicago Picasso” was installed in Daley Plaza (then Civic Center Plaza). Not that this track record of  citywide tastemaking was unique to Picasso. Alexander Calder was also in the Arts Club stable of  favored artists. In 1935 the sculptor showed his stabiles in Carpenter’s luxurious Wrigley Building galleries — ­agreeing not to hang mobiles from her impeccably plastered ceilings. In 1974 his Flamingo went up in Federal Plaza and his Universe began turning at Sears (now Willis) Tower. If  major commissions like these were not yet envisioned in the 1920s, significant transformations to the Art Institute were. By maintaining a space within the larger museum between 1922 and 1927, the Arts Club provided a “little gallery” experience to Chicagoans and tourists who might not otherwise have sought it out. Within the museum’s hallowed, lion-­guarded walls, the organization was able to reach a “democratic Sunday public,” as Roullier wrote in an internal report.31 In addition to the 1923 Picasso show, the organization curated one for Rodin

70

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

in 1924, and the next year put on Henri Toulouse-­Lautrec’s first-­ever solo show in the United States. These exhibits directly expanded the Art Institute’s permanent collection. After the Rodin show, Arts Club founding member Robert Allerton donated two bronzes, and the museum purchased Lautrec’s Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) (1887–­1888). Constantin Brancusi’s Golden Bird (1919–­1920), however, is perhaps the most shining monument to the long-­standing relationship. In 1927, at Carpenter’s behest, Marcel Duchamp came to Chicago to curate a major installation of  the Romanian’s works. The Arts Club acquired Golden Bird from the show, later donating the beloved masterpiece to the Art Institute in 1990. Arts Club activities paved the way for other important AIC acquisitions in the 1920s. In 1922 the museum received the Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer Collection, including paintings by Claude Monet and Pierre-­Auguste Renoir. In 1926 Frederick Clay Bartlett donated the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, a cache including Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of  La Grande Jatte (1884). The early 1930s brought in the Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Collection, boasting names like Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin. In 1931 the Arthur Jerome Eddy Collection arrived. This gift was especially significant; it saw the return of  many of  the connoisseur’s Armory Show purchases and turned the Art Institute into a rare American venue for the permanent installation of nonfigurative work, including Kandinsky’s Improvisation with Green Center (1913). To this day, the Art Institute’s holdings in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century transatlantic modernism are unparalleled among American encyclopedic museums; their amassing took place in the decades directly after 1913. Alongside international stars of  modernism, the Arts Club also showcased artifacts from global art history. Taken together, these displays — ­which ranged from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, from Africa to Asia — ­tutored visitors in a canon not unlike the one championed by Helen Gardner, the Art Institute’s beloved art history professor, who was writing her landmark textbook during these years. The approach to teaching world art also shared something in common with Kathleen Blackshear, Gardner’s protégé and an instructor who took her own students to the Field Museum and the Oriental Institute. Her exercises, including an assignment to copy Japanese prints and African masks, had a major impact on her students, including Eldzier Cortor, Joan Mitchell, and several among Chicago’s so-­called Imagists. Having set a stage for modernism that looked and felt much like the stage for social networking, the Arts Club was perhaps most successful in what twenty-­first-­century sociologists have termed “affective labor,” that is, the work and caretaking that goes into building and maintaining relationships, which themselves serve as the foundation for other forms of  labor, artistic, economic, and so on. When Brancusi commemorated his friendship with Carpenter with a portrait; when later Arts Club president Elizabeth (“Bobsy”) Goodspeed personally saw to Gertrude Stein’s happiness during a visit, ensuring she could sit in on a University of  Chicago seminar and go on a police detail through Chicago’s meaner streets; when Carpenter’s niece, Rue Winterbotham Shaw, sat down to lunch with Mies van der Rohe to ask for a design favor for the club’s new spaces on Ontario, and got it, free of  charge; or when Shaw cultivated a lifelong friendship with John Cage — ­all of  these loyalties, and the material benefits they accrued, were banked on the typically feminized labors that had been the Arts Club’s stock-­in-­trade: decorating, hostessing, and individualized support. This continual caretaking led Duchamp to recount his Arts Club partnership as especially cushy. “I have at least a lunch a day and a tea as well,” he marveled. “It is a real delight to see myself  swimming in these social perfumes.”32

71

Little Rooms LIESL OLSON

preference: these women were also intent on overturning social norms within their discreet, composed setting. Unlike a museum or university lecture hall, the club’s quarters — ­in every building it has occupied — ­have resembled a living room or salon, with serendipitous exchanges between presenters and their audiences. This intimacy, discretion, and flow of ideas made the Arts Club during its first decades a place of frequent and playful gender-­bending, where homosexuality among both men and women was tacitly accepted. The aesthetic choices and attendant freedom at the Arts Club of Chicago were also informed by sexual politics. When the 1913 Armory Show came to Chicago, the artworks that were most scandalous to local audiences were Paul Gauguin’s depictions of half-­dressed Tahitian women, the masculine geometries of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Henri Matisse’s muscular Blue Nude, and Robert Henri’s bold, autonomous Figure in Motion. To protest the Armory Show, on its last day art students burned copies of three Matisse paintings — ­all female nudes. The issue here was that the female bodies were not idealized — ­passive and demure — ­but strong and pulsing with sexuality. The Arts Club, arguably the most important outgrowth of the Armory Show in Chicago, certainly understood that modern sexuality was at the center of groundbreaking transformations in aesthetic form. This modern sexuality operated on an individual level too. The voluminous records of the Arts Club of Chicago — ­housed at the Newberry Library — ­are rich with material that allows any researcher to speculate about romantic and sexual liaisons among the club’s members and visiting artists. For instance, correspondence relating to Gertrude Stein’s several trips to Chicago in 1934 and 1935 — ­during which she stayed twice at Bobsy Goodspeed’s home — ­abounds with sexual punning, and photographs include intimate group portraits of Stein among the women of the club. Other early club members, like architect Arthur Heun (who designed with Carpenter and then Goodspeed the club’s first four locations), novelist Arthur Meeker, decorator John Gregg and his companion Robert Allerton, and writer Thornton Wilder, suggest that the club was as homosocial as it was sapphic. The “little rooms” of the club offered a certain freedom to these artists and writers, and promoted an avant-­garde agenda that was more than merely aesthetic.

A key venue for the modernist avant-­garde, the Arts Club of Chicago was founded in 1916 and flourished during its early decades because of the work of several remarkable, socially connected, and still underrecognized women. Indeed, the feminized labor upon which the club depended was a feature of many sites of cultural activity in Chicago during the first decades of the twentieth century. From the “little magazines” launched by Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson to the work of Chicago Tribune writer Fanny Butcher and gallerist and curator Katharine Kuh, women built Chicago’s cultural infrastructure: they ran bookstores, organized galleries, launched periodicals, and hosted salons. And many women in Chicago, of course, became great artists and writers. One hub of this cultural activity was the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue, the home of the Arts Club of Chicago for its first two years. It is striking how often the word “little” is used to describe these artistic and political enterprises, when little is precisely what booming Chicago, with its big business and commercial drives, was not. It started with the Little Room, founded in the 1890s, an informal community that included Monroe, writers Henry Blake Fuller and Hamlin Garland, playwright and actress Alice Gerstenberg, dramatist Anna Morgan, and sculptor Lorado Taft, among many others. After a concert or play in the Auditorium Building, this group would walk around the corner to the Fine Arts Building and gather in the tenth-­floor studio of painter Ralph Clarkson. Perhaps they would perform music or a short play — ­but what they really desired was an intimate place to talk. Ellen Van Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s Little Theater (1912) also started in the Fine Arts Building, staging the provocative plays of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and other modern dramatists instead of more popular offerings. And every “little magazine” in Chicago got its start in one of the building’s small spaces: first Francis Fisher Browne’s reputable The Dial (1880), then Monroe’s modernist monthly of free verse, Poetry (1912), and shortly thereafter Anderson’s politically radical Little Review (1916). In this sense, the Arts Club of Chicago was also a “little” club, a place where an alternative sociality developed out of the lively exchange of ideas among artists, writers, musicians, and performers. The groundbreaking exhibitions organized by Arts Club president Rue Carpenter, exhibitions coordinator Alice Roullier, and later president Elizabeth “Bobsy” Goodspeed were not simply inspired by aesthetic

72

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Independents, Bohemians, Activists In 1905 esteemed University of Chicago sociologist Albion Small explained that in order to understand society and the forces that “make it different,” observers had to “explain groups on the one hand, no less than individuals on the other.”33 A similar approach rewards the art historian. In the interwar years, independent art groups proliferated in Chicago. While supporting artists materially with places to learn and show, or advancing fair labor practices, such groups also offered moral support, lubricating the free flow of creative exchange through meetings, workshops, and parties. Collectively, these independent societies organized Chicago’s art scene and provided routes of connection between its many neighborhoods and modern art’s many movements — ­pathways beat by foot or the local, elevated train that ultimately led toward creative transformation. Many groups began by confronting an obstacle. This was certainly true for the No-­Jury Society of  Artists. Formed in the summer of  1922, and encouraged by the success of  a local Salon des Refusés exhibition the prior summer, the No-­Jury Society agitated against what its members perceived as the unfair — ­or at least narrow — ­jurying of  the Art Institute’s annual Chicago and Vicinity show. Proposing an alternative, the group staged its first exhibition at the Marshall Field’s department store that fall. Any artist who paid a four-­dollar fee received two works’ worth of  wall space, allocated alphabetically. Putting their own careers where their mouth was, No-­Jury members simultaneously pledged not to participate in the AIC shows, so long as these remained closed to broader representation. As a result, a number of  local stars — ­including Carl Hoeckner, Edgar Miller, Raymond Jonson, and Rudolph Weisenborn — ­were absent from Art Institute rosters for years. The No-­Jury group continued to stage exhibitions throughout the 1920s, “wherever they could get space,” as painter Harold Haydon later recalled: from Werner’s Bookstore, to the Chicago Public Library, to Adele Lawson’s gallery at the Palmer House and Jennie Purvin’s space at Mandel Brothers.34 Predating the No-­Jury group by a year, but comprising many of  its same members, Cor Ardens emerged in 1921 as the brainchild of Hoeckner, Jonson, and Weisenborn. Living up to its name, Latin for “burning heart,” the group pursued artistic expression as a form of transcendental seeking. Its founding ethos was “to bring together, at least in spirit, sympathetic isolated individuals.”35 Beatrice Levy was one such kindred soul. Active in Chicago circles and a habitué of Provincetown’s East Coast colony before relocating to California at midcentury, Levy’s work tended toward the fantastic. An untitled painting from 1928 proffers a fairy-­tale view of  an island-­sequestered castle, Hokusai-­like waves lapping against gem-­colored bluffs (fig. 2.7). Though not based in Chicago, the Russian painter and mystic Nicholas Roerich was another member of  Cor Ardens’s network of  solitary seekers. Besides traveling in the same avant-­garde circles in Russia that birthed the music and theater so influential to Jonson, Roerich was a vocal proponent of  Theosophy — ­a spiritual movement with strong ties to Chicago. In 1923 the Chicago Art League joined the city’s art club roster. Distinguished by its dedication to African American artists, it organized classes, exhibitions, and lectures out of the Wabash Avenue YMCA (3762 South Wabash Avenue), a major way station for newly arriving blacks in prior decades. Founded by William Edouard Scott, whose painting was influenced by Parisian modernism and personal travels to Haiti, and William McKnight Farrow, a painter who also worked at the Art Institute during the period, the group sought to build an African American patron base among the middle and upper classes. Farrow, in particular, was

73

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

2.7  Beatrice Levy, Untitled, ca. 1928. Oil on board, 12 × 8 in.

keen on this. His “Art and the Home” column in the Chicago Defender was a regular source of  artistic inspiration for black readers. It was also a source of  some scolding. Surveying the homes and backyards of  black Chicagoans, Farrow urged them to take up a program of  artistic self-­improvement. “Cannot we ourselves,” he asked with rhetorical vehemence, “become implanted with that ‘I will’ spirit that made Chicago the best place for us, [and] unite in making our neighborhoods the best places in Chicago?”36

74

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Farrow’s belief  in art as a tool of  racial advancement shaped what he thought to be appropriate styles and subjects for black artists. In 1925 he delivered a slide lecture at the Y on the topic of  ancient Egyptian art, which he hoped would inspire practicing artists. But a debate ensued: some audience members argued that contemporary black art ought to portray contemporary black experience, however much that might run afoul of  art-­world tastes.37 Farrow’s preference for asserting race-­beauty through established modes would prevail two years later, however, at The Negro in Art Week (fig. 2.8). Staged at the Art Institute in 1927, the exhibition resulted from a partnership between the Chicago Art League and the Chicago Woman’s Club. Nowhere among the Impressionist landscapes, Symbolist-­inspired African allegories, and portraits of  well-­to-­do African Americans was there a scene of  everyday Bronzeville. In fact, the preeminent painter of black life on the South Side, Archibald J. Motley Jr., had declined invitations to submit. Chilly relations with the League were surely to blame. Motley had refused to join the group early on, and in 1925 Farrow asked him to stop submitting black genre scenes to the Art Institute’s annual juried shows. Farrow had a vested interest in managing black artists’ visibility at the Art Institute, an organization, he often noted, that had “never closed its doors against us.”38 The Arts Crafts Guild was another important forum for black artists before the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) emerged later in the era. This group clustered around the charisma and generosity of  artist George Neal, who initiated a program of  educational redistribution. Taking classes at the Art Institute during the week, Neal brought lessons to the South Side on Sundays, instructing young artists like Margaret Burroughs, Charles Davis, Eldzier Cortor, and Charles White — ­all of  whom would become major players in establishing the SSCAC. White, just fourteen when he started with Neal, recalled that the group was mostly “working people, young people.” Classes were held at members’ homes. Sometimes the group would hire a model for life drawing or arrange small exhibitions. Eventually, the Guild also took on fund-­raising, securing tuition for members who — ­in keeping with Neal’s original impetus — ­promised to bring that education back, teaching new students on the South Side.39 If  the denizens of  Chicago’s art world worked side by side during the day, they also came together at night, in bohemias big and small. Early in the century, they gathered in Towertown, near the historic Water Tower. This hotspot dissipated after 1920, when the Michigan Avenue Bridge brought an influx of  gentrifying elites, hungry for artistic chic and easy commutes. Further north and a bit later, in Chicago’s current Old Town neighborhood, artist-­ designers Edgar Miller and Sol Kogen undertook to renovate a historic mansion into artists’ live-­work spaces (fig. 2.9). In the late 1920s the Carl Street Studios project (155 West Burton Place) — ­a kaleidoscope of  handmade historical revivals and revisions — ­also utilized the talents of  muralist John Warner Norton and the craft expertise of  Jesus Torres, an immigrant from Guanajuato, Mexico. Employment at the stockyards had brought Torres to Chicago, but in three short years he had transformed himself  into a sought-­after interior designer, completing commissions for restaurants and clubs in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis — ­thanks in part to art classes taken at Hull-­House. By 1947 his design work bejeweled the club cars of  the Golden State Limited, an ironic milepost, the Tribune observed, in an American journey that had started when Torres traversed the train’s route by foot.40 When Miller and Kogen set out to build an artists’ residence, they had plenty of  local enclaves from which to draw lifestyle inspiration. These included Hyde Park’s 57th Street colony, of  course, but also the West North Avenue apartment building where Miller himself lived

75

2.8  Charles Dawson, cover of brochure for The Negro in Art Week, November 16–­23, 1927. Institutional Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

76

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

2.9  Jesus Torres, interior of a bathroom, part of Edgar Miller and Sol Kogen’s

Carl Street Studios renovation, 155 West Burton Place, 1927.

and held court. He hosted a popular salon there, which neighbor Aaron Bohrod remembered as significant: “a kind of  discussion group . . . where we brought our paintings” for critique.41 Sculptor Si Gordon fostered a similar incubation space in his Hyde Park studio, maintained in a rented storefront on 55th Street. There, he created sculptures in wood and plaster, hosted aspiring artists, and urged them to browse and borrow from his sizable personal library. Among the browsers was a young Margaret Burroughs, who remembered Gordon’s books to have been influential — ­especially a volume on Harriet Tubman.42 Cultural influence in the form of  hosting was often reciprocal, as in the case of  Gordon and Burroughs. Burroughs was the center of  her own community, an occasional salon that gathered in the home she shared with husband Bernard Goss on South Michigan Avenue, earning the nickname “Little Bohemia.” Like many of  the groups that developed in these years, Gordon’s studio and Little Bohemia were centers that fostered inter-­neighborhood and interracial connection. Jane Addams’s Hull-­House provided another such platform, but one more explicitly undergirded by a commitment to social service. Among many others, the German-­born and -­trained Carl Hoeckner was an active player at Hull-­House. Typically, he carried membership in many other organizations too, including Cor Ardens and, also with Beatrice Levy, the Chicago Society of  Etchers. Though he was not an especially active exhibitor in the Art Institute’s annual shows — ­largely because of  the boycott he’d sworn with the No-­Jury Society — ­he became the cornerstone of print instruction at its school, holding a teaching post there in the 1930s and early ’40s. At the same time, he was offering print training at Hull-­House, working

77

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

alongside printmakers who had been influenced by Mexican graphic traditions and their connection to revolutionary politics. A young Charles White would thus be encouraged to travel to Mexico City directly, boarding trains with his wife Elizabeth Catlett in pursuit of border-­ crossing connection. Hoeckner’s Hull-House poster also subtly reveals this Mexican influence (fig. 2.10). The figures, brows furrowed, gaze upward, eyes fixed, perhaps, on the looping form that crosses from the banner announcing hull house into the figures’ own space. This orb evokes diagrams of  the atom and the universe, like Diego Rivera’s incorporation of  technological imagery into his murals — ­a dialectical insinuation that the settlement house’s progressive ideals will offer rare inspiration to modernity’s otherwise homogenized masses. The message along the image’s bottom spells out a recipe for liberatory transformation — ­“Free Instruction / Creative Production” — ­the rhyme suggesting a step-­by-­step transformation of  preparation into action, a guiding principle of the settlement house movement.

2.10  Carl Hoeckner, Hull House poster, 1935. Woodcut on cream wove paper, 17 ¼ × 11 ¼ in.

78

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Artists’ organizations served a vital connective function for Chicago’s art world, building cross-­city networks of  artistic exchange that were at least as transformative as the national and international networks in which these artists also participated, and from which they imported new ideas to their homegrown groups. Dissemination was all the more efficient because habitués of  one circle often frequented several more — ­“pass[ing] quickly and easily” across the city’s “mosaic of little worlds,” as Chicago sociologist Robert Park described urban social groups in his classic The City, from 1925.43

Super-­Realism In the 1930s and ’40s, Chicago boasted numerous artists who were exploring figuration’s continued possibilities after the advent of abstraction. Compelled by Western painting’s historical emphasis on representation, they probed the limits of this responsibility, exaggerating representation’s claims on the known world to arrive at what might be called Chicago “super-­ realism,” a term Ivan Albright preferred to “surrealism.” (This term would later take on a different aesthetic and political valence in its use among the artists of AfriCOBRA in the 1970s, with no less importance to Chicago movements.) Some of these artists, like Aaron Bohrod and Archibald Motley, were responding to a legacy of urban realism bequeathed by literary leaders in Chicago, like Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, but also via New York’s Ashcan School painters. Chicago’s figurative artists of the later interwar period revised this inheritance, transforming the hard-­boiled American realism of the early century into a more gothic version for the Great Depression and subsequent wartime years. Bohrod’s connection to the Ashcan School was direct. The native Chicagoan studied at the Art Students League in New York, where he fell in thrall to John Sloan. From him, Bohrod absorbed a paint-­what-­you-­know ethos that eventually persuaded him to return home and do for Chicago what his teacher had done for lower Manhattan.44 By 1940 he had achieved this goal — ­at least in the view of the arts magazine Parnassus. “Bohrod goes directly to those parts of  the city which speak most loudly of  shabbiness and dinginess,” it reported.45 The writer was right. Unlike earlier painters’ portrayals of  the Chicago scene — ­efforts Bohrod deemed “sanitized” and “elegant” — ­Bohrod’s paintings showcased sagging houses, workers slumping through factory gates, and studied vignettes taken from the city’s many micro-­milieus.46 This last is on offer in Haircut (1936; fig. 2.11). Lightly dark in its humor, the scene contrasts the serene confidence of  the snipping barber with some faintly discernible nervousness in the customer, eyes trained on the sharp scissors. Some aspects of  Haircut portend the magical, trompe l’oeil realism of  Bohrod’s overstuffed postwar still lifes. At least, the Parnassus feature had seen this coming, observing not only the artist’s “emphasis . . . on detail” but “the amount of  work” behind it — ­effort betrayed in Haircut in small passages, like the pebbling of  the purple window pane at upper left. The effort Bohrod expended on otherwise unremarkable city scenes was in keeping with an unrelated Chicago trademark: Chicago School sociology, which critics in the era dismissed as “microphotographic illustrations” in ethnography — ­“little studies,” one skeptic wrote in 1948, “of ‘press while you wait’ tailors in the Loop, dwellers in rented rooms, etc.”47 While Bohrod may not have crossed paths with University of  Chicago sociology professors in his West North Avenue apartment, he certainly shared their habit of  close attention to small things.

79

2.11  Aaron Bohrod, Haircut, 1936. Oil on gessoed panel, 35 × 25 in.

80

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Bohrod’s urban realism was tempered, Parnassus explained, by “a vision of  what lies behind drab exteriors.”48 In this, another set of  comparisons present themselves, germane to Chicago in the 1930s. That decade kicked off  with the debut of  Grant Wood’s American Gothic at the Art Institute’s American show, where it attracted controversy for the dour, even sinister portrayal of  an Iowa farmer and his daughter. Wood, even more than Bohrod, made flagrant display of  the hard work required by painted description, and both painters allowed the obsessiveness of  their practice to hint at something darker underneath. Representation remained conservatively in place, but its ideals seemed to curdle. Visitors to the Art Institute’s sprawling Century of  Progress exhibition in 1934, timed to coincide with the world’s fair, met with a similar provocation — ­this time in the form of  a nine-­by-­thirteen-­inch canvas. Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of  Memory (1931) was the show’s scene-­stealer. “Are those ants?” asked one woman, getting a close look at the painting named “most curious” by visitors. “Yes, they must be,” her husband replied. “I count five legs, maybe six.”49 Visitors rubbernecked to get a view, vying for a glimpse of  “a school of  art that is more real than real — ­if  anything is real.”50 As this repartee suggests, The Persistence of Memory proved to be the Century of  Progress’s version of  the Armory Show’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Much as Arthur Jerome Eddy had once diagrammed Duchamp’s painting, instructing viewers on how to locate both nude and staircase, the local press sorted out Dalí. “It is really no mystery at all,” one writer explained. “The watches, some soft boiled and some fried . . . mean that your memory will get like that if you keep thinking and thinking . . . [and get] all heated up.”51 What seemed to delight readers most was the work’s physical smallness, its minute exactitude, and its apparent departure from sanity in realism. Dalí achieved these effects “with the same painstaking care given to miniatures,” another writer observed, perhaps thinking of the scale-­model period rooms of  Narcissa Niblack Thorne, installed at the Art Institute just the year before.52 That the concrete could be more upending to audiences than the abstract was not a lesson Albright needed to learn. By the late 1920s, the painter had devoted himself  fully to his inimitable vision, taking years to complete large, dark canvases with imagery Time magazine called “macabre” and “superphotographic.”53 He perfected these in an abandoned Methodist church he’d converted to a studio in Warrenville, Illinois, with his twin brother, Malvin, a fellow artist who exhibited as Zsissly. Albright’s working spaces were a marvel in their own right. When Jean Dubuffet, the French artist and champion of outsider art, visited them in 1951, he surveyed the props the painter had amassed: “nests of  wasps and mice, . . . cut-­glass flasks, oxidized and encrusted with filth, . . . old hats and gloves, . . . dust and spider webs” — ­all made close up and strange through magnifying glasses the artist supplied.54 Albright composed artworks the same way, building up layers of lace, flowers, fabric, paper, wood, paint, flesh, veins, and fingernails — ­all described as recognizable, but over-­rendered as grotesque. The result, Dubuffet wrote, were “disquieting” views of  a “rumbling, rotting, grinding world.”55 Most uncanny of  all, however, was how “the center of the picture is everywhere at once”: paintings flattened into a scrim of equal priorities, maps of the everyday world — ­each lock of  hair, each puckered thigh, each corduroy wale, a site worthy of local exploration. Dubuffet was not the first to fall prey to Albright’s entrancing tricks, nor the first to respond to them in writerly extravagance. Writing in 1937 for the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell recoiled at the painter’s “simulated amalgam of livid gray leather and hammered

81

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

brass for flesh.”56 Time’s visit with the “cheerful little gray-­haired” artist in 1941 yielded more praise, noting the prizes he had won at exhibition — ­including audience popularity polls — ­and enthusing over “surfaces [that] . . . shone like crushed tinfoil.”57 As for Chicago’s own Eleanor Jewett, she relished the performance of  shock that Albright’s works courted, writing of  Ida, one of  his most notorious sitters, “She is a heroically built woman with a simple face, but, O, the gymnastic training she must have taken before she secured those thighs and those astounding legs.”58 The painting in question, Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida (1929–­1930), portrayed a blonde, twenty-­year-­old wife and mother from Oak Park, Illinois, where Albright had worked as a medical illustrator during brain surgeries in 1919, directly after having completed similar wartime duty in army hospitals in France (fig. 2.12). As art historians have noted, these early medical encounters built the foundation for Albright’s lifelong pursuit of  flesh in lively mortification.

2.12  Ivan Albright, Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida,

1929–­1930. Oil on canvas, 56 ¼ × 47 in.

82

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Albright’s national reputation and personal quirks made him conspicuous in Chicago circles. Bohrod was frequently compared to him, and Eldzier Cortor remembered seeing Albright in the art supplies room of  the Works Progress Administration (WPA) office but was too young to have struck up a lasting relationship. Cortor was younger than Albright and Bohrod, but his later paintings reflect dimensions the older artists shared. The Room No. VI (1948) is a case in point (fig. 2.13). Painted in a hotel room in New York City and carried back to Chicago on a Greyhound bus, the work presents the same leveling presentation of parts that is characteristic of  Albright and Bohrod, and the same delight in patterns juxtaposed. Cortor remembered meeting Archibald Motley in that same WPA supplies room, recalling him as a painter touched by his travels to Paris and “really into this idea of a real artist with his palette . . . the brush, and the smock.”59 Like Albright and Bohrod, Motley was a nationally celebrated Chicagoan in the 1930s and — ­palette and smock notwithstanding — ­another artist drawn to margins of  respectability. In Motley’s case, a series of Bronzeville genre scenes bent urban reportage toward the surreal and fantastic. Born in New Orleans in 1891, Motley’s African American family was one of tens of  thousands who made their way north to Chicago at the turn of the century: a social movement up roads, rivers, and railways that would transform Chicago and black American culture both. A canvas like Walter Ellison’s Train Station (1936), a musical style like Muddy Waters’s urbanized blues, a novel like Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) — ­all of  these stand as monuments to this moment of  translocal cultural innovation. Motley’s biography would be also marked by travel and boundary crossing, as in his Parisian forays, his interracial marriage to his Englewood high school sweetheart, and the favorable reception of his work on the East Coast. After early efforts in a meticulous academic style, frequently trained on “respectable” black subjects in portrait arrangements, by the late 1920s Motley had solidly entered the realm of urban super-­realism. In works like Black Belt (1934), he recorded the scenes and characters of black Chicago nightlife that he had studied firsthand, sketchbook in tow — ­a habit perhaps inspired by his encounters with George Bellows during his 1919 residency at the Art Institute (fig. 2.14). However, and as Bohrod was to do with his Ashcan inheritance, Motley transformed the tradition of  urban realism into something uncanny. His figures often overlap disconnected; cars in Black Belt drive into a pink and blue sky; the job of  painted, urban description is cut loose from earnest authenticity. Art historians often eulogize Michigan-­born Macena Barton as a painter who evades categorization. However, her works echo other Chicagoans’ forays into the figurative and the fantastic, even channeling some of  the spiritualism that had motivated the abstractions of  the Cor Ardens painters. Specializing in faithfully rendered portraits, which she sometimes ornamented with the sitter’s psychic aura, Barton worked hard to ensure that she would be visible to rearguard and adventurous audiences alike. She maintained memberships in both the establishment Association of  Chicago Painters and Sculptors and the rebellious No-­Jury Society. All of  these efforts may have been hedged bets; for Barton, money was always tight. Working nights as a copy editor, Barton desperately petitioned the Art Institute for a teaching post, well after her name was commonplace in the local art press. Complicating things, Barton came into her own at a moment when artistic experimentation was even riskier than it had been in prior generations. Beginning in 1936, Josephine Hancock Logan’s Society for Sanity in Art crusaded in the city’s cultural scene, recruiting vocal adherents to her antimodernism cause.

83

2.13  Eldzier Cortor, The Room No. VI, 1948.

Oil and gesso on Masonite, 42 ¼ × 31 ½ in.

84

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

2.14  Archibald Motley Jr., Black Belt, 1934. Oil on canvas, 33 × 40 ½ in.

Jewett, however, admired Barton. In a review of 1931, she urged readers to buy a painting “now, today” — ­promising good returns on early investment.60 Barton’s patently apparent academic skill made her more outré subject matter palatable, a strategic approach that seems also to have underlain fellow Chicagoan Gertrude Abercrombie’s modest success in these same years (fig. 2.15). Barton also caught the eye of critic C. J. Bulliet, a far more adventurous Chicago tastemaker and one who enjoyed national readership through venues like Art Digest and the New York Times. In 1932 Barton painted Bulliet. The piece exemplifies her aura painting mode; a deep orange color field outlines the confidently seated critic (fig. 2.16). Barton’s Salome (1936; fig. 2.17) also covertly portrays the critic. It is an arresting painting, showing a brazen nude wielding a bloody scimitar and gazing down at the plattered head of  John the Baptist, his blue eyes cast up. True to Barton’s manner, the subject matter was biblical in derivation but countercultural in association, thanks to precedents set by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in the 1890s. The subject pushed a feminist envelope too. Barton’s decision to paint nudes — ­wide-­hipped and pubic-­haired — ­was reportedly made in defiance of Bulliet’s pronouncement that the genre should be solely the province of  men. It is his head then, of  course, that sits on the platter; never mind that the two had been involved in a public, extramarital love affair for years.

85

2.15  Gertrude Abercrombie, Self-­Portrait of My Sister, 1941. Oil on canvas, 27 × 22 in. 2.16  Macena Barton, C. J. Bulliet, ca. 1935–­1939. Oil on canvas, 30 1⁄8 × 24 3⁄8 in.

2.17  Macena Barton, Salome, 1936. Oil on canvas, 83 × 56 in.

87

J E NNI F E R JANE MARS HALL

Margaret Brundage was another Chicagoan whose fame rested on her facility with the strange. An illustrator for pulp magazines, she enjoyed a career-­making run of  thirty-­nine straight covers for Weird Tales during the 1930s (fig. 2.18). She first exercised her skills as a student at McKinley High School, where she edited the school newspaper and oversaw the cartoon work of  classmate Walt Disney. But, while Disney would make good in Chicago’s art world — ­the Art Institute showcased his work in a 1933 exhibition, a then-­rare move to present cartoons as fine art — ­Brundage would struggle. This in spite of the fact that her beautiful, buxom, violently tortured cover girls moved magazines. In Chicago establishments dealing in pulp and porn, like Ben Abramson’s Argus Book Shop or the newsstands in the South Dearborn district, Brundage was an icon.61 She also enjoyed a place among the city’s leftist intellectual fringe. She tended bar at the infamous Dil Pickle Club (10 Tooker Alley, off North Dearborn), where she met Myron “Slim” Brundage. The two were married briefly. He went on to become the founder of  the College of  Complexes in the 1950s, a ringleader of Chicago’s “hobohemia,” and a janitor-­philosopher who had “failed so often,” as one 1971 profile put it, “that failure has set him free.”62 Margaret Brundage found a new niche at the end of  the interwar period, but one in which her participation was no less socially subversive. During the 1950s she served as the president of  the South Side Community Art Center, a product of  New Deal funding and a site of  black cultural advancement forged through interracial collaboration.

Art Work/Social Work When the New Deal arts programs came to Illinois, they tapped into a cultural scene already lively with cross-­networked associations, anchored by a major museum and academy, and committed to art as a means both to understand contemporary life and to serve it. Federal funding thus only buoyed existing trends. Two products of the programs reflect this fact and nicely illustrate the culmination of an era in which global visions, local loyalties, translocal travels, and inter-­neighborhood connection served as the major conveyances of Chicago modernism. The first is Edgar Miller’s Animal Court, a 1938 suite of animal sculptures funded by the WPA’s Federal Arts Project (FAP) and installed at the Jane Addams Homes, newly built on the near West Side as one of  Chicago’s first housing projects (fig. 2.19). There were seven stone pieces in all: several larger groups, including one of a bull and puma, and several smaller pairs, such as one depicting dancing wolves. Installed in a public plaza ringed by some of the development’s thirty-­two buildings, the sculptures’ squat and squared-­off  forms echoed the blocky brick complexes behind them — ­and suggested that a similarly lively spirit dwelled therein. True to his love for stylized historical revivals, Miller imported Near Eastern motifs. His moderne mammals thus appear to have been crossbred with ancient Assyrian statuary. But Animal Court inverted the heraldic relations typical of  those older monuments. Instead of  looming over viewers to remind them of  their lowly place, Miller’s bull and puma became a dais, a playground platform for climbing, whooping, and jumping — ­kids turned into kings. The siting of  Animal Court literalized many dynamics that shaped its production. As a FAP work, it resulted from the same network that had brought a young Eldzier Cortor into contact with Albright and Motley — ­an intergenerational, inter-­neighborhood connection that was rife across the project. The eminent printmaker June Wayne later recalled that the FAP thrust her into new milieus and, so also, new ideas.63 She met painter Berenice Berkman, the

88

2.18  Margaret Brundage, A Rival from the Grave (cover study for Weird Tales by

Seabury Quinn), 1936. Pastel and mixed media on board, 20 × 13 ½ in.

89

The Better Homes Institute ERIN HOGAN

basing his scheme on the colors in the painting. (Another seminar focused more extensively on the various paintings.) Later in the week he would stage an intriguing reversal of this first demonstration, entering a room choked with furniture and knickknacks and, without saying a word, editing its contents, leaving viewers with a “harmonious” and clean arrangement. As interest in the seminars grew and Crane’s energy flagged, more lecturers joined his crew. The Extension Department eventually added a second road show to meet the demand. Decorating, of course, was a fundamental topic, but the five days also included lectures on dress and fashion (“are you thick or are you thin?”), gardening, the design and construction of a home from roofing to plumbing (“consider how far you must carry the dishes to the sink”), cooking, and “How to Live a Thousand Years,” a presentation of broad advice about how to lead a better life. And of course, using the paintings, lecturers also covered art appreciation, which fulfilled the original mission of the department. This ambitious enterprise, and the department itself, was discontinued in 1922, in part due to disagreements between Crane and the Art Institute about logistics, bookings, and compensation. But while it lasted it ignited the passions and ambitions of homemakers. Hundreds of people would fill lecture halls and auditoriums for the presentations. Then, at the end of a week, Crane would fold his tent — ­collapsing his walls and collecting his fireplaces — ­and move on to the next town.

Before the days of HGTV, aspirational homemakers throughout the Midwest needed to look no further than their local civic auditorium for decorating advice, thanks to an ambitious program organized and executed by the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1916 the museum established a Department of Extension, whose mission, “Take Art to the People,” had a corollary goal: “People Will Take to Art.” At first, extension programs consisted of traveling exhibitions and lectures, but under the direction of Ross Crane, a draftsman and cartoonist who became the department’s charismatic leader, they expanded to include home decorating seminars presented under the scientific-­sounding name of the Better Homes Institute. The road show Crane and his colleagues put together was hardly just a seminar. The five-­day workshops centered on a literal ton of material, shipped from town to town between 1917 and 1922. The crates included a collapsible room — ­three full-­size walls — ­and many of its trimmings: movable fireplaces, windows, doors, and fifteen to twenty actual paintings, not reproductions. At each stop, local businesses were invited to participate — ­and promote themselves — ­by completing the setup with furniture, rugs, and draperies. In more than seventy-­five cities and towns across the United States (and a few in Canada), attendees sat rapt as Crane walked into his three-­walled room, assembled on a stage, furnished initially with only a fireplace and one of the paintings. He would then proceed to decorate the diorama,

first person to talk to her about Picasso, and she developed a strongly professional practice as an emerging artist. From the FAP’s decentralized bureaucratic structure, Wayne learned the importance of  administrative organization; she would carry this lesson forward into the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which she founded in Los Angeles in 1960 and moved to New Mexico ten years later. Morris (“Toppy”) Topchevsky was also employed in Chicago’s FAP and also exemplary in his involvement, especially in the experiences he brought to it. A painter and muralist active in the Chicago scene in the 1920s and ’30s, he held his own salon, an important site of  interracial cultural exchange, and taught art classes at Hull-­House. It was Toppy who had first inspired Jesus Torres, who had gone to Jane Addams’s center expecting only English classes. So it was that a federally funded commission like Miller’s could be a fully local monument, concretizing relationships that had long been fluid within Chicago’s sprawling landscape. That the works ornamented a site bearing Addams’s name was all the more fitting.

90

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

Second, and perhaps the most lasting endowment from the New Deal to the city is the support it provided for the founding of  the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC). The result of  ongoing efforts to establish a black-­run center of  artistic production, training, and display, the SSCAC opened in 1941 as one of  the New Deal’s many regional community arts centers. Today, it is the only one that remains operative. Lively from the beginning, the SSCAC opened with public speeches from Eleanor Roosevelt and Alain Locke, the Howard University philosophy professor and Harlem black arts advocate. Thereafter, the SSCAC became an important place for community arts education. Studio classes were taught by Charles White and Toppy Topchevsky, and exhibitions ranged in content from contemporary art to art of  the black diaspora to applied design — ­satisfying the project of  black connoisseurial advancement that William McKnight Farrow had once urged, while also offering representations of  contemporary lived experience. At the opening ceremonies, a statement on behalf  of  several of  the founders drove home this latter point. Drafted by Burroughs, the real dynamo behind the organization, the statement reflected on their motivations: “We believed that the purpose of  art was to record the times . . . the people around us. We were part of  them. They were us.”64

2.19  Edgar Miller, Animal Court, Jane Addams Homes, 1938. Limestone.

91

2.20  Gordon Parks, photograph of Langston Hughes holding Marion Perkins’s

Sitting Figure, early 1940s. Gelatin silver print.

92

ROUTE S TO M ODE R NIS M , 1913 – 19 4 3

To this organization — ­and its capacity for brokering intimate connections between disparate forces — ­a photograph of  New Yorker Langston Hughes by midwesterner Gordon Parks offers oblique homage (fig. 2.20). In his hands, the poet holds a stone sculpture carved by Marion Perkins. With its broad features and crouching posture, Perkins’s Sitting Figure (1939) betrays the same traces of Mexican influence that had been so important among leftist artists at Hull-­House. Perkins himself  was an avowed Marxist; he carried his investments in translocal, politically motivated art practice into his work establishing the SSCAC. The photograph appeared later on the dust jacket of the poet’s One Way Ticket. In the title poem, Hughes writes: I pick up my life And take it with me And I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Scranton, . . . I pick up my life And take it away On a one-­way ticket — ­ Gone up North, Gone out West, Gone!

— Reflecting on his hometown, writer Studs Terkel marveled, “All roads led to and from Chicago. A thousand trains pulled in and pulled out each day.”65 This regular routine of connecting and exchanging has long been an undeniable feature of the city’s urban experience, but it was especially pronounced during this period. These busy rail routes, moving objects, ideas, and people into and out of the city, gave a distinct character to its artists and cultural scene: a place that pulsed as a center, a place that beat as a start.

93

The Midwest in the visual arts is only now bringing forth the artists who will reveal the physiognomy and meaning of their place. The artist has always in the past been conditioned by his life here, and yet there has always been present the feeling of being lost in a cultureless world of tremendous bustle, noise, and violence (this from Chicago — ­ and from the country around an eating loneliness) — ­an abundance of life everywhere, and yet no culture. Mitchell Siporin, “Mural Art and the Midwestern Myth” 1

CHAPTER 3

THE MEANING OF PLACE 1933–­1 956 MAG G I E TA F T

When the US Farm Service Bureau contacted a young Arthur Siegel in 1942 about photographing Chicago, he was told exactly what sort of  pictures to take. The organization furnished a list of  keywords describing the Chicago they wished to see: “metropolis — ­industrial, railway center, stockyards; architecture by John Root, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright; Field Museum, universities, Board of  Trade, beaches, parks.”2 This industrial metropolis was the Chicago America knew. And it was the Chicago fine arts photographer Kenneth Heilbron captured that year in Untitled (Coal Yards on Chicago River at Lake Shore Drive, Chicago) (fig. 3.1). In the foreground, mounds of  coal are piled high to power a city whose brawling skyline rises foggy but tall in the distance. At a glance, it could be a portrait of  almost any industrial American boomtown. But with its emphasis on industrial enterprise, raw materials, and skyscrapers, it is a familiar — ­if  generic — ­portrait of  the rough-­and-­tumble Chicago mythologized as the city of big shoulders. Siegel, however, would make very different pictures of Chicago. Raised in Detroit, he came to the city in 1937 on a one-­year scholarship to study photography at the New Bauhaus and returned in 1945 to teach at the school under its new moniker, the Institute of Design. As an outsider who made Chicago his home during a period of rapid growth and urban transformation, Siegel saw a different Chicago — ­and he recorded it with his camera. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, Siegel cut his teeth as a freelance photographer for national weeklies such as Life, Fortune, and Colliers, capturing midcentury Detroit using techniques like aerial views, which he learned from his European émigré instructors in Chicago. When he returned to Chicago after serving in the Marine Corps during World War II, Siegel photographed buildings being razed to make way for new highways, solitary figures amid the downtown bustle, palimpsests of  neon and print advertisements competing for the city’s new wealth, and, rather than trains, the scribbles of  signal lights that choreographed their movement into and out of  the city (fig. 3.2a–d). He published these pictures in mainstream magazines where Americans across the country would see them, and he shot many of  them in color, which was then far

95

MAG G IE TAF T

3.1  Kenneth Heilbron, Untitled (Coal Yards on Chicago River at Lake Shore Drive, Chicago), 1942. Gelatin silver print, 12 ½ × 16 ½ in. Estate of Kenneth and Edna Heilbron, 2000.295. Art Institute of Chicago.

more common in advertising than in art photography. More than idle experimentation or commercial pandering, Siegel’s use of  color captured the city that existed behind its iconic industry and architecture. He was eager to develop new techniques that might, as he said, more effectively “[reveal] the world about us.”3 In midcentury Chicago, that world was changing rapidly. As the primacy of the railroad was displaced both by air routes that connected the city to far-­flung destinations and by highways that connected it to nearby cities and towns, the world became simultaneously much larger and much closer. Indeed, during these years, Chicago served as a unique urban laboratory. Avant-­garde exiles from Europe mingled with midwestern industrialists. Local studio artists tried their hand at design, dressing homes and offices across the country and overseas. The city’s premier museum, the Art Institute, found new ways to introduce midwesterners to

96

3.2a  Arthur Siegel, spread featuring A Wrecked Building in Chicago,

Life magazine, November 20, 1950, pp. 82– ­83. 3.2b  Arthur Siegel, Chicago, 1949. Dye imbibition print, 9 1⁄8 × 13 ½ in.

Gift of the Illinois Arts Council, 1976.1262. Art Institute of Chicago.

97

3.2c  Arthur Siegel, Dry Cleaner, 1946. Dye imbibition print. Image, 6 7⁄8 × 10 ½ in.; sheet, 10 × 12 in. Purchase with funds provided by the Council of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, P2003.13. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX. 3.2d  Arthur Siegel, spread of

Untitled, Life magazine, November 20, 1950, pp. 84–­85.

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

the Western canon, while artists on the South Side brought art exhibitions and education into their neighborhoods. And as abstraction was gaining currency in New York, Chicago artists pressed the limits of  representation, as well as the expressive possibilities of photography. The city fed their exploration. “Chicago is the potential art center of  the world,” announced Dudley Crafts Watson, a painter and School of the Art Institute teacher in December 1943. “It is ideally located.”4 The sentiment was hardly new. Since the 1890s Chicagoans had been touting the city’s potential to become a global art city rivaling Paris, and for good reason: Chicago was booming. There was money, there were museums, there were collectors, there was a premier art school that drew students from across the country, and there were artists — ­droves of  them. Though at midcentury the city was still struggling to establish a robust commercial infrastructure of  gallerists and dealers, European art centers like Paris, Munich, and London were destabilized by the war, and a number of  factors suggested that Chicago was better poised than ever before to become the art center Watson had in mind. Area industrialists were supporting the arts with unprecedented vigor, new art spaces geared toward teaching general audiences to understand and make art were opening around the city, and a cohort of young photographers was carrying out experiments that would make Chicago an international photography hub for years to come. In short, Chicago had the money, the audience, and the creative drive. But artists were often frustrated, first by the challenge of finding venues willing to show their work and, when they did, by the limited attention they received in local and national papers. In 1942, the year before Watson’s declaration, painter Ivan Albright, at the time the sole Chicago artist with a national profile, observed that “the lack of art coverage . . . has inadvertently made our city provincial.”5 In building collections and staging exhibitions, the city’s cultural elite often overlooked homegrown talent. For example, in the summers of  1933 and 1934, when the Century of  Progress Exposition drew eyes from across the country and around the world to Chicago, its artists played a prominent role in, to borrow critic Eleanor Jewett’s term, “decorating” the fairgrounds, but they were largely excluded from the official art program.6 Two decades later, when acclaimed Chicago gallerist and curator Katherine Kuh, a longtime champion of  local artists, was invited to curate the American pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale, the exhibition catalog featured a map of  Chicago on its cover, but Albright was the only Chicagoan among a lineup of  New Yorkers. Though Chicago didn’t become the global art center Watson imagined, these untraditional contributions — ­decorating the fairgrounds, recognition in the form of a cover illustration — ­stand as emblems of  an increasingly enigmatic midcentury Chicago art scene. This scene was defined less by the art world’s familiar arbiters — ­curators, collectors, and critics — ­than by artists themselves, who developed creative ways to work and disseminate their ideas, through reproducible media like fabric design and photography, and through innovative, artist-­run education programs that trained new generations of  artists and new art audiences.

Chicago Industry, Chicago Art The Century of Progress Exposition (1933–­1934) is remembered for features high-­minded and low. General Motors invited visitors to observe as a working assembly line turned out cars that were then driven around the fairgrounds. Meanwhile, Sally Rand took top billing in the national press with her burlesque fan dance. Such spectacle, combined with the fair’s roaring

99

MAG G IE TAF T

color palette, bolstered its claim to be a “flaming expression of fun and frivolity.”7 Chicago artists importantly contributed to the “spirit of carnival” that characterized what many were calling the Rainbow City.8 Local painters covered the walls of pavilions throughout the exhibition with decorative abstractions and large-­scale murals, and area students supplied preparatory drawings of settlers, trains, and steamboats for the Illinois State Building’s monumental stained-­glass windows. But they were largely excluded from the fair’s official exhibition of painting and sculpture. Hosted by the Art Institute, whose own limestone façade was a relic of  the 1893 White City, the official exhibition during the summer of  1933 was a cerebral show, not of  art made by Americans, but of  art collected by them. The fair’s business directors and promotors initially envisioned a popular art show and, as curator Daniel Catton Rich remembered, “even sent out canvassers who asked Chicago shop-­girls and taxi-­drivers to name their favorites.”9 But the Art Institute intervened. Curators, including Rich, put together a show featuring paintings from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries that could be found on American shores, “emphasizing in this way,” as the catalog explained, “the resources of  the nation.”10 This display of  cultural capital included works held by a number of Chicago collectors, including Oscar F. Mayer (of  wiener fame), the McCormick Family (who then owned the Chicago Tribune), and David A. Smart (who cofounded Esquire magazine and after whom the University of  Chicago’s Smart Museum would later be named). However, a visitor interested in art by Chicagoans would have had better luck behind the museum, in Grant Park. There, at the fair’s Out-­Door Picture Mart, local artists rented booths to show and sell their work. This scenario was emblematic of  the art scene in Chicago. Chicago artists were selling their work, but the big collectors weren’t buying it. Local artists persistently bemoaned the few exhibition opportunities available to them, and indeed, the majority of the city’s museums and galleries specialized in Old Masters or in contemporary works imported from more traditionally recognized art centers, chiefly Paris and New York. But there were a number of institutions around town that dedicated space to Chicagoans. Though the Arts Club’s primary mission was to bring artworks and speakers from around the world to Chicago, it held an annual no-­jury exhibition open to its members (most of  whom were local), and the Art Institute maintained both a gallery reserved for Chicago artists and a yearly juried Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. Those who weren’t members of the Arts Club or weren’t selected by the AIC jury could rent space at open-­air fairs like the one at the Century of  Progress or at annual exhibitions staged by the Chicago No-­Jury Society of  Artists. For young artists the opportunity to show work alongside that of other artists offered an invaluable foray into the art world. In the case of Gertrude Abercrombie — ­who in the early 1930s, before earning the title Queen of  the Bohemian Artists, was working as a commercial artist for Sears, Roebuck & Company — ­it helped launch her career as a painter. When Katherine Kuh opened her eponymous gallery in 1935, she too made room for Chicago artists. The first gallerist in Chicago to show photography and graphic design as art, she interspersed groundbreaking exhibitions of work by European modernists like Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers with shows of  local artists like Abercrombie and Charles Sebree, a versatile African American painter best known for portraits like Boy in a Blue Jacket (1938) featuring sitters with cavernous eyes, gestural brushstrokes, and pallid colors. In doing so, Kuh endorsed Chicago artists as part of  a vital international scene. Similarly, the Renaissance Society, a contemporary kunsthalle at the University of Chicago, showed painting and

100

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

sculpture by the European avant-­garde as well as, for instance, Polish-­born, Chicago-­raised Morris Topchevsky’s watercolor scenes of Mexican life (1930) and oil, watercolor, and woodcut landscapes by Romanian émigré Emil Armin (1944). The Ren’s 1941 exhibition Works by Chicago Artists Loaned by Chicago Collectors featured portraits and landscapes by Albright, Abercrombie, and Sebree. The accompanying catalog urged “users” (i.e., collectors) to invest in contemporary art by Chicagoans, insisting that if (and only if) they did so, the work might one day enter the canon of  “timeless art.”11 But there were also different ways and other reasons to invest in the local scene; a number of Chicagoans were funding art programs that, they hoped, would channel young creatives into local industry.

William McBride, Art Collector M A G G I E TA F T

companies like Metropolitan Mutual Assurance Company. With Fred Jones and Fitzhugh Dinkins, he painted the murals and carved the oak doors at the First Church of Deliverance at 43rd and Wabash. A man of boundless energy, McBride was also an avid art collector whose collection of work by African American artists was, for a time, the largest in the world. Much of the art he collected was made by his friends, a veritable who’s who of midcentury African American artists: Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, William Carter, Charles Sebree, Richard Hunt. They liked selling to him because he paid better than other Bronzeville collectors like the Policy Kings, who ran a hugely successful numbers racket and tapped their profits to commission paintings and build art collections to legitimize their status in the upper ranks of Chicago’s black society. He would also buy in bulk, negotiating deals to purchase unsold works at the end of exhibitions. “If you did an overview with a movie camera or a TV camera,” Winbush once said of the warehouse where McBride stored his collection, “you would just see miles and miles of boxes.” Works that he owned by artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner and Marion Perkins are now in the personal collections of such figures as Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby and the institutional collections of such organizations as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which also holds some prints by McBride himself) and the Carter G. Woodson Library on Chicago’s South Side. McBride collected on a grand scale, but it is the legacy of his collection, not its size, that distinguishes him as a collector. He was a repository of African American art, recognizing the worth of these works and preserving them for their eventual path to a broader public.

Shortly after the young William McBride arrived in Chicago from Louisiana with his family, he met the famed gangster Al Capone. Capone offered him his first business opportunity, giving him a quarter for every glass bottle he gathered. McBride, the story goes, turned around and told neighborhood boys that he would give them a penny for every bottle they found in the streets and alleys of their Bronzeville neighborhood. He collected the bottles from his friends, amassing an immense stockpile. According to his sister, these years in the early 1920s were the start of his collecting impulses. In the course of his life, McBride would build an equally impressive art collection. McBride was an artist, a designer, and a collector — ­a true Renaissance man of Chicago’s South Side — ­who left his mark all over the city. He took classes at the School of the Art Institute, where he met artists like George Neal and studied privately with Ivan Albright. Later he became a fixture — ­“almost like the furniture,” some said — ­at the South Side Community Art Center, even living there for a time before moving into the coach house behind Margaret Burroughs’s Bronzeville home at 38th and Michigan. He designed all of the posters, pamphlets, and promotional materials for the Center’s annual Artists and Models Balls; and he served as art director for the annual dance performances staged by the Sadie Bruce Dancing School, a Bronzeville studio serving neighborhood children, and Mildred B. Haessler’s Ballet Group, which trained the children of middle-­class African Americans living in the South Loop. He worked alongside the famed Chicago designer and art director LeRoy Winbush in the silkscreen department at Goldblatt’s, a chain of midwestern discount stores, and did commercial work for black

101

MAG G IE TAF T

Educating Artists for Industry When the city’s most powerful, moneyed men formed the Association of Arts and Industries in 1922, it was to enlist local talent to improve the quality of Chicago-­made goods. “Chicago must not be constantly depending upon New York for design work,” Walter Paepcke, head of the Container Corporation of America (CCA), would write. “We make the products in the Middle West, and we should have the man power with which to do them in good design.”12 Paepcke and the Association’s other members recognized that there was a host of young artists earning degrees at the Art Institute. Beyond simply hiring them upon graduation, the Association sought to arrange a course of education to train talented students specifically for work in area industry. But industrial design was only then developing as a professional field in the United States, and with no model to draw on, it proved challenging for artists and industrialists to work together. Members of both groups had difficulty balancing creative experimentation with a bottom line and overcoming the notion, long-­held in Chicago, that art was an antidote to the everyday, not its steward. A 1929 attempt to partner with the School of  the Art Institute in establishing what would have been one the first accredited schools of industrial art in the United States failed.13 But in 1937 the Association founded an independent school modeled after “the best Industrial Art Schools in Europe, with workshop practice.”14 To lead this European-­style school, it hired a European — ­László Moholy-­Nagy, a Hungarian-­born artist, designer, and pedagogue who had taught at the Bauhaus during the German school’s most industrially minded years. Moholy was drawn to the “uninhibited curiosity” of the Americans: “Everyone is a potential student,” he wrote in a letter to his wife Sibyl.15 He promised the Association (and Chicago) a Bauhaus legacy that was, in the 1930s, becoming increasingly well known and respected as modern design enchanted Americans from coast to coast. When Moholy was interviewing for the job, he wrote to Sibyl of  a unique sort of  loneliness he felt in Chicago. “It all looks familiar,” he told her, “but when you investigate it, it is a different culture — ­it is no culture yet, just a million beginnings.”16 Moholy picked up on a feeling that had characterized Chicago’s art world since its inception — ­a sense of  great potential coupled with continual loss, as young students came, trained, and left. With Hitler gaining power in Europe, Moholy was attracted to this unformed sensibility and the opportunity to once more pursue the creative possibilities of  mechanized industry. He brought with him to Chicago a number of  his European collaborators, including photographer Gyorgy Kepes, sculptor Alexander Archipenko, and weaver Marli Ehrman. Though his wife warned against it, Moholy called the fledgling school the New Bauhaus. The name announced Chicago as the carrier of  the Bauhaus legacy and suggested it was not a place to leave, but a place to come and stay. At the beginning, support for the school was enthusiastic. The Association offered funding, and Marshall Field III, heir of the department store magnate, provided a former family residence. The nineteenth-­century brick mansion was renovated, its Victorian solarium replaced with a modernist concrete, steel, and glass cube affixed to the building’s side (fig. 3.3). The formal clash foreshadowed a perhaps predictable rift that soon emerged between the new school’s director and those who had hired him. Moholy shared the Association’s commitment to hands-­on learning, but where the Association favored an instrumentalized pedagogy in the service of  practical application, Moholy’s teaching was grounded in more free-­form instruction designed to foster individual creativity. While students were supposed to be training for

102

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

careers designing things like industrial baking trays for Hostess and paperboard packaging for CCA, Moholy had them making tactile charts — ­long strips of  wood decorated with a variety of  protruding, textured shapes that he described as “scenic railway[s]” for the fingertips.17 After the first year, the Association withdrew its funding. Though Moholy would quickly resume teaching at a revamped version of the school, now named the School of  Design and funded primarily by Walter Paepcke, the abrupt end of  the New Bauhaus gave him insight into this city of  a million beginnings. “Creative people don’t seem to thrive in the Chicago atmosphere,” he wrote in the early 1940s. “The enthusiastic support given to new projects, new ideas, dies too quickly. There’s no stamina, because there are no convictions.”18 Fortunately for Moholy, he had Paepcke, though it’s hard to say whether Paepcke’s support was due to conviction, to his wife, Pussy, who was passionate about European modernism, or to the Container Corporation’s wildly successful ad campaign, realized in partnership with a stable of modern artists.

3.3  Dariel Humeston, Marshall Field Mansion, 1905 S. Prairie Ave., Chicago, ca. 1937.

103

MAG G IE TAF T

Like its forebear, the School of Design (renamed the Institute of  Design after it received accreditation in 1944) promised a simultaneously applied and expressive education. It trained “men and women practically and theoretically as designers of handmade and machine-­made products in wood, metal, plastic, glass, textiles, and for stage, display, exposition-­architecture, typography, photography, modeling and painting,” while also offering each student “that happy status of  self-­experience and experimentation which is the true source of  creative achievements.”19 Moholy modeled this approach by balancing a successful career as a designer and as an artist. During his years in Chicago, he did freelance work, most notably for Parker Pen Company, and began new experiments in abstraction, making pendant sculptures and pictures out of  industrial-­grade Plexiglas. He extended his lifelong inquiry into light by applying color and scratching lines into the recently invented material, achieving effects in reflection and refraction that, he said, could never be realized through paint alone.20 Katherine Kuh agreed — ­she called these pieces “vehicles for choreographed luminosity.”21 In the classroom, Moholy encouraged his students to be similarly curious about new industrial materials. When area companies donated new synthetic fabrics and plastics for the students to put to practical use, Moholy would instruct them simply to explore the materials and their properties. By studying the structures, textures, and surfaces of  the great variety of  new synthetics entering the market at midcentury, students sharpened their sensory perceptions. For instance, those in the introductory course led by Hin Bredendieck, a German Bauhaus–­trained joiner who would go on to launch the design program at the Georgia Institute of  Technology, used wood to carve so-­called hand sculptures. These abstract sculptures were intended to fit comfortably in the palm and between the fingers, thereby preparing students to design ergonomic telephones, tumblers, and tool handles (fig. 3.4).22 For some students, like fiber artist Lenore Tawney, these exercises were liberating. She studied sculpture at the Institute of  Design and worked closely with Archipenko, but it was Moholy’s drawing class, in which he would, for instance, drop a piece of  string and instruct students to draw it exactly as it fell, that would ultimately shape her practice. Rather than drawing a piece of  string in space, in sculptural tapestries like Waters above the Firmament (1976), Tawney would use string itself  to draw in space. But the exercises Tawney found freeing, others found frustrating. In the early 1940s, many of  the school’s students worked for area companies like Marshall Field’s, Standard Oil, Rand McNally, and Kraft. Because the school promised to bring design problems from industry into the classroom, employers paid their workers’ tuition and in many instances made donations to the school. But they weren’t terribly impressed with the return on their investment. “While the individual opinions of  our students vary between wide limits,” explained one employer — ­Hughston M. McBain, postwar president of Marshall Field & Co. — ­in a letter to Paepcke, “there is a general consensus that the courses have but small application to the kind of  work they do and that the curriculum is so limited as to make additional courses after the first somewhat repetitious.”23 While employers expected students to emerge from their coursework with greater design facility, Moholy expected them to emerge as more fulfilled human beings.24 For him, the School of  Design was not just a design school. It was a place where students could explore what he called “the interrelatedness of  man’s fundamental qualities.”25 In the words of  his wife and biographer, it was an experiment in totality.26 The experiment was short-­lived. Moholy died in 1946, and three years later, when the school was folded into the Illinois Institute of  Technology, of  which it is still a part, its new

104

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

3.4  Spread from “L. Moholy-­Nagy and Institute of Design in Chicago,” Everyday Arts Quarterly (Minneapolis), no. 3 (Winter 1946 / Spring 1947). Ryerson and Burnham Library Book Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.

director, Serge Chermayeff, reoriented the curriculum toward what he called “technical skill . . . within the framework of  a highly developed industrial society.”27 But even as the school’s mission changed, many of Moholy’s former students and colleagues carried forward his approach to creatively integrating art and industry.

Integrating Art and Industry In 1948 the Renaissance Society mounted Form at Play: Abstraction in Various Materials by Chicago Artists, a show exploring the role of abstraction in art and design. Marie Zoe Greene-­ Mercier, who had been a student at the New Bauhaus (where she was frequently scolded by Moholy for poor attendance), showed collages that used shapes drawn from mail-­order dress patterns to explore texture (and prompted critic Frank Holland to call her “the most original artist in Chicago”).28 In the same show, and with the same eye toward intertwining art and everyday life, Hildegarde Melzer exhibited ceramics designed and executed at the Ceramics Workshop, a Chicago studio comprised predominantly of women artists. Jano Walley contributed chunky jewelry that combined natural and synthetic materials to build layered

105

MAG G IE TAF T

compositions. Julia McVicker and Else Regensteiner, weavers who had together established the firm reg/wick Hand Woven Originals in 1945 out of McVicker’s South Side home, displayed woven patterns developed directly on the loom rather than sketched in advance. And James Prestini showed wooden bowls and platters that MoMA design curator Edgar Kaufmann Jr. would later say blurred the boundary between craft and art.29 All of these makers had a connection to Moholy’s school. But the exhibition identified them simply as Chicago artists whose work had been gathered “to make abstract art not only more intelligible, but more enjoyable to the general public, who . . . are apt to dismiss it.”30 The choice to frame the artists by dint of their shared residency in Chicago — ­rather than their shared origins at the Institute of Design — ­suggests that Moholy’s mission to cultivate applied creativity was no longer just the project of ID. It had become a distinctive characteristic of artists in Chicago. Hardly just an antidote, art was increasingly a part of the everyday. This was not always by choice. Following the dissolution of  the New Deal’s Federal Arts Project in 1942, many of  the artists it might once have employed capitalized on opportunities for work in Chicago’s thriving industrial landscape, which included manufacturers like Radio Flyer, Sunbeam, Bell Telephone, Motorola, Schwinn, and Zenith. By the early 1950s Chicago hosted the world’s largest steel and rail center and, according to Newsweek, “the nation’s largest industrial area.”31 The city was, at midcentury, not only hog butcher to the world but retailer to the nation, and artists took advantage of  this booming industrial expansion. In the past, artists in Chicago and elsewhere had sought employment from industry in order to bankroll their art-­making. But in midcentury Chicago, artists began making art for industry. Institute of  Design alumni Frances and Michael Higgens, who began Higgens Glass Studio in their apartment in 1948, experimented with boldly colored, geometric and biomorphic abstract patterns in useful glassware made in kilns behind their couch. By the early ’50s, they were taking orders from Marshall Field’s and Georg Jensen’s New York shop before ultimately partnering with the Dearborn Glass Company. In 1947 John Denst and Donald Soderlund, who studied at the School of  Design and the School of  the Art Institute, respectively, opened Denst and Soderlund, a tastemaking wallpaper firm dedicated to making large-­scale patterns that produced the illusion of  space. And they were not the only ones designing patterns — ­a number of  Chicago artists were particularly successful in the realm of textile design. Chicago’s art schools provided ample opportunity to study fabric, including pattern design, screen printing, and weaving. However, a number of the most influential textile designers to emerge from Chicago, including Angelo Testa, Ben Rose, and Eleanor Kluck (née McMaster), began as painters and then parleyed their experience with color, composition, and form into new careers. For Testa, who realized his first design — ­the Little Man print, comprising a silhouette twice and thrice repeated (fig. 3.5) — ­in a silkscreening class at the School of  Design, the switch was voluntary. Testa worked like an artist sketching, making, and selling his work; he would design a pattern, screen-­print it on machine-­produced, store-­bought cottons, linens, and wools to create “undreamed of  vibrations and effects” (here Moholy’s influence is evident), and then sell it to a design house like Knoll or Herman Miller for distribution. 32 Testa’s practice managed to balance creatively and commercially viable design for the consumer market. Both Ben Rose, of  Ben Rose, Inc., and Eleanor Kluck, of  Elenhank (the company she formed with her husband Henry Kluck), trained as painters at the School of the Art Institute in the late 1930s and began working in textiles almost accidentally. Each designed their first

106

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

3.5  Little Man, 1942. Designed by Angelo Testa; produced by Angelo Testa &

Company, Chicago. Screen-­printed cotton, twill weave, 63 ½ × 36 5⁄8 in.

patterns for personal use — ­Rose screen-­printed table mats to give away as Christmas gifts, and Kluck designed fabrics to decorate her and Henry’s all-­too-­beige apartment. Architect Henry P. Glass admired Rose’s design and used it as window dressing for his Vincent Kling Studios project in Chicago, while architect Reginald F. Inwood incorporated Kluck’s rolling, staggered Flora pattern into his design for a southern California community house. That both of  these rookie patterns ultimately dressed the interiors of  modern architectural projects offers some indication of  why art and industry were successfully intertwined

107

MAG G IE TAF T

through textiles in Chicago after the war. Throughout the country, textiles were part of  the postwar growth in domestic furnishing and homewares, but in Chicago specifically, the city’s architectural legacy had long attracted artists and informed their work, whether explicitly or not.33 Kluck, for instance, thematized the city in patterns like Metropolis (1955), which references the skyscraper through a stacked and layered building motif  that produces a dense verticality (fig. 3.6). She also approached pattern itself as architecture, imagining textiles in three dimensions rather than two. As the Tribune explained in 1950, “Elenhank has paid particular attention to how fabrics will look pleated.”34 As a rule, the firm’s designs lacked any repeats across the entire width of the fabric, and in its custom work, clients could select how densely or sparsely a pattern repeated. The result was more like a site-­specific installation than an endlessly repeating motif. Local industry and innovation further aided the rise of  textile arts in Chicago. Ben Rose built his career on this. He collaborated with area corporations, including United Airlines, for which he designed a Hawaiian motif  to upholster the seats of  the Stratocruisers it flew between San Francisco and Honolulu. He also worked with locally made materials, like pigments manufactured by the Chicago-­based company Naz-­Dar and fireproof  synthetics that met postwar urban fire codes. This work earned Rose national attention, including a number of  Good Design citations jointly awarded by the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and the Museum of  Modern Art in New York. The Good Design program, active from 1951 to 1955, recognized “design intended for present-­day life, in regards to usefulness, to methods and materials and to the progressive taste of the day.”35 Selections were made by a rotating, two-­person jury that often included at least one Chicagoan — ­Serge Chermayeff, for instance, or Meyric Rogers, curator of  decorative arts at the Art Institute. Winning designs like Rose’s were exhibited at the Merchandise Mart, with a portion of  the display then sent to MoMA — ­Chicago supplying New York with good design. While Rose received national accolades, his mentor, Francis Chapin, was skeptical of his former student’s practice of  repurposing painterly style in the service of  salable textile patterns. Chapin, a lithographer and painter of sea-­and cityscapes, and a well-­respected teacher at SAIC, embraced the special freedom available to artists in Chicago. He once told a reporter that it was better to be an artist in Chicago than in New York because in Chicago “an artist had more chance to develop his own style.”36 With designs like Groves (1954), a furnishing fabric that features staggered, horizontal bands of  tree silhouettes printed in two shades of  green (fig. 3.7), Rose worked his patterns as though they were paintings. He used only white textiles, as though the fabric were a canvas, and drew motifs from natural forms (like clouds) and everyday ones (like paperclips), consistent with the linear style he had developed while a student of  Chapin’s. But his creative practice depended on clients, commissions, and sales. In Chapin’s eyes, when artists yoked creativity to business, they were forced to abandon their own style and serve convention. When photographer Arthur Siegel tried his hand at textile design, he experienced precisely this. In 1949 Hans Knoll, whose namesake company manufactured now-­iconic designs by Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and others, suggested Siegel sell some of his photographs, which had been used to decorate the walls of  Knoll showrooms across the United States, as fabric patterns to the Swedish design company Nordiska Kompaniet. Siegel developed at least four motifs based on the double exposures and color printing he was exploring with his students at the Institute of Design. But when Nordiska Kompaniet surveyed a number of  Scandinavian

108

3.6  Metropolis (furnishing fabric), 1955. Designed by Eleanor Kluck and Henry Kluck; produced by Elenhank Designers, Riverside, IL. Screen-­printed linen and cotton, plain weave, 107 7⁄8 × 52 ½ in.

3.7  Groves (furnishing fabric), 1954 (reprinted in 1988). Designed and produced by Ben Rose, Chicago. Screen-­printed modacrylic and rayon, 108 ¾ × 49 ½ in.

109

MAG G IE TAF T

architects to ask if  they would use the patterns in their projects, none expressed interest. A representative told Siegel his patterns were “beautiful” but “too advanced.”37 The company rejected all but one, Timglas, featuring stripes of  blue hourglass silhouettes on white linen. Siegel’s experience with Nordiska Kompaniet was typical of  the challenge presented by industry. Walter Paepcke had envisioned collaboration between art and industry as a recipe for “the good life.”38 Artists could help industry produce “artistically outstanding” things, and industry could help artists “share to a greater extent in the earning possibilities which are essential for a happy existence.”39 Collaboration offered Chicago artists lucrative careers and an opportunity to disseminate their work in lieu of  the exhibitions from which they so often felt excluded. But it also forced a bottom line. As Paepcke himself  reflected in the midst of  his efforts to raise money for the creative bastion that was the Institute of  Design, “I cannot interest firms or individuals unless they, as successful, somewhat impatient, and aggressive businessmen, see the same rapid strides of  progress that they are used to witnessing day by day in their own organizations.”40 Though not always successful, these midcentury efforts at collaboration broke down the boundary that had historically separated art and everyday life in Chicago, and they succeeded in disseminating work by Chicago artists across the country, and beyond.

Building Arts Communities and Building Communities through Art In the years leading up to World War II, most of Chicago’s galleries were clustered just north of the Chicago River. Earlier in the century, this neighborhood, then known as Towertown, had been a raucous bohemian mecca. By the 1930s the scene had settled and the galleries, including the Arts Club and Katherine Kuh’s gallery, had moved in. “Scores of old, disreputable houses are made over into studios, but not for artists,” reported the Chicago Sunday Times. “They were fitted with French windows, over-­ornamented fireplaces, ceiling beams and various ‘quaint’ and ‘artistic’ gew-­gaws — ­and rented to businessmen and assorted dalliers who adored north light sentiment.”41 And it was primarily these businessmen and assorted dalliers who made up the audience for modern art. Building on prior efforts to democratize art, be they by Hull-­House or the Better Homes Institute, there were a number of midcentury efforts to expand that audience. At the Art Institute, Kuh pioneered new display techniques that lay the foundation for future museum education departments. And on the South Side, in the predominantly black neighborhood christened Bronzeville in the 1930s, a group of artists and “society people”opened the South Side Community Art Center, making art and art education more readily available to the city’s black residents.42 In both cases, organizers capitalized on the familiar — ­familiar skills or familiar spaces — ­to introduce new audiences to the unfamiliar world of modern art.

Pioneering Art Education Before Katherine Kuh arrived at the Art Institute in 1943, education at the museum had been primarily for kids. A gallery called the Children’s Museum featured rotating exhibitions of work made by children and instructional displays of artists’ materials and tools. In 1939, the year after Daniel Catton Rich took over as director of the museum, the space was renamed

110

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

the Gallery of Art Interpretation, and its focus shifted from educating children to educating adults. This adult-­oriented education gallery was the first of its kind in an American museum, and from 1943 to 1952 Katherine Kuh presided over its innovative installations. Kuh was not new to art education. Before closing her gallery in 1943, she had held art history lessons there, delivering lectures on modernism and animating them with the work on view in the gallery. At the Art Institute, she translated these lessons into visual displays. Her first order of  business was to hire recent émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to redesign the space. (Lore has it that, as at the Arts Club, Mies did the job for no pay on the condition that the museum permit him to smoke his beloved cigars while working in the gallery.43) In the new space, which was now both intimate and flexible, Kuh installed Who Is Posada?, a companion to the museum’s monographic show Printmaker to the Mexican People, about the turn-­of-­ the-­century Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. To answer the question, Kuh focused attention on Posada’s environment and his influences, as well as other printmakers whom he in turn influenced. Eliminating wall and label text as much as possible, Kuh arranged visual comparisons to present visitors with a contextual look at the printmaker. To show how Posada drew from indigenous Mesoamerican traditions, she displayed the artist’s prints alongside maps, photographs, and pre-­Columbian artifacts borrowed from the Field Museum. Rather than teaching visitors about art by introducing them to specialist terminology or philosophical interpretations, Kuh tried “to make only those statements on the wall which can be proved by visual examples, comparisons or contrasts.”44 For visitors to learn, she asked simply that they look. In Who Is Posada? and in subsequent shows like the popular Explaining Abstract Art, Kuh pioneered innovative techniques in using visual, rather than verbal, didactics, as well as intermedia displays that paired works of art from different periods and genres. For example, in How Real Is Realism? (1951), she showed work from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries and placed sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography side by side in an exhibition designed to challenge visitors who wrote off  abstraction and equated realism with quality. The director of  the San Francisco Museum of  Art (now SF MoMA) observed that Kuh’s gallery was “the only case so far in which a major museum has set aside space for the regular presentation of  teaching exhibitions.”45 Museums around the country took note, asked to borrow Kuh’s exhibitions, and have since adopted her techniques for permanent collection and special exhibition galleries, eliminating wall labels and showing painting and sculpture alongside contextual material. Critics and museum visitors continue to debate the efficacy of  the tactics pioneered by Kuh, while curators and educators continue to deploy them to entice new audiences.

Bringing Art into Neighborhoods In 1939, at the same time the Art Institute was reconceptualizing its Children’s Museum as the Gallery of Art Interpretation, the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) opened six miles to the south. The Renaissance Society was already in the neighborhood, but HPAC had a different mission. The itinerant organization was founded less as a kunsthalle than as a community center. Located today in a converted army warehouse a few blocks from Lake Michigan, the Center spent its first sixty years without permanent quarters. The priority of HPAC’s first director, painter Harold Haydon, was simply to put art where people work and live.46

111

Hyde Park Art Center mission statement

112

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

In Chicago, there was plenty of precedent for this. In Bronzeville artists convened at the Abraham Lincoln Centre, founded as a settlement house by the All Souls Unitarian Church in 1905, and at the Wabash Avenue YMCA, which regularly hosted exhibitions. Not only were these spaces far from the geographic center of Chicago’s near North Side art world; they also integrated art with everyday activities. During the 1930s this coupling of art and everyday life was embraced in the United States on a national scale: The Federal Art Project (FAP), established as part of  the Works Project Administration, supplied government relief  to artists by hiring them both to produce art for public institutions, and to raise consciousness of art’s social and personal value.47 The Illinois FAP sponsored murals in schools, libraries, post offices, and field houses, a sculpture program at the Brookfield Zoo, and frescos in City Hall. These projects brought art into existing civic spaces. But as part of  a national community art center program, the agency also partnered with a committee composed of  Chicago’s black intelligentsia to fund the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), a new civic space dedicated to art. Of the many community art centers founded across the country as part of the Federal Art Project, it is the only one still operating. The story of  the SSCAC’s founding seems one from our own time: An elegant building falls into disrepair — ­in this case, a mansion built for a nineteenth-­century grain merchant, divided into one-­room “kitchenette” apartments that could be rented cheaply to African American men and women newly arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration. The building is then redesigned by big-­name designers and repurposed as a community space — ­here, Hin Bredendieck, a former teacher at the New Bauhaus and consultant for the FAP design workshop, and Nathan Lerner, an instructor at the School of Design, led a team that coordinated the conversion of  the building’s partitioned interiors into spaces suitable for an arts center (fig. 3.8).48 Unlike early twentieth-­century settlement houses, where typically white, middle-­class instructors schooled poor, ethnic immigrants on high art canons and peasant craft traditions, the SSCAC was a community center organized by black Chicagoans and run primarily by black artists. It opened in 1940 to provide work, exhibition, and meeting space for area artists “to whom the opportunity for creative self-­expression has been denied.” While the School of  the Art Institute was one of  the few integrated art programs in the country, and near North Side gallerists like Peter Pollock regularly exhibited work by black artists, the SSCAC supplied a dedicated space for black Chicagoans to make and see art in a predominantly black neighborhood. It was also to serve as a civic center where ignored culture could be folded into the mainstream and “the bugaboo of  racial differentiation may be permanently destroyed.” As the Defender explained to its black readers across the country, the South Side Community Art Center aimed to “create a rightful appreciation of  the artistic contributions of the black artist to American civilization.”49 But these parallel ambitions were not necessarily commensurate. When planning began in early 1938, there was debate among the organizers as to whether the SSCAC was to serve a community constituted by neighborhood or by race. While the head of  the Illinois branch of  the Federal Art Project, George Thorp, envisioned it as serving “all the people on the south side,”50 some committee members warned against alienating the growing number of  black Chicagoans who lived on the city’s West Side.51 Golden B. Darby, chair of  the organizing committee, insisted on openness. In a letter to the committee, he advocated for “a Community Art Center to include all the people . . . a Democratic organization which excludes no person or group of  people.”52 His ambition was realized almost immediately. The center welcomed a racially diverse audience to its inaugural

113

MAG G IE TAF T

3.8  South Side Community Art Center, 3831 South Michigan Avenue, ca. 1941.

exhibition, We Too Look at America, which featured work by Henry Avery, Archibald Motley, Charles Sebree, and other black Chicago artists. A Chicago Sun art critic suggested that the socialites who frequented the Arts Club “could profit by a visit down the street at their neighbors’, the South Side Community Art Center.”53 The Defender reported that the audience was mixed also in terms of age and class. A reporter for the paper witnessed “little kids with their noses running and their sox dropping over their shoe-­tops, high school students with their too bright nail polish and their beach comber hats. Old women carrying armloads of  groceries, teachers, lawyers, preachers, doctors.”54 To draw a diverse public, the Center developed robust and varied programming. In 1939, before even opening, the SSCAC organized the Artists and Models Ball, an extravagant affair at the Savoy Ballroom, a famed South Side jazz spot in Kenwood. Taking Cleopatra as the theme, Margaret Goss (later Burroughs) designed an elaborate, Egyptian-­inspired stage set for 150 performers. Charles White premiered unfinished panels from Five Great American Negroes, a nearly thirteen-­foot mural depicting historical African American leaders Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington alongside a pair of  contemporary figures, George Washington Carver and Marian Anderson. Attendees participated in a spectacular parade and costume contest, won by Marva Trotter Barrows, who dressed as Marie Antoinette (fig. 3.9a–b).55 The event was originally conceived as a fund-­raiser to help the organizing

114

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

committee buy a building they’d found on South Michigan Avenue, just a few blocks from the Bronzeville commercial district known at “the Stroll.” But its success as a celebration of South Side glamour turned the ball into an annual affair. In subsequent Artists and Models Balls, Dorothy Dandridge sang, Frank Neal danced, and Elizabeth Catlett won a prize for a glamorous costume sewn from Burroughs’s studio drapes. Festive posters and broadsides designed by William McBride and coverage in the Defender and other area newspapers attracted the attention of  black Chicagoans around the city, and the Center’s diverse lineup of free exhibitions, classes, and lectures held that public’s interest. The early years of  the South Side Community Arts Center saw Gordon Parks’s exhibition Creative Photography, displays of  religious art that juxtaposed Lucas Cranach the Elder’s paintings of  Christ with Burmese Buddhas, courses on weaving and watercolor, and lectures on contemporary craft and the chemistry of  paint. Artists affiliated with the Center both taught and showed there. Parks, for instance, led the South Side Camera Club and, in the Center’s darkroom, developed pictures of the neighborhood, where most black Chicagoans were constrained to live, an area he would describe, years later, as a “landscape of ash piles, garbage heaps, tired tenements, and littered streets.”56 This sort of  programming connected artists and their art with a public, and it also helped establish the Center as a cultural anchor for a neighborhood in flux. In the two decades before it opened, Chicago’s black population had grown by more than 500 percent, and most of  the new residents had moved to Bronzeville. In the late 1930s the neighborhood’s old row houses were razed and replaced by housing projects. The SSCAC responded to these changes, screening films like The Negro in Art and We Are All Artists for local students. Interior design classes taught “easy and inexpensive methods of beautifying the home,” and a consultation service was available for tenants of the newly erected Ida B. Wells Homes nearby.57 The Center exhibited works from the predominantly white Western canon and also heralded and cultivated black artistic achievement. It presented lessons in modern design and adapted and revised those lessons to suit government-­built apartments. Such programming made art a part of the neighborhood, and the neighborhood a part of Chicago’s art scene.

3.9a  Charles White, Five Great American Negroes, 1939 / 1940. Oil on canvas, 60 × 155 in.

115

3.9b  Spread featuring photographs of the First Artists and

Models Ball, Chicago Defender, November 4, 1939.

116

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

So successful was the SSCAC that it became a model for other community arts organizations. Not a week after it opened, on May 7, 1941, members of the Polish Arts Club of  Chicago proposed their own federally funded art center project. The FAP was dissolved before their proposal could be realized, but that didn’t stop the Club from borrowing yet another idea from the SSCAC: in 1950 it hosted a Bal Masque. As at the SSCAC’s Artist and Models balls, guests participated in costume competitions, artists were awarded prizes for exhibited works of  art, and the hall was decorated with an array of  modernist murals, from avant-­garde to decoupage. Like the South Side Community Art Center itself, the Polish Arts Club’s Bal Masque was an “experimental plunge into the social world.”58

War Art Seven months to the day after the dedication of the South Side Community Art Center, Pearl Harbor was bombed and World War II came to Chicago. In the city that had long been the country’s largest meatpacking center, meat rationing forced butcher shops to close. Gas rationing emptied the avenues and thoroughfares systematically designed by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett and their Chicago Plan Commission. Navy Pier operated as a training site for sailors, and the Hilton and Congress hotels were converted into barracks for several thousand troops. Visitors to the Art Institute saw the shadow of the war even in the museum’s lobby, where firefighting equipment like galvanized pails and buckets of sand — ­as well as a huge drum in patriotic colors — ­stood ready, lest the city be subjected to bombing.59 The war’s pulse was no less felt by Chicago artists, who found their access to materials limited, and curators, who could no longer rely on European loans. Artists and curators alike weighed whether to address politics and the war in their art and exhibitions. And if so, how? For many artists, the war changed how they worked and what they made. While the FAP had supplied those on its payroll with paint and brushes, stone and chisels, the war made some materials nearly impossible to come by. The government rationed metals and photo-­ processing chemicals. The cost of  paper skyrocketed. These shortages limited preestablished practices but also opened up new possibilities. For instance, studies of  “the function of  light and form” in visual perception had already been central to Gyorgy Kepes’s photography courses at the School of Design, but wartime classes on camouflage now extended this inquiry beyond camera experiments.60 Students investigated Canada geese, zebras, and other natural camouflage and fabricated three-­dimensional landscape models. Some of these were exhibited in the Renaissance Society’s 1942 exhibition War Art, an unusual show featuring industrial designs like an infrared oven, a new type of barbed wire, and a shock-­proof  helmet created by School of  Design students, alongside patriotic murals and posters made by the WPA Illinois Art and Craft Project. For Moholy, this work wasn’t only about supporting the war effort with practical designs. “After the war,” he told a reporter writing on an exhibition of work from the School of Design, “the things the students have done here, odd as they seem, might help in the reconversion of  industry.”61 Trained in color, shape, space, and motion — ­according to Moholy, the ABCs of  design — ­this generation of  young Chicago practitioners would help usher wartime industry back to peacetime production. Nathan Lerner, for instance, who trained in and taught at the School of  Design’s Light Workshop, went on to shape the iconography of  postwar American consumer culture with his design for the Masonite pegboards used in window displays, not

117

The Great Ideas of Western Man LARA ALLISON

Chicago was home to a distinctive marriage of American postwar corporate innovation and modern culture. Starting in 1950 the founder and president of the Chicago-­based Container Corporation of America, Walter Paepcke, instituted an advertising campaign that brought together canonic writers and thinkers of (mostly) European and American intellectual and political history with contemporary arts and graphic design. “The Great Ideas of Western Man” campaign (with though a few ads titled “The Great Ideas of Eastern Man”) ran for an astonishing twenty-­five years. It was a broadly collaborative effort, engaging the talents of University of Chicago philosophy professor Mortimer Adler; Paepcke’s wife Elizabeth; former Bauhaus instructor and company consultant Herbert Bayer; company art directors Egbert Jacobson, Ralph Eckerstrom, and John Massey; and representatives from the advertising firm N. W. Ayer. Adler was contracted by Paepcke to furnish the CCA designers and advertising team with a steady supply of moral, philosophical, and political quotations drawn from the professor’s “ideas index” (published under the title Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas in 1952, as volumes 2 and 3 of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 54-­volume series Great Books of the Western World). The quotations were then illustrated or given graphic form and printed as ads for the Container Corporation in Time, Business Week, Newsweek, and Fortune. Ultimately more than three hundred ads, thirteen per year, were published. The campaign brought together many of Paepcke’s interests. Since the 1930s he had been involved in a pioneering effort to bring modern art into US corporate design, communications, and marketing. He supported the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design in Chicago, and German modernism more broadly. And he was a participant in the University of Chicago’s Great Books reading course offered to university trustees, Chicago business leaders, “eminent citizens,” and their wives. The campaign appeared as the artistic avant-­garde in America was being defined as Abstract Expressionism, presenting a quandary for the creators of the “Great Ideas” series. Despite their own interest in abstraction and the contemporary, they felt that the subjective painterly abstraction of the movement could not meet the requirements of a commercial commission to interpret external ideas in a visual, legible form. Because Abstract Expressionism was largely defined by the internalization of meaning and a retreat from the political and social world, it stood against the principles of the German modernists and design reformers that shaped

Paepcke and his team’s approach to corporate advertising. As a result, the “Great Ideas” advising committee regularly turned to graphic designers, rather than artists, to meet its ends. Even so, the campaign managed, over a quarter of a century, to incorporate a diversity of artistic and craft mediums and styles, communicating, in effect, freedom of expression within the politics of corporate excellence. The “Great Ideas” ads sold not only the ideal of classics-­ based or liberal education but the idea that American business was the rightful heir to the tradition of American democracy and the humanist tradition of the West. The campaign essentially repackaged historical ideals for a postwar mass audience, promoting Paepcke’s view that artists and business leaders were responsible for leading a march of historical progress through their mutual interests. Offering a space for readers of mainstream magazines to contemplate the Enlightenment ideals of happiness and freedom, the advertisements were nonetheless structured by a decidely capitalist aim, to build a better society through the unification and shared values of the artist, business leader, and consumer.

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

to mention the bear-­shaped honey bottles and Thermos coffee containers that sat atop them. Curators were also affected by the war. Katherine Kuh was forced to close her gallery; however much she championed Chicago artists, her primary emphasis was new work from Europe — ­which was no longer available. Other institutions around town (and across the country) simply redirected their attention, resulting in a swell of  exhibitions focusing on American art. Locally, the war offered curators and institutions an opportunity to consider the relation between art and politics. Resolute in the antiquated notion that art was not to comment on but to offer respite from the world at large, the Arts Club refused any exhibition that acknowledged the war, and turned down exhibitions like Blitzed British Architecture, war posters, and a show featuring the so-­called degenerate art that the Nazis had banned in Germany.62 By contrast, Jewish gallerist Peter Pollock, who had been instrumental in founding the SSCAC, was eager to mobilize that institution “for the stabilization of civilian and morale defense.”63 In courses, students were asked to design propaganda posters for government distribution. Pollock and others at the Center recognized the war as an opportunity to unite and integrate mainstream America in the service of a common cause. Meanwhile, in Art in War, a series of shows held between September 1942 and May 1944, the Art Institute exhibited drawings, paintings, and photographs made on the front lines. Like bond drives and newsreels, these exhibitions set out to connect Chicagoans to the war being fought overseas. Primarily representational rather than abstract, the work on view showed not only the war’s violence (as in the Road to Victory exhibition, on loan from the Museum of  Modern Art) but also its routine banality, as in a series of  illustrations by Californian Barse Miller in which, for instance, a cold soldier warmed his hands over a small stove or a group of  men played dice in the barracks on New Year’s Eve. Shortly after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, art critic C. J. Bulliet wrote in his Chicago Daily News column about the importance of artists in stimulating a human understanding of war — ­while acknowledging the particular challenges posed by new weapons. Nuclear warfare, he speculated, might be impossible to depict.64 After World War II, Americans and Europeans would often debate the possibility and efficacy of  representation, usually in relation to the Holocaust. But before the war ended, when the scale of  the European genocide was still not fully understood, a number of  Chicago artists were already reflecting on the possibility of  representation in the wake of  the weapon born from experiments conducted in the belly of  their city, in a laboratory underneath the University of Chicago. How could an artist render any human dimension to this new technology that dropped from the air and annihilated life with such unrelenting force? In 1946 Moholy took up the task in two paintings that stand out as an exceptional return to canvas and pigment in the midst of his Plexiglas experiments (fig. 3.10a–b). In each, a floating orb occupied by irregular patches of color recollects the schematic diagrams used to represent the bomb in popular pamphlets and articles. In Nuclear I, CH, the bomb is brought into contact with a cartographic rendering of an urban grid, flattening the space between the bomb’s roots (in Chicago) and its annihilation (overseas).65 In these paintings, two of Moholy’s final mature works, he mobilizes the flat planes and color fields he had long used in his abstract paintings. But where prior work aimed to produce pure sensorial experience, this duo of  paintings confronted the challenge of  representation. Soon after finishing these paintings, Moholy died of  leukemia. But his late interest in representation was shared by and would remain vital for many artists in Chicago. Printmaker

119

3.10a  László Moholy-­Nagy, Nuclear I, CH, 1945. Oil and graphite on canvas, 38 × 30 in. 3.10b  László Moholy-­Nagy, Nuclear II,

1946. Oil on canvas, 49 ¾ × 49 ¾ in. Gift of Kenneth Parker, M1970.110. Milwaukee Art Museum.

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

Misch Kohn, for instance, who during the war spent a year working at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City before returning to Chicago to teach, first at the School of  the Art Institute and then at the Institute of Design (where he would instruct a young Barbara Jones-­ Hogu), made figurative prints that pressed the boundaries of representation. In Death Rides a Dark Horse (1949), one of  the first of  his signature, large-­scale wood engravings, the form of  a Cubist-­inspired figure on horseback slips between muscular precision and chaotic mass. While Kohn embraced printmaking’s reproducibility, which allowed him to make and disseminate multiple copies of  a single work, others like Ivan Albright, whose obsessively detailed, ghoulishly colored paintings earned him both hefty commissions and the title “painter of  horrors,” preferred the monumentality of easel painting. In 1942 Albright won the Metropolitan Museum’s Artists for Victory prize for That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door). Albright had begun the painting in 1931, but by the time it was completed, in 1941, the funeral wreath hanging on a Victorian door evoked not only death generally but also the fathers, brothers, and sons felled during the war. In the coming decades, the so-­called Imagists would resist comparison with Albright, but they too would anchor their painting in figuration. This representational work is often overshadowed by the scale and iconicity of East and West Coast abstraction. But works by Moholy, Kohn, Albright, and others laid the foundation for a group of  subsequent Chicago artists to fundamentally shape what some at midcentury were calling the “post Pearl Harbor period of American art.”66

Eye on Chicago After the war was over and Arthur Siegel had returned to Chicago with an invitation to teach at ID, he went to the beach with a 16-­millimeter movie camera and a woman in a striped dress. With her back to Lake Michigan, Siegel filmed her movement against the white of the sand and the blues of the water and the sky. He fixed his lens on her figure, zooming in to capture her dress’s horizontal bands of cream, orange, and green, then back out to record her rigid motion. Siegel’s film, which he called simply Filmic Dance #2, weaves together the gestural component of two strands of abstraction then gaining currency in postwar America — ­textiles and dance. (Siegel was familiar with the former through his own foray into textile design, while the latter was precisely the sort of thing he might have been exposed to during the summer he spent at Black Mountain College in 1951, where dancers like Katherine Litz were debuting experimental choreography.) But Siegel was hardly just recording this woman in motion. He was also exploring the boundaries of the camera’s documentary, formal, and expressive possibilities. Along with Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and other photographers who trained and taught at the Institute of Design, he used Chicago as a laboratory for picture-­making, shaping American photography, and so American art, in the process. ID’s photo department had begun as a two-­year certificate course. By the early 1950s it was granting four-­year degrees and became one of  the first schools to award MS degrees in photography. Widely recognized by photo historians as “the seminal place for the education of  the modern artist-­photographer,” the department built upon a robust camera culture in Chicago at large.67 This included amateur and professional groups like the Fort Dearborn Camera Club, the Chicago Photographic Guild, and the Council of Photographic and Art Studios; juried public exhibitions hosted by the Art Institute between 1900 and 1938 and the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) from 1942 to 1947; gallery shows

121

MAG G IE TAF T

at the Albert Roullier Gallery, among others; street shows at the Old Town Art Fair and the 57th Street Art Fair; and commercial photography firms like Kaufmann and Fabry, which specialized in architectural photography, and Krantzen Studios, which did work for mail-­order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. The Institute of  Design advanced this culture by offering young photographers an education in photographic technique and the freedom to explore the medium’s character, attracting international students like Yasuhiro Ishimoto, an American-­born photographer raised in Japan, and Dane Keld Helmer-Petersen, who also taught at ID and would become known for his architectural photography. Other photographer-­educators trained in the department include Barbara Crane, Art Sinsabaugh, Kenneth Josephson, and Ray K. Metzker, who took their training with them to help launch new photography programs across the United States (and, in Ishimoto’s case, overseas). The training students received in ID classrooms shaped American photography, and Chicago also left its mark. For instance, though neither Ishimoto nor Helmer-Petersen would remain in Chicago after finishing school, both went on to publish photo books that present its urban landscape to international audiences (fig. 3.11a–b). In Helmer-Petersen’s book, ugly, industrial Chicago, with its landscape of steel and stockyards, is abstracted into stark silhouette. He shoots not the buildings themselves but their verticality, pointing his camera up into the air. Power lines and skyscrapers are turned into geometric patterns, black motifs against a bare white sky. Ishimoto’s book, on the other hand, tells the stories of  the city’s streets. Shooting shadows and storefronts, he captures two Chicagos, one of suited men and gleaming skyscrapers, the other of  impoverished children and dilapidated buildings.

The Taller de Gráfica Popular VICTORIA SANCHO LOBIS

Coen, Max Kahn, and Margaret Burroughs traveled from Chicago to work at the Mexico City studio. Curators and administrators from the Art Institute of Chicago soon followed the artists. Visionary curator Katherine Kuh visited the workshop in 1943 and acquired the first group of prints by TGP members for the museum’s permanent collection. In 1944 the Art Institute’s first curator of prints and drawings, Carl Schniewind, also traveled to Mexico and acquired more than a hundred prints by the TGP’s founding members — ­Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O’Higgins. Schniewind collected a variety of printed material — ­relief prints, lithographs, broadsides, deluxe portfolios, pamphlets, and printed books — ­and used these acquisitions to realize two exhibitions: a project featuring the graphic art of Leopoldo Méndez (1945) and a survey of the TGP as a collective (1946). These exhibitions followed a major presentation, in 1944, of the late nineteenth-­century

The Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP; People’s Graphic Arts Workshop) was founded in 1937 in Mexico City to galvanize artists to use prints for political and artistic expression. Committed to an antifascist, progressive agenda, the workshop produced a broad range of images around social, historical, and literary themes. Works took various forms, from posters and pamphlets for wide, public distribution to editioned print portfolios aimed at art collectors. Mexico captured the imagination of Chicago’s artists in the early twentieth century, particularly through the books of Stirling Dickinson, a Chicago-­born and -­trained artist who helped found the artists’ colony in San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico. Mexicans also began immigrating to Chicago in significant numbers at this time. It is not surprising, then, that within a year of the workshop’s inception, the Artists Union of Chicago hosted TGP’s first exhibition on foreign soil. Within the next two or three years, artists like Eleanor

122

bold graphic language of prints and the power of an art form produced in multiple to express national identity as well as political issues of international concern.

Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, billed as the first exhibition exchange organized by the Mexican government and an American museum. The Art Institute’s collection of TGP material would eventually grow to more than three hundred works, one of the most significant collections outside of Mexico. The museum’s engagement with the TGP is beautifully embodied in a wood engraving matrix that its Print and Drawing Club commissioned directly from Méndez. Titled What May Come (Mexico, 1945), the matrix was used to create an edition of prints available for sale to members of the club. The block and several impressions of the print survive today in the Art Institute’s permanent collection. Though compact in size, the block and the image it bears register a dense and vast network of symbolic imagery: the artist lies in the foreground, attended by skeletons or calaveras, symbols of Mexican identity. The valley of Mexico recedes into the distance, behind a crucified eagle above a nopal cactus. Hardly a romanticized or ideal image of Mexico, What May Come expresses a desire for honest cross-­cultural exchange and mutual understanding in a time of profound international anxiety. Chicago and its institutions have since maintained a steady interest in acquiring and displaying works produced by the TGP. In 1987 the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art; NMMA) opened its doors in the Pilsen neighborhood; its presence in Chicago reflects the strong representation of Mexican descendants, a community that has grown steadily over the twentieth century. The NMMA collection boasts hundreds of works produced by the TGP, which reinforce the social justice mission of the museum. The Art Institute has continued to expand its collections and presented a survey exhibition in 2014, curated by Diane Miliotes, that renewed its commitment to Mexican art and the legacy of the collective. Artists and intellectuals currently active in Chicago, like Eric Garcia and Georgina Valverde, demonstrate the palpable impact the TGP has had on the city and its cultural communities — ­through the

Leopoldo Méndez, What May Come (Mexico, 1945), 1945. Relief print from a zinc plate. Image, 304 × 176 mm; sheet, 422 × 350 mm. Art Institute of Chicago.

Teachers at the school encouraged this sort of picture-­making. In classes, Siegel, Siskind, and Callahan took their students both into the darkroom, where they experimented with photograms, and out to the city. Most famous among these jaunts was the Siskind-­led Sullivan Project, begun in 1952, to document the towering buildings of  the “father of  skyscrapers,” architect Louis Sullivan.68 Some of  the pictures, such as Siskind’s own photographs of  the Walker Warehouse, capture Sullivan masterpieces that have since been demolished.69 Participants pursued photographic investigations of Sullivan’s architecture, capturing close-­ups of  its form, ornament, and surface. One of  Siskind’s students, Richard Nickel, would dedicate the

123

3.11a  Keld Helmer-­Petersen, spread from Fragments of a City: Chicago Photographs, 1960. 40 unnumbered pages; illustration, 7 ¾ × 9 ¾ in. Ryerson and Burnham Library Book Collection, Art Institute of Chicago. 3.11b  Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Untitled, 1959/1961. Gelatin silver print, 7 7⁄8 × 11 in.

Gift of Yasuhiro and Shigeru Ishimoto, 1999.100. Art Institute of Chicago.

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

rest of  his career to lobbying for preservation and photographing Chicago’s architectural past, memorializing many structures and details that would otherwise be lost to urban renewal. Meanwhile, other photographers focused, not on Chicago’s architectural monuments, but on what Arthur Siegel called “the commonplace.” Ted Williams, one of  the first African American students at ID, took pictures of alleyways and building backs, the parts of a city not designed for public view. His photographs look like snapshots — ­laundry on the line, a gate swinging open. But Williams uses these everyday cityscapes for compositional play. A photograph of  row houses that would soon be razed to make way for a section of the Frances Cabrini homes is bisected by a fence running horizontally across the picture (fig. 3.12). The rundown backs of  the three-­flats contrast with the careful maintenance the man in the foreground carries out on his car, while the skein of  power lines above and across the buildings rhyme with the angled tire marks that streak the unpaved ground. The picture is one of construction, building symmetry out of  the site’s uneven parts. In Williams’s photograph, the city is not just a subject to be pictured but a form to be shaped. Williams might have learned that from his teacher Aaron Siskind, who joined the ID faculty in 1951 and taught there until 1971, when he left for the Rhode Island School of  Design. Siskind was known by many as a “painters’ photographer.”70 In pictures of  decrepit urban surfaces, he converted the peeling, dripping, and cracking paint that dressed the walls of  city building into monochromatic abstractions (fig. 3.13). The gestural lines captured in his photographic compositions rival those of  his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries like

3.12  Ted Williams, Alley from 1121 N. Larrabee in Cabrini-­Green, Chicago, undated

(ca. 1951). Gelatin silver print, 8 ½ x 11 in. Chicago History Museum.

125

3.13  Aaron Siskind, Chicago 42, 1952. Gelatin silver print, 13 5⁄8 × 16 ½ in.

Gift of Mr. Noah Goldowsky, 1956.395. Art Institute of Chicago.

126

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Indeed, before he arrived in Chicago, Siskind had been part of  their New York scene: between 1947 and 1954, he had five solo shows at Egan Gallery, which had helped launched Willem de Kooning’s career, and in 1951 he was the sole photographer included in the groundbreaking Ab-­Ex exhibition The Ninth Street Show. After he came to Chicago, Siskind held on to his New York friends, promoting their work to midwestern collectors and gallerists, helping Kline, for instance, land a 1954 show at the Allan Frumkin Gallery.71 But unlike Pollock, Kline, and other New York School painters whose abstractions were rendered in their studios, Siskind’s, by nature of  his photographic medium, were tethered to the street; as though to emphasize this, he named his pictures after where they had been taken. Those shot in Chicago were titled with the city’s name and then a number. In Siskind’s Chicago series, the city serves as a tool for formal experimentation in photographic abstraction. Harry Callahan, like Siskind, made a number of photographs in Chicago. Callahan is best known for intimate pictures of his wife Eleanor, some of which traveled the world from New York to Moscow in the landmark 1950s exhibition The Family of Man, and also for his technical experimentation with extreme contrast and multiple exposures. Multiple Exposure Tree, Chicago (1956; fig. 3.14), for example, shows a ghostly layering of  tree branches recollecting the layering of  silhouette in Rose’s Groves fabric pattern. The eerie image is the product not of  darkroom manipulation but of  field experimentation: Callahan exposed a single negative more than once, without advancing the film. Callahan experimented every day; he reserved his mornings for wandering the city with his camera. He continued the ritual when he left the Midwest for Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961, walking that city every morning and photographing it. When he was traveling, he’d take pictures wherever he happened to be — ­New York, Asheville, Aix-­en-­Provence. Literary scholar Sherman Paul observes a certain urban anonymity in these images: “Though Callahan places and dates them,” he writes, “cities are cities, all alike.”72 Callahan focused his attention on the particularities of  photography and his family, but with Chicago as his backdrop for so many years, he also, perhaps inevitably, captured the city. In one picture from 1950, figures roam a street wet with snow and marred by tire tracks. Both figures and tracks appear choreographed, charting carefully calculated paths. Chicago looks like a stage set, an orderly façade.73 Callahan would later describe the photographs he made during his time in Chicago as self-­portraits, part of  “a body of  work that is a continuous piece of life,” showing the photographer “as a young person and as an old man.”74 Though Callahan’s body and face are never visible, the pictures nonetheless register his presence. This is evident in Camera Movements, a series of  night-­time exposures of  numberless city lights, begun before he arrived in Chicago in 1943 and continued during his early years in the city (fig. 3.15). Using color transparency film, then only recently available on the market, he focused the camera on the city’s radiance and then rotated the camera for the duration of  an extended exposure. While Moholy-­Nagy made similar pictures with sharp, neon-­colored lines that zig and zag in an otherwise black or near-­black field, Callahan’s utilize bodily gesture. In other words, the lines are the product not of  the subject’s movement — ­roaming car headlights, for instance — ­but of  Callahan’s movement of  the camera in space. These studies of line, like Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, register the photographer’s distinctive motion. Callahan used the city’s radiance to explore photography’s expressive potential. If painter Leon Golub would disparagingly refer to the ID crowd as “formalists,” he overlooked the fact that theirs was a formalism engaged not only with the medium of  photography, but with the medium of  the city as well.75

127

3.14  Harry Callahan, Multiple Exposure Tree, Chicago, 1956. Gelatin silver print,

2 1⁄8 × 2¼ in. Gift of Matthew Horn, 1988.545.6. Art Institute of Chicago.

128

3.15  Harry Callahan, Chicago (Camera-­Movement on Neon Light at Night), 1946. Dye transfer chromogenic photograph. Image, 8 ¾ × 13 ¼ in.; sheet, 10 ½ × 13 7⁄8 in. Gift of Dr. Daryoush Houshmand, 87.246.2. Brooklyn Museum.

Bebop Artist Gertrude Abercrombie DONNA SEAMAN

trees, letters, a vase, a telephone, gloves, windows, seashells, owls — ­just as a jazz musician improvises on familiar melodies, frequently transforming anguish into exuberantly inventive and transcendent compositions. Arts columnist Ron Offen picked up on the artist’s jazzy wit, writing that Abercrombie’s paintings “project the same feeling as an ironic Gillespie run of flatted fifths and thirteenths. The obliqueness is there, the elfin humor, the eldritch detachment.” When Studs Terkel asked her why so many jazz musicians were “drawn” to her, Abercrombie replied, “I guess they just know that I really love them. I love their music.”

At the height of the bebop era, artist Gertrude Abercrombie opened her Hyde Park home on Chicago’s South Side, not far from the famed storefront nightclub the Beehive, to touring jazz musicians, defying the strictures of postwar segregation. Her celebrated Saturday-­night parties and Sunday jam sessions were elevated by such giants as Miles Davis, Percy Heath, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, and Sarah Vaughan. Abercrombie herself played the piano and scatted. As the daughter of opera singers, music was in her DNA. She pinned her passion for jazz to hearing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” when she was fifteen years old; while her parents “thought jazz was junk,” she insisted on getting the sheet music and learning to play Gershwin’s now indelible composition. “The legend of Gertrude’s romance with the world of bebop jazz was already widely known,” observed activist, editor, and writer Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, who was eighteen when she began attending Abercrombie’s jazz soirees, where “the booze flowed freely, the air was thick with the smell of pot, and the emotion was breathless.” Artist and curator Don Baum, a close friend of Abercrombie’s, remembered that “there was nothing she liked more than to sit down at the piano with somebody like Dizzy or Miles standing near her playing their instruments. It was pretty wild.” Abercrombie’s guests included the jazz-­singer duo Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, and Kral created a piece titled “Afrocrombie” in their host’s honor. Jazz pianist Richie Powell, Bud Powell’s younger brother, was inspired to compose a tribute to the artist titled “Gertrude’s Bounce.” Abercrombie told Studs Terkel, “Richie decided that he was going to write a tune about me. And it sounded like he was writing ‘Santy Claus Is Coming to Town.’ . . . It was a very hot night and I ran downstairs and put on a green dress and a red belt on it to pretend I was Santy Claus.” Powell claimed that the music captured the rhythm of her walk. Abercrombie said, “Well, I loved it that he wanted to write about me, but it didn’t sound like the way I walk but that’s all right, I didn’t care.” “I want to make an unequivocal statement that Gertrude is the first bop artist,” said Dizzy Gillespie. “Bop in the sense that she has taken the essence of our music and transported it to another art form.” Indeed, Abercrombie riffed on her own private lexicon of images — ­the moon, clouds, bare

Dizzy Gillespie and Gertrude Abercrombie, 1964. Black-­and-­white photograph (photographer unidentified).

130

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

— The city, so central to Chicago’s pioneering photographers, also guided American participation in an international art world. When Katherine Kuh was invited to curate the American pavilion for the 28th Venice Biennale in 1956, she organized the exhibition around the theme of the city. For Kuh, the emphasis on the urban was valuable in distinguishing the essence of American art and painting in particular. “Since American cities differ from those in Europe both in appearance and in history,” she wrote in the catalog, “our painters have tended to evolve a personal method of interpreting them.”76 In Kuh’s estimation, twentieth-­century American painters working in a variety of genres and styles were united in their attempt to give form to the multiplicity and turbulence of American cities, their “towering skyscrapers,” “drab buildings and poverty,” “the radiance of numberless city lights.”77 These features, which she identified as most potent for American artists, defined Chicago and had been defined by Chicago. After all, it was in Chicago that skyscrapers were born in the nineteenth century; in Chicago that the Chicago School of urban sociology pioneered research on urbanism and poverty early in the twentieth century; and in Chicago that the first modern turbogenerator had been installed to illuminate the urban grid in 1902. But the show Kuh organized focused on New York City, which she deemed “the cumulative symbol of urban America.”78 Among the forty-­six paintings shown at the American pavilion, only one was by a Chicago artist (Albright). This was not for want of options. In her own Chicago gallery and as curator of  modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute, Kuh had exhibited work by Chicago artists who addressed the city and who, like many of  the artists she did choose for Venice, engaged abstraction. For example, in Untitled (City Street) (1940s; fig. 3.16), Lucile Leighton renders an urban block with such verticality that it seems as flat as the Masonite on which it is painted. Leighton’s street becomes not only a place for the play of children, whose bodies and shadows are depicted with startling sharpness, but also for the play of  paint, thickly applied cream whites that make plain the sticky opacity of oil. But Leighton, who studied at the School of  the Art Institute and with Misch Kohn at the Institute of Design, was nowhere to be seen. Kuh did give a nod to Callahan, commissioning him to devise a photocollage to open the show. And the cover of  the exhibition catalog was decorated with a map of Kuh’s adopted city (she’d been born in St. Louis), but in its pages she dismissed Chicago’s “smoke drenched silhouette” as exemplary of  the “decadence and dustiness of middle western life.”79 Many members of  Chicago’s art world felt snubbed. They understood that Kuh had squandered an opportunity to show their city to the world and feared their exclusion marked the city as “unimportant as a cultural center.”80 It especially stung that the declaration came from one of  Chicago’s own. Kuh had accepted, if not adopted, the New York–­centric mentality that had been growing since the war. In 1942 Chicago had seemed full of  potential as a global art center. But after the war, a coterie of  New York critics, collectors, and curators heralded a new generation of  painters — ­the so-­called Abstract Expressionists — ­who were making large-­scale works well suited for the walls of  galleries and museums. In 1948, influential critic Clement Greenberg wrote in the national periodical Partisan Review that the United States had become the art world’s “center of  gravity,” with New York at its core.81 There, artists had exhibition opportunities and a strong critical armature of  which, at midcentury, Chicago artists could only dream. Indeed, even a younger generation of  defiant Chicago artists was looking eastward. In 1948, when art

131

3.16  Lucile Leighton, Untitled (City Street), 1940s.

Oil on Masonite, 32 × 25 in.

132

TH E M E ANIN G O F PL AC E , 1933 – 1956

students from around Chicago organized Exhibition Momentum to protest their exclusion from the Art Institute’s annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition, they imported a jury of New York critics, artists, and gallerists to judge the show. Exhibition Momentum itself became an annual show, and the students continued to ask New Yorkers like Greenberg, Pollock, and Betty Parsons to evaluate their work. The invitations affirmed these figures as the art world’s gatekeepers, and New York as the art world’s epicenter. Nevertheless, Chicago artists were laying the foundations for an art world to come. Rather than rely on curators and gallerists, they developed alternative methods to disseminate their work. Some, in partnership with area industrialists and society people, established schools and community centers where they taught young artists who, like pollinating bees, took the lessons they’d learned in Chicago to far-­flung destinations. Others experimented in reproducible media like textiles and photography that allowed them to make and disseminate multiple copies of  a single work, be it among young couples setting up house or international readers and collectors of  photo books. Through their particular and divergent brands of  midwestern industrialism and urban pragmatism, Chicago artists at midcentury exported their work across the country and around the world.

133

The very toughest sort of town, they’ll tell you — ­ that’s what makes it so American. . . . It just acts with the nervous violence of the two-­timing bridegroom whose guilt is more than he can bear. . . . Making this not only the home park of the big soap-­chip and sausage-­stuffing tycoons, the home cave of the juke-­box giants and the mail-­order dragons, the knot that binds the TV waves to the airlines and the railroad ties to the sea, but also the psychological nerve center where the pang goes deepest when the whole country is grinding its teeth in nightmare sleep. Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, 1951 1

I stay in Chicago because it’s really shitty, it’s really america. I stay here because of the indifference, not in spite of it. I know who I am anyway. And I know who they are. I was never confused about my own idiosyncratic behavior. It’s the only thing I’ve got, for God’s sake. Why should I lose it in the turmoil of Acceptance in New York? Who am I then? Theodore Halkin, 1972 2

CHAPTER 4

Raw Nerves 1948–­1 973 ROBERT COZZOLINO

Defiance, assertiveness, aspiration, outrage. Chicago’s postwar art world thrived on protest, pushing back against what was considered “mainstream,” and at its most productive channeled that attitude toward new opportunities for artists. It was an art scene full of organizers and reactionaries who often took the energy and ferment bubbling over in Chicago with them to other places — ­a diaspora of  eccentrics and driven inventors. This generation may have had its eye on their immediate struggles, but they carried the culture of  individualism and persistence inherited from their Chicago predecessors forward. The limitations imposed on the scene through a small number of  commercial spaces, old-­guard clubs and organizations, and powerful institutions ambivalent about allegiances, forced action. Artists made their own way, reinvented exhibition venues, and redefined the art scene. It could be a claustrophobic and frustrated climate that was paradoxically open. Leon Golub, who spent his formative years in Chicago, later reflected, “It was like you could run free, because there was no place to run to, so to speak.”3 Artist Ted Halkin’s word for the climate was “indifference,” but he and others saw it as one that permitted risk and tolerated taboo. This encouraged artists to follow their gut, developing a personal vision despite whatever trends flourished around them. To George Cohen, Chicago enabled artists to reject obedience to the “right” principle: “We know about that principle. . . . But goddamn it . . . I refuse to accept it. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a perversity, or an alienation, or a toughness . . . or maybe we’re just losers. But there is a reluctance here to do something just because it’s right.”4 A wide range of  artists shared this viewpoint, feeling that Chicago’s immediate postwar environment had become “notoriously inhospitable to its artists.”5 It inspired protest against local authority and gradually constructed a contrarian identity in relation to an international art world that is still often perplexed by Chicago’s art. Some of  the imagery and many accounts from this period are volatile, full of contradictions, and bear the weight of purposeful desperation. These qualities grow from and mirror the climate of  a city that had slipped in stature through the revelations of its inequitable social order and the authoritarian political machine in charge. That characterization of  Chicago as “inhospitable” came not from a younger revolutionary but from Gustaf  Dalström, a fifty-­four-­year-­old veteran of  the scene. A leader in Chicago’s progressive art groups in the 1920s and ’30s, he knew the city was hard on artists. Perceptions of  indifference permeated all sides and generations. One solution to indifference or outright hostility is to create a microenvironment, an ecosystem within a larger whole that feeds and helps its inhabitants thrive. It is how to survive. That was the strategy of  a group of  artists

135

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

excluded from the Art Institute’s Annual Exhibition of  Artists of  Chicago and Vicinity in 1948. Dalström’s complaint, made to Art Institute director Daniel Catton Rich, led to a policy excluding students from participating in the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition for several years. In turn, those excluded and their sympathizers formed Exhibition Momentum as a protest and to provide alternative opportunities for area artists. The events that led to this incident set a path toward the alternative spaces and political actions of  subsequent decades. It was a watershed moment, significant for the ways in which it shaped the participants and established a confidence that artists could make their own way regardless of  institutional support. As a group, Exhibition Momentum posited a way to work around old-­guard authority and the dearth of  commercial spaces in Chicago, but it proved unsustainable due to conflicting aims and infighting. The positive results of  its aspiration showed others what was possible through collaboration and in the face of adversity.

“Injustice and Foul Play” The period between 1947 and 1949 was a challenging time for Daniel Catton Rich. On one hand, his museum enjoyed healthy attendance, great popularity in the region, and a steadily growing reputation in the field for connoisseurship and risk.6 Yet those qualities were balanced with animosity from local artists concerned about equity and inclusion, attacks in the local press colored by gossip more than aesthetics, and national accusations that Rich was a communist because of his defense of modern art. Rich promoted Katharine Kuh to be associate curator of painting and sculpture in 1948, and in 1949 she presented the groundbreaking first public exhibition of Walter and Louise Arensberg’s collection of modern art. Kuh and Rich had hoped that the collection would remain permanently in Chicago, but the following year it was promised as a bequest to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rich, who was appointed in 1938, steered the Art Institute through a period of unprecedented growth and professionalized the museum. He hired staff, like Kuh, who proved to be innovators in museum education and installation practices. Together they pushed to cultivate adventurous taste among the trustees and the public. They were blindsided by intense animosity from artists in their own backyard. There was nothing unusual about the structure, size, or advance publicity around the 51st Annual Exhibition of  Artists of  Chicago and Vicinity. It arrived like clockwork in June 1947, juried by four art-­world professionals: Albert Christ-­Janer, the director of  the Cranbrook Academy of  Art, located outside of Detroit; Philip Guston, then a painting instructor at Washington University in St. Louis; Mauricio Lasansky, a printmaker from the University of  Iowa; and John Rood, who taught sculpture at the University of  Minnesota. They selected 180 objects for the exhibition and in the process rejected more than a thousand. Jurors selected fifteen prizewinners and five honorable mentions. This too was common, but the selections sparked an angry and vindictive protest letter. Dalström sent the letter to Rich on behalf of  more than five hundred artists representing eleven local professional art organizations.7 To assure that it would not be ignored, he sent copies to local critics and the museum’s trustees. Dalström alleged the museum’s inadequate support of  Chicago artists and held Rich responsible for “the resulting cultural poverty.” While he complimented Rich’s acquisitions and traveling exhibition program, he decried the museum’s “indifferent attitude” and “lack of  adequate exhibition space” for local artists

136

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

and their work. This had dire effects throughout the art scene, Dalström argued, forcing the migration of  artists to “more congenial surroundings elsewhere.” Nowhere were these issues more evident to Dalström than in the current Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. Dalström’s letter offered several assertive suggestions, worded like demands. According to Dalström, jurors rejected too many artists each year. He felt they should be expected to include “as many artists as possible” — ­at least 350 works, roughly double the average number. The jury structure itself was unfair. Dalström suggested a dual jury featuring four local figures and two “outsiders” in order to privilege Chicago over the broader midwestern “vicinity.” Indeed, a percentage of places each year should be guaranteed to local entrants. But that was just a start. To make up for years of  perceived neglect, Dalström proposed that the museum begin a prints and drawings annual for Chicago artists and “give assistance and support” beyond its walls “to try and find space for exhibitions of Chicago artists.” The protest initially annoyed and perplexed museum staff. Rich was in Europe on museum business, and so Frederick A. Sweet, associate curator of  painting and sculpture, addressed the issue in his absence. Sweet told the press that the Art Institute supported local artists more consistently than any other museum in the country and had given more than a hundred local artists solo exhibitions. Answering Dalström’s criticism of the juries, he reminded the community that the regionally diverse approach had been implemented in 1930 after artists complained that “local persons serving as jurors were subject to personal feelings that impaired their artistic judgment.”8 Sweet’s defense of  the museum made matters worse. Artists planned protest exhibitions of those rejected from the 1947 show.9 Rich and Sweet had reason to feel that Dalström was not playing fair. In 1947 alone numerous Art Institute exhibitions featured Chicago artists: the “1st Veteran’s Art Show” (which included future members of  Exhibition Momentum), the Society for Contemporary Art’s seventh annual exhibition, the Art Directors Club of Chicago’s fifteenth annual exhibition, the School of  the Art Institute Annual, a memorial exhibition for László Moholy-­Nagy, and five solo exhibitions in the “Room of  Chicago Art.” Even without the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition, work by Chicago artists was on view nearly every month. Dalström and his group appear to have had problems with the kind of artists included and awarded prizes in 1947. The protesters did not specify in their letter what made that year’s exhibition so problematic. The criteria for inclusion, composition of the jury, number of prizes, and general size of  the exhibition were consistent with recent Chicago and Vicinity shows. It was Tribune critic Eleanor Jewett who, in a conspiratorial tone, suggested the real source of  their anger: “Students, graduate students, and teachers of  the Art Institute school figure largely in the prize list and make up a good proportion of the exhibitors. There is something here, which smells of  injustice and foul play.”10 Jewett’s accusation exaggerated the truth. SAIC-­affiliated artists did not appear in significantly larger numbers than usual in 1947. Broader issues connected to student participation seem to have struck a nerve. Youth was overshadowing instructors and older stalwarts of the scene, displacing them and adding new competition for prizes. Fourteen of the twenty prizes and honorable mentions offered in 1947 went to artists aged thirty-­five and under: Eleanor Coen (31), Eldzier Cortor (31), Herrmann Dyer (31), Miyoko Ito (29), Ellen Lanyon (21; her second major Chicago and Vicinity prize), Joan Mitchell (22), Stanley Mitruk (25), Galya Pillin (21), Felix Ruvolo (35), Lester O. Schwartz (35), John E. Stewart (21), Frank Vavruska (30), Ruth Wahlberg (23), and Emerson Woelffer (33). Half  of  these were women. Veterans of  World War II had also begun to appear

137

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

in the annual. While some were no longer in their twenties, they were attending school on the GI Bill and were considered students and amateurs by the older, established artists associated with Dalström. Mitchell Siporin, whose painting End of  an Era (1946; fig. 4.1) garnered the 1947 exhibition’s most prestigious prize, the Logan Medal, was emblematic of  this tension. Siporin was not especially young (he was thirty-­seven years old and an MFA student at SAIC), and he was already nationally known as a politically active artist committed to social justice. In the postwar period his longtime affiliations with communist organizations made him suspect among right-­leaning peers and politicians. Human rights were a lifelong commitment for Siporin. His parents had instilled these values in him early on, and he sought out like-­minded teachers and friends as his career progressed. He studied at the School of  the Art Institute between 1928 and 1932 while also working privately with the politically active Jewish American artist Todros Geller. Throughout the 1930s Siporin contributed drawings and cartoons to left-­leaning publications, including the New Masses. In 1936 he collaborated with Langston Hughes, making an egg tempera painting to accompany Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” for the July issue of  Esquire. At the end of  the decade, he and fellow Chicagoan Edward Millman won the commission for the largest of  the Treasury Department’s WPA mural projects, executed for the central post office in St. Louis.11 End of  an Era was likely too much for Dalström and his peers to take. Among the most politically charged and stylistically radical of  Logan Prize winners, the painting elicited attacks in the local press for its hybrid expressionist/surrealist style and forthright sympathy for civilian victims of the war. Jewett, who was already disgusted by the new approaches evidenced in the exhibition, described End of  an Era as “the cream of  the crop of  horrors,” while C. J. Bulliet, in the Daily News, directed Siporin and his veteran classmates to exorcise themselves of  the “withering and blighting influences of the war.”12 Siporin had been an artist-­ correspondent during the war, assigned to North Africa and Italy from 1942 to 1945. He witnessed destruction, the ongoing refugee crisis, and atrocities that echoed in the work he did after he returned to the United States. End of an Era was a public statement of mourning for what he had seen in Europe. It attempted to conjure an image of  hope through closure, laying to rest a period that resulted in unprecedented destruction. Two of  the jurors — ­Guston and Lasansky — ­would have been especially sensitive to the form and message of  Siporin’s work. Guston had been painting images of  unrest and threat since the 1930s; Lasansky was a politically minded printmaker. During the 1960s and into the ’70s each would make intensely personal work inspired by the brutality of the Holocaust, racial violence, and the Vietnam War. In 1947, with images of  the war fresh in public consciousness, Siporin’s painting struck a chord with these jurors even as it repelled local critics and artists who tended toward apolitical representation. Mounting pressure on Rich led him to convene the Art Institute’s committee on painting and sculpture on February 3, 1948, to discuss the issues raised by Dalström’s group. Conscious of  the bad publicity the controversy had caused, they voted to limit participation in future annuals to “professional artists,” essentially banning students from entering, hoping to appease the professionals and their wealthy supporters. When this news reached students, they mobilized to protest. Led by Leon Golub, who crafted an antagonistic and humorously sarcastic letter charging the museum with discrimination and cowardice, 813 artists signed a petition to reverse the ban. From the perspective of  the angry students, Rich and the

138

4.1  Mitchell Siporin, End of an Era, 1946. Oil on canvas, 40 × 52 in.

139

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

museum’s trustees had failed to defend them, siding instead with entitled has-­beens threatened by shifting sands.13 Rich met with representatives from the student group and promised to speak with the trustees, but it is clear that he hoped the new controversy would die down. He underestimated, though, the students’ determination to push back and make their own way. The ban galvanized students from SAIC and the Institute of  Design, as well as older sympathizers such as Gertrude Abercrombie, ID instructor Serge Chermayeff, and SAIC instructor Kathleen Blackshear. To military veterans like Cosmo Campoli, Golub, Halkin, and others, the ban was a biting repudiation of  their service and effort to reenter civilian life. The reactions of  the two protesting groups — ­Dalström’s and Golub’s — ­reveal how critical the annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition was to the local scene. One member of the student group described it as the common ground where all artists were “weighed one against the other” by a neutral jury that often had no knowledge of local infighting, factions, and politics. “So to be rejected from the Chicago show means you’ve been judged lacking by your peers, and that your work is not good enough to deserve display.” This attitude led collectors to consider, when weighing an artist’s worth, whether they had exhibited in the Chicago and Vicinity show. “They are suspicious,” the student continued. “Maybe they are getting something that is not so good. They’re not sure of their taste . . . unless it’s got the okay of  the Art Institute.”14 Once it was clear that Rich had no intention of backing down, the group began planning an exhibition. They voted on a name — ­Exhibition Momentum — ­and elected representatives to scout a location, design a catalog, invite jurors, do publicity, raise money, design and install the show, and arrange the opening. Among those who became prominent in the protest group were Golub, Campoli, Halkin, 1947 Chicago and Vicinity award winners Ito and Lanyon, Don Baum, George Cohen, Dominick Di Meo, Roland Ginzel, Joseph Goto, Roy Gussow, Whitney Halstead, Thomas Kapsalis, Robert Kuennen, Robert Natkin, Robert Nickle, Alex Nicoloff, Franz Schulze, Beatrice Siegel, Nancy Spero, Evelyn Statsinger, and John Waddell. Between 1948 and 1957 Momentum held eight exhibitions at six different venues.15 Initially a forum for aggrieved Chicago artists protesting the Art Institute, the organization eventually opened its membership and exhibitions to include artists from eighteen states. In an effort to be transparent in its jurying process, Momentum revealed how many submissions had been rejected and stated which artists each juror had selected. Most of the invited jurors were well-­ known New York critics, artists, and dealers, a rebuke to the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition’s regional focus. This also positioned the group’s work as relevant to a national, professional art world. The young organizers enticed high-­profile figures to judge their new endeavor, such as Josef  Albers (1948); Clement Greenberg and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1950); Max Weber and Jackson Pollock (1951); Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Sidney Janis (1952); Adolph Gottlieb and Ad Reinhardt (1953); Robert Motherwell, James Johnson Sweeney, and Betty Parsons (1954); Robert Goldwater, Charles Egan, and Jack Tworkov (1956); and Philip Guston, Sam Hunter, and Franz Kline (1957). Momentum’s leadership was strained from the outset. Initially they unified against the Art Institute to organize an exhibition that would reveal the absurdity of  its annual’s new “professionals only” designation. Their common goal, expressed in the 1948 catalog, was to narrow “the gap between art and the social world.” Through inclusiveness and a democratic process, Momentum’s leaders sought to foster a creative environment that would make Chicago “a vital center of art in America.” Irene Siegel wrote that she hoped the group would lead

140

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

to “the building of  a museum of  contemporary art in which the barriers between the minor and so-­called major arts would be lifted, where the integration of  architecture, sculpture, painting, advertising, product design and other visual arts so vitally important to a balanced civilization would be realized.” But not everyone in Momentum shared Siegel’s idealistic view. In 1950 the group experienced an identity crisis and held a meeting to discuss philosophy and direction. If  they had joined together to protest the Art Institute and now had made their point, was there a reason to continue? Targeting the museum was unsustainable, unproductive, and actually invested the institution with power. Some enthusiastic members left after the first year because they felt the group retained too much negativity and animosity toward the museum.16 Tensions intensified between subgroups associated with the School of  the Art Institute and the Institute of  Design. Though both favored eliminating the barriers between art and life, public and artist, they clashed over how to do so. Golub recalled: A ferocious struggle came up because we wanted to emphasize the social and political aspects of our exclusion, and the Institute of Design people were interested in adding wall space and speaking about the pure motives of art, and they felt we were terribly unclean in our desires . . . causing a great deal of strife. . . . The others were very upset over this kind of semipolitical, disorganized attitude. . . . I realize now that our political expression was related to the expressionist bias of our art. There was some kind of connection.17 These competing attitudes played out for all to see in Momentum’s 1950 exhibition catalog. The group voted to include nine member essays in a publication designed by Robert Nickle. In “A Law unto Himself,” Golub argued that society had gradually pushed artists to the margins where once they had been central. As a result, “specialization, cultural discontinuity, and competing ideologies” had caused art to lose its role as a “common language.” Disorder in society had inspired the greatest artists of the past, and society needed art as a magic, ritual, cure. Museums helped to homogenize art; Golub wanted to restore the power of revelation. This philosophy persisted among many in Golub’s circle. In a 1959 statement for the Museum of Modern Art’s New Images of Man catalog, Campoli wrote, “Imaginative forces, creative forces, penetrative forces, fall through the funnel which is the artist, and through his hands; like a caterpillar turning into a moth, the transformed image is evolved.”18 Fed up with this attitude, Alex Nicoloff accused the SAIC faction of  diagnosing society’s problems through the self-­absorbed temperament of  their “fatted egos.” Art was not the realm of  shamanistic figures claiming to heal the world but was embedded in the events and relationships of  every day: How many galleries of paintings will apologize for the rot and filth of a single slum? . . . To plant and cultivate seed, design a better chair or table, this is to better life. . . . The holy “universal language of art” that covers a crack or fills the vast walls of museums is not enough. What will be enough is to insure the fulfillment of every individual’s most fundamental creative needs of daily life. This is the theme and variations we must nourish and arm.19 By 1956 Momentum had shifted so far from a utopian ID/SAIC balance that its exhibition included “only fine art” because the organizers felt that such material absorbed “the attention

141

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

of the observer with levels of content which the advertising designer, ceramicist and industrial designer do not treat.” Ad Reinhardt had admonished the group in his 1953 juror’s statement that alternative standards create their own problems and new sets of exclusions. Although new waves of artists had become involved with the group as older artists moved away or cycled out, even here exclusionary biases took hold. Despite late leadership from idealists such as Irving Petlin, by 1958 Momentum was no more.

Chicago Experimental Music, Part I JOHN CORBETT

Historically, Chicago has been a pivotal place for the gestation and dissemination of new ideas in music and audio arts. Take 1942 as a mythic starting point. John Cage was a Chicago resident, described in the Chicago Daily Tribune as “a lecturer at the Moholy-­Nagy School of Design whose hobby is to experiment in the organization of sound.” That year he would present his percussion music in a landmark concert at the Arts Club. Peripatetic composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch was also living in Chicago in 1942, the year he built the first incarnation of his chromelodeon, a 43-­pitch reed organ. In a 1956 documentary, as Partch gives a tour of his 1801 North Orleans home while kids play baseball on the street outside, he says, “An inscription, given to me by a Japanese calligrapher, has hung on my studio wall in recent years and it says: ‘Though homeless, you make a shrine wherever you are.’ At the moment, my shrine happens to be in Chicago. And if it is a shrine, it becomes one only through the musical instruments I have around me.” The sense of transience expressed by Partch has been part of the Chicago experimental music community since its scattershot inception. People from elsewhere, like Cage and Partch, have found temporary or permanent sanctuary in the city. Chicago has also served as a launch pad for international figures, as it did in the 1950s when many of the great jazz musicians of the hard bop era, who had cut their teeth in Chicago, found fortune in New York or elsewhere. Indeed, it was the jazz scene — ­and the creative music that grew out of and sought to differentiate itself from jazz — ­that constitutes Chicago’s most important contribution to adventurous musical culture worldwide. Sun Ra moved to Chicago in 1946. The pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and self-­avowed extraterrestrial stayed for fifteen years, moving on to New York and finally to Germantown, outside Philadelphia. But it was in Chicago that he crafted his unique and influential approach to music and musical presentation, which included theatrical

elements like costumes and props, electronic instruments and experimental techniques, and a preoccupation with space, futurity, ancient Egypt, and the well-­being of African American culture. Ra started one of the first musician-­run record labels, El Saturn, in 1956, three years after Partch issued an LP on what he called the Harry Partch Trust Fund First Edition, later retitled Gate 5 Records. This independence and self-­production continued to be a hallmark of Chicago’s music scene into the 1960s. Certainly the single most significant development was the formation in 1965 of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Spiritually led by pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, the AACM provided a focal point for musicians, predominantly black and experimentally oriented. Key figures to emerge from the AACM include the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors), Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Fred Anderson, Wadada Leo Smith, Jack DeJohnette, Steve McCall, Leroy Jenkins, Douglas Ewart, and George Lewis. One of the founding members, Phil Cohran, had played in Sun Ra’s Arkestra toward the end of Ra’s Chicago period. Cohran split from the AACM early and founded the Affro-­Arts Theater at 3947 South Drexel Boulevard, which presented his own Artistic Heritage Ensemble, a group that included guitarist Pete Cosey (later known for his work with Miles Davis) and future members of Earth Wind & Fire. By the middle of the 1970s, much of the centralized energy of the Chicago experimental music ecosystem had dispersed, ironically, just as the city was becoming known as one of its American hubs. Ra was long gone; the Art Ensemble had moved to Paris in 1969, returning but then going in various directions, along with most of the other major figures. By the 1980s tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson was virtually the last holdout, earning him the nickname “The Lone Prophet of the Prairie.”

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Momentum’s demise was a symptom of  its success. While initially a protest against authority, it reclaimed that authority through a will to make Chicago a more fertile environment for artists. Momentum members founded galleries, cooperatives, and workshops that boosted the scene in productive and expansive ways: Campoli, Ray Fink, Golub, and John and Lynn Kearney established the Contemporary Art Workshop (1949–­2009); Eugene Bennett and John Miller ran the 414 Workshop (1953–­1959); Don Baum began managing exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1956; Natkin opened the Wells Street Gallery (1957–­1959); Morris Barazani, Fred Berger, and Eve Garrison established Exhibit A (1957–­1959); and Fink, Ginzel, Richard Hunt, Ito, Lanyon, and others founded Superior Street Gallery (1959–­1961).20 Although many of  these ventures were short-­lived, they sustained the scene and added grassroots energy. In boldly rejecting the establishment, they demonstrated artists’ capacity to take things into their own hands, the need for alternative venues for emerging artists, and the creative value of  artist-­run spaces. Exhibition Momentum was a turning point in the Chicago art scene. Its efforts drew attention to the city and its artists, and collectors, critics, and curators took note. Franz Schulze had declared in 1950’s 9 Viewpoints that the group’s “originators were people who felt societal forces, inquired into this culture, recognized needs, and chose to become counterforces, fillers of  need to their own extent.” Exhibition Momentum provided its participants with lessons and experience that benefited them long into their careers. For Di Meo and Lanyon it taught the value of  collective action and networks, which furthered their work in the antiwar and feminist movements. For Golub and Spero it revealed the power and limits of political action and provided strategies for making the political synonymous with being an artist. There is a cliché that Chicago artists, especially in the postwar decades, were hermetic, inward-­looking, and isolated. Exhibition Momentum showed that there is a constant thread of  political and social impulses that underlies existentialist and fantastic imagery.21

Here There Be Monsters

In the evenings especially, a provincial poverty floats through the streets. At the corner of a dead-­end street, children smoke and whisper about their plans. Sitting on their porches, women watch the city lights on the horizon. The groaning of the El shakes the silence; the foliage of a tree rustles; a cat rummages in a trash can: the slightest sound lingers. You feel far, far away from human ventures and follies, in the heart of a calmly ordered life that repeats itself day after day. Yet tomorrow morning you’ll read in the paper that they found a corpse cut into pieces in one of these alleys, that two men slit each other’s throats in a nearby bar, that a barkeeper was shot down with a revolver two steps away. The sweetness of Chicago nights is deceptive. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day 22

In the 1950s the United States grew gradually more paranoid about nuclear annihilation and communist infiltrators, while it continued to maintain racist social policies. Chicago seemed to register national anxiety and tension in high relief. The press in Chicago — ­one of the sites of the Manhattan Project — ­had closely followed developments in the nuclear arms race after the war’s end. In 1950 Life magazine published a graphic showing how much of the city would be destroyed if struck by atomic and hydrogen bombs. Illinois’s Republican governor, William Stratton, signed a bill in 1955 requiring public workers to take an anticommunist loyalty oath.

143

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

And that same year Jet magazine published David Jackson’s photos showing Emmett Till’s horrifically defiled body for the world to see. Writers from inside and out amplified Chicago’s reputation for violence, toughness, and seediness during this period. Some, like Studs Terkel, turned to its people, the everyday and vernacular, acknowledging the rawness and difficulties of the city but choosing to emphasize perseverance and hope. In this cultural climate, several artists who had participated in Momentum began to attract attention in the art world beyond Chicago for figural work that conveyed existentialist concerns.23 Many of  these artists were World War II veterans and were forthright about the impact on their work of  what they had seen during their service. Golub and H. C. Westermann, for instance, were haunted by war memories and made art addressing both humanity’s vulnerability and its capacity for violence. Psychoanalysis fascinated them, and they discovered Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, which reproduced drawings made by psychiatric patients at the University Hospital in Heidelberg — ­and would inspire generations of  Chicago artists and collectors. Many had been students of  Kathleen Blackshear at SAIC, who had directed them toward the collections of the Field Museum of  Natural History to fulfill their drawing and design assignments. These sources made sense together and suggested to the artists a relevant vocabulary for the times. Although there were painters in Chicago who made abstractions — ­such as Morris Barazani, Eve Garrison, Roland Ginzel, Thomas Kapsalis, and Robert Natkin — ­the artists who achieved national and international attention in the late 1950s made the human body and representational imagery their focus.24 None practiced mimetic realism, developing daring and eccentric methods for applying paint and objects to surfaces. George Cohen incorporated mirrors and nails in his work. Halkin built up thick reliefs in his paintings. Spero made nocturnal images in a state of  half-­sleep. Golub abused his figures with cleavers. Despite rejecting total abstraction, it is clear that they learned much by looking at the methods and materiality of  contemporary abstract painting. But instead of allowing that to define their practice, they harnessed these strategies in order to activate imagery. Although they may seem worlds apart, the figural painters were closer to Chicago’s most innovative midcentury abstract artists, such as photographers Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Kenneth Josephson. Relying on the body as a way to reveal a closely observed world, these artists often strayed from a straightforward representational subject, but their efforts heighten awareness about existence. Siskind’s photographs show how fragments and ruin can focus attention and reengage us with the world. Like the surfaces of  the painters’ work, Siskind brought out vulnerability and beauty in the ravaged, abandoned, forgotten, unnoticed, accidental, deteriorating surfaces of the city. Siskind’s Chicago 42 (1952; fig. 3.13) shows more than thirty irregular blots of black pigment on a surface roughly textured with accretions of  white paint. With the wider context cropped away, it is hard to tell what purpose the deliberately applied blots served. Pushed wet into the surface at regular intervals, none are exactly alike, and they drip and run into their neighbors below in the gridded pattern. They echo the rhythms of  the expanding city — ­its modernist architecture, mechanized assembly lines, efficient slaughterhouses, and multiplying populace. Their jittery, messy, mutating resistance to the structure that guided their application seems in concert with the city’s social tensions (often found in the flashpoints of  gridded blocks and buildings). The blots call to mind gunshots against a wall. The surface splits and cracks, and deep gouges run through the black and white paint.

144

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Siskind’s photographs of  puckered and blistering walls, pounded and scraped asphalt, and the edges of  signs present a disorienting view of the city. Though people are absent, their presence is felt in these traces of  work, of  accidents, of  violence and graffiti, of  attempts to communicate. So in the work of  Chicago’s postwar figural painters, the body often exists as a trace or as a vessel to carry other meanings. Their corporeal manifestations were often hybrids — ­humanity merged with beasts — ­metamorphic, in flux and difficult to define. Halkin’s Angel (1954; fig. 4.2), for example, is at once humorous and menacing; thematically dark and threatening, yet presented in full light, brightly colored like a heraldic banner; sourced from ancient literature yet vivid and awake. Its body appears as a dessicated composite of exposed organs and skulls. Nine bright trickster faces confuse the viewer who might be unsure where to look or which pose the gravest threat.

4.2  Ted Halkin, Angel, 1953. Oil on canvas, 50 × 38 in.

145

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

Works such as this led several critics to explain that the new generation of  Chicagoans made monsters and trafficked in horror and the abject. Above all the press characterized them as makers of  images, asserting a false dichotomy that implied that figurative work could not be engaged with materiality and process while abstract work was incapable of  representation.25 In this way, the Chicagoans and Chicago art became the monstrous other of  modernism at midcentury — ­abject, raw, fixated on the body, its physicality, and its psychological states.26 This “Imagist” label emerged during a period of  volatile debate over the continued viability of  Abstract Expressionism as a vanguard style and speculation about its successors.27 Given the inherently dialectical basis of  formalist criticism at the time, artists who confronted contemporary issues through the body, hybrid creatures, and mythology were considered image makers. Those who did not sympathize with the existentialist concerns of Chicago artists or their representational strategies dismissed the work as outmoded. “Imagism,” originally connected to these figurative painters, eventually became an umbrella term for work by the generation that followed and remains shorthand for a supposed Chicago style. Its overuse and overexposure attached to a particular group of  artists in the 1970s provoked a backlash among artists not interested in painting or the figure. None of the artists labeled Imagist embraced the term (nor were they responsible for it in the first place), and it remains a confusing appellation that serves only to reinforce critical dichotomies. Method and imagery, representation and abstraction, were often intertwined in Golub’s work of  the period. In works such as Colossal Figure (1961), a monumental painting of a nude man, Golub rendered the form and surface of the figure with thick encrustations of a lacquer-­ based paint that he scraped, rubbed, and scourged into the canvas. In the act of defining the edges and appearance of  the body, he confronted it physically, merging with it on the floor, face to face, a strenuous act of  endurance that was emotionally and physically draining (fig. 4.3). The resulting painting presents a body that appears burned, flayed, bleeding. Wounds on the figure’s body are physically present as gouges in paint, the surface worn away like the walls and walkways in Siskind’s Chicago photographs. Its presence is dependent on a field of alternately pooled and abraded skeins of pigment, shimmering miragelike as if on the edge of  existence. Golub’s contemporary statements reveal that he intended these figures to show humanity’s capacity for endurance. He connected the empathy and anguish they might elicit with the healing process of  a world still reeling from the atrocities of World War II. The figures present humanity as having “undergone a holocaust or facing annihilation or mutation.” Yet Golub chose to see in even the fragmented forms “heroic . . . beauty and sensuous organic vitality.”28 He spoke using the language of  existentialism and made art that grew out of  sources shared by many writers and artists who reconsidered meaning in the wake of  the war. Simone de Beauvoir described this tragic dimension of  living but insisted on the power of  individuals to be resolute in the face of  what had transpired: “Existentialism, struggling to reconcile history and morality, authorized them to accept their transitory condition without renouncing a certain absolute, to face horror and absurdity while still retaining their human dignity, to preserve their individuality.”29 Many critics and curators positioned Golub and his work as the epitome of  the Chicago group. He was included in several exhibitions in New York from 1954 through the early 1960s that purported to make sense of  the new nature of  postwar figuration. Peter Selz, who had trained and spent time in Chicago during the Momentum years, presented Golub, along

146

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

4.3  André Morain, Leon Golub Painting in His Paris Studio, 1960.

with Campoli and Westermann, in his first exhibition as a curator at the Museum of  Modern Art, New Images of  Man (1959). Selz gathered twenty-­three artists, more than half  of  them European (including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Alberto Giacometti), as an explicit refutation of  Abstract Expressionism’s stature. The exhibition violated the status quo in the New York art world by being regionally diverse (Bay Area figurative artists were included, including Richard Diebenkorn, who as a young man had exhibited with Momentum) and giving sculpture an unusual prominence. It also argued for the relevance of existentialism to contemporary art and the body as the prime vessel of meaning for artists concerned with politics, spirituality, and survival.30 Selz’s framework for the exhibition was explicit. For the artists he selected, “significant form” and bold expressions were no longer enough. While he acknowledged that the anguish of  their imagery can be “frightening,” the artists were “aware of  the mechanized barbarism of  a time which, notwithstanding Buchenwald and Hiroshima, is engaged in the preparation of  even greater violence in which the globe is to be the target. . . . They express their rebellion against a dehumanization in which man, it seems, is to be reduced to an object of  experiment. Some of  these artists have . . . the ‘courage to be,’ to face the situation and to state the absurdity.”31

147

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

Although the artists in Selz’s exhibition, and the Chicagoans who helped inform his sensibilities, favored representational imagery, the way in which they discussed their work overlap critic Harold Rosenberg’s interpretation of Abstract Expressionism. Rosenberg, like Selz, had rejected the dominance of formalism. To him, engaged avant-­garde artists composed in such a way that their objects had become unique emotional and physical extensions of their makers. In his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg posited: A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life — ­whether “moment” means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-­painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.32 Although Rosenberg had artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock in mind, there were numerous others whose approach revealed similar points of view. Golub’s physical confrontation of his subjects was one instance. June Leaf described her creative breakthrough in similar terms. She described making Red Painting (1954; fig. 4.4) as a process of self-­discovery and engagement with materials to find content: In the Red Painting I found my alphabet. It was my archeological zone. I felt something was there under me, a language. So that meant I had better start digging. I said I’ll work from nine to five. I’ll stand at this wall, and I’ll find that first shard that will tell me this is the zone I’m supposed to dig in. I hacked and hacked. And then one day these blocks of red appeared that I knew formed the chest of a human being. I started from the chest, which is funny since it’s where the heart is, and a life-­sized figure grew around it on the right side of the canvas. . . . It’s the most mysterious thing I’ve ever done. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever made anything that was so utterly intuitive. But I know it’s from that basis that I work.33 Nancy Spero’s Black Paintings, a series she started at the end of the 1950s, also involved an intimate process of searching for content in grounds of charcoal gray, burnt umber, and a range of deep dark blues and chromatic blacks. She often worked on the paintings at night, and they serve as a bridge to the more overtly politicized work on paper that defined the rest of her career. The seeds of Spero’s dedication to human rights, and consciousness regarding the abuse and oppression of women, can be seen in At Their Word (The Sick Woman) (1958–­ 1959; fig. 4.5). The painting juxtaposes a startling passage from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948) with a body painted like a ghostly shroud. Campbell’s book examined stories from Greek, Hindu, Mayan, and Norse mythology, Arthurian legend, and the Bible, among other sources, in order to consider the universal meaning of rites of passage and transfiguration.34 The excerpt Spero chose describes the ordeal of  the Sumerian goddess Inanna in the underworld before her rebirth: “At their word, the word which tortures the spirit, The sick woman was turned into a corpse, The corpse was hung from a stake.” By scrawling the chilling, out-­of-­context phrase over veils of  soaked-­in paint, she made the process and materials bring out analogies to pain, spirit, and flesh without mimetic description. The painting is the first instance in which Spero combined allusions to ancient myth, political history, sexuality, and violence against women.

148

4.4  June Leaf, Red Painting, 1954. Oil on canvas, 72 × 108 in.

149

4.5  Nancy Spero, At Their Word (The Sick Woman), 1957–­1958. Oil on canvas, 60 ¼ × 40 1⁄8 in.

150

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Spero reflected on the Black Paintings as “elegiac and existential, but internalized to a great degree, even as they gesture at the world.” She also made small gouaches on paper: images of “angels,” apparitional, screaming female heads with tongues thrust out, emerging from dark, vaporous grounds, emitting graffiti-­like shouts of “merde” or “fuck you” . . . a defiantly externalized subject. I wanted to make manifestos against war and violence, against the bombs that were dropped on Japan during the Second World War and now the violence in Vietnam. . . . I didn’t want to do anything “establishment.” Now part of this was an art world rebellion. Even were I welcomed by the art establishment . . . I would have been hostile. . . . I felt free to make these anti-­war manifestos on paper. To be defiant of the art world as well as of the government. Anti-­war but also anti-­art — ­an artist is never totally anti-­art! 35 Spero’s disparaging of the “establishment” was an implicit jab at New York. Although later in their careers Golub and Spero would participate in New York’s activist art community, in the 1950s they fell outside, making work that was held in suspicion. This intercity animosity was another thread in the period, popularized by writer A. J. Liebling’s superficial and haughty attempt to profile Chicago in the New Yorker. In a memorable passage from the three-­part piece, he described the city as a dirty, undistinguished sprawl concealed by an elaborate thin cosmopolitan façade: Lying on their backs, the beachers gaze out at the great empty surface of Lake Michigan. . . . When they turn over on their bellies, they are able to look back at what skyline Chicago has to offer — ­a serrated wall of high buildings aligned along the lakeward side of the city. . . . So viewed, Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place. But the beachers are not fooled. They know what they see is like a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it. . . . The façade is no more functional than a billboard turned away from the road; it might impress travelers if they approached the city from the Lake, but nobody does. The stranger arrives by car from the airport, approaching the Loop across a tundra of industrial suburbs unchanged in character by the city line, or else comes in on one of the railroads that run through slums of their own making.36 Liebling’s profile turns on the winking assumption that Chicago is a second-­rate outpost masking as a cosmopolitan and sophisticated center. We know what he thinks before we get a quarter of the way through his travelogue. He introduces readers to Chicagoans who reflexively assume their inferiority to New York. But as many have pointed out, he chose to see the Chicago he expected and did not really investigate the city’s neighborhoods and culture. The generation of artists who emerged from Momentum assertively (and possibly defensively) rejected Abstract Expressionism. Some considered it superficial, thin, and perhaps that explains their impulse to seek meaning deep below the surface. The animosity could be palpable. Golub recalled how excited he and his classmates were to see actual works by Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock for the first time in 1947 at the Art Institute.37 “There was a lot of  noise about Pollock [but] . . . nobody had ever seen a Pollock. . . . I could hardly wait to see [it]. The students were allowed to go in Monday morning after the show had opened, so we ran up and my shock was great. They didn’t mean a thing to me. They didn’t mean a thing! What I saw were . . . rococo swirls of  color, endless patternings

151

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

of  color. . . . What I wanted was something altogether different. I used to find it at the Field Museum. I used to find it in masks . . . [and] insane art.”38 In another instance of  “the Chicago attitude towards New York painting at this time,” Golub related how sculptor Cosmo Campoli participated in a 1956 panel with Ibram Lassaw, Hedda Sterne, and Roland Ginzel in conjunction with a Society for Contemporary Art exhibition at the Art Institute. The museum had recently acquired Willem de Kooning’s Excavation (1950) and Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow (1953), which were on display for the discussion. Golub recalled: I came to hear my friend Campoli, who had a very curious way of acting. . . . To Cosmo this work didn’t mean terribly much. And at one point he . . . got so indignant that he yelled. “It’s all shit,” and ran off the stage. That’s the most extreme point of view that one could have. Not that the rest of us felt this way, but what it represented was the fact that this art, then so powerful in New York, still had not made its point to many of the Chicago artists.39 When Golub published a critique of Abstract Expressionism in 1955, he described it as “an international style, perhaps the most generalized and widespread style that has appeared in this century.” He was troubled by what he saw as its anonymous, interchangeable gestures standing in for subjectivity in an “extremely individualistic era.” The style allowed “the intrinsic denial of individuated imagery,” despite the subjective rhetoric around it. Golub thought it demonstrated an irresponsible detachment from society, which seemed the antithesis of what motivated him and his friends.40 Spero and Golub spent 1956–­1957 in Italy, where they studied Etruscan and Roman statuary, funerary monuments, and frescoes. These ancient sources reverberate in Spero’s own critique of  the art world and of  Abstract Expressionism. In Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge) (1958; fig. 4.6), she confidently and defiantly refutes the American art world’s unrelenting focus on Manhattan. Her solution is to entomb a cluster of New York–­based artists she felt had received inordinate attention from the art press. She recalled, “I was very angry, feeling frustrated. I wasn’t getting my message out, that I was overlooked.”41 Two figures flank a phallic yellow ochre tombstone, which rises nearly to the full height of the painting. Wearing rabbit-­eared dunce caps, they thrust pink tongues “of  defiance and ridicule” at the viewer. They glare outward, warding off  those who might seek to exhume the dead or pause to pay tribute to their achievements. Spero’s “homage” relegates the artists identified with the “New York School” to the afterlife, their names so well known they need only be indicated by initials. R[obert] M[otherwell], H[elen] F[rankenthaler], M[ark] R[othko], J[ackson] P[ollock] — ­one can puzzle out several of the targets of  Spero’s contempt. Ironically, some names are difficult to reconstruct, no longer obvious; like inscriptions on Etruscan tombs, they require a specialist to translate. In contrast to the initials, Spero has boldly inscribed her own name below the aggressive faces flanking the monument. This assertion of identity, not merely as a signature of  authorship, but as integral to the content, emphasizes the ironic statement “I do not challenge,” scrawled like graffiti along the top. Spero makes clear that the painting mocks and questions the homage — ­the seemingly unquestioned reverence afforded artists associated with the New York School. No challenge, but a will to relegate them to the past and overwrite their status, move forward, make art on her own terms.

152

4.6  Nancy Spero, Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge), 1958. Oil on canvas, 47 × 31 in.

153

Vivian Maier PAMEL A BANN OS

Even though Vivian Maier, a live-­in nanny and caregiver, made the deliberate choice not to share her pictures, she has become one the most famous photographers to emerge from Chicago. Her best-­known images — ­women in fancy hats, children playing, men asleep on park benches — ­ ostensibly capture the mundane, but they are shaped by a discomfiting edge. They are just a few of the more than 150,000 photographs she shot over five decades. Maier’s is a twenty-­first-­century story: internet channels turned her into an international sensation shortly after her death, but throughout her life her work remained unseen and unknown, even to those whose paths she crossed while living in Chicago and its suburbs for more than fifty years. Born in New York to an Austro-­Hungarian father and a French mother, Maier spent much of her childhood in France. She spoke with a French accent throughout her life, cultivated a European persona, and seems to have told no one about the family she left behind in New York. She was described as “mysterious” by those who learned of her prodigious output only after her death, as someone whose desire for privacy veered toward secrecy, which lent her an enigmatic air. Maier’s earliest known photographs (1950–­1951) are landscapes and posed portraits shot on a folding camera during a year’s stay in France, near where her mother grew up. But in 1952 she transitioned to the square-­format Rolleiflex, which she wielded on the sidewalks of New York, establishing the format and street-­photography style for which she would become widely known. Her first published photographs from this period, introduced in 2009 by the major holder of her photography, visually echo the standard greats of the genre, like Lisette Model and Diane Arbus. Maier moved to the Chicago area in 1955 and worked as a nanny in the North Shore suburb of Highland Park. Always carrying a camera and often traveling by bicycle, she was a familiar, independent presence in the community. In 1959 she traveled around the world, creating thousands of images. It seems that nearly everything was of equal importance to Maier’s camera. She shot photographs in neighborhoods throughout Chicagoland during the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling suburban activities and families. She had a keen formal aesthetic and was fearless in her approach.

154

A voracious recorder, Maier often carried two or more cameras and also shot motion-­picture footage of her surroundings. Maier’s legacy — ­thousands of prints, slides, and negatives, motion picture footage, and more than two thousand rolls of undeveloped film (images she had only ever seen through the camera’s viewfinder) — ­was discovered when her storage lockers were auctioned for nonpayment about a year before her death. The purchaser divided up the material and re-­auctioned it, fracturing her archive in a way that prevents a thorough reconstruction. Today, Maier’s legacy is spread across three major collectors, while an unknown mass of other material has scattered to places unknown. Despite this chaos and a copyright challenge in 2014 that led to the appointment of a public administrator to oversee her estate, Maier’s visibility since her death is impressive. More than a thousand images by a photographer who hid her work from everyone can now be found in six published books, multiple websites, and two feature-­length biographical movies.

Vivian Maier. Ron Slattery Negative Collection.

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Anticulture As the artists of this generation processed how their experiences and points of view might be expressed, they were encouraged by SAIC instructor Kathleen Blackshear. Many had taken her art history and design courses. Blackshear was the protégé of Helen Gardner, an influential educator who taught the first art history course offered at SAIC and wrote Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History and Significance (1926). In the book’s second and third editions (1936, 1948), Gardner included generous sections on Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Native American art. Blackshear’s curriculum stressed that anthropology, natural history, and science were valuable to art historians and artists. She embraced modernism and taught Dada and Surrealism, encouraging her students to look at journals such as Minotaur, View, and VVV in the museum’s library. In all of these sources the artists found new ways to represent the intangible and physical aspects of their world. They found alternatives to a Western classical tradition and its innumerable descendants in non-­Western art, in early modernism, and in imagery and objects made by those outside of the art world. Blackshear encouraged her students to embrace urban vernacular objects, such as storefront signs, as sources of  visual inspiration. This openness helped students develop a personally meaningful visual language and embrace the legitimacy of  “non-­art” source material.42 Building on Gardner’s concepts, she urged students to draw at the Adler Planetarium, Field Museum, Oriental Institute at the University of  Chicago, Shedd Aquarium, and zoos.43 Don Baum and Ray Yoshida believed she was “anti-­[Italian] Renaissance” because she emphasized the Northern tradition and medieval art.44 George Cohen reflected that many SAIC students were moved to reject “the emptiness of  French formalism” in favor of  German Expressionism and other alternatives: “When we wanted something to see, we often would go to the Field Museum to look at the then-­not-­well-­displayed-­not-­thought-­to-­be-­great art collections from New Guinea, New Ireland, New Caledonia and Old America. It held a hell of a lot more than form for us.”45 Blackshear (and eventually the instructor and artist Whitney Halstead) played a critical role in legitimizing the interests of artists drawn to material outside of the narrowly defined fine arts. This may account in part for the positive reception in Chicago for self-­taught artists and their work. A heightened sensitivity to such material resulted in Nathan Lerner’s recognizing the value of  Henry Darger’s work when he found it, the efforts made by Halstead and others on behalf  of  Joseph Yoakum, and the interest in Lee Godie and Pauline Simon by Don Baum and others. Jim Nutt championed Martin Ramirez’s work when he spotted it in Sacramento, California. Several artists, notably Roger Brown and Ray Yoshida, assembled collections of  material by anonymous and known makers, a wide range of  work that coexisted in dialogue in their homes. These objects were not considered curiosities by the Chicagoans but rather viable living viewpoints by artists positing additional ways to see and depict the world.46 Evelyn Statsinger developed her first mature body of  work as an SAIC student working with Blackshear and visiting the Field Museum. Although she had an academic training with nude models at the Art Students League of  New York, at SAIC she followed an impulse to embrace new and unconventional methods. She made photograms with objects and paper fragments as well as ambitious ink and crayon drawings such as In the Penal Colony (1949; fig. 4.7). Inspired by the eponymous Franz Kafka short story, Statsinger made the drawing as she listened to a broadcast of  Edith Sitwell reciting her series of  poems Façade accompanied by

155

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

4.7  Evelyn Statsinger, In the Penal Colony, 1949. Pen, ink, and crayon on paper, 31 × 58 in.

William Walton’s musical score. These literary and musical sources combined with Statsinger’s close study of  objects from New Guinea and the work of  early modernists such as Paul Klee. It was these connections that led architect Mies van der Rohe to be one of  her first patrons, encouraged by Katherine Kuh. In the Penal Colony is, like Siskind’s photographs, abstract and representational, pictographic and full of  narrative associations, attentive to mark-­making but assertive about its connection to a meaningful whole. Simple lines with meandering edges define a complex of  forms, which Statsinger fills, meticulously, compulsively, with repeating freehand patterns. Patterns change from one area to the next within the twisting serpentine bodies. Trace references to the Kafka tale remain, such as a central hand that reaches toward a lever to operate a deadly machine. Statsinger departs from academic realism and conventions of  beauty in favor of  ritualized methods, a mixture of  menace and wit, and organic mutations that make figuration polyphonic. This fertile ground is what greeted Jean Dubuffet on December 20, 1951, when he and his friend Alfonso Ossorio braved a snowstorm to reach Chicago by train to give a talk at the Arts Club in conjunction with a solo exhibition. Already championed by local collectors such as Maurice Culberg, Dubuffet arrived in a city receptive to his ideas. Campoli, Cohen, Golub, and Claes Oldenburg were among the younger artists present. Cohen mused that Dubuffet’s “trim black suit, dark tie, white shirt and long, black cigarette holder” formed the perfect foil to a talk on the value of  “savagery.” The lecture, titled “Anticultural Positions,” was no revelation, Cohen recalled — ­it was vindication. Older and internationally respected, Dubuffet was arguing eloquently in favor of  ideals the young artists shared. “We found many of  our views

156

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

reinforced by much of  what he said, although some of it seemed remote to me at the time.”47 In his talk, Dubuffet argued that canons of  Western beauty that had been in place since the Renaissance (if  not longer) were false, as was the dichotomy they supported that denigrated anything that deviated from these humanist values as opposite and inferior. Most of  the world’s culture, Dubuffet asserted, stood outside of these norms. He preferred this multiplicity of  excluded viewpoints and so had come to reject Western culture. Western academic culture had devalued values he prized, including “instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.” Dubuffet compared Western culture to a dead language, “without anything in common with the language spoken in the street. This culture drifts further and further from daily life . . . it no longer has living roots.” Dubuffet’s assertions followed from his ongoing immersion in and championing of  what he called l’art brut, or “raw” art — ­art outside of  the academic tradition. This included everything from African tribal art to children’s drawings, from the art of  the mentally ill and of mystics to graffiti and art by self-­taught makers — ­anything made without regard for the institutional, critical, academic, and commercial structures of the art world. Dubuffet asserted continuity between all things (rejecting “man” as superior) and rejected exclusionary definitions of beauty. Any value that served to negate others was in his view corrupt and should be abandoned. Painting could communicate more directly than words; it conveyed ideas. Dubuffet rejected painting as a means to make pleasing arrangements of  colors and shapes. “Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporal [sic] like words,” he argued. “The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves. Further, painting manipulates materials which are themselves living substances. . . . Painting is a way of  expression of  our inner voices. . . . [It] can endow man with new myths and new mystics, and reveal, in infinite number, unsuspected aspects of  things, and new values not yet perceived.”48 While in Chicago, Dubuffet did not meet the younger artists who attended his talk but did find an artist who struck him as a kindred spirit. During a tour of  the Art Institute’s galleries with Rich and Kuh he encountered Ivan Albright’s That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (1931–­1941) and was so moved that he asked to meet the artist. Kuh arranged a visit to Albright’s Ogden Avenue studio, where Dubuffet encountered the project the Chicagoan had started in 1942, then provisionally titled The Window. It would take another decade to complete and eventually bear the title Poor Room — ­There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever without End (1942–­ 1946, 1948–­1963; fig. 4.8). When Dubuffet visited him, Albright had already constructed a room-­size tableau from salvaged wood and bricks, furniture found in junk shops, objects from Maxwell Street Market (Chicago’s legendary open-­air flea market), and natural detritus such as bird and wasp nests, branches, and hair. He had carefully mapped all the objects onto a diagram, noting the constantly shifting positions from which he planned to depict everything in order to subvert conventional perspective. Albright began the painting as a conventional self-­portrait. By 1951 he had shifted the concept to that of  the embodied self  represented through his implied movement within a cluttered room and bodily analogies embedded in the depicted objects. Albright wrote that he hoped to “lead the observer all thru the room and then outside again but so he does not know he is being led. At places have him stop and cry. At places have his emotions torn asunder. At places have him worship God. At places have him have contempt. Make of  man a poor thing. A real thing a sorry thing, a thing which he is but knows not. Have him love the bricks and have the bricks hard.”49 Albright’s elaborate process involved painting single objects from

157

4.8  Ivan Albright, Poor Room — ­There Is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday,

No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever without End (The Window), 1942–­1946, 1948–­1963. Oil on canvas, 48 × 37 in.

158

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

several positions, at multiple distances, in light from contradictory sources. The cumulative effect would be of  objects and matter fighting one another, twitching in space, floating slowly. Albright used a realist method to undermine the stability viewers expected of realist imagery, giving the whole composition an uncanny spectral feeling. Dubuffet apprehended this immediately, and the “alarming” experience of  seeing Albright’s still-­life construction and in-­progress painting haunted him. It inspired at least one painting (Door with Couch Grass, 1957) and the written tribute he contributed to Albright’s 1964 retrospective catalog. Dubuffet believed Albright was working against the arbitrary conventions of  Western art and considered him the greatest artist in America.50 He wrote that Albright’s work reconstituted the world in a way that called all knowledge and perception into question. His approach, which seemed to be hyperdescriptive, made those objects “unknowable.” To Dubuffet, Albright forced his viewers into a phenomenological crisis: We feel strongly, in front of these paintings, that we live in a mirage . . . that all our vision deceives us, that all the notions on which we have until now based our standards of appreciation of all things — ­are erroneous. That the keys to the world — ­and those of our lives and being — ­are . . . extremely foreign to ours. I am sure that never have paintings had such strong powers of revelation. . . . Swept away, in the marvelously proliferating universe, in the pullulating anarchy . . . are all the criteria of order and the archetypes of our former ideas of beauty; nothing remains. For them is substituted a howling tumult, polycentric . . . a Gehenna of forms entirely devoted to delirium; to all beings a suddenly rendered liberty . . . of the most disquieting kind. Each of the painted objects perpetrates its flowering without . . . the slightest thought of its surroundings. The center of the picture is everywhere at once; all being is center.51 Dubuffet’s assessment came at a time in which The Window was cited as an antecedent to the early 1960s obsession with vernacular culture in assemblage and Pop.52 Albright’s painting and the tableau from which he painted it influenced a wide range of artists, including Marcel Duchamp.53 However, Albright’s interest in what British critic Lawrence Alloway termed “junk culture,” or what Ray Yoshida would term “trash treasures,” had long been an undercurrent in Chicago art. Alloway connected the impulse to mine junk culture as an art born of urban living: Its source is obsolescence, the throwaway material of cities, as it collects in drawers, cupboards, attics, dustbins, gutters, waste lots, and city dumps. Objects have a history: first they are brand new goods; then they are possessions, accessible to few, subjected, often, to intimate and repeated use; then, as waste, they are scarred by use but available again. . . . Assemblages of such material come at the spectator as bits of life, bits of environment. The urban environment is present, then, as the source of objects, whether transfigured or left alone.54 Both Richard Hunt and H. C. Westermann embraced vernacular objects and discarded materials by incorporating them into sculptures that paradoxically reconsider the tradition of the heroic figure and of masculinity. Hunt’s Hero Construction (1958; fig. 4.9) consists entirely of discarded, damaged, and scrapped metal that had fallen far from its original purpose. Hunt welded disparate parts together in defiance of their abject condition to form a monument to resilience and strength. The result is an anthropomorphic construction, at once apocalyptic

159

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

and optimistic. Despite the industrial materials, Hunt considered this process akin to the transformation of an organism from one state to another — ­a metamorphosis — ­the dormant materials gaining life as dignified form. “For one whose life is art,” he reflected, “the evidence of art in everyday life is a continuing confirmation of the possibilities inherent in the creative process.”55 Hunt’s Hero is composed with a slight rising gesture, head held high, chest expanded outward, body alert. Westermann’s Memorial to the Idea of  Man If  He Was an Idea (1958; fig. 4.10), which Selz included in New Images of  Man, is a complex autobiographical cabinet in the form of  a Cyclops. Rife with references to the artist’s life as an acrobat and a US Marine, the sculpture critiques militarism and the regimented conformity that shapes men into violent automatons. Westermann’s harrowing experiences as an antiaircraft gunner aboard the USS Enterprise during World War II and as an infantryman in the Korean War had a profound impact on his outlook and art. This memorial is itself a pine box, referencing the simple interment of the war dead. Its head is a battlement, its unblinking single eye is bloodshot in a shell-­shocked stare. On either side of  its head are posts that call to mind Frankenstein’s monster — ­the walking dead reanimated against its will. Closed, the cabinet below is a clean and quiet mystery; open it is a cacophony of  bottle caps that spell out the artist’s initials and cover the back wall. On the lower interior shelf  we see the figure’s internalized memories — ­the sinking of  a “death ship.” Westermann witnessed the USS Franklin being hit by kamikaze pilots; more than eight hundred men lost their lives amid explosions as the burning aircraft carrier dumped them into the ocean. Combining masterful carpentry skills and throwaway mass-­produced caps, the sculpture is a reliquary shrine for Cold War America. Claes Oldenburg was active in Momentum and had been close to Cohen, Leaf, Rosofsky, and Westermann. He has repeatedly cited the twenty years he spent in Chicago as critical to his ideas of  art and everyday life. “After all,” he wrote, “I don’t come out of Matisse or the sunny concept of  art. I come out of  Goya, Rouault, parts of  Dubuffet, Bacon, the humanistic and existential Imagists, the Chicago bunch, and that sets me apart from the whole Hofmann-­ influenced school.”56 In 1956 he left Chicago for New York but took with him a comically dark sensibility that shaped his earliest happenings and installations. He steered an interviewer in 1966 toward Chicago in order to dispel assumptions about the primacy of  New York in Pop’s development: “In Chicago, where I spent a lot of time, people like June Leaf and George Cohen were working very close to a Pop medium in 1952. George Cohen used to go to the dime store and buy all the dolls he could find and other stuff like that. Even though he used them for his own personal image there has always been this tendency.”57 Oldenburg’s version of  Pop developed from his early life in Chicago as a reporter for the City News Bureau and his experiences in Momentum and exchanges with these other artists. His existentialist translation of  the American vernacular first resulted in The Street (1960), a performance and installation at Judson Church in New York. In his 1961 “Statement,” a tour de force of  declarative writing, he stated his belief in the capacity of  real life to bring art into existence: accidents, bodily fluids, evidence of mortality, “kids’ smells” and sensations, “soggy onions,” “the brown sad art of  rotting apples,” “bread wet by rain,” “the sweat that develops between crossed legs,” sensory experience, the visceral, and the lived: “I am for an art that is political-­erotical-­mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum . . . that grows up not knowing it is art at all . . . that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary . . . which is eaten, like a piece of  pie, or abandoned with

160

4.9  Richard Hunt, Hero Construction, 1958. Steel (welded and chromed), 64 × 29 in. (without base). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold H. Maremont, 1958.528. Art Institute of Chicago.

4.10  H. C. Westermann. Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea, 1958. Pine, bottle caps, cast-­tin toys, glass, metal, brass, ebony, and enamel, 56 ½ × 38 × 14 ¼ in.

161

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

great contempt, like a piece of shit.” Oldenburg made bodily experience central to meaning in the world, gloriously abject, unmistakably real.58 Both The Street and his follow-­up performance/installation The Store (1961–­1964) fulfilled Oldenburg’s wish to make objects that reflect how human experience “is totally mysterious . . . what I want to do more than anything is to create things just as mysterious as nature.” He hoped each project would possess “an unbridled intense satanic vulgarity unsurpassable, and yet be art.”59 What he assembled was a world that mirrored the everyday but made it strange, personal, intimate, and magical. It was a modern urban archeology that conjured his exploration of  Chicago and New York neighborhoods and the feeling of discovering objects at the Field Museum. Destruction and intentional ruin guided the development of  The Street; charring, folding, creasing, tearing, crumpling. Its construction conveyed an absurd agony, a heartwarming familiarity, pathetic and precious at the same time. Chicago returned to Oldenburg’s work as inspiration several times during the 1960s. The artist Roger Brown once reflected on the distinctive way in which Chicago artists viewed and used popular culture: “[Here] one sees [comics and advertising] as art in themselves, not as something to be blown up to make art, but as something to parallel in your own work. Those things are already art: so if  you can make art as good, you’re really lucky.”60 His teacher, Ray Yoshida, was exemplary in treating comics as a folk art of transformative inspiration. Yoshida began slicing apart comic books and comic strips around 1967 as a way to redirect and refresh his practice. He was intimate with the fluid exchange of reused goods in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market, and this directly affected a change in his work. On trips to the market, he began gathering, among other things, a lot of comic books. During this period I felt that I had to begin looking or expanding out, looking for newer forms to deal with. . . . I began cutting shapes out that interested me and kept sketchbooks of these and had various categories, like arms, or profiles, rocks, abstract phenomena, lightning, thunder and so forth. These collages actually began as a kind of investigation into new source material for my art. I think one day I began on a large sheet of paper . . . assembling these stratified compositions and they seemed to be very exciting to me, so I made the source material become works themselves.61 Yoshida’s reconstitutions of comics took many forms. In one he filled the twenty-­four compartments of a Lucite box with carefully crumpled pages from the funnypapers (1967; fig. 4.11). Each little cell frames a detail Yoshida plotted to be its focus, a hyperaesthetic reliquary for the comic. Because the nature of comics is to propel a narrative forward through visuals alone, Yoshida’s disparate fragments alight from left to right and downward in succession as though they can be seen and read. Characters appear to react to actions in the previous frames, as when an explosion is followed by an angry, vocal blonde woman. A car signifies movement in a story line, and a close-­up of a man’s intense contemplative expression suggests a stewing detective. The character Nancy appears twice, suggesting temporal links from before to after the explosion. A man on a telephone in the last frame provides the sense of a serial cliffhanger. Yoshida includes the word pop in the last row, at left, a sly wink as he undermines the clean, slick proclamations of the art world’s then darling form. Soiled, creased, torn, compressed, and severed from their original narratives, the comics in this box re-­present as mysterious, subjective, and unresolved.

162

Hef and LeRoy TR AV IS VO G AN

Neiman’s distinctive work came to signal the lifestyle Playboy endorsed — ­bright, energetic, and free. The magazine, in turn, helped make Neiman one of the twentieth century’s best-­known popular artists. But Neiman’s association with the notorious publication also fueled his exclusion from the world of respectable art. “My Playboy connection forever sealed my fate as an artist who would not be accepted by the art establishment,” he wrote in his memoir. Perhaps the relationship contributed to the widespread critical excoriation that Neiman received throughout his career. While Neiman eventually settled in New York and Hefner migrated to a larger Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, their 1950s association in Chicago linked them together as composers of a fantasy life, concocted by midwestern aesthetes, embraced by millions of American men.

While far from the most revered contributors to Chicago’s art scene, Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner and artist LeRoy Neiman stand among its best-­known participants. Before reinventing himself as “Mr. Playboy,” Hefner toiled as an unfulfilled copywriter for the Carson Pirie Scott department store and Esquire magazine. When Esquire left Chicago for New York, Hefner stuck around to develop a magazine that extended its manly and stylish focus. Launched in December 1953, Playboy aimed to curate and celebrate “the good life” for men in postwar America. Though most famous for its nude photos, the magazine offered guidelines for upwardly mobile young men pursuing the sophisticated, pleasure-­ seeking lifestyle it defined, with commentary on fashion, music, cuisine, literature, and art. Though cultured and chic, Playboy shrewdly avoided the pretentiousness that might alienate readers who simply wanted to ogle naked babes. The magazine was so successful that Hefner bought a conspicuous Gold Coast mansion — ­the first Playboy Mansion. Hefner had met LeRoy Neiman at Carson Pirie Scott, where Neiman did fashion illustrations while establishing his artistic chops and teaching at the School of the Art Institute. The publisher and the artist — ­both midwesterners and World War II veterans — ­were kindred spirits with little use for traditional social mores. Neiman’s work reflected Playboy’s ethos by celebrating leisure: he painted posh scenes at Rush Street restaurants, gritty dive bars on Clark Street, horse races, and nightclubs. Moreover, his vibrant and splashy style — ­which melded the figurative with the abstract — ­mirrored Playboy’s efforts to be thoughtful without being elitist. Neiman began working regularly for Playboy in 1954, when Hefner hired him to illustrate Charles Beaumont’s short story “Black Country,” the first work of short fiction to appear in the magazine. The illustrations received a Chicago Art Director’s Award, Playboy’s first industry accolade. Neiman parlayed this success to become Playboy’s de facto artist in residence. In 1957 he created the “Femlin,” a figure that adorned the magazine’s party jokes page for the next fifty years. The following year, he started “Man at His Leisure,” a column for which he traveled the world sketching exotic locales that Playboy readers might visit. Neiman’s murals decorated the Playboy Mansion and the Playboy Clubs Hefner began opening in 1960. He even sketched at the Cook County Courthouse when Playboy faced obscenity charges.

LeRoy Neiman, Playboy “Femlin.” Archival material from Playboy magazine. All rights reserved.

163

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

4.11  Ray Yoshida, Untitled, 1967. Lucite box with collage, 8 × 12 × 2 in.

Although different in form — ­discrete parts precisely excised and rearranged on clean paper — ­Yoshida’s comic book specimens are more closely related to this strange box than to his scrapbooks of  parts and pages. Comic Book Specimen #15 (1969; fig. 4.12) channels the feeling of  disruption and uncanny recontextualization Yoshida managed in the box into a plotted-­ out collage. The page focuses on a lead character, a muscle-­hard superhero complete with tight suit and trailing cape. He looms large in the center while action disperses and expands around him. In place of  his head, he sprouts a hand, and as he recurs throughout the page his body bears threatening limbs and other identity-­effacing objects. Scale shifts abruptly in several places and desperate floating captions purport to lay forth a story. Although frames and sequential vignettes appear geared toward “reading,” no coherent story takes shape. The character is trapped in a plot that is labyrinthine, mirrored, maddening. Yoshida’s example as both mentor and working artist would prove invaluable to a generation that came of  age in the late 1960s.

164

4.12  Ray Yoshida, Comic Book Specimen #15, 1969.

Collage on paper, 23 ½ × 18 ½ in.

165

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

“A Bunch of Delinquents” In the early 1960s artists in Chicago navigated a scene that offered few ways to gain critical and commercial exposure. Several artist-­run spaces had closed. Allan Frumkin and Richard Feigen, who had opened galleries in 1952 and 1957, respectively, were unusual in exhibiting some local artists alongside nationally and internationally known peers. But their rosters were limited. Artists could be overlooked — ­if they made it past juries — ­amid the sheer quantity of exhibitors in the Art Institute’s competitive annuals, the Chicago and Vicinity and American exhibitions. Grassroots efforts continued through the 1960s as artists organized Phalanx (1964–­1967) and then PAC (Participating Artists of Chicago; 1966–­1969). Phalanx and PAC held large group exhibitions using multiple spaces including IIT’s campus and the Hyde Park Art Center. PAC had a home on North Halsted for about a year (1967–­1968) until funds ran out and the organization disbanded. Alongside these efforts, Don Baum curated the exhibition program at the Hyde Park Art Center beginning in 1956. By the mid-­1960s his creative approach made it vital as “a place where artists who have had no previous exhibiting experience could show.” 62 A veteran of  Momentum, Baum bridged multiple generations and facets of  the art world. He had already earned critical acclaim for his own assemblages of doll parts and bones. He was friendly with collectors, trusted among academics, respected by professional curators such as Kuh, and admired by artists ranging from his close friend Gertrude Abercrombie and his Momentum alums to young art students. Baum’s enthusiasm and openness made the Hyde Park Art Center, according to artist Ed Paschke, “the only game in town, the only accessible situation for someone who had just recently gotten out of  art school. The [commercial] galleries weren’t interested. Nobody knew who you were or what you did. This was the only viable working place to show.”63 Baum’s exhibitions were stylistically wide-­ranging and thematically oriented. They often required artists to create new work on quirky topics, whether toys, masks, or, in one well-­ known case, Three Kingdoms: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1965). Baum’s playful way of  putting unexpected artists together sparked many new friendships and connected artists who were friends but hadn’t shown together, such as Hunt, Lanyon, Ginzel, and Ito. To expand his knowledge about the city’s artists, Baum visited studios, learned about people through word-­ of-­mouth, and attended student exhibitions. Between 1962 and 1965 he also organized ambitious historical surveys of the city, including a history of  Hyde Park artists and a three-­part examination of  the postwar “Chicago School.” Through Baum’s efforts the Hyde Park Art Center became “very popular . . . a kind of  meeting place, where other artists would come. And of  course if  you have thirty artists in a show, you have thirty people coming to an opening, and their friends and their mothers. . . . So then people around the community began to come to the exhibitions. And all of a sudden there was this kind of  atmosphere about [HPAC] . . . which was very alive, where people wanted to come and they wanted to be in the shows.”64 Baum helped build a community of  artists, established an inviting place for them to meet, and revealed how much he cared about place. The Hyde Park Art Center exhibitions that received the most attention during the 1960s were three installations by a group of  six artists who called themselves Hairy Who: James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. Frustrated by the meager exhibition opportunities for emerging artists and tired of  having single works

166

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

overlooked in the sprawling PAC and Phalanx exhibitions, Falconer and Nutt devised a plan to exhibit with a small group of friends.65 Hoping for greater attention but lacking the reputations or body of  work for solo exhibitions, this plan would allow them each to exhibit several pieces with work by like-­minded artists. Nilsson and Nutt took the proposal for a group of  five to Baum; he loved it and suggested Wirsum as a sixth artist. “That is how the group was formed,” recalled Nutt. “Not out of a unified carefully thought out philosophical position, but rather the need to present our work as powerfully as possible within our means.”66 The collective name emerged during a group gathering. Wirsum overheard his friends talking about Chicago critic and artist Harry Bouras’s WFMT radio show and, not knowing who he was, asked plaintively, “Harry, who? Who is this guy?” The rest of  them cracked up, incredulous that Wirsum could not know Bouras, and changing Harry to “Hairy,” struck on a show title.67 Their first exhibition in 1966 was so successful they followed it with two more, in 1967 and 1968. In 1969 curator Walter Hopps invited them to exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. In 1971 they were among an international group of artists included in The Spirit of  the Comics at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. A stapled price list accompanied their DC exhibition like a baseball program and conveyed a serendipitous origin story that “revealed itself  exactly (almost to the day) twelve years later.”68 Washington Post critic Paul Richard relayed it to his readers in a review of the exhibition: On April 14, 1954, the Cubs opened their season by playing the New York Giants at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The game was the occasion of a peculiar coincidence. Karl Wirsum, a blond teen-­ager, was inside the park selling popcorn to the fans. Art Green, a sign painter finishing a billboard on nearby Sheffield Street, found his concentration shattered by the sporadic roaring of the crowd. Outside the ballpark, Jim Falconer was selling programs. Suellen Rocca, then 11, was sitting inside in the company of her father watching her first professional baseball game. Gladys Nilsson stared at the stadium from the window of the “el” that was carrying her home from school. Then Hank Sauer hit a home run and Jim Nutt, sitting in the stands, caught it.69 “None of the [Hairy Who] disputes the mystical significance of the coinciding events,” the program notes state. “Jim Nutt goes as far as to say: ‘It explains a lot.’ ”70 The story immerses the group in the most vernacular Americana — ­the ballgame — ­and seeds it with tidbits that weave the city into the tale. Nods to Pop art — ­like Green working as a sign painter — ­make the story plausible yet preposterous (he was thirteen years old in 1954). The Cubs’ home opener that year in fact took place on April 15, when they lost 11–­5 to the Cincinnati Redlegs (Sauer did hit a homer in the game).71 The story highlights the humor, tendency toward the absurd, and savvy crafting of a public persona that characterized the group. While Nutt emphasized that Hairy Who was a collection of individuals who had fun exhibiting serious work together, the press reveled in their youthfulness and presented them as a rabble-­rousing group. The same Franz Schulze who had been a leader in Momentum often covered the Hairy Who as a critic and recognized their self-­awareness: “The image they project publicly is one of  cool, knowing ease topped off with a nutty sense of  humor. They are cunning promoters of  themselves and have a gift for making memorable remarks to the press.”72 Whitney Halstead, also covering the Chicago scene for national publications, urged viewers to see past their

167

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

persona: “With all of  the various promotional devices and press coverage, it is possible to fail to consider the works themselves, or to give them proper consideration.” Reviewing the 1967 exhibition, he described the exquisite corpse–­style poster and other promotional materials: “In true Dada spirit, their delight in perversity made [the poster] all but unreadable. . . . Though each artist contributed several [comic book] pages (as well as designing a button for distribution at the vernissage) all of  these contributions, both group and individual, demonstrate the unadulterated lampooning of  nearly everything from traditional media and styles to exhibition display and exhibition catalogues.”73 These collaboratively produced materials disrupted the polite conventions of  the white-­ cube exhibition, as did the work itself. Hairy Who installations emphasized experience and environment, (non-­art) objects in dialogue with the work of strong personalities in a variety of  materials. “Hairy Who” was an evocative name that caused heads to cock and rejected the trend of  introducing sets of  emerging artists in generically titled exhibitions — ­like 16 Americans. In place of  conventional catalogs packed with bios, facts, and an authoritative essay, they made comic books featuring original drawings converted to print. They even contributed da Hairy Who Kamic Kamie Page to the underground newspaper The Bridge in 1967.74 The Hairy Who settled on the comic book format as a solution to working with the Hyde Park Art Center’s small budget. The first one mimicked the form exactly — ­glossy covers and newsprint-­like interiors with “advertisements,” game pages, and coupons. One coupon on a page by Nilsson offered a 25 percent markup on any artwork in the show. With each new show, these comic book catalogs became more elaborate in production and more enigmatic in content. Many strips were self-­referential, as when Rocca’s “Dancing Couple” sashayed off  the street into the Hyde Park Art Center to see the Hairy Who exhibit, commenting on Rocca’s paintings (1966; fig. 4.13). In the second to last panel, one of  the dancers exclaims, “Hey! I found one with a Santa Claus and a diamond ring! Wonder if  it’s a clue?” Her partner responds sadly, “Maybe there is no Hairy Who!” In the final panel his thought bubble reads, “I don’t believe in Hairy Who!” to which she responds, “Neither do I!!” — ­as, unseen by the figures, a hairy yellow monster enters the frame. A multipanel narrative strip Wirsum contributed to The Hairy Who Sideshow (1967), their second comic book, presents twelve characters flashing and zipping amid the kaleidoscope pulse of  electric lights. A phrase, “It took me 27 years to get this cute all up in here in my Maxwell St. suit,” accompanies their masklike visages. Wirsum overheard a wealthy Hyde Park Art Center patron comment on the Hairy Who group’s youth — ­“don’t they look cute” — ­and incorporated it into a rogues’ gallery of laughing and grimacing faces inspired by sideshows at Riverview Amusement Park.75 The first Hairy Who installation was (for them) straightforward, but for the second, Nutt recalled, “Next to each work we had a small black and white photo of an excessively tattooed individual upon which we wrote a number in black ink that corresponded to a mimeographed show list.”76 They enhanced the photos — ­derived from Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill — ­with chewed bubble gum. Highlighting the critical role that collecting had on the artists, starting in 1967 the installations included inspirational objects and source material. They painted the walls, sometimes continuing themes or formal motifs from the exhibited artwork onto the gallery surface. They painted chairs and placed them into the installations, blurring the distinction between art objects and surroundings. In 1968, for the final Chicago Hairy Who exhibition, they covered the HPAC walls with cheap floral linoleum, hung large

168

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

4.13  Spread from The Portable Hairy Who, Hyde Park Art Center, 1966.

Ryerson and Burnham Library Book Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.

price tags from each work, and incorporated even more sources from their studios. “If  anything was done in response to the art world,” Nutt acknowledges, “I guess it was the linoleum walls. There was a certain distaste for white walls as the proper place to hang pictures.”77 Critics struggled to make art historical comparisons and contemporary connections. Eventually Schulze came to characterize the work as “brutish and closely akin to the spastic drawing of  illiterates and junior-­high-­school students.”78 Elsewhere he concluded, “They are a bunch of  delinquents.”79 A Hyde Park writer called their second exhibition “Crème de la phlegm,” asserting that it had “all the appeal of  half-­chewed food, combined with a wet sneeze, cold lumpy oatmeal, and the memorable feeling of  resting your hand on somebody’s recently discarded chewing gum. The success with which these artists communicate disgust, revulsion or absurdity, however, is not to be denied.”80

169

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

Most critics agreed that the Hairy Who spoke a Pop dialect, but one that was “base and regressive,” in contrast to its supposedly refined New York cousins. All of  the artists transformed their sources or used them as oblique cues rather than practicing close appropriation as in Roy Lichtenstein’s and Andy Warhol’s work. The artists absorbed, but did not copy, a wide range of  comics, pinball machines, corner store signs, hand-­lettered reverse painting on windows, sordid ads ripped from the back of  magazines, childhood board games and tin toys, and jewelry catalogs. Schulze struggled with the paradox he saw in well-­crafted objects bearing violent and intimate imagery, blurring the boundaries between private thoughts and public sharing, outrageous humor and serious content. He wrote in 1967: Rocca’s imagery is based largely on what she finds in her husband’s [jewelry] trade catalogs . . . which she seems to explore and repeat and chew up, idly, like a dreamily compulsive child. There is a regressiveness to it, and to the work of the other five as well — ­as if memories of early years were crucial: memories of baseball trading cards, bubble gum orgies, the secret sight of one’s parent’s arm pits and underwear up close, one’s own mucus, tire pumps lying out in the rain in the back yard, broken balloons, misspelled words scrawled on the walls under railroad viaducts, the drawings found in the margins of elementary school text books.81 While the group struck some contemporary critics as transgressive and vulgar, that seems to be why they struck a chord with others. Lawrence Alloway (who some credited with coining the term “Pop Art”) felt they pointed to a visceral vernacular beyond the clichés of Pop.82 In 1967 Nilsson, Nutt, and Rocca won top prizes at the Art Institute’s Chicago and Vicinity exhibition juried by Alloway, Hopps, and Art Institute curator James Speyer. Schulze’s discomfort with their work may have been due to a generation gap. Their work extended and transformed the existentialist tenor that had consumed his peers, but he seems to have seen only repulsive manners. Despite the interest of some leading critics, the work proved too volatile for the mainstream. Writing in 1971, Joan Siegfried described how the Hairy Who had extracted the oversanitized body from American mass culture, transformed it through their disparate viewpoints, and served it back to the public raw. As she paged through The Hairy Who Sideshow, she remarked: The spectator is overwhelmed by the sight of fragmented images in a shapeless world. Figures are monstrously mutated, waving limbs like amputated stumps. They are beset by tongues and intestines, saliva, mucous, and excrement. . . . It is a vision of man reduced to his bodily functions, the kind of man American advertising struggles mightily to overcome with all its highly touted preparations for personal hygiene.83 The body is a prominent subject in the Hairy Who’s collective and individual work in the late 1960s. They delight in its imperfections as smells seep out, flesh sags and meanders, pimples and hair erupt in unexpected places, and all falls into disorienting fragments. Many images combine loathsomeness and desirability, sensuality and repulsion, each body asserting its way in the world regardless of shape. Expressionism, Surrealism, medieval art, African sculpture, Oceanic masks, MAD magazine, comic strips, pinups, wrestling magazines, and baseball cards — ­all scoured for means of exploring the body’s meanings. What some critics considered juvenile shock material was part of a long tradition of using the bawdy and bodily to contemplate our mortality and humanity.

170

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Nutt’s Miss E. Knows (1968; fig. 4.14) presents a body full of  contradictions and transformations. Made with a sign painter’s brush in reverse on Plexiglas, it shows a woman striving to maintain “beauty” as she mutates in mortal disarray. Miss E’s bubblegum pink flesh swells and ripples as though wandering independently of  the underlying muscles. A prosthetic aluminum limb attached to the Plexiglas extends her stump of a right arm. Her nose is grotesquely elongated in a phallic protuberance, the skin at its base replete with bumps and puckers that swallow up her eyes and mouth. Miss E. poses coyly in the nude, sporting loud red hair and a sway to her hips. A sequence of  unrelated images streams across her face, projected by a flashlight. They and the images on the left side of  the painting show suspicious beauty treatments, questionable medical practices, and sexual fetishes. Through images like this, Nutt aggressively reconfigures the pinup/centerfold/beauty ads that bombard American women with absurd messages about ideal beauty.84

The Fate of Regional Exhibitions On April 26, 1965, Studs Terkel devoted his radio show to the Art Institute’s 68th annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. His guests were James Speyer, the Art Institute curator, and jurors Ted Coe, from the William Rockhill Nelson Museum of Art (now the Nelson-­Atkins Museum of Art) in Kansas City, and artist Wayne Thiebaud. In their conversation, they discussed the relevance of regional exhibitions.

Chicago art work. I think Chicago art work is much broader than our show ever is.

James Speyer: But I do think there’s a consideration to take seriously, about a local exhibition in 1965 in a community as large as Chicago. I’m not sure at all that a community should have a local salon of this sort, in 1965, because I don’t believe that the artists in Chicago are the only artists from Chicago. There are many artists from Chicago who are not perhaps here at this moment. There are others who are coming in. There’s a constant flux. This is a time when people don’t stay in one place. New York doesn’t have a regional exhibition. Los Angeles does, less and less. It used to. But all of these big regional shows were conceived before the gallery system. Now, for example, Chicago has a very good gallery system. We have a lot of private galleries now. We see a great deal. The Arts Club has constant shows of the highest quality. [The Art Institute has] a great many contemporary shows, and the idea of having a local, Chicago — ­I say salon because it’s the French word to use for a big exhibition — ­seems kind of, I don’t know, redundant. I think that the same artists could show other places, perhaps, and that it gives the wrong emphasis to take it as the essence of

TC: I can think of a number that probably wouldn’t have sub-

Ted Coe: I know a fair number of Chicago artists who are not

in that show, for one reason or another. JS: It’s not a matter of their having been refused, you know. Many did not submit.

mitted. I watched to see if they were there, and they were not there. Studs Terkel: Jim’s comment is quite interesting — ­that a

regional exhibition doesn’t quite tell the story. JS: It’s not needed anymore. You know, in the old days — ­this is the 68th, I can’t figure out how many years ago (68 from 65), it must have been at the end of the nineteenth century — ­and in those days there were no private galleries to mount anything. This was the place for any Chicago artist to show. Also people stayed put a great deal. . . . ST: If there’s a sort of internationalization or homogenizing, isn’t there a loss of some uniqueness? . . . Isn’t there a loss if these regional styles disappear? JS: There’s a loss, but it’s 1965 and it’s just all gone. And you can go to Athens, Greece, and you can eat the same food and stay in the same hotel and come in on the same plane as you do in Los Angeles or Chicago.

Studs Terkel Radio Archive, courtesy Chicago History Museum and WFMT Radio Network.

171

4.14  Jim Nutt, Miss E. Knows, 1967. Acrylic on Plexiglas with aluminum

and rubber, enamel on wood frame, 75 5⁄8 × 51 5⁄8 in.

172

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

Nilsson’s Very Worldly (1967; fig. 4.15), among the most ambitious of  her early works, combines reverse painting on Plexiglas with collage. Soon after making it Nilsson shifted her focus nearly entirely to watercolor, a medium with which she is a virtuoso. Here, though, the Plexiglas functions like a window onto an impossibly elastic and prolific surge of  people pulsating though space. It swells as an all-­over bodyscape, an organic writhing mass of  strollers and nosy bodies. They crowd, ooze, and overlap one another, tumble, push and press, entangle, intertwine, poke outward, and emerge from folds. Large heads are silhouetted against the field of  bodies and profiles. Some wear hats or goggles, glasses or masks. There are hats like anemones, limbs like slugs, noses like trunks and beaks. Contraptions like submarines, spaceships, or bumper cars burble past. Faces smile vindictively, joyously, salaciously, morph bestially, float away, turn upside down, shape-­shift and change scale. Ladies and gentlemen gawk, ogle, parade in finery, reveal breasts, climb one another, and peek indiscreetly. Heads emerge from buttocks, eyes bug out, tongues wag. Nilsson’s Very Worldly is a raucous riot of  characters who seem to contradict her title, though they try to give airs of  sophistication and cleverness. Such images arose from the city’s sounds, visual cacophony, energizing pulse, and crowds. Chicago neighborhoods, with their distinctive identities, made a huge impression on Art

4.15  Gladys Nilsson, Very Worldly, 1967. Acrylic and

collage on Plexiglas, 51 × 75 × 2 in.

173

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

Green. He reveled in the odd surprises that popped out from the street. “One morning there was a guy who had a chicken store and he’d put his own sign in the window and he didn’t know how to spell very well,” he recalled. “It said, ‘Fresh poetry.’ It just struck me as a wonderful juxtaposition.” At the intersection of Ashland, Ogden, and Madison he encountered the Wendell Bank Building, atop which rose “a giant turtle wax sign that was as big as the building. . . . It was incredible. It always gave me the chills. I couldn’t believe this insane thing that somebody had put up here. . . . It was just finding extraordinary things which always seemed to be done by somebody who was not trained as a professional, who was doing it because they didn’t know any better, nobody told them you couldn’t do such a dumb thing as that and they went ahead and did these great things.”85 Wirsum synthesized his imagery from Chicago’s environment, especially Maxwell Street Market, Riverview Amusement Park, and the shifting character of  neighborhoods. He describes his process through analogies of place, mind trips that have him “jumping from one neighborhood of  ideas to another, each of  which have separate identities of  evolution, much like wandering about in the city without a fixed destination”86 A Blackshear student trained to be open and receptive, he was excited about Mexican art and visited the country in the 1960s. He had been inspired by Nazca pottery and the sculptural traditions of Aztec and Mayan art but while there discovered dazzling taxicabs personalized by their drivers and bright, surprising store graphics and signs. A devotee of Chicago blues music, Wirsum frequented West and South Side blues clubs and sought out gospel music. This rich combination of  sources flows through Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1968; fig. 4.16), an homage to the rhythm and blues singer who crafted a shamanic stage persona. Hawkins is shown in the midst of an electric, magical transformation, embodying power, creativity, and sexuality. The singer loved the image and approved it as the cover of  his 1970 release on the Philips label, titled Because is in your mind (Armpitrubber), after text on Wirsum’s painting. The Hairy Who may not have intended specific countercultural connections, social critique, or a political position for their work, but they made images of  the body at a time when their generation was under siege. Amid the dire circumstances of  the Vietnam War, assassinations of  civil rights leaders and presidential candidates, and protests and demonstrations answered with violence, many were forced into political positions that had moral consequences. Green made paintings of secretary of  defense Robert S. McNamara as a cold, calculating war technocrat. Falconer contributed a page to a 1966 comic inviting readers to make their own “Surplus War.” Rocca and Nilsson participated in protest exhibitions, and Wirsum’s imagery edged toward the apocalyptic.87 In New York, Golub and Spero made virulent antiwar art about the suffering of  civilians and helped organize Artists Against the War in Vietnam. In Chicago, a wide range of artists jumped in, including Lanyon and Ginzel, who made works lampooning President Johnson and criticizing Mayor Daley as an authoritarian bully.88 James Falconer reflected on the period: “I think there is actually a lot of tension . . . a lot of  aggression in the work. . . . Jim [Nutt]’s earlier work has a lot to do with . . . personal aggression. The artist’s aggression against society? Who knows. . . . But I do think that I wasn’t particularly happy that I was going to get drafted . . . and it wasn’t particularly a pleasant time, and coupled with . . . all of  the cultural, and hippie and the kind of  explosion of  music. . . . At the time the Hairy Who was a bunch of young people.”89 Falconer cofounded the Chicago branch of  Artists Against the War in Vietnam with Di Meo, Robert Donley, and Don Main, and with them produced the screen-­printed book Protest Papers in 1968.90 He characterized Golub’s

174

4.16  Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 36 in.

175

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

generation as having had “more of  a political education where they can fit themselves into a vision of  the world that has a specific kind of  reference, whereas we, the younger people have more of  a generalized sort of  anxiety that . . . can fluctuate.”91 Nutt’s Summer Salt (1970; fig. 4.17a–b) shows the aggressive mood and generalized anxiety Falconer described. Produced at a time when journalists were uncovering and reporting on Vietnam War atrocities of  increasing frequency and intensity, Nutt’s image channels this horror and abject cruelty. One of  many bold and still shocking images of  mutilated bodies, Summer Salt’s relation to the torture of American POWs may be purely coincidental but registers the climate with precision. A man, naked except for underwear, sits in what appears to be a heap of  seething excrement or gore crawling with little green maggots. His arms are bound behind his back, so tightly they may well be broken. His severed head has been forcibly smashed back onto his torso, the fresh blood splashing away from his neck. His penis, painfully raw and engorged, floats upward away from his body. The image, made in reverse on a clear vinyl window shade, is composed with the care and attention of  a Northern Renaissance altarpiece depicting the grotesque martyrdom of a saint. The object as a whole furthers this comparison. The window shade, when retracted, reveals a painted panel behind featuring small, fragmentary images, like emblems of  a forgotten, violent hagiography. The intimate window format suggests that such events could be happening throughout the city, whether Chicago or Hanoi. Dominick Di Meo became one of  the earliest artists in the city to directly protest and organize against the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson’s policies, and Mayor Daley’s response to demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.92 He printed Landscape Beautification Johnson Style (ca. 1966; fig. 4.18) and distributed copies on the street as a call to action, eliding the boundaries between gallery walls and the moving world. Against a black ground a massive wedge of  human skulls and bones tips forward to reveal densely packed remains. Skulls gape at the viewer, their jaws broken open in a perpetual gasp. President Johnson’s angry head rises behind this dense structure of death, his features rhyming with the expressions of  the death’s heads. Brows lowered, eyes in a squint, his mouth an active, open hole, LBJ appears as a destructive apparition responsible for the grim spectacle at his chin. More skulls seem to spill from his mouth as if  he just spewed forth these dry bones or, conversely, is eating them, ingesting their brittle bodies, drawing power from their violent absences. Di Meo’s title refers to the Highway Beautification Act, a 1965 bill signed by LBJ that aimed to reduce the visual clutter of  billboards, junkyards, and other eyesores by restricting their placement and numbers. Johnson claimed that the soul of  America was at stake in cleaning up roadside vistas and pledged to restore the beauty of  the landscape he adored in childhood.93 Yet, as the United States became more deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War, human costs escalated, dissent at home became more intense, and Johnson’s domestic programs looked increasingly out of  touch, at odds with the brutality of  his foreign policy.94 Di Meo’s montage makes this clear. In the spirit of German artists George Grosz and John Heartfield, who bravely attacked Hitler’s regime in the 1930s, Di Meo transforms a much-­touted domestic reform into a euphemism for genocide. Other Chicago artists made art about how media technology had made the Vietnam War continually visible on the home front. Ed Paschke’s Tet Inoffensive (1968; fig. 4.19) refers to a devastating turning point against the United States in the Vietnam War and indicts the celebration and replaying of violence in the media that had become standard in the 1960s. In

176

4.17a  Jim Nutt, Summer Salt, 1970. Acrylic on vinyl, enamel on wood panel, 61 ¼ × 36 × 3 ½ in. 4.17b  Jim Nutt, Summer Salt (with vinyl

windowshade retracted), 1970. Acrylic on vinyl, enamel on wood panel, 61 ¼ × 36 × 3 ½ in.

177

4.18  Dominick Di Meo, Landscape Beautification Johnson Style, ca. 1967. Offset print on paper, 10 × 8 in. 4.19  Ed Paschke, Tet Inoffensive, 1968.

Oil on canvas, 39 × 35 in.

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

the upper corners of  the painting, Paschke reproduced a famously horrific image that won its photographer, Eddie Adams, a Pulitzer Prize: South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong guerilla point-­blank. In the lower corners, also doubled, is an image of  North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, pictured smoking with a smirk on his face. That this is a critique of  American imperialism is made explicit in the center through a cinematic image, also doubled, of  John Wayne dressed as a cocky cowboy. Edward Flood’s Zero Dead Hero (1970; fig. 4.20) is a nihilistic monument to the war dead made with the visual language of  storefront signs and pinball machines. Flood’s handmade painted wood box is decorated on all sides. A tiny death’s head can even be seen on the bottom. Inside, several Plexiglas panes fit into slots, one behind the other, reverse-­painted to mimic a pinball backsplash. The overlapping panes compose a lush tropical jungle suggestive of  Vietnam’s terrain. Lightning flashes threaten the dark sky and double as bursting artillery. Zero Dead Hero’s relation to pinball machines is chillingly apt. Pinball is inherently a game of  chance, and the games’ primary locations — ­arcades, bars, and bowling alleys — ­were places in which television and radio was an important social backdrop through which patrons would hear war news. That connection between death and chance must have struck Flood as appropriate for a war memorial to his generation’s unidentified soldiers. Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention during the last week of August 1968. The violence that erupted when police attacked protesters outraged and galvanized the city’s artists. In the immediate wake of the events, Ralph Arnold made One Thing Leads to Another (1968; fig. 4.21), a large collage interconnecting America’s innumerable social injustices. Racism and bigotry, extreme poverty, and the dashed hopes of  those seeking a better life in the supposedly liberal city of Chicago are linked with the war and the draft, and with Mayor Daley’s fiction of  “law and order.” Arnold presents images sliced from magazines, newspapers, and AP photographs to heighten the immediacy and truth of  his observations. “I saw this,” he seems to say, testifying to the validity of his social equation and its desperate sums. While Chicago artists like Arnold struggled to make sense of  the aftermath, artists elsewhere, in California and New York, proposed a two-­year art boycott of  Chicago until 1970, when Daley’s term was over. Within days more than fifty artists endorsed the call, and the New York Times reported on it.95 As news of  the boycott spread, Oldenburg, who was in Chicago during the convention and was beat up during the clashes with police, wrote to Richard Feigen to cancel his planned solo exhibition, scheduled to open at the gallery October 23. “In Chicago, I, like so many others ran head-­on into the model American police state,” Oldenburg wrote. “I was tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked me and choked me and called me a Communist . . . a gentle one-­man show about pleasure seems a bit obscene in the present context.”96 Sensing a way to channel the local and national outrage, Feigen proposed a Richard J. Daley protest show in place of  Oldenburg’s solo slot. Ten other galleries, aided by artists’ groups, followed Feigen’s lead and organized political exhibitions.97 There had previously been local protest exhibitions against President Johnson, most notably one held at Richard Gray Gallery in February 1967. The events surrounding the convention unleashed new work, involved more spaces and artists, and struck directly at the local overlord. Among the most startling and unexpected responses was that of  Barnett Newman, who had written to Charles Cunningham, director of  the Art Institute, on September 3, requesting that his work be removed from Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, set to open October 19. He explained, “I do not want to

179

4.20  Edward C. Flood, Zero Dead Hero, 1970. Acrylic, Plexiglas, and wood, 31 ½ × 22 ½ × 5 ¾ in.

4.21  Ralph Arnold, One Thing Leads to Another, 1968. Collage and acrylic on canvas, 60 × 60

in. Art Institute Photography Purchase Fund, 2011.131. Art Institute of Chicago.

181

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

be represented in this exhibition in protest against the uncalled-­for police brutality of  Mayor Daley, which fills me with disgust. I cannot in good conscience do otherwise.”98 Newman’s submission to the Feigen show was an imposing six-­foot-­high steel sculpture, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (1968; fig. 4.22a–b). A large metal frame strung with an orderly grid of  barbed wire, the object stood in the center of  the gallery, quiet but threatening, referencing the obscene barriers affixed to the front of army jeeps for crowd control during the convention unrest. Newman spattered the barbed wire and base with red paint, evoking the blood of  brutalized protesters. The cynical title was a deliberate jab at Daley’s Irish heritage and a rebuke for the mayor’s anti-­Semitic heckling of  Senator Abraham Ribicoff  as he spoke at the convention. “Lace curtain Irish” was a well-­known phrase in Daley’s working-­class neighborhood, used to denigrate someone trying to mask a modest background with superficial signs of  finery. Newman’s implication was that Daley’s attempt to rise on the national scene could not conceal an underlying violence and contempt for Chicago’s citizens. While Newman rejected the Art Institute’s Dada and Surrealism exhibition as a personal political statement, a homegrown Chicago Surrealist Group did so based on the original tenets of Surrealism. On the museum’s steps, founders Franklin and Penelope Rosemont distributed flyers for a protest exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in the Old Town neighborhood. Over one hundred works of art by members of the Chicago Surrealist Group hung on the gallery’s walls in a rebuke to what they felt was a mummification of revolutionary movements in the museum’s tomb. The group (which included Lester Dore, Schlecter Duvall, Robert Greene, Eric Matheson, and others) formed in 1966, after the Rosemonts met with André Breton and other French surrealists in Paris. The Chicago group felt that Surrealism was alive with perpetual possibilities for liberation through a unification of art and radical politics. It was not enough to make images and objects. Surrealism should be taken to the streets and to society, to foster the change needed in the desperate late 1960s. Gallery Bugs Bunny became more than an art space. It was a gathering spot for a community of anarchists, Black Panthers, and others dedicated to upturning the festering status quo.

Epilogue The success of the Hairy Who and several other artists of their generation resulted in national attention that led to assumptions about the kind of work done in Chicago. This was reinforced by the group of twelve Chicago artists Baum selected to represent the United States at the São Paulo Bienal in 1973, which may have been assembled to give a sense of greater stylistic unity than was accurate.99 On the heels of the Hairy Who exhibitions, artists attending SAIC between 1968 and 1972, such as Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, and Barbara Rossi, had to contend with comparisons to these recent alumni, particularly when they exhibited in their own groups. Each of these four developed a body of work that examined identity and engaged with sexual politics, and specifically with emerging queer and feminist points of view. In their work, the sexually frank but often gender-­ambiguous imagery of artists such as Nilsson and Nutt became more forthright.100 Ramberg consistently engaged the interrelations of  sexuality, clothing, desire, consent, and objectification in her work. Waiting Lady (1972; fig. 4.23) epitomizes this strategy in a concisely composed image compressing a full female body into the strict confines of  Ramberg’s painted panel, suggesting literal confinement in a box or cell. Although related to

182

4.22a  Barnett Newman, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, 1968. Cor-­ten steel, galvanized barbed wire, and enamel paint, 70 × 48 × 10 in. 4.22b  Barnett Newman, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (detail), 1968. Cor-­ten steel, galvanized barbed wire, and enamel paint, 70 × 48 × 10 in.

183

ROBE R T C OZ ZOLINO

4.23  Christina Ramberg, Waiting Lady, 1972. Acrylic on Masonite, 22 ¾ × 32 ¼ in.

Ramberg’s memories of  seeing her mother dress in uncomfortable clothes for the pleasure of  society and men, she has untethered the image from narrative specificity, and there lies the disturbing ambiguity. Is the subject glimpsed in a split second within ordinary rituals of  dressing or undressing? Is she a victim, bound against her will, or willingly part of  a fetish relationship? Ramberg’s work was deliberately provocative and deeply engaged the role of surface and pattern in representational imagery in order to examine societal strictures. Brown engaged politics and homosexuality from the outset of  his career. If  any artist of  this period engaged with the joy and horror of  living in the city, it was Brown, whose frequent depictions of  architecture affectionately reference Chicago. His 1973 solo exhibition at Phyllis Kind Gallery was devoted to the theme of  “disasters,” which included residential high-­rises and skyscrapers in apocalyptic tumult, as in Ablaze and Ajar (1972; fig. 4.24). These paintings, at once humorous and horrifying, combine many threads of Brown’s experience. “I grew up in Alabama in a small town near Montgomery,” he recalled: I think that childhood experiences are always in an artist’s work forever. I was brought up in a very fundamentalist, religious church. They preached hell-­fire and brimstone. I was always scared to death of the devil and the end of the world. As a kid I remember we would drive cross-­country to my grandmother’s during the summer and on the way back (it was a five hour trip) as it got darker at night and you could look across the horizon and see glowing lights of little towns, I thought that maybe that was the end of the world and the fire was starting over there. I would think about that in the back seat of the car while my parents were in front driving home.101

184

R AW NE RVE S , 194 8 – 1973

4.24  Roger Brown, Ablaze and Ajar, 1972. Oil on canvas, 70 ¼ × 47 in.

The period surveyed here was full of great social upheaval, to which Chicago’s artists responded. The local scene was beset with challenges to access, exposure, and growth, but artists worked to expand the options available to the community. This pride of place and sense of what was possible through collective action reverberated throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Several prominent artists chose to remain in Chicago or to maintain roots in the city. This was a corollary to the perception that successful artists fled the city. That artists working in Chicago could develop in a manner that was unpressured by other corners of the art market could appear as both a blessing and a problem. James Falconer chose to see it in a positive light: “Chicago seems to me (with the great advantage of hindsight) a place to invent your world. A place that is far enough away so that you could misunderstand the rest of the world and a place unique enough to provide an actuality which no other place will. To use a title from a Sun Ra record, a place where angels and demons are at play, perhaps on the same team.” 102

185

CHAPTER 5

MAKING SPACE 1961–­1 976 REBECCA ZORACH

Preamble: Art as Action In 1961 Margaret Burroughs, together with her husband, Charles Burroughs, and their associate Eugene Feldman, founded the Ebony Museum of  African History at her home at 3806 South Michigan Avenue. Burroughs developed the museum out of  her own collection as a response to her exclusion from the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) during the Red Scare of  the 1950s.1 Renamed the DuSable Museum in 1968, it reflected what was to be a decades-­long commitment to educating children and adults about African and African American history through the arts and culture. If  this serves as the signal event inaugurating the 1960s in Chicago, it can help us to trace how important the Black Arts Movement was in crystallizing the city’s socially and politically engaged art practices in the 1960s and ’70s. The Black Arts Movement brought together African American artists who identified with the political urgency of  the Black Power phase of  the civil rights movement. In this period, activist artists, many of  them African American or inspired by black political struggles, deeply marked the city. Working in tandem with activists, they developed a politically astute, aesthetically experimental, and community-­based practice. Although not always acknowledged by elite institutions, activism and social engagement have characterized Chicago art from early on. African American artists and artists of color — ­and among them, many women — ­have played a defining role within this key component of Chicago’s distinctive artistic character. As earlier chapters have shown, the absence of  a high-­level art market and of  major museum support for Chicago artists has meant that, historically, a relatively high proportion of  Chicago artists have worked as educators or as commercial artists. This was all the more true for African American artists, who did not have access to the brick-­and-­mortar art market that did exist in Chicago; museums and established galleries showed white artists almost exclusively. Black artists made their own spaces, showing in social service centers, schools, retail establishments, and apartment and studio galleries. In warm weather, they exhibited at outdoor art fairs, such as the 57th Street Art Fair in Hyde Park and the Lake Meadows Art Fair (founded by, once again, Margaret Burroughs, who had been an early participant in the 57th Street fair). They also showed work at the South Side Community Art Center, which by the later 1960s had shed its McCarthy-­era fears and become a hospitable place for politically

187

. . . they are ready to rile the high-­f lung ground . . . Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Wall,” 1967

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

engaged black artists. A strong array of  black social and professional clubs, social service institutions, and a powerful black publishing industry created a landscape within which black art could flourish. In Johnson Publishing’s Negro Digest (later Black World), edited by Hoyt W. Fuller Jr., Chicago possessed one of  the most important periodicals of  the national Black Arts Movement; indeed, the magazine was international in scope, reflective of  a subaltern cosmopolitanism. Beyond the South Side, marginal, politically radical, and grassroots communities also supported the activities of  artists. Supportive scenes for activist artists could be found within Chicago’s populous and boisterous community of  labor activists, which included communists, anarchists, and Wobblies (the nickname of the IWW, the International Workers of the World). Other spaces included those maintained by social crusaders like Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr and the social settlement movement they initiated at Chicago’s Hull-­House, and the rebellious bohemians and freethinkers who populated Bughouse Square (from the 1890s an outdoor, radical soapboxing arena on the near North Side) and set up their own institutions, salons, and artist colonies around the city.2 At the South Side Community Art Center in the spring of  1967, a pathbreaking event occurred: the first public introduction of the Organization of  Black American Culture (OBAC, pronounced oba-­si, oba meaning “chief” in Yoruba).3 Formed initially in late 1966 as the Committee for the Arts by writer and editor Hoyt Fuller, poet Conrad Kent Rivers, and sociologist Gerald McWorter, the group declared the goal of  “bringing together the Black Artist with the Black Masses into a solid union which will establish the bedrock for the flowering of  art and the regeneration of  the spirit and vigor of  the Black Community.”4 The goals of  OBAC, as expressed in its “Statement of Purposes,” were manifold: to encourage talent and spread appreciation of the arts; to channel “creative energies” into “constructive endeavors”; to create indigenous expressions, “unhampered and uninhibited by the prejudices and dictates of the ‘mainstream,’” that “reflect the richness and depth and variety of  Black History and Culture”; to provide honest portrayals of  the black experience “as it profoundly proclaims the human condition”; and “to provide the Black Community with a positive image of  itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibilities for creativity.”5 The poet Haki Madhubuti (who, as Don L. Lee, had worked as a curator at the Ebony Museum) traces the founding impulses of  the Black Arts Movement to cultural workers’ responses to the 1965 assassination of  Malcolm X, who had said that culture was an “indispensable weapon” in the struggle for freedom.6 “And we came out and hit the streets with our poetry,” Madhubuti recalls, “and it changed the whole scene in terms of how poetry was seen, and respect for the written word.”7 Comparable statements can be made about artists working in other media, who were pushed by Malcolm’s death or by other events of the politically heated 1960s to dedicate themselves to militant action through their work as artists. For most people outside Chicago, the city’s best-­known event of  the late 1960s is the August 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC), a scene of mass protests and what was later termed a “police riot.” Television made the DNC events especially visible. The simple fact of  physical confrontation should not have been a surprise: anyone paying attention could have anticipated clashes between protesters and police. But the intensity and lawlessness of  the police actions were a shock to those who experienced them and who saw them on the nightly news. It was a year of  intense political emotion. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy provoked rage and sadness. Tense expectations of  a difficult convention

188

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

built over the months. Multifarious groups and individuals had long planned to converge on Chicago, in particular to mark their opposition to the Vietnam War. Groups organizing protest contingents included the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), the Poor People’s Campaign, Women Strike for Peace. the American Friends Service Committee, the Black Panther Party, and, famously, the Youth International Party, or Yippies, with tricksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin at the helm. Through the media, the Yippies issued a raft of  gleeful provocations, including the most fantastical: that LSD would be released into Chicago’s water supply. But the police response to these taunts exceeded any explicable bounds — ­officers indiscriminately beat peaceful demonstrators, bystanders, and journalists alike. Especially journalists. The DNC events were remarkable not only for the violence police officers exercised, but for the fact that they unambiguously directed it against members of the press.8 Many questions remain unanswered: Did the police attack journalists and photographers because they thought the media were too sympathetic to protesters? Did they react in spite of  the fact that “the whole world was watching” (as protesters chanted), or because of  it? Did they think it wasn’t? Or did they not think about it at all? Mayor Richard J. Daley himself  had developed a theory of media responsibility, which he expressed in September 1966 to a luncheon meeting of  the Radio and Television News Directors Association. It was “haters, kooks, and psychotics,” he said, who populated news media reports of civil rights marches and political events: “Frequently, the news is ‘managed’ by certain individuals and organizations who understand the nature of the media. With full knowledge that cameras are present, these individuals will make charges and outrageous statement [sic]. They stand a very good chance of  being on television, whereas the calm, responsible statement will go unheeded.”9 Media representatives, the mayor believed, allowed themselves to become the passive vehicle for these “kooky” points of  view. Reading against the grain of  Daley’s negative view, this sense of  the power marginal groups might obtain by manipulating the press opens space to think expansively about the agency of protesters and other populations excluded from political and other privilege. By engineering media scenes, they became visible; they thus became active image-­makers, finding ways to shape the city. If these were not always art per se, they shared much with the efforts of  artists to find creative ways to make their political feelings visible. At the national level, it’s not surprising to mention the Yippies — ­trickster activists who artistically manipulated media attention — ­in the same breath as artists. It takes a little more digging to establish a sense of the landscape for activists and artists, and their historical connection, working at a grassroots level in Chicago. Certainly, Chicago’s communities had a rich history of  public street activism that long predated the Yippies’ arrival. Protesters operated by taking up space in public, making themselves visible and unavoidable, exploiting media attention to create spectacle. In addition to standard forms of  protest, like picketing, they had long experience in spectacular forms of  carving out, occupying, moving through, and filling up space. In particular, black struggles for economic opportunity, better schools, and open housing in the 1960s and ’70s used what author Arthur Waskow called “creative disorder” to gain attention.10 With his verbal flair and sense of  media spectacle, comedian Dick Gregory repeatedly led provocative marches to Mayor Daley’s home to protest poor school conditions in 1965.11 After police arrested Gregory and fellow protesters in November of  that year, on grounds that their presence was a provocation to violent counterprotesters, Gregory filed a case against the city that eventually went to the Supreme Court and established that there is no “heckler’s veto” on protest.

189

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

This chapter proposes that we draw a slightly wider circle around the phenomena we consider “art,” provisionally including creative forms of activism alongside the making of art objects, performances, and environments. My ambition is to establish space for the concerns of  black, Latinx, and activist artists of  the Black Arts Movement and community mural movement to define the terms of  a dialogue that does not exclude mainstream artists, works, and institutions, but rebalances and redefines what counts as center and what counts as periphery. Key terms for this chapter include the assertive occupation of  space, the exploration of  the figure, and the collective performance of  political feeling and popular distribution of  visual ideas.

Occupying Space, Manipulating Media With the founding of the DuSable Museum, OBAC, and numerous other organizations and spaces, the activities of organizing and institution-­building became as important to the notion of what art is as the making of objects. The founding of OBAC was to have far-­reaching consequences for black cultural production in Chicago. Offshoots and allies of OBAC include the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), Kuumba Theater, and the OBAC Writers Workshop, which continued under that name for many years. The single work produced by the OBAC Visual Artists Workshop, which included painters, photographers, and a designer (Sylvia Abernathy), was the Wall of Respect (fig. 5.1). After meeting together for several months, discussing black art and on the lookout for a collective project, the group was introduced by the photographer Billy Abernathy to the painter William Walker. Walker had experience painting murals, and through contacts in the community had access to a wall at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue. Together, the group conceived a wall of  black heroes. The mural would provide an alternative to graffiti and a platform for cultural and political activity. It was also a pointed response to the great downtown art event of 1967, the unveiling of  the “Chicago Picasso.” And, significantly, it claimed space. The initial version of  the Wall was divided into sections celebrating black heroes in the realms of  politics, music, athletics, drama, literary pursuits, and religion, and was produced by fourteen artists, including both painters and photographers. The original painters were Edward Christmas (who painted the Literature section), Jeff Donaldson (Jazz), Elliott Hunter (Jazz), Wadsworth Jarrell (Rhythm & Blues), Barbara Jones-­Hogu (at the time, Jones; Theater), Norman Parish (Statesmen), William Walker (Religion), and Myrna Weaver (Sports). Photographers designated to affix their work to the Wall (in the form of  prints first mounted to hardboard and coated with a sealant) were Billy Abernathy (Jazz, Rhythm & Blues), Darryl Cowherd (Literature), Roy Lewis (Statesmen, Theater), and Robert A. Sengstacke (Religion).12 Sylvia Abernathy, a designer who trained at the Illinois Institute of Technology, came up with the layout, which took advantage of the wall’s specific features and created a pattern of  light and dark backgrounds that divided the mural into its sections. Part of  the project’s innovation was its inclusion of photography: photographers’ work would be part of the mural, and they would thoroughly document its making, the changes it went through, and the many events that surrounded it. The Wall of  Respect claimed space, and it also made space. It became not only a platform for performances of  music, poetry, and theater, but also the site of  militant political rallies that

190

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

5.1  OBAC Visual Artists Workshop, Wall of Respect, 1967 (now destroyed). Photograph: Robert Sengstacke.

attracted a great deal of attention from the police. In this respect, it was consistent with the activities of  artists and musicians in Chicago who worked constantly to find, claim, and make space — ­whether they had long-­term ambitions to build alternative institutions with a view to self-­determination for the black community, or were simply finding a way in the moment to get their work done and bring people in to see and hear it. Black artists created independent art spaces, such as W. J. Studios and Gallery, at the southern edge of Hyde Park (run by Wadsworth Jarrell, in space he shared with his spouse and fellow AfriCOBRA artist, Jae Jarrell, and another member of  AfriCOBRA, Gerald Williams); Osun Gallery, in South Shore (run by artist ˙ and musician Yaoundé Olu); and Afam Gallery, which moved several times from Bronzeville to South Shore to the South Loop (run by a collective that included artist/musician José Williams). Despite the flurry of  activity they engendered, the existence of  most of  these South Side spaces has gone almost unnoticed by historians outside the Black Arts Movement itself. At a time when the ownership of real estate was highly politicized, especially in Chicago, painting on walls, in public, became charged with political implications. Jeff  Donaldson, one of  the painters of  the Wall of  Respect, stated later that it was important to the artists that they not seek permission to paint — ­that they simply claimed the space. The claiming of space was connected to the Wall in another way as well. Earlier that summer, activists had symbolically claimed nearby Washington Park and renamed it Malcolm X Shabazz Park. Roy Lewis, one of  the Wall photographers, photographed the event and installed his photograph on its Statesmen section — ­next to the portrait of  Malcolm X (fig. 5.2).

191

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

Occupying space was a political act that took place in the context of  rapidly changing neighborhoods. Bronzeville was the historical home of  African Americans in Chicago; restrictive covenants prohibited them from living almost anywhere else. But Bronzeville was changing. During the 1950s, inner-­city housing stock had been demolished at a rapid pace to construct highways and large institutions like the University of Illinois at Chicago. (While the struggles of  African American residents of the South Side involved the largest numbers, other populations were also affected. In the early 1960s Florence Scala and other mostly Italian American women staged protests and sit-­ins at the mayor’s office to protest the demolition of  their near West Side neighborhood for the construction of the UIC Circle campus.) Manufacturing jobs were leaving the city, reconfiguring the relation between workplaces and residential neighborhoods. A series of  Supreme Court decisions opened up new swaths of  the city’s geography to black residents — ­in principle. In the mid-­twentieth century, as African Americans began moving (often at their physical peril) into previously white neighborhoods, the Federal Housing Authority refused to insure mortgage loans in those neighborhoods. Often, the only option for would-­be homeowners who did not have the full price of  the house in cash

5.2  OBAC Visual Artists Workshop, Wall of Respect (detail with Roy Lewis’s photograph of activists

claiming Malcolm X Shabazz Park), 1967 (now destroyed). Photograph: Robert Sengstacke.

192

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

was “contract buying.” In these exploitative arrangements, the buyer paid on an installment plan and was often subjected to hidden fees, rate changes, and harassment by inspection, leading in many cases to the loss of the home.13 The situation in Chicago was so charged that in 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. dramatized the housing situation in Chicago by moving into a slum apartment in North Lawndale on the city’s West Side, making Chicago his test case for a northern Freedom Movement. In this context, to protest housing conditions might mean participating in a march, like the fair housing march King led in Marquette Park in 1966. But claiming visibility in public space might also have the character of a sit-­in, an occupation, something like the way artists claimed and energized the city block around the Wall of Respect. For example, activists in the summer of  1966 made a spectacle of  the eviction of  rent-­striking tenants of  Old Town Gardens on the near North Side simply by sitting on furniture that had been put out on the sidewalk. In 1970 members of  the Contract Buyers’ League did something similar but more dramatic, occupying Civic Center Plaza (later Daley Plaza) in support of  four families on the far South Side who were withholding payments pending a court ruling on the illegality of their housing contracts.14 After two hundred police officers evicted the families, the CBL, in an effort to make the evictions more visible, took the household belongings the police had dumped on the street and transported them to the downtown plaza. Displaying furniture in public was one way to make an impression; inviting members of  the public into houses and apartments to make conditions visible was another. As activists pushed for open housing, residents of  Kenwood, an affluent interracial neighborhood, held annual “open houses” in the 1950s and 1960s to demonstrate the success of integration, making art and artists part of the story they told. Artists who participated, held demonstrations, or exhibited work as part of  the open houses included Si Gordon, Egon Weiner, Marie Zoe Greene-­Mercier, Marion Perkins, and Judge Mark E. Jones; art patrons Leonard and Ruth Horwich were regular hosts.15 In genteel Kenwood, the open house was already both a creative and a political statement. All the more, then, when it served the more pointed political goal of  displaying slum conditions or a crime scene to public view. CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) held “slum open houses” that showed the public the opposite end of  the economic spectrum: “A look into a Chicago slum building is a shocking experience,” stated the organizers.16 The Illinois Black Panthers opened the West Side apartment in which spokesman Fred Hampton was killed by FBI and police operatives in 1969 to guided tours. “In the eyes of many in the black community,” a New York Times journalist wrote, “the apartment has rapidly become a combination shrine and political education center.”17 As art entered the realm of  the action and the event, it became more difficult to distinguish it from the attention-­getting practices of  activists, and perhaps it was also informed by them. In 1967 Moving, a Happening by Allan Kaprow, commissioned by the Museum of  Contemporary Art for its inaugural exhibition, invited members of  the public to transport “old furniture” through the streets and into “empty houses.”18 Wittingly or unwittingly, Kaprow’s Happening resonated with performative protest around housing in Chicago.

“Send Him Back to Art School” The Wall of Respect was unveiled in the same month of the same year as another Chicago art phenomenon, the monumental sculpture known simply as “the Picasso.” Like Picasso, the

193

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

creators of the Wall were professional, trained artists. But this is where the resemblance ends. The Wall was everything the Picasso was not: it was avowedly made by Chicago artists in Chicago; it was the product of overt collaboration; and it was made in concert with community members who critiqued, contributed to, and protected it. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks, invited to pronounce a dedication at the opening of  the Picasso, articulated a set of modernist aspirations for a kind of art that challenges its viewers. Her respectful but distant response to the Picasso seemed to express ambivalence about the object’s privileged status as art. The tone of  that poem contrasts sharply with the warmth and engagement she expresses in her poem for the Wall of  Respect, paired with the Picasso poem as “Two Dedications.” For Brooks, the Wall affirmed the humanity of its people against a racist society’s assaults. She ends with the lines: “The old decapitations are revised, / the dispossessions beakless. / And we sing.” The contrast between the two monumental artworks, sharpened by their contemporaneity, was obvious to many onlookers. Don L. Lee wrote defiantly in his poem about the Wall, “Picasso ain’t got shit on us, send him back to art school.”19 Useni Eugene Perkins (son of  sculptor Marion Perkins and brother of the painter Toussaint Perkins) took a similarly strong position: Let Picasso’s enigma of steel fester in the backyard of the city fathers’ cretaceous sanctuary It has no meaning for black people, only showmanism to entertain imbecilic critics who judge all art by European standards . . . The WALL is for black people . . .20 The critiques of the Chicago Picasso that surrounded the unveiling of the Wall of Respect came with an awareness of the fact that Picasso had been inspired by (or perhaps appropriated) African imagery to propel his work forward. Margaret Burroughs in particular had long taken an interest in Picasso. As early as 1940, before the South Side Community Art Center even had a building, she had proposed to its board a visit to the Picasso exhibition then on view at the Art Institute.21 In 1966 she wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune commending the city on its prospective acquisition of the monument — ­then asking, “When will a fitting memorial be raised to DuSable?”22 In her linocut entitled Picasso Faces, Burroughs acknowledges the European artist’s inspiration for her work. She may have been especially sympathetic to him — ­a self-­declared communist — ­because of her own political leanings. And yet the Picasso itself  raised questions about community and public that were not so distant from those of  the Wall of  Respect, though its “community” and “public” were understood quite differently. Commissioned by the city (and a reluctant mayor, as skeptical as anyone of  “modern art”), and situated in Civic Center Plaza, the sculpture articulated a definitional tension between the public as the people and the public as the government. Picasso had declared in his deed of gift that he was giving the sculpture to the people of Chicago, but sited in Civic Center Plaza — ­what was to become Daley Plaza — ­it could easily seem like an organ of  official policy. Scenes of protesters congregating near it suggest, however, that citizens believed they could stake a claim of ownership of  the space.

194

Art Criticism in Chicago JAMES YO O D

national contemporary art magazine — ­Flash Art, Arts, tema celeste, Parkett, Sculpture, Art News, etc. — ­had at least an occasional correspondent in Chicago. Locally, the New Art Examiner — ­founded in 1973 by Jane Addams Allen and Derek Guthrie — ­provided the most concentrated coverage of the Chicago art world during the thirty years it was published. Under the editorship of the late Kathryn Hixson, the magazine was feisty, opinionated, and willing — ­some thought, eager — ­to ruffle the local power elite (for example, two NAE articles from the late 1980s carried the titles “Why MCA?” and “Cowardice and Politics Ruin ‘The Chicago Show’”), which may have provoked donors to withdraw their support. (It ceased publication in 2002.) In its pages, though, both local writers and national ones — ­Donald Kuspit, Peter Schjeldahl, and Eleanor Heartney, among them — ­articulated positions on Chicago as an important, independent art center. The internet, not surprisingly, has been a boon to the range and variety of arts writing and commentary in Chicago. By 2000 the advent of the citizen journalism that the web made possible led to an extraordinary proliferation of voices, greater not merely in number but in diversity and range of interests. Websites and blogs have come and gone, but some such sites have been responsible for a great deal of the arts conversation in Chicago in the past fifteen years. Duncan MacKenzie and Richard Holland’s Bad at Sports, a weekly podcast built around extended interviews with art figures, often from Chicago, was founded in 2005 and has become, almost in spite of itself, a rich resource of archival material on Chicago art and its community, as has the website The Visualist (thevisualist.org). For art criticism, chicagoartistwriters.com has been an interesting forum for new voices, as has neotericart.com.

The explosive growth of the Chicago art community in the decades following World War II also accelerated the professionalization of art criticism and art writing in the city. Not that there weren’t distinguished critics during the great age of Chicago newspaper journalism earlier in the century; figures such as Harriet Monroe, Eleanor Jewett, C. J. Bulliet, and even Carl Sandburg took a whack at art criticism in one or another of Chicago’s major dailies. Between 1970 and 2010 their successors — ­Harold Haydon, Sue Taylor, and Margaret Hawkins at the Chicago Sun-­Times, Alan Artner at the Chicago Tribune, and Franz Schulze at the Chicago Daily News — ­continued that tradition, recently carried on (in a sharply reduced newspaper market) by Lori Waxman in the Tribune. Free print weeklies such as the Reader and NewCity avidly continue to cover the local art scene. Even in the 1950s and’60s, when newspaper art criticism was on the wane, voices such as Harry Bouras on WFMT radio (his first name would provide the impetus for the naming of the “Hairy Who” in 1966) and Henry Hanson, with his long tenure at Chicago magazine, broadened the local appetite for cultural commentary. Art magazines, both local and national, became a major site of Chicago art criticism. Artforum and Art in America particularly, mostly in the form of exhibition reviews, kept Chicago and some of its artists on the national map. Art in America’s critics included the previously mentioned Schulze and Taylor, and later Susan Snodgrass and Kyle MacMillan covered the scene for them. Judith Russi Kirshner, Buzz Spector, Laurie Palmer, Hamza Walker, and I were regular correspondents to Artforum, in my case for twenty-­two years. (Before us there were Whitney Halstead and Dennis Adrian. Now Solveig Nelson and Zachary Cahill, among others, carry the torch.) By the 1980s practically every inter-

Initial outrage about the Picasso, as expressed in the media (whether by officials, critics, or ordinary people interviewed for a juicy quote), was largely reactionary and focused on its abstract form or the artist’s left-­wing politics. Once installed, the monument quickly drew protest to Civic Center Plaza. At its inauguration the Chicago Surrealists circulated a flyer excoriating the city government, the sculpture as a sterile idol, and Picasso as a (latter-­day) reactionary. The Chicago Surrealists, led by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, were poets, publishers, and activists; they maintained close ties with European Surrealists and the Situationists, and were allied with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the IWW. (At

195

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

Roosevelt University, Franklin studied with St. Clair Drake, the great African American social scientist who coauthored The Black Metropolis with Horace Cayton.) They were not averse to using the media circus around the Picasso as an opportunity to advance their own political views, citing the “loathsome war against the Vietnamese” and black revolutionary militancy to come.23 Another protester — ­visible in films of  the inaugural event — ­held a puzzling sign: “the colossal booboo / creative evacuation of / emotional debris / fright.”24 The filmmaker Tom Palazzolo, who began chronicling the folk life of working-­class Chicago neighborhoods in the 1960s, found the “absurd and mystical pomp” of  the inauguration fascinating; his film The Bride Stripped Bare (1967) alludes to the inanity of  the media event of  the sculpture’s unveiling by juxtaposing striptease imagery with footage of it; his title adds a further layer of  humor with its reference to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.25 The Picasso also contributed to the visualization of protest in a more than accidental way. Many scenes of  protest were photographed in front of  the Picasso in the late 1960s and ’70s. When the Contract Buyers’ League protesters dumped the evicted families’ furniture in Civic Center Plaza, they did so in the shadow of the Picasso. Student protesters who paraded into the plaza in October 1968 with a casket representing the Chicago Board of  Education also knew what they were doing: in full view of news cameras, they aligned the prop with the center of  the sculpture and then stomped on it (fig. 5.3). Gang members and Black Panthers were likewise photographed in front of the Picasso (fig. 5.4). It made protest picturesque.

196

5.3 (facing page) Jack Dykinga, Black Student Demonstration at Civic

Center Plaza, Chicago Sun-­Times, October 28, 1968. 5.4 (above) Hiroji Kubota, Black Panthers, USA, Chicago, Illinois, 1969.

197

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

If  Mayor Daley had initially been ambivalent about the Picasso, the City of  Chicago, sensing its PR value, soon moved to license the image of  the sculpture, fast becoming an icon of  the city, and thereafter to protect its ostensible copyright vigorously. In May 1968 a barber, Maestro Gerhard Nonnemacher, wrote a letter to Picasso requesting the artist’s permission to use an image of  the sculpture on his appointment cards. He received no reply.26 William N. Copley, a surrealist painter, gallerist, collector, and publisher, read about Nonnemacher and in June sent a letter requesting a legal opinion on the status of  the Picasso’s copyright to Chicago attorney Barnet Hodes, who had an interest in artists’ rights issues. On August 26, as delegates and protesters converged on Chicago for the opening day of  the Democratic National Convention, Hodes responded with an extended legal opinion suggesting that the city’s assertion of  copyright might be challenged in a declaratory judgment action in federal court. It was around this time that Pop artist Claes Oldenburg — ­who had grown up in Chicago as the son of  the Swedish consul and attended the School of  the Art Institute — ­came into the story. Oldenburg later wrote that “the motive for making the soft Picasso came when [Hodes] asked me to execute a copy of  the maquette for the Chicago Picasso, to figure in a lawsuit challenging the city’s copyright to the sculpture.” He responded to Hodes that he would much prefer to “make the copy soft,” and Hodes was agreeable (fig. 5.5).27 Oldenburg also knew Copley. In November, Copley included a series of  menus by Oldenburg, entitled Unattendable Lunches, in the sixth and final issue of  his publication S.M.S. (standing for “shit must stop”), a periodical portfolio of  artists’ multiples. In the fifth issue he had included a folder of  materials entitled The Barber’s Shop, documenting the licensing situation and Nonnemacher’s efforts to establish the right to use a drawing of  the Picasso on his card.28 Oldenburg’s participation in the court case followed his own direct experience of  the DNC protests in August. Oldenburg recounted soon after the infamous events that he had been “tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked me and choked me and called me a Communist.” He was scheduled for a show at the Feigen Gallery in Chicago in October, but in such a context, he told Feigen, “a gentle one-­man show about pleasure” seemed “a bit obscene.”29 Feigen filled the slot in his schedule with a protest show titled Richard J. Daley, channeling energies that had begun gathering toward an art boycott of  the city, organized by artists revolted by the scenes of  violence they had seen on television.30 Many artists who were otherwise intending to join the boycott chose to participate in Feigen’s show, including some of  the most famous names in the art world.31 One of  the key works produced for the exhibition, Barnett Newman’s Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, turns the modernist grid into a frightening fence of  barbed wire (fig. 4.22a). It was a politicized twist on a familiar mode of  modern art, suggesting that abstraction could, with only very slight modification, look extremely political indeed.32 Copley, notably, also participated in Feigen’s show. A number of  other galleries organized their own thematically linked exhibitions (among others, the muralist John Pitman Weber and the filmmaker Tom Palazzolo participated), and the Museum of  Contemporary Art’s already scheduled show Violence in Recent American Art became newly charged with meaning. Ralph Arnold, whose collage One Thing Leads to Another also addresses convention events (fig. 4.21), exhibited his brooding Unfinished Collage 1968 in the MCA show (fig. 5.6). As he often did, he incorporated media imagery of  current events into his collage paintings. The triad of  large canvases formed a triangular column that hung a few feet above the ground, memorializing John and Robert Kennedy and

198

5.5  Claes Oldenburg, Soft Version of Maquette for a Monument Donated to Chicago by Pablo Picasso, 1968. Canvas and cord painted with liquitex, metal on painted wooden base, 39 3⁄8 × 28 ½ × 19 5⁄8 in. Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

199

5.6  Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage 1968, as installed in Violence! In Recent American Art,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, November 8, 1968–­January 12, 1969.

200

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

Martin Luther King — ­it also, disturbingly, left a blank space “which the viewer,” wrote Tribune reviewer Robb Baker, “realizes has been left for victim #4.” 33 The DNC protests provided whites with an object lesson in the police brutality that was the ordinary experience of  many African Americans. Barbara Jones-­Hogu was inspired to make the silkscreen Be Your Brother’s Keeper, which combines startlingly bright “coolade” colors with scenes of  strife drawn from convention events (fig. 5.7). Text on the print reads, “Resist Law and Order in a Sick Society.” Arnold and Jones-­Hogu were nearly alone among African American artists in responding directly to the convention violence. To many residents of  poor black neighborhoods, the protests, which emphasized the war in Vietnam, did not seem directly connected to their lives. Mike Gray and Howard Alk’s film American Revolution 2 makes this point clearly, before going on to chronicle the cross-­racial coalition-­building of  the Black Panthers, (Puerto Rican) Young Lords, and (Appalachian white) Young Patriots that constituted Chicago’s original “Rainbow Coalition.” Dick Gregory was prominent among the DNC protesters — ­he is seen in the film telling marchers, as they headed south toward the International Amphitheater, to tell police they were “going to my house.” His home, in Hyde Park, was in the same general direction as the convention; the suggestion could almost be taken as a ludic version of the Kenwood “open house” tradition. But many African Americans in Chicago had difficulty identifying with an event one described as a “bunch of honkies [getting] their heads beat.”34 As Jones-­Hogu put it, reflecting on the events, “Logic . . . kept most Black people away from the scenes since they knew that the police were preparing for confrontation.”35 With these events in mind, we can circle back to the lawsuit on the Picasso’s copyright, considering it as an art-­activist intervention that unfolded in the aftermath of  the DNC protests. Copley’s Letter Edged in Black Press was incorporated in Illinois to give it standing in the case. Its declared intent was to publish multiple photographic reproductions of  Oldenburg’s Soft Picasso in S.M.S., since the making of  the object, without publication, would not have been considered an infringement sufficient to test the copyright. The case against the city contested the claim of  copyright on several grounds: Picasso had given a gift “to the people of  Chicago”; the sculpture was in the public domain by being, quite literally, in the public domain; proper copyright notice had not been affixed to the maquette when it was first displayed (a requirement under US copyright law at the time); and reproductions of the maquette had been widely published with no objection by the city. In the end, Judge Alexander Napoli declared in a 1970 decision that Picasso’s studio maquette was the work. All parties agreed there could be only one copyright in a work of art. It must attach to either the maquette or the subsequent monument; the former was actually made in Picasso’s studio, while the latter was not.36 Subsequently, because copyright was not properly asserted when the maquette was first displayed at the Art Institute, or in later reproductions circulated to the public, the maquette fell into the public domain; and the “Chicago Picasso” was merely a replica that made no original creative contribution. By defining the status of  the sculpture as itself  a replica, the judge’s decision established a comprehensive right to reproduce the image of  the Picasso for commercial or political ends. While the decision did not, in and of  itself, create the sculpture’s appeal to activists seeking a striking image, it removed any fears they might have that the city could prosecute them for seizing its image to dramatize their claims.

201

5.7  Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Be Your Brother’s Keeper, 1968.

Silkscreen, 25 × 26 ¼ in.

202

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

Contestation and Collectivity In the summer of 1967, as the Picasso and the Wall of Respect were being prepared for unveiling, other events were afoot in the world of Chicago arts. Given the riots and protest happening around the country, there was every expectation that the city would have a “hot summer” — ­that is, a very violent one. Acknowledging frustrations, the Chicago Daily Defender created a campaign urging, “Keep a Cool Summer.” One of  the programs the Defender highlighted was On the Beach, a multidisciplinary, open-­air arts festival held at the 63rd Street beach house on the shores of  Lake Michigan.37 Phil Cohran, one of  the founders of  the Association for the Advancement of  Creative Musicians (AACM) was the festival’s music director. The event galvanized black consciousness in Chicago: large crowds came, not only receiving culture but experiencing one another, recognizing themselves as a culturally alive collective body. It was a particularly intense moment, coinciding as it did with the creation and unveiling of  the Wall of  Respect. Cohran’s Artistic Heritage Ensemble played at the dedication of the Wall too, and Gwendolyn Brooks mentions Cohran in her poem about the mural. In her description, his work is a synthesis of  nature and culture: Phil Cohran gives us messages and music made of developed bone and polished and honed cult. It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration, the day-­long Hour. It is the Hour of ringing, rouse, of ferment-­festival. Diverging somewhat from the AACM’s focus on playing original compositions that emphasized individual creative freedom, Cohran emphasized the didactic role music could play (“messages and music”) in conveying black history and culture. The Affro-­Arts Theater developed in this direction following the experience of On the Beach. Cohran identified a possible location to enable the festival to continue once colder weather set in: the former Oakland Square Theater at 3947 South Drexel Boulevard, in the heart of Bronzeville. A few months after the unveiling of the Wall of Respect, in November 1967, he began renovations in earnest.38 With community donations of cash, materials, and sweat equity, and Cohran’s personal commitment, a run-­down old movie palace would become the Affro-­Arts Theater. (“Af” was for Africa and “fro” meant “from.”)39 As he reshaped the space, Cohran hoped to create something more than just an entertainment venue. On the model of the programming that had occurred at On the Beach, he and his collaborators planned workshops and classes as well as performances. In the spring of 1968, he hosted a speech by Stokely Carmichael and began having trouble with the police. The building had been operated as a movie theater until a few months before he opened, but suddenly there were issues with codes and permits. He was told he could not sell tickets, so he offered free admission. “So we operated that Friday night,” as Cohran told it, “and then Saturday morning . . . the policeman came in with his hand on his gun. And he said ‘You’re going to have to close, now.’ So that was the theater closed.” He posted a notice on the marquee: “We are closed by deceit.”40 Meanwhile, at Columbia College, the president, Mirron Alexandroff, planned a conference called “The Arts and the Inner City.” Held May 12–­15, little more than a month after the assassination of  Martin Luther King Jr. and the West Side uprising that followed, the conference

203

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

became the scene of  a confrontation between militant members of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and well-­intentioned members of  Chicago’s socially conscious white art community. It was most ironic, given what followed, that the conference’s programmatic statement noted that in the design of  art programs for the poor, “there has been little involving of Negro artists or of  helping the Negro communities to develop their own arts programs.”41 Precisely this is what a group of  African American Chicago artists pointed out in their own response to the conference. Joining together as the Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists (COBRA), they picketed the event, protesting organizers’ failure to invite more than a token few black Chicago artists. Jeff  Donaldson served as spokesman. Richard Abrams (later Muhal Abrams), of  the AACM, was another prominent participant.42 Though they were invited inside, they

57th Street MAX GRINNELL

the visual arts, the 57th Street buildings came to house the Huettel Art School in 1931, which offered formal instruction in a range of subjects and media, including still lifes, sculpture, watercolors, and pastels. The school would become an anchor for this South Side cultural menagerie. After World War II, the buildings were sold to a new set of owners, leading to uncertainty about the future of the various art-­related businesses. Fortunately, the new owners left the area more or less intact, and the 57th Street “artist colony” even enjoyed a resurgence of interest among artists coming from other parts of the Midwest and beyond. By the early 1960s these storied buildings hosted an aquarium, a hamburger emporium, and other less artful establishments. As the nation’s first urban renewal project took stock of the area, the structures, once seen as a vital part of Hyde Park’s art scene, were deemed a “blight” on the community. Despite last-­minute proposals to convert them to a community art center, the buildings were demolished in 1963, pushing many of their former residents to Old Town and beyond. While the buildings are gone, the spirit of community-­ centered art lives on in the Hyde Park Art Center and the celebrated 57th Street Art Fair. Started in 1948 by Mary Louise Wormer, the owner of an art gallery in the colony, this early summer ritual brings dozens of visual artists to 57th Street in one of the city’s most enduring and vibrant neighborhood fairs. The noted sculptor Claes Oldenburg made his first sale here during the early days of his career.

For over seventy years, the eastern end of 57th Street, between Stony Island and Lake Park Avenues in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, was home to a motley collection of one-­story storefronts that provided shelter and studio space to a roving cast of artists working in a vast array of media. These twenty-­five tiny buildings were constructed in 1891 as a form of real estate speculation, in the hope that people visiting the nearby Columbian Exposition in 1893 would be enticed to rent in the area. Following the world’s fair, artists began to populate these modest ground-­level garrets. As the city slumped into an economic depression, budding practitioners of belles-­lettres and progressive politics, including Thorstein Veblen, Edgar Lee Masters, Floyd Dell, and Carl Sandburg, moved into the storefronts. Writers came and went as the century turned, and the spaces became bookstores, small cafes, and live-­ work spaces for visual artists. Dell, the poet, playwright, and later publisher of the important magazine The Masses, offered a sketch of these tiny artist enclaves in the early 1920s: “Each apartment contained one large room and some had the luxury of a bathtub. In mine the bathing arrangements were more primitive — ­one stood up in an iron sink and squeezed water over oneself with a sponge. We were delighted with this bohemian simplicity.” By the time the 1920s were roaring, the African American Cube theater group, cofounded by Katherine Dunham’s brother, had set up shop in one of the storefronts, heralding the arrival of the “little theater” movement in Chicago. In

204

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

initially refused to partake of food and drink in the receptions, symbolically continuing their protest.43 In a prepared statement, COBRA members explained that it was “immoral and usurping at this time in history for white Americans to be setting and interpreting standards of  black art for black people.”44 Heated discussions ensued, and the group split into white and black caucuses, with Latinos joining the black group and artists who had come from outside Chicago joining in solidarity with the Chicago artists’ protest.45 The black caucus’s statement concluded with the demand that the Affro-­Arts Theater be reopened; the last session of  the conference was scrapped, and attendees reconvened there to protest its closure. Conferees held further discussions at the theater, and the events concluded with a performance by the Artistic Heritage Ensemble.46 As an entity, COBRA existed essentially to protest the Columbia conference. But Jeff Donaldson, as an artist and art historian, had an ongoing interest in collective discussion about a “Black Aesthetic.” In the weeks and months that followed the conference, African American visual artists met to discuss this theme. A core group — ­Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell, Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-­Hogu, and Gerald Williams — ­developed a process of  mutual critique and formed a collective aesthetic identity around elements taken from each artist’s style and from observations of  popular black culture. For example, the use of  text came from Jones-­ Hogu, while Robert Paige, a friend of the group and a textile designer, contributed the idea of  “coolade colors” — ­vibrant, fruitlike hues he saw in clothing worn on the streets. They eventually took the name AfriCOBRA, the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. Among the precepts the group espoused was an emphasis on the human figure, posed frontally — ­in the manner of  African sculpture — ­and presented affirmatively, challenging the dominant culture’s exclusions by insisting upon the humanity of  African Americans. Though committed to figuration, they also sought to tap into and extend ways in which Euro-­American artists critiqued Western representational conventions. In their use of  color, lettering, lost and found line, and pointillist techniques, they abstracted and mobilized the human figure to both formal and political ends. They also distanced themselves from straightforward social documentary (particularly insofar as it resided in “negative images” of suffering). Their form of  realism combined the real and the imaginary; they called it “superreal,” using the term in quite a different sense from the way Ivan Albright had used it decades earlier. In the Wall of  Respect, in the work of  poets and photographers, the theater and Afrocentric rituals of  the Kuumba workshop, and the collective aesthetic philosophy of  AfriCOBRA, the doctrine of  “positive images” played a key role. The goal was to present positive models to shape black viewers’ consciousness. “The main thing we were dealing with was positive images,” said photographer Bob Crawford in dialogue with his daughter Margo Crawford in 2008.47 Jones-­Hogu has said of  AfriCOBRA’s work, “We wanted to make positive images . . . directing and motivating [viewers] with particular thoughts, attitudes, and postures.” 48 The positive, however, was not the only option: in her printmaking master’s thesis, Jones-­Hogu herself  had produced vibrant imagery that was highly critical of  American society, morphing the stars and stripes of the US flag into white-­robed KKK figures and swastikas. And William Walker’s murals often included stark imagery of confrontation. As a group, however, AfriCOBRA insisted on positive images and humanism. African American people were to be the subject matter and the arbiters of  black art: “Our people are our standard of  excellence,” Donaldson wrote. “We strive for images inspired by African people/experience and images which African people can relate to directly without formal art

205

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

training and/or experience.” AfriCOBRA, he continued, made “art for people and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable.”49 One of  the first shared themes AfriCOBRA took up was the black family, making an effort to present positive images of  the diversity of  families in the black community. Perhaps the most striking work created under this rubric is Jae Jarrell’s velvet appliqué Ebony Family dress (fig. 5.8). With its modern shape, bright, abstracted patterns, and lettering (Es and Fs), it represents AfriCOBRA principles in what is effectively a sculpture to be worn. Wadsworth Jarrell’s painting Revolutionary, a brightly colored portrait of  Angela Davis, also used lettering to create the entire image, presenting a message, but a hard-­to-­decipher one that forced the viewer to really look (fig. 5.9). Jeff Donaldson used his knowledge of  African art and history to incorporate African gods in his work. His acrylic painting Ala Shango brings past and present together: two young men create a kaleidoscopic burst of  color as they use an African sculpture to break the glass, indicated with stenciled letters (fig. 5.10). The revolutionary mood of Jarrell’s and Donaldson’s paintings also informs Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s silkscreen Unite, which she made first as the culminating print of her Institute of  Design MA thesis in 1968 (fig. 5.11).50 The print expresses collective action through the massing of  figures and the repeated word unite — ­in its abstract geometries, a shout transmuted into beams of  light and shadow falling across the figures’ faces. Unite marked a shift in Jones-­Hogu’s work toward the “positive images” AfriCOBRA would espouse. As part of  the group’s collective print project of  1971, it also came to emblematize the potential of  reproductive media to distribute political messages to a wider audience. Jones-­Hogu’s print commanded collectivity and it displayed it formally, in its patterned grouping of  figures who, notably, bear divergent religious symbols but unite in a common effort. Another important visual trope of  cooperation, solidarity, and unity was the motif  of  merging faces that Burroughs used in Picasso Faces, which would become a veritable leitmotif  in work by black artists of the 1960s and ’70s. Burroughs herself  had played with this motif  in a formal way in an earlier painting that may have been done in the 1940s.51 It was put to a different purpose in the work of Harold Haydon, a philosopher and painter, the Sun-­Times’s art critic for years, and director of Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. Beginning in the 1940s, Haydon had been painting figures inspired by the physiology of  binocular vision, representing faces simultaneously from more than one point of  view as a critique of  monocular perspective. While he had few major exhibitions, he showed frequently throughout the 1950s in the Renaissance Society’s member exhibitions, where many South Side artists could have seen his work.52 In the hands of  black artists, the motif  was malleable: rather than a purely optical statement, it was a medium for expressing social meanings about group identity and interracial friendship. The imagery of  merging or overlapping faces recurred repeatedly in works by black artists in the late 1960s and ’70s, including Sylvester Britton, William Walker, Mark Jones, and Don McIlvaine. In Walker’s case, the Hyde Park mural Childhood Is without Prejudice is an explicit statement about interracial friendship (fig. 5.12). Britton’s Across the Land (now at the DuSable Museum), with its multiple faces layered in stripes of  red, white, yellow, and brown similarly suggests diversity in the population of “the land” (presumably the United States). His Family suggests unity within an African American family (“I am because we are”), and numerous works on paper also explore the motif. Judge Mark Jones abstracted the motif  further, using a surface pattern of  geometric forms, African-­inspired motifs, and bright colors to suggest a sense of black collectivity.

206

5.8  Jae Jarrell, Ebony Family, ca. 1968. Velvet dress with velvet collage, 38 ½ × 38 × ½ in. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.15. Brooklyn Museum.

207

5.9 (left) Wadsworth A. Jarrell, Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 64 × 51 in. Gift of R. M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange, Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.18. Brooklyn Museum. 5.10 (facing page) Jeff Donaldson, Ala Shango,

1969. Acrylic on cardboard, 38 × 28 in. 5.11 (below) Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Unite, 1968–­1971.

Silkscreen with ink on wove paper, 22 ½ × 30 in.

209

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

5.12  William Walker, Childhood Is without Prejudice, 1977.

Art in the Streets The art of building collectivity was not simple. The Wall of  Respect at 43rd and Langley touched off the national and international community mural movement, even though the collaboration that produced it was racked with conflict. Controversial changes were made soon after the Wall was unveiled: William Walker intervened to allow Norman Parish’s Statesmen section to be whitewashed, and Eugene “Eda” Wade added a Black Power fist at its center and repainted the portraits (fig. 5.13). Opposite the Wall of Respect, another mural appeared in 1969, painted by Walker, Eda, and others, on the wall of a condemned building. The Wall of Truth featured politically charged statements and graphic imagery and provided space for posting news items and propaganda. Participants included young artists and neighborhood residents who painted their own critical statements on racism and violence in American politics and culture. In 1970 Margaret Burroughs told John Pitman Weber, a young white artist, that he had to meet William Walker. Together, Walker, Weber, and Eda established a mural project under the umbrella of  the Community Arts Foundation, which also sponsored theater in the streets. That summer, they produced three murals: Walker’s Peace and Salvation, Wall of Understanding;

210

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

5.13  OBAC Visual Artists Workshop and others, Wall of Respect (detail

showing Eda’s Black Power fist), 1968 (now destroyed).

Eda’s Wall of  Meditation; and Weber’s Wall of  Choices. By 1971 they became known as the Chicago Mural Group; the CAF continued to provide fiscal sponsorship and administrative support. Walker in particular mentored many young artists, nourishing the mural group’s growth. The experience of  working on the Wall of  Respect and other early murals shaped the group’s approach. Artists met repeatedly with community members to develop support for a project, gather ideas, and encourage participation. Often, they worked with community youth programs to enlist young people for the execution of the work. The muralists each had their own view of  their art form, but as a group, they understood murals as a museum in the streets, a form of  public history and self-­representation, and a way to rally community members around current issues. In the early years of  the movement, Weber actively made connections to Latino communities, working closely with Puerto Rican and Mexican American artists and community members around the city. He led work on Rompiendo las Cadenas (Breaking the Chains) and Unidos para Triunfar (Together We Overcome), both on the Northwest Side, in 1971, and People of  Lakeview Together in 1972 (fig. 5.14). (The building on which Rompiendo las Cadenas was painted was slated for demolition in the late 1970s, and a concerted community

211

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

effort, in which images of the mural played a major role, was able to save it.53) Painters Mario Galán, José Bermudez, and Hector Rosario, working with the Puerto Rican Arts Association, created The Crucifixion of  Don Pedro Albizu Campos in 1971 in Humboldt Park, representing the repression of  the Puerto Rican nationalist movement. These projects were preceded by numerous murals in the Pilsen neighborhood on the lower West Side, where Mario Castillo worked beginning in 1968, joined by Ray Patlán and other Mexican American artists in the early 1970s. Over the decades, drawing on the tradition of  Mexican mural painting as well as the more recent community mural movement, Pilsen has become the Chicago neighborhood best known for its murals. Castillo painted his first mural inside Lane Technical High School (on the North Side) in 1964. His Peace (Metafisica) (1968), at Halsted and Cullerton, and Wall of  Brotherhood (1969) at 18th and Halsted, were the first outdoor Chicano murals in Chicago (fig. 5.15). Unlike most murals of  the time, they are abstract, but they nonetheless carry cultural meaning. The design of Peace was inspired by the Mexican muralists of  a generation earlier and by indigenous imagery of the Americas. The expressly multicultural Wall of Brotherhood was inspired by 1969’s Apollo 11 moon landing and the idea of  the “global village.” Castillo painted it with a diverse crew of young people from New York and composed its dense system of imagery using Central American, African, Native North American, and European cultural symbols.

5.14  John Pitman Weber and Oscar Martínez, People of Lakeview Together, 1972 (now destroyed).

212

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

5.15  Mario Castillo, Wall of Brotherhood, 1969 (now destroyed).

Soon after creating the Wall of Brotherhood, Castillo left Chicago for graduate school in California. He first went to USC; after meeting Allan Kaprow as part of  a Happening during the EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) Conference at USC in 1969, he moved to Cal Arts, where he studied intermedia arts with Kaprow and Nam June Paik.54 It is tempting to draw connections between mural arts and the new media arts on the level of  rhetoric. Both often emphasized experience over the creation of objects. Murals, like Kaprow’s multimedia events, were frequently called “Happenings”; the process that produced them and the performances they elicited were as important as the product. Castillo certainly saw no contradiction between working as a muralist, which he continued to do, and working in film and experimental new media. In 1972 he created the prescient CORS (Castillo Optical Reader Synthesizer), in which he played back 16-­millimeter film as sound. Throughout the 1970s he moved between Illinois and California, eventually settling in Chicago and teaching at Columbia College. In 1971, also in Pilsen, Ray Patlán began painting murals with young people at Casa Aztlán, a former Bohemian settlement house. By the late 1960s the Czech immigrants it had served had largely left the neighborhood. In 1969 the Mexican American community had successfully occupied the building, and it became a center for arts and community. Patlán painted the

213

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

5.16  Marcos Raya, Casa Aztlán murals, ca. 1975 (now destroyed).

building inside and out. Artists also held exhibitions and used studio space at Casa Aztlán, alongside the Benito Juarez Health Clinic, run by the local chapter of  the Brown Berets, a militant Chicano political organization.55 After Patlán left for California in 1975, Marcos Raya and Salvador Vega repainted the exterior in a different style (fig. 5.16).56 In 2013 the building was acquired at auction by a developer, who painted over the murals in 2017. Other Latino artists also drew nourishment for their efforts from successful community organizing efforts. In 1975 Artistas Chicanos Independientes (ACI) picketed the Art Institute to protest the exclusion of  Latino artists. In February 1976 as the College Art Association met across the street at the Chicago Hilton, they again picketed, this time joined by several other groups: Casa Aztlán, the Public Art Workshop, the Chicago Mural Group, the Chicago Artists Coalition, and Mujeres Latinas en Acción. Castillo and Patlán also became members of  MARCH, a collective of  Latino artists founded by José Gamaliel González, that in the later 1970s became a national organization. Other members included artists Carlos Cortéz, Sal Vega, Marguerite Ortega, and Aurelio Diaz, and art historian Victor Sorell. González established the group’s first iteration, Operation MARCH (Movimiento Artistico de la Raza Chicana), in 1972 while working with children and Brown Berets in East Chicago, Indiana, and teaching at Indiana University Northwest. In East Chicago, he created murals and artistically sophisticated floats for United Farm Workers protests. González moved his operation to Chicago in 1974, founding the West Town Community Art

214

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

Center and producing the “Aztlán Gallery” or “Raza de Oro” section of  the Hubbard Street “Mile of  Murals,” organized by Ricardo Alonzo beginning in 1971 on the near West Side. In 1975 González chartered MARCH as a nonprofit organization, condensing the name to Movimiento Artistico Chicano. In addition to helping spearhead the mural movement in Pilsen, which remains home to an energetic mural culture, MARCH produced numerous exhibitions and created a Latino artists’ slide registry. Among its goals were more interaction between Mexican artists and Chicano artists in the Midwest and elsewhere in the United States.57 MARCH succumbed to internal conflict in the late 1970s. González went on to found MIRA (Mi Raza Arts Consortium), another organization for Latino artists in Chicago, in 1980. Like González and Patlán, muralists working on the West Side organized their projects in collaboration with youth who attended the classes offered by neighborhood art centers. In North Lawndale, the painter Don McIlvaine created several murals, including Into the Mainstream (fig. 5.17), done in 1969 with students while he was director of the Conservative Vice Lords’ art center Art & Soul, which had begun as a collaborative project with the Museum of  Contemporary Art (fig. 5.18). The mural put the disenfranchised young people he worked with front and center, monumentalizing them. While McIlvaine began with the idea of black youth moving “into the mainstream,” as the title suggests, the completed mural, shaped by community interactions, was instead a portrait of  anger and frustration at the slow progress of  social change. His Black Man’s Dilemma is a more critical portrait of conditions of  life for African Americans, displaying social ills and a figure stabbed by a knife that also cuts through the Bill of  Rights. Further west, in the Austin neighborhood, the white artist Mark Rogovin painted Protect the People’s Homes in 1970, taking a highly visible public stand against gentrification. Inspired by the Wall of  Respect on his arrival to Chicago in 1968, following a stint studying mural painting with David Siqueiros in Mexico, Rogovin began painting political murals, often relating to gentrification. Concerns about gentrification were also especially acute in near North Side neighborhoods — ­Old Town, Lincoln Park — ­that had been the home of Chicago’s Puerto Rican population. The activist film collective Kartemquin humanized the experiences of  displaced working-­class families in the film Now We Live on Clifton (1974) by simply chronicling their daily lives.58 Rogovin had worked with the Chicago Mural Group as part of the MCA’s 1971 Murals to the People exhibition, and split off  to found the Public Art Workshop, a youth art program and mural information center with an archive of slides and books on international mural art. In Break the Grip of  the Absentee Landlord (1973; fig. 5.19), his painting technique takes full advantage of  the wall’s features to create a dynamic image of tenants’ fight against exploitation. Rogovin’s innovations in mural style include using projected images to create anamorphic (geometrically distorted) silhouettes. In concert with Bert Phillips, Peggy Lipschutz, and others, he also made large-­scale objects and floats for political protests, including a giant Free Angela Davis float for the South Side’s Bud Billiken Parade (fig. 5.20) and a kinetic Mad Bomber representing Richard Nixon. In 1969 Rogovin collaborated with Lipschutz and Phillips and other African American artists, including Ramon Price and Margaret Burroughs, on When One of  Us Falls, a booklet of  poems and artwork honoring Fred Hampton, the record of  a memorial program held at the South Side Community Art Center. The large protest floats formed the kernel of  Chicago’s Peace Museum, which Rogovin founded in 1982 (also the founding date of  the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum).

215

5.17 (left) Don McIlvaine, Into the Mainstream,

1969 (now destroyed). 5.18 (below) Sachio Yamashita, mural on Art & Soul façade, 1968 (now destroyed). Photograph: Anne Zelle. 5.19 (opposite, top) Mark Rogovin, Break the Grip of

the Absentee Landlord, 1973 (now destroyed). 5.20 (opposite, bottom) Robert Sengstacke, photograph of Mark Rogovin’s Free Angela Davis float, ca. 1972, at Bud Billiken Parade, Chicago.

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

In 1971 the Museum of  Contemporary Art made murals into a Happening with Murals to the People, inviting four muralists to paint works in its galleries that were then installed elsewhere in the city. William Walker, for example, painted the Wall of  Love, which celebrates love, strength, support, and companionship within black families. The panels that comprise it were subsequently installed on the cornice of the facade of  the South Side Community Art Center. The participating artists were pleased to have the cost of  their paint covered but, ambivalent about being squirreled away inside a museum that charged admission, released a statement reaffirming their commitment to working in the streets: We want the walls of Chicago to be art galleries for the people. We are anxious to encourage more artists in all fields to “take to the streets,” to become involved, and to work for the people. Our murals will continue to speak of the liberation struggles of Black and Third World people; they will record history, speak of today and project toward the future. They will speak of an end to war, racism, and repression, of love, of beauty and of life. We want to restore an image of full humanity to the people, to place art into its true context — ­into life.59 Walker changed his own section of  the Wall of  Respect twice, viewing murals as providing an opportunity for ongoing, street-­level commentary on current events. He continued the practice of  providing space for posting articles and flyers with the Wall of  Truth and with his monumental Peace and Salvation, Wall of  Understanding, painted in 1970 on the near North Side, close to the Cabrini-­Green housing project (fig. 5.21). A blue ribbon at the center of  the wall creates a cutaway view of  the forces of  conflict that divide humanity, while four large hands of  different colors seek to join together in peace and understanding. Not only did Walker continue to paint murals for twenty years after the Wall of  Respect; he was also a mentor to many muralists.60 Where many of  the artists discussed here have emphasized “positive images,” Walker typically presents a balance between confrontation and conciliation, the negative and the positive. This debate also played out across the collaboration between the painter and brilliant draftsman Mitchell Caton and the poet and muralist C. Siddha Webber. Both were connected to the South Side jazz scene, and their work together pulsed with musical rhythms. For their first collaboration they chose “The Alley,” an outdoor music spot near Washington Park — ­a garage off  an alley where people spun records and danced on weekends in the summertime. (They were not alone in being inspired by music. Barbara Jones-­Hogu designed the album cover for the musical Black Fairy, and Sylvia Abernathy designed several album covers for Delmark Records. Robert Paige and other visual artists participated in the AACM’s Happenings and avant-­garde theatrical performances.) Caton first created a relatively simple, abstract mural expressing musical rhythms on the east side of  the alley. Next, together with Webber, he painted a more complex and colorful one to the west. Caton’s contribution emphasized the criminal activity he saw in the neighborhood. He called the mural Rip-­Off  Alley. Webber painted a poem on a spiritual theme, and offered a competing title, Universal Alley. Another mural produced by Caton and Webber, Philosophy of  the Spiritual, took its name from a 1971 jazz album by bassist Richard Davis. It depicted cult figures like Sun Ra — ­with a policeman’s gun pointing at him — ­and the “Cosmic Speaker,” KeRa Upra, a street corner prophet, musician, and artist. The mural also took

218

5.21  William Walker, Peace and Salvation, Wall of Understanding, 1970 (now destroyed).

219

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

on challenging issues like sickle cell anemia and poverty. Alongside the powerful imagery, Webber painted a long poem entitled “Run to the Sun” that combined spiritual and political wisdom (fig. 5.22).

System and Environment Mitchell Caton wrote poetically of the ephemeral appeal of mural painting to children in his report on the Wall of Pride and Self-­Awareness: “the Wild and young very alive and real. (silent call are colors in sunlight, colors are real because they change with light.)”61 This sense of mural works, of a kind of realness defined by changing light, gestures toward the ephemeral and the performative, toward the “hip world” of Beat poets and Happenings and jazz clubs, a world chronicled by Billy Abernathy in his photographs exhibited at Shepherd’s Studios in 1967. As art increasingly emphasized these qualities, photography took on significance as a way of documenting its evanescent moments. Roy Lewis, writing about his photography of everyday people in North Lawndale, said that he was interested in fleeting moments “that occur for only a half second but convey a totality,” and otherwise go uncaptured, unseen.62 Many black visual artists acknowledged the inspiration of  music, even the centrality of  music as an art form. Black Americans’ contribution to music in the nation and around the world was not open to question.63 Taking a non-­European perspective also incited a revaluing of  the musical and performing arts. Saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Marion Brown argued in Black World in 1973 that an emphasis on vision has characterized Western societies, while non-­Western societies emphasized the aural. Visibility implied a relation to evidence (hence a reliance on notions of  accuracy), yet “visual relationships are too detached and do

5.22  Mitchell Caton, Philosophy of the Spiritual, 1972 (now walled up).

Photograph: Robert Sengstacke.

220

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

not communicate directly with what is being perceived.”64 From this point of  view, the visual arts — ­painting in particular — ­embodied a detached, Western aesthetic sensibility. Furthermore, the relation of  makers to “objects” — ­already a vexed term — ­was particularly fraught for African American artists because of the legacy of  slavery. Black Arts Movement theorists positioned a Black Aesthetic against the object — ­whether because Western aesthetics had reached a dead end in its focus on the object for its own sake, or as the result of  the trauma of  the Middle Passage, which irretrievably cut black Americans off  from the heritage of  African artifacts and abusively turned human subjects into “objects” of property.65 Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones) wrote in Blues People (1963) that “the artifact was, like any other material manifestation of pure African culture, doomed. . . . Music, dance, religion do not have artifacts as their end products, so they were saved.” Thus, “these are the most apparent legacies of the African past,” the art forms best positioned to tap into African heritage, the best models for artists reconstructing or excavating black identity.66 In his essay “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,” published in Addison Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic, jazz guitarist and writer Jimmy Stewart took this position a step further, affirming performance as an internal and not merely accidental paradigm for black art. He argues that culture in the white American context is based on “the accumulation of discernible artifacts of  a people,” a premise that enabled whites to believe that black Americans had no culture.67 But, Stewart insists, music forms “the ideal paradigm of  our understanding of  the creative process as a movement with existence,” able “to accompany reality, to ‘move with it’ . . . and not against it, which all, yes all, the white cultural art forms do.”68 Here, the “negative” emerges as characteristic not only of  modernism but of  the deadness of  Western art forms, embalmed in museums and cut off  from participation in life. What’s elsewhere described as “positive” is here the sense that art is additive and cumulative, traveling along with life rather than opposing itself to life. In this orientation toward performance and process, the Black Arts Movement paralleled changes occurring in the white art world, as the making of  objects gave way ostensibly to process, performance, concept, and system. Harold Haydon’s art criticism in the Sun-­Times chronicled these changes — ­classing together earthworks, ephemeral art, conceptual art, and art and technology — ­with a bemused spirit of  intellectual generosity. Jack Burnham’s influential Artforum essay “Systems Esthetics,” published in 1968 while Burnham was a professor of  art at Northwestern, argues that “art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of  their environment.”69 Artists in a technological society succeed by “liquidating” their position as artists; similarly, art understood as system is unbounded and composed of  “goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system.”70 The art critic Harold Rosenberg, professor of  social thought at the University of Chicago from 1966 to 1978, also chronicled the sense of  art vanishing into life, an “esthetics of impermanence,” but viewed this shift with a longer historical view and a more jaundiced eye: performance, confrontation, and Happening were an endgame for anti-­art and anti-­object tendencies that had long existed in the idea of  the avant-­garde, but “impermanence has become a stylistic device, eagerly appreciated in terms of  esthetic precedents.”71 Both writers continued to emphasize New York artists, but Burnham’s geographic location in Chicago inflected his sense of  the shift: in a few short pages of  “Systems Esthetics,” he refers to two exhibitions at the Museum of  Contemporary Art and one at the Art Institute. From the MCA, he mentions Dan Flavin’s controversial exhibition (his

221

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

first solo show) and the upcoming exhibition Art by Telephone as exemplars of  post-­formalist or “systems” aesthetics. The latter, inspired by Moholy-­Nagy’s “telephone pictures,” came to fruition in late 1969, presenting works fabricated on the basis of  instructions phoned in by thirty artists. The museum capitalized, in a sense, on Chicago’s distance from the epicenter of  the art world. Art by Telephone would have made less sense in New York, where most of  the artists could just drop by. The exhibition catalog was an LP, distributing not reproductions of  the physical works but audiorecordings of the phone calls.72 The MCA was only a year old when Burnham’s essay was published but was already shaking up Chicago’s art scene. In 1964 conversations among collectors and art professionals had begun that led, three years later, to the opening of  the Museum of  Contemporary Art at 237 East Ontario Street. Like Burroughs, its founders defined their new institution in terms of  exclusion from a more established one. Joseph Shapiro, Lewis Manilow, and other collectors were dissatisfied with the Art Institute’s reluctance to engage with contemporary art, as well as its board’s hostility to Jews.73 They imagined the new institution as a kunsthalle, a space for temporary exhibitions and events rather than a collecting museum. Jan van der Marck, the first director of  the museum, saw it as an experimental laboratory, a place for pushing boundaries. In addition to giving Flavin his first solo show, and commissioning Kaprow’s Moving,

Rhona Hoffman Gallery RHONA HOFFMAN

I became a gallerist in 1974, working as the director of the Grace Hokin Gallery on Ontario Street, across from the MCA. Grace hired me to find good contemporary art that was being made in New York and bring it for exhibitions to her gallery. In 1976 Donald Young and I opened Young Hoffman Gallery on Ohio Street, behind the MCA. In 1983 I founded the Rhona Hoffman Gallery and moved to River North, which in the next few years became the epicenter for the growing number of contemporary art galleries. From the beginning in 1976 the goal for my galleries has remained the same: to show art that I care about deeply and that is new to Chicago, relevant to its era, and global in its dialogue. I exhibit art that is reductive, minimal, conceptual, text-­based, art that addresses important social, political, or cultural issues. The artists are of all ages, genders, and ethnicities; work in all mediums; and in great measure share my interests, concerns, and enthusiasms. I am forever grateful to collectors from Chicago and elsewhere who share my interests enough to come to the gallery and buy the art I exhibit. They and all the many artists I have known have made an incredible life for me.

In the 1960s New York was the center of the art world for creating, viewing, and buying art. Andy Warhol’s Factory opened in 1962 and Max’s Kansas City, where artists and musicians hung out every night, in 1965. It was fun city, but serious art was being made as well. People loved Pop art and photorealism. Chicago by comparison was very slow. The Art Institute was and remains a great world institution, but back in the 1960s little contemporary art was shown. Curator Jim Speyer’s and Anne Rorimer’s American exhibits were prescient but only every other year. There were only a handful of galleries in Chicago showing contemporary art. The great Chicago collectors bought their art in Europe and New York. Things changed in 1967 when the Museum of Contemporary Art opened. I served on the Women’s Board from its inception until 1974. When it opened, it was a kunsthalle. Jan Van der Marck, its first director, had great exhibitions of current painting, sculpture, architecture, and performance opening every eight weeks. I could keep up to date by being at the museum and attending all of its activities as well as by going to New York.

222

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

Van der Marck invited Christo and the then-­uncredited Jeanne-­Claude to wrap the museum, making it the duo’s first wrapped building in the United States. Under his guidance the MCA also helped initiate Art & Soul, an art workshop and gallery on the West Side, created in partnership with the Conservative Vice Lords, a street gang turned community organization.74 Art & Soul brought numerous artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement together with art-­ world insiders, on the one hand, and West Side residents — ­including gang members — ­on the other. Art & Soul, too, was referred to as a Happening (one downside to this is that it enabled the MCA to think of  the workshop merely as an event, not something to keep going). So was the Wall of  Respect, and even the Columbia College conference “Art in the Inner City”: “As in the intermedia world,” Thomas Willis wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “the symbol networks do the relating. Lacking control or structure, participants find their own ways to state and solve problems. Out of this anarchic combination of attitudes and ideas, new and meaningful patterns of  control can result.”75 Burnham used the word “environment” twenty-­two times in his essay. Along with the Happening, the Environment was a genre named by Allan Kaprow. By the 1970s the word also brimmed with the nascent ecological consciousness of the art world, yet the terms “ecology” and “environment” were still fluid, referring equally to space in general, to the ecologies of  social life, and to the natural world.76 In 1972 the Illinois Arts Council established a committee on Architecture and Environment, which addressed the broader built environment and considered proposals for murals, installation art (“environments”), and educational workshops on ecological art practices. As part of  the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project (1971–­1977), photographer John White produced lush photographs that chronicle everyday life on the South Side of Chicago (fig. 5.23). DeWitt Beall, a filmmaker who directed Lord Thing, an experimental documentary about youth gangs (in particular the Conservative Vice Lords), went on to make a series of films for local public television called Earthkeeping, which combine environmental and social issues (and documentary with Second City comedy skits!). Other artists used surrealism to highlight environmental anguish in a technological society in their 2-­D work, as in a series of  prints on ecological themes by Estelle Carol (founder of  the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective) and Salvador Vega’s painting Mother Earth (1973, now at the National Museum of Mexican Art; fig. 5.24). One Chicago-­based artist who referred to himself  as an environmental artist — ­in the sense of  an artist who creates, or alters, environments — ­was Sachio Yamashita. A native of  Japan from Kagoshima prefecture on Kyushu Island, he had come to the United States in 1968 after finishing art school in Tokyo. He joined in the mural movement in his own abstract and idiosyncratic way. After painting rainbow stripes on the exterior of  the storefront as artist in residence at Art & Soul (see fig. 5.18), he painted other abstract rainbows and numerous other murals all over town — ­for example, a Wave mural inspired by Hokusai’s famous print on an apartment building on North Avenue. Yamashita was on a mission to paint a thousand water towers in the Chicago area, starting in Old Town (he got about thirteen done).77 Irene Piraino wrote in the Daily News that the artist saw Chicago as “his coloring book” and imagined that if  Yamashita had his way, “the entire area would float in a color bath of  reds, blues, pinks, yellows and greens.”78 He also proposed turning the city’s elevated train tracks into bicycle paths — ­a plan that anticipated the current greenway on the old Chicago & Pacific Railroad line, now dubbed the 606.79 While politically minded muralists in New York found the more abstract styles promoted by the nonprofit organization City Walls to be anodyne decoration,

223

5.23  John White, Sidewalk Merchandise on Chicago’s South Side, 1973.

224

5.24  Salvador Vega, Mother Earth / La tierra madre, ca. 1973. Acrylic on canvas,

46 ¾ × 94 5⁄8 in. Permanent collection, 2000.41; gift of James and Arline Prigoff. National Museum of Mexican Art. Photograph: Michael Tropea.

225

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

the same could not be said of  Yamashita’s work. As with other muralists, much of  the work took the form of  community collaboration and negotiations with authorities. Janet Bloom wrote of  his work that “imagining the cumulative effect of  his negotiations, you can almost agree with him that his work is the most political in Chicago.”80 The negotiations and social engagement required by the other practices described in this chapter suggest the superlative may be misplaced. But indeed, Yamashita showed how murals could be understood not just as community-­based art but as huge environmental installations, breaking free from the gallery, changing city dwellers’ consciousness.

The Distribution Religion Mural production combined collective self-­organization with widespread dissemination, in the sense that murals’ large scale and public placement allowed many viewers to engage with them. Muralists understood their work explicitly as a way of making art for the people and sharing both aesthetic beauty and political education as widely as possible. William Walker saw his paintings as a form of street newspaper, changing as events unfolded. In an effort to distribute information as widely as possible and to respond quickly to political events, other artists chose print media. In 1971 AfriCOBRA members concretized Jeff  Donaldson’s statement that their group’s art was “for people” in a new way. Relying on Barbara Jones-­Hogu’s printmaking expertise, they worked together to produce a series of  silkscreen “poster-­prints” to be sold for ten dollars in bookstores and at art fairs. (Jones-­Hogu studied with Misch Kohn at the Institute of  Design, where her already brilliant student work included experiments with woodcuts, linocuts, and lithography, among other media.) Other artists produced work with more directly political aims. John Pitman Weber made propaganda prints depicting black and Puerto Rican liberation heroes like Fred Hampton and Cha Cha Jimenez. The printmaking arm of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, produced dozens of  prints in support of  the Chicago Maternity Center, farmworkers’ struggles, third-­world women, the peace movement, abortion rights, and other political issues and campaigns. They also freely reprinted and distributed works made by other printmaking collectives, such as a print by a Detroit women’s group that reworked Emory Douglas’s iconic Black Panther cover depicting a woman carrying a baby on her back while holding a gun (fig. 5.25). Mexico was a key source of  inspiration for printmaking as well as for murals. In 1952 Margaret Burroughs traveled to Mexico to study at the Taller de Gráfica Popular. It was a route Elizabeth Catlett had traveled before her. For most of  her career, Burroughs did not edition her prints, and sometimes simply photocopied them to distribute to children, friends, and the prisoners she taught at Stateville and other Illinois prisons. She was joined in this philosophical disregard for the conventions of  fine art printmaking by Carlos Cortéz, printmaker, poet, and social activist, who was involved in Beat culture in the 1960s and moved to Chicago in 1965. Cortéz produced political graphics for IWW publications and produced prints, such as Draftees of  the World Unite (fig. 5.26), in unnumbered editions that he sold cheaply.81 The style of  Cortéz’s linocuts is reminiscent of  the bold, expressionist lines of  José Guadalupe Posada and the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Along with his work with the IWW, he was also involved in MARCH.82

226

5.25  Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, Mountain-­Moving Day: Yosano Akiko (poem),

ca. 1972. Paper screen print, 17 × 23 ½ in.

227

On Henry Darger N AT H A N L E R N E R

I saw Henry Darger every day for about twenty years. A shuffling old man, a recluse who never had visitors except for a rare visit from a priest. He lived in a single, large room that he had rented in 1932. The room was filled from floor to ceiling with the debris of his scavenging. He would take long walks in order to gather his amazing collections, and at great distances from home he could be seen poking through garbage with his cane, looking for his treasures. Crucifixes, broken toys, old magazines, scores of used eyeglasses repaired with tape, dozens of empty bottles of Pepto Bismol, hundreds of balls of twine that he made by tying small pieces together; the list was endless. Every morning at seven he would come clumping down the stairs on his way to breakfast and early Mass. In the summer he wore old shirts with the sleeves crudely cut off near the shoulders and you could see a long, frayed shoestring tied at one end to a trouser belt-­loop and at the other to a torn wallet in his pocket. In the winter, all of this was covered by an army coat that came all the way to his shoe tops. If it was very cold, he would add a kind of fisherman’s cap with long earflaps. He would rarely speak to anyone, but if spoken to would respond politely, always about the weather. . . . In the years that passed Henry somehow seemed almost a part of the building. He came and went almost unnoticed.

He never had any visitors. His strangeness became familiar and accepted. For his neighbors there grew a feeling of affection and protectiveness for this grumpy old man who never smiled. His paranoia for privacy was respected. For many years after an accident at the hospital, Henry suffered with a lame knee, and when he finally became too feeble to climb the stairs he asked me to find a place for him to live in a Catholic old people’s home. This I did. On a freezing cold day, my wife Kiyoko walked Henry on the ice to the Little Sisters of the Poor which was about three blocks from our house. After a couple of visits, Henry was accepted. The next day Henry left the room he had lived in for forty years. It touched my heart to watch him as he left the room. He took nothing with him except for his clothes; his long-­eared cap, his greasy army coat, his shabby shoes. He looked around the chaotic room through his taped glasses with the shattered lens and walked out of what had been his life. . . . It is a humbling experience now to have to admit that not until I looked under all the debris in his room did I become aware of the incredible world Henry had created from within himself. It was only in the last days of Henry Darger’s life that I came close to knowing who this shuffling old man really was.

Henry Darger, At Jennie Richee. 2 of Story to Evans. They attempt to get away by rolling themselves in floor rugs. Crayon, watercolor, and collage on paper, 19 × 24 in.

© 2017 Estate of Nathan Lerner. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

5.26  Carlos Cortéz, Draftees of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Generals!, ca.1968. Linocut, unnumbered. Sheet, 23 1⁄8 × 33 1⁄8 in. Permanent collection, 1997.31; gift of the artist. National Museum of Mexican Art.

The 1960s and ’70s also saw a flurry of  alternative publications, political newsletters, counterculture newspapers (of  which the most visible was Chicago’s Seed), comics, poetry chapbooks, and broadsides. Publications played a crucial role in the institution building that had always been a key feature of black Chicago. Johnson Publishing’s Negro Digest (renamed Black World in 1970) was an intellectual bellwether for the national Black Arts Movement, a space for wide-­ranging cultural criticism edited by Hoyt W. Fuller Jr. The poet Haki Madhubuti learned the art of institution building working as a curator with Margaret and Charles Burroughs at the DuSable Museum and also had the importance of  institutions impressed upon him in conversations with Dudley Randall, the founder of  Broadside Press in Detroit. The commitment to build lasting, community-­based institutions drove Madhubuti to establish Third World Press, which published the OBAC poets and other writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. Under the umbrella of the Institute for Positive Education, Third World Press was combined with other experiments in self-­sufficiency: schools, a farm in Michigan, and a grocery co-­op.

229

R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

In 1973, also on the South Side, Chicago’s contribution to national visual arts criticism, the New Art Examiner, began publishing. The Chicago New Art Association, a group affiliated with the College Art Association, had begun publishing a newsletter in 1972, which eventually evolved into a tabloid and then a magazine. Members included Derek Guthrie and Jane Addams Allen, who were also at the time art critics for the Chicago Tribune. Guthrie was British and a newcomer, with no complicating loyalties within the Chicago art scene; Allen had been a student of  Harold Rosenberg at the University of  Chicago and was an intellectual descendent as well as grandniece of her namesake, Jane Addams. As critics for the Tribune, they initiated the catholic and opinionated approach to criticism that would carry on in the New Art Examiner. They pulled no punches with respect to the so-­called Imagists, whose dominance of  the national view of  Chicago art they deplored. Among their more cutting interventions into a Chicago art discourse they deemed sclerotic was an article on the self-­taught painter Joseph E. Yoakum that strongly suggested members of the Hairy Who and others had exploited and then abandoned the older artist.83 In their account of  the Imagists at the São Paulo Bienal in 1973, Allen and Guthrie describe the work as nostalgic for an old Chicago made up of  white working-­class neighborhoods: If you have ever lived in an unrenewed section of a large city — ­a neighborhood of homes sporting bay windows with ornamental shades partially obscuring enormous lamps; of old dime stores, cigar stores, lingerie shops, B movie houses, and girlie shows — ­then you may have some concept of the urban nostalgia animating the Chicago artists going to Sao Paolo [sic]. Nostalgia — ­because such neighborhoods in Chicago are fast falling victim to the squeeze between the expanding black ghetto on the one hand and high class urban renewal (to contain the ghetto) on the other.84 If Allen and Guthrie did not quite state that the Imagists were nostalgic for an unchallenged whiteness, it is at least interesting that they trace these artists’ subject matter to the same changes in the urban fabric that prompted so much protest and creative political activity by black and other politicized artists. Dismissed from their position at the Tribune in 1973  — ­perhaps because of such controversial positions as these — ­they turned their energies to a new publication. The New Art Examiner would play a major role in supporting and critiquing new developments in the art world throughout the 1970s and ’80s: the mural movement, the Black Arts Movement, early feminist art, performance, film, video, and new media. The early 1970s also saw the formation of  many organizations working in time-­based media that bridged art and protest. Video in particular was a medium newly available to consumers via devices such as the Sony Portapak, introduced in 1965. Working in film and video was a collective endeavor, in which various practitioners came together to support one another. Many projects and organizations were also designed to support community-­based and political work — ­the Chicago Film Workshop, supported by the Community Film Workshop Council; the Chicago Editing Center; the film collective Kartemquin; Videopolis, a “community video access project” organized by Anda Korsts; community television initiatives. 85 The organization Communications for Change helped tenant protesters in Uptown document with video their attempt to present a mouse-­and roach-­covered cake to the manager of their HUD building.86 Members of  the West Side organization FORUM (Full Opportunity Redirected to Uplift Mankind) used new media to invite the public to view conditions in private space. With video cameras borrowed from UIC, they documented the poor conditions in West

230

MAK I NG S PAC E , 1961 – 1976

Side housing projects and hosted viewing parties of  their tapes, inviting neighbors and local officials.87 Other FORUM activities demonstrate the permeable boundaries between performance and video in activist contexts, as when they organized a Bike Ride for Survival on the West Side and protested blaxploitation films with improvised street drama — ­accompanied by African drums, flutes, and horns, and a casket symbolizing the death-­dealing effects of  the drug trade in the black community — ­in front of  the downtown Oriental Theater, where the film Superfly was showing.88 In a very real way, the intersections between art, protest, and distribution in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Chicago also inflected the development of  new media in the visual arts, in part because the cost of new technologies often required institutional backing. Sonia Landy Sheridan, teaching at the School of  the Art Institute, experimented with early color photocopy technology to create multiples, pursuing analogies between technological and biological generativity viewed from a feminist perspective. Dan Sandin, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, invented his image processor, a video synthesizer (on the model of the audio synthesizer), between 1971 and 1974. Sandin, Phil Morton (who went on to found the Video Data Bank), Jane Veeder, and their colleagues pioneered experimental video as an art of self-­ exploration.89 Yet Sandin first began using video during student protests of  the Kent State shootings, creating information kiosks and live closed-­circuit feeds to expand the audience for campus demonstrations, speeches, and discussions.90 He and his colleagues also adhered to a philosophy of  do-­it-­yourself, free distribution they called “copy-­i t-­r ight” — ­an ethos, not of  copyright, but of  proper copying to make information widely available. As Veeder put it in an interview with Jon Cates, the ideology of copy-­it-­right derived from an “early counterculture . . . sense that information should be free.”91 This emphasis on reproductive media, free distribution, and the leveling of  hierarchies resonates with the impulse to challenge the Chicago Picasso’s copyright, with AfriCOBRA’s production and distribution of  inexpensive poster-­prints, with the muralists’ desire for a museum of  the streets. At the same time, it moves the frame of  reference to an airy realm of information that seems to float free from the grassroots — ­and from the spatial politics of  the city. Those spatial politics remained, however, to shape meaning, experience, and the raw facts of  survival for many Chicagoans who fought for a place in the new global and virtual city of the decades that followed.

231

The art world, like the economy (and often in tandem with it), is in constant flux; it is cyclical, fluid, and unpredictable. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse. Sometimes it may actually be improving even as it appears to be declining. . . . [But] as artists depart, other artists emerge — ­just not necessarily on the same trajectory as their predecessors. Ann Wiens, 1998 1

There is an interest in authenticity, but without sentimentality, a welcome newness without claims to any profound originality. A beckoning trustworthiness is in the air that is post-­smarmy, treating all parties involved as equal parts of the conversation, and equally responsible. Kathryn Hixson, 2001 2

CHAPTER 6

ALT ER IT Y ROCKS 1973–­1 993 JENNI SORKIN

The Couple in the Cage In 1992 the artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña went on the road with a new work they called The Couple in the Cage (fig. 6.1). At each stop, from London to Minneapolis, adorned in grass skirts, headfeathers, and sunglasses, they had themselves locked in a metal cage and put on view before the public. In Chicago, their performance was hosted by the Field Museum of  Natural History. For two days (January 16–­17, 1993) Fusco and Gómez-­Peña acted out a scene of  faux-­history: calling themselves “undiscovered Amerindians,” they posed as modern-­day indigenous inhabitants of  a fictitious island off  the coast of  Mexico, revealed to the world from inside a cage, presenting themselves as if in captivity. The performance dramatized the Western cultural practice of  dehumanized spectacle: displaying subjugated peoples of  color as primitives, exotics, even zoo animals. It targeted the museum’s ethnographic collections, particularly its holdings in Native American remains and ritual objects, prompting the Field Museum to engage in constructive self-­critique. It also made audiences think about repatriation and racial bias, crucial issues in the history of  museums and colonialism and collecting.3 As Gomez-­Peña eloquently stated, “I think we have touched a colonial wound in the piece.”4 During the 1990s, declarations of difference — ­race, class, sexuality, and gender — ­came to be the strongest drivers in American art, including in Chicago. But had a previous generation of  artists, active in the 1970s and ’80s, not pioneered new media and built the alternative space movement, the proliferation of  difference — ­or alterity — ­could not have taken hold. It did, however, and in the doing, fundamentally restructured and expanded opportunities for women, people of  color, and artists whose practice was not object-­based. Chicago’s artists envisioned generative forms of  collaboration and new ways of  working in an effort to foster a complex, active pluralism in the city. They were also invested in cultivating partnerships and projects that produced a heightened presence and more interaction on the national level.

233

6.1  Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, The Year of the White Bear and

Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, performed 1992–­1994.

234

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

While the alternative spaces, institutions, media, and exhibitions of  the 1970s and ’80s were rooted in uprisings and demonstrations by the young and the disenfranchised throughout the earlier postwar era, they also pointed to a new insistence on the aesthetic progression of  Conceptualism, or idea-­driven art. Thinking and talking through artwork, reading and arguing about ideas, and considering the implications of  ideas such as performing live, creating a video on a loop, or making a sculpture out of fabric ushered in an exuberant and distinctive criticality in Chicago’s art community. These practices fundamentally disrupted viewers’ idea of  art as simply a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a pedestal. In the parlance of youth: alterity rocks. Sometimes in unexpected ways.

An Anniversary for Chicago “A Decade Completed!” trumpeted the New Art Examiner’s October 1983 issue in celebration of the magazine’s tenth birthday (fig. 6.2).5 In fact the years between 1973 and 1983 had witnessed many new spaces and organizations charged with providing public support, professional recognition, and greater visibility for the city’s native talent. Official advocacy now became a strategic step forward from the ad hoc spaces, cooperatives, workshops, and onetime exhibitions of the immediate postwar era.6 There was plenty to celebrate in 1983. The year also marked the tenth anniversary of the city’s two cooperative feminist art galleries, Artemisia and ARC (Artists, Residents of  Chicago), as well as of  N.A.M.E Gallery (an acronym without actual meaning), an alternative space founded mainly by students from the School of  the Art Institute. These three sites, together with the New Art Examiner, carved out a niche in Chicago that supported the risk takers and youth who were coming to be recognized as a significant professional class: the emerging artist. Bold, liberated, and energetic, Chicago’s emerging artists of  the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s were eager to capitalize on the possibilities of  doing things differently. While finding a receptive audience is a perennial desire for every generation of artists, the “alternative space” came to be a defining feature of  1970s-­era American art production. In Chicago, precursors to alternative spaces were the early twentieth-­century artists’ clubs such as the Arts Club and the Chicago Art League. Yet alternative spaces were distinct from the earlier civic art spaces in that they were not founded to serve the general public — ­rather, they were intended by artists to foster a lively scene, and a stream of opportunities, for fellow artists. Among other things, they rejected the solo show in favor of  group exhibitions featuring many artists at once. This arose from a generational belief  in the authenticity of  collective practice and the democracy of  opportunity for many, as opposed to the idea of artistic genius and the meteoric rise of a single artist. The term “alternative space” comes from the funding structure put into widespread use by the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1970s. The NEA provided a great deal of  the seed money for local and regional arts initiatives, an investment of  federal support for cultural programming that in turn spurred state and local governments to provide matching grants or other funding opportunities. In 1973 Chicago already had a substantial cultural infrastructure for developing contemporary art practices, with long-­standing nonprofit centers beyond the commercial galleries. The most prominent of  these included the Renaissance Society (established in 1915), the Hyde Park Art Center (1939), the South Side Community Arts Center (dedicated 1941),

235

6.2  New Art Examiner, vol. 11, no. 1, October 1983. Ryerson and Burnham Library Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

236

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

and the Contemporary Art Workshop (1949). Added to these in 1973 was the Smart Gallery (later known as the Smart Museum of  Art) at the University of  Chicago, and in 1974 the Spertus Institute dedicated its gallery space downtown. These newcomers were joined by a multimillion-­dollar expansion of  a venerable institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1976. That same year the Museum of Contemporary Photography was established at Columbia College.7 In 1973 as well, Susanne Ghez arrived at the Renaissance Society, becoming director the following year, and transformed what had become a parochial gallery into a thriving space for contemporary artists that revitalized the mission articulated in the 1930s, under Eva Watson-­ Schütze, to be “an independent, experimental laboratory for the search of  legitimate meaning in art.”8 Ghez’s early efforts centered mainly on Conceptual and postminimal art, giving Joseph Kosuth his first US museum show and exhibiting a multimedia project around Robert Smithson’s Mirror/Salt Works (1976). She developed serious one-­person shows for local artists too, from painters Miyoko Ito (1980), Gaylen Gerber (1992), and Rebecca Morris (2005) to ceramist William J. O’Brien (2011) and photographer John Neff (2013). The critic Alice Thorson remarked that the decade from 1973 to 1983 had “transformed Chicago from an art outpost into a thriving national center. Ten years ago the power matrix of  the Chicago art world comprised a handful of  galleries and two powerful institutions.”9 But what was so obvious about Chicago’s success as to go unmentioned by Thorson was its thriving art school, the School of  the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), more than a century old. Passing through its cutting-­edge programs, SAIC students became alumni, and many found the city to be an affordable place to rent studio space, put down roots, and establish themselves as working artists. Today, the 1970s are viewed as a golden era of public support for the visual arts in America, unprecedented and unmatched since. A key reason is that the NEA involved artists in its policy decisions. From 1977 to 1981, the Berkeley ceramic sculptor Jim Melchert was the agency’s director of  visual arts. Melchert is credited with transforming the cultural landscape, investing in artists he called “innovators,” individuals who were skilled at finding unorthodox ways of  reaching new publics.10 One such innovator was Carlos Tortolero, a history teacher in the Chicago Public Schools who wanted to create a neighborhood cultural center for Mexican American residents of  Pilsen, a working-­class, ethnic enclave located just southwest of the city’s center. With a measly budget of  $900, Tortolero established the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of  Mexican Art) in 1982.11 Margaret Burroughs, founder two decades earlier of  the DuSable Museum and by the early 1980s a Chicago Park District commissioner, helped Tortolero secure funding.12 For the first five years the museum operated without a building, staging art shows and cultural events in temporary spaces. In 1987 it opened the doors to its first building on 18th Street in Harrison Park. A free museum, the center became famous for its annual Día de los Muertos (Day of  the Dead) celebrations and programming. In 1984 Museum of  Contemporary Art curator Lynne Warren organized an exhibition that documented the thriving art scene in Chicago. Titled Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago, the show focused on local artists, enhancing their loyalty to the museum. It offered a potent combination of  legitimacy, a strong sense of  history, and pride of  place. It was the first museum-­based show in the city to simultaneously categorize and characterize the city’s post-­1960 momentum.13

237

J E NN I SORKI N

However, the press was less than kind in its reviews. As Christopher Lyon, of the Chicago Sun-­Times, wrote, “The alternative to Warren’s point of view is to see artist-­organized shows and galleries as essentially secondary phenomena, temporary collective manifestations of the individual artists’ drive toward self-­sufficiency and independence.”14 Lyon’s dismissal underscores the long-­standing bias and uphill battles that young artists working in nontraditional media have faced in Chicago’s business-­as-­usual commercially driven art scene.

Alternative Spaces In Chicago, alternative spaces offered a way to expand the audience for art beyond the city’s vaunted painting traditions, especially because they highlighted young artists at the beginning of their careers, who often worked in newer media such as video, performance, and mixed-­media sculpture and installation. Ed Paschke said much the same of the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s, reinforcing how crucial these start-­up spaces were for galvanizing a sense of community.15 As Guy Whitney, a founding member of N.A.M.E., writes, “We felt committed to providing a venue for what we considered our peers. It was, for me and many others, the place to be. Where the energy hub existed for our community. We spent eons of time at weekly meetings discussing art for exhibit and hashing through it until we could find consensus.”16 N.A.M.E.’s acronym was ironic, referencing the bureaucratic tax forms used to establish nonprofit status, where the first line asked for the entity’s “name.” Steve Sherrell, a founding member of the short-­lived West Hubbard Gallery (1977–­1982), referred to this early period as “the Hubbard Street scene.”17 Seven different organizations were clustered on Hubbard Street in River North: ARC, Artemisia, Chicago Filmmakers, N.A.M.E., Raw Space, the Center for New Television, and West Hubbard Gallery. Some of the smaller spaces were media-­specific: Chicago Filmmakers (established in 1973) splintered from N.A.M.E. to focus on historic and contemporary film programming, as well as screenings by international filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Conrad. Raw Space (1979) was an auxiliary space for ARC members pursuing sculpture and installation. The Center for New Television (1978) was a video-­only space that included postproduction facilities and programmed screenings, mixing local with nationally prominent artists such as Dee Dee Halleck, Chip Lord, Ilene Segalove, and Bill Viola. West Hubbard Street also featured an operation called Bookspace, established by Elaine Carl, John Hogan, and Dan Spinella to distribute artist’s books, multiples, tapes, and films. Finally, the Chicago Editing Center (1978) became the most consistent venue for video screenings into the early 1980s. In 1986 Dawn and Lou Mallozzi, Eric Leonardson, and Perry Venson established Experimental Sound Studio, well to the north in the Edgewater neighborhood, a pioneering facility for the sonic arts and experimental sound recording, that later added an exhibition space, Audible Gallery, and a repository, the Creative Audio Archive. In their respective missions, Artemisia, ARC, and N.A.M.E offered peer engagement and an expanded critical dialogue for contemporary art in the city of Chicago, as well as national-­ level engagement. Many of the originating members were not just graduates of the School of  the Art Institute of  Chicago, but classmates.18

238

Curating Chicago LY N N E W A R R E N

which showcased nary an Imagist. But as this gallery mainly featured solo or two-­person shows, few got the opportunity to exhibit, resulting in the perception that local artists were limited to token opportunities. In reaction, both the Art Institute and the MCA in the 1990s began to integrate Chicago artists into more programmatic categories — ­acquiring works for the collections, including them in thematic group exhibitions, giving some major solo shows but downplaying them as local artists. Ironically, the lowered visibility of “Chicago,” even as more Chicago artists were represented, aroused its own dissatisfaction. How to take pride in Chicago’s local artists without typecasting them as local and how to promote them to the larger art world for too many years seemed an unsolvable dilemma. Now, however, in the era of the “global” art world, a newfound delight is being taken in discovering regional differences, with the historical work of the Imagists receiving a good amount of attention, especially in New York. And the MCA and Art Institute seem to have found a balance where artists are both shown in identifiable Chicago contexts and integrated into the general program categories, with little stress on them being “Chicago.” For example, Rashid Johnson emerged in the MCA’s Chicago-­themed 12 × 12 series in 2002 and was then, in 2012, featured in the “ascendant artist” series, which contextualized him as a figure of national/international scope. In this century the Art Institute has routinely featured exhibitions celebrating Chicago, such as those around the School of the Art Institute’s sesquicentennial, but has also shown figures like Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle and Dawoud Bey, who live in Chicago, and Martin Puryear, who once lived in Chicago, without particularly claiming them as locals. Curating Chicago artists, for me, even through the difficult decades, has had boundless rewards in being able to closely follow careers and forge lasting relationships, both professional and social. It is wonderful to see so many artists who have chosen to live and work in this city now able to escape the strictures of being labeled a “Chicago artist.” And at this point, I can say “curating Chicago” has escaped those strictures as well.

Often those who have been on the scene for many years, as I have, stress how much things have changed. But in regards to “curating Chicago,” unfortunately things — ­until very recently — ­have stayed too much the same. For too many decades, Chicago’s major arts institutions grappled with the issue of how, and how often, to show local artists. For nationally and internationally focused institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago or the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I’ve spent my career, how to handle local artists was framed by “the Second City” stigma, resulting, I believe, in the fear of being dismissed as parochial if too much attention was paid to the local. For much of Chicago’s history, the best way for an artist to ensure an exhibition was not by courting a curator but by organizing the exhibition oneself. From Rudolph Weisenborn’s anti–­Chicago and Vicinity effort, the Introspectives, and the various salons des refusés held around the turn of the century and at a department store in 1921 to the now-­ legendary Exhibition Momentum shows, the women’s co-­ops and alternative spaces of the 1970s, and the apartment galleries of the 1990s, Chicago artists did not sit around waiting to be discovered. While these efforts took some pressure off institution-­based curators to show local work, they also provided opportunities for curators to connect with new artists, occasionally resulting in an exhibition. But when these opportunities did arise, so too did a long-­ standing conundrum. How best to serve Chicago artists? Present them as locals, or integrate them into a larger exhibition program? For almost a century, from 1897 to 1985, the Art Institute chose the former, presenting local artists in its annual Chicago and Vicinity shows. These exhibitions, however, were generally panned by the local press and rarely led to an artist’s “big break,” ultimately satisfying few. In its early years, the MCA chose the latter strategy. It integrated local artists into many group exhibitions and featured some — ­such as H. C. Westermann and Jim Nutt — ­in traveling solo exhibitions. But with the rise of the Imagists and group exhibitions featuring them, the MCA came to be perceived as showing only a certain kind of local artist. In response, following its expansion in 1979, the MCA dedicated a space, the Borg Warner Gallery of Chicago Artists,

239

J E NN I SORKI N

Feminist Beginnings, Connections, and Precedents Artemisia and ARC were all-­women cooperative galleries with roots in feminist networks that began in New York and extended to Chicago. As art historian Meredith Brown observes, “Formed of lateral connections, the women artists’ network helped bring women out of isolation and into relation with each other. . . . Through activism, information sharing, and cooperative galleries, women sought to transform the art world.”19 Both of  Chicago’s feminist galleries were established during the summer of  1973, after two open meetings intended to stimulate discussion and showcase feminist art activity in New York. Painter and printmaker Ellen Lanyon was one of  the organizers, in keeping with strong feminist tendencies in her own work. Her allegorical painting Cobra (1975; fig. 6.3), for example, comments upon the insidious nature of  domesticity and marriage. A massive two-­ headed cobra emerges from the chimney of an otherwise cheery, pink suburban home. Its coils gather in the backyard, too large to fit inside. Seen through the window, a small fire burns, signaling smoldering rage within. Of  one body, but two minds, the cobra’s heads are distinct but bound together, suspended in a state of animus, while autumnal leaves cluster, also oversize. Lanyon was active in West-­East Bag (WEB), a bicoastal feminist art collective established in 1971 by Judy Chicago, Lucy Lippard, Miriam Schapiro, and New York Times art critic Grace Glueck to forge a network of women artists through a newsletter publicizing exhibition opportunities.20 WEB also encouraged regional slide registries, where artists could deposit images of  their work, as well as historic works by women, for use in art history courses and public lectures. WEB eventually expanded to over twenty cities and eleven chapters.21 Joy Poe, a founding member of  Artemisia, also describes being inspired by a video about New York’s AIR Gallery (another feminist cooperative) screened by the feminist sculptor (and native Chicagoan) Harmony Hammond at the First Annual Midwest Conference of  Women Artists.22 But Chicago had been a site of  radical feminist activity since the late 1960s. Shulamith Firestone, one of  the architects of  socialist feminism in the liberation era, graduated in 1967 with a BFA in painting from the School of  the Art Institute of  Chicago.23 Upon graduating, Firestone helped found Chicago Women’s Liberation, Westside Group (also known as the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union), which focused on social services and new-­left activism. The union agitated on behalf of  women’s health and reproductive rights, education, economic rights, and lesbian visibility and against the Vietnam War. Notable for its hands-­on approach, it provided free or low-­cost contraception and reproductive education, advocated for women prisoners’ rights to visits with their children, and offered access to abortion services after it was legalized.24 Located in Logan Square, the union became known not just for its social interventions but, according to historian Margaret Strobel, for its intellectual contributions. One of its pamphlets, from 1972, is credited with introducing the term “socialist feminism,” which critiqued Marxism for its notorious neglect of gender.25 Such targeted initiatives stimulated social change in the form of permanent social justice alliances in Chicago. They also were among the first efforts to focus exclusively on gender equality, leading to Chicago’s first women’s studies program. The program established in 1972 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) would morph into a full-­fledged academic department in 1979; Strobel was the first faculty member hired. In 1970 UIC had hired artist Irene Siegel, who had studied at the Institute of Design, as the first woman professor in the art department, where she taught drawing and painting until 1983.

240

6.3  Ellen Lanyon, Cobra, 1975. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 in.

241

J E NN I SORKI N

6.4  Elisabeth Subrin, still from Shulie, 1997. Video, 36:38 min. Color, black and white, and sound.

In 1968 Firestone left Chicago for New York City, where she helped establish radical feminist groups including the Redstockings and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. Beyond her tireless organizing, she authored the groundbreaking book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which argued that socialism would abolish class privilege and feminism would abolish gender difference.26 In 1997 feminist filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (SAIC, MFA 1995) made a short film titled Shulie, which recreated, shot for shot, documentary footage from a 1967 art critique with all male professors of  work by the twenty-­two-­year-­old Firestone (fig. 6.4).27 Using many of  the film’s original locations, Subrin juxtaposes the present with the past, foregrounding the troubling lack of  change over thirty years regarding the patronizing behaviors of male artists toward female students and peers.28 In the 1960s Firestone was one of the three most nationally prominent feminist intellectuals with formal artistic training; the others were Ti-­Grace Atkinson and Kate Millet.29 This shared background is noteworthy and suggests that the impulse to make and exhibit art was one of  the primary ways women sought to transform the dominant culture of patriarchy. Activating cultural production was one of  the central goals of  1970s-­era feminists in the visual arts.

242

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

Artemisia Gallery In 1973 eighteen artists established the cooperative art gallery known as Artemisia at 9 West Hubbard Street, on the city’s near North Side.30 The name paid homage to the seventeenthcentury Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few women painters active in the early modern era who have so far been identified. Yet she was until recently known less for her paintings than as the plaintiff in a spectacular rape trial. Artemisia’s father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, sued her teacher, a minor painter, for violating his daughter. For many centuries, most of Artemisia’s works had been mistakenly attributed to Orazio. 31 Such an injustice merited redress, and the story of Artemisia’s struggle for recognition and a proper legacy resonated with Chicago’s women artists. Artemisia’s programming reached its apex between 1973 and 1979, and focused on professionalization, community building, and self-­empowerment. In 1988 Joy Poe reflected, “Artemisia is, I suppose, the most important thing that’s ever happened to me [in particular] the chance to be around people that were successful and to see what they were like.”32 The gallery hosted an influential lecture series centered on the role of women artists in society, featuring artists, curators, and historians who worked on feminist topics and made feminist art. One of  the first notable visitors was New York–­based curator Marcia Tucker, who, in the spring of  1973, led “An Informal Discussion on Women in the Arts” (fig. 6.5a–d).33 The feminist art historian Joanna Frueh was the programming director from 1974 to 1976. In its earliest and most influential era, the gallery’s member-­artists created a leadership structure informed by radical feminism, featuring decision-­making by consensus. The group secured grants to support the Artemisia Fund, an educational entity separate from the members-­only exhibitions that dominated the gallery’s yearly calendar. A program from October 1983 illustrates these two roles, listing five month-­long solo exhibitions by members working in a variety of media, with a shared opening reception, and at the bottom, two slide lectures by renowned artists Nancy Spero (an ex-­Chicagoan) and Barbara Kruger. In a later grant application, Artemisia reported that Kruger’s lecture “drew a full house of 200,” and that the roster of lectures for that year included Cynthia Carlson, Lauren Ewing, Pat Steir, and Betye Saar.34 Artemisia regularly invited a national-­level artist to present a solo exhibition. The annual Invitational Exhibition helped raise the profile both of the artist and of  Artemisia, and gave its members the opportunity to interact with an admired artist. Among the artists honored with solo exhibitions were Judy Chicago (1974), June Wayne (1975), Eve Sonneman (1977), Michael Jantzen and Alice Neel (1978), Mary Eckhardt, Lorraine Levi, Tom McCauley (1979), and Alice Adams, Alice Aycock, Suzanne Doremus, and Nancy Fried (1980).35 Artemisia’s programming also included group exhibitions by invited curators, bringing a national-­level dialogue on feminism to Chicago. For instance, Lucy Lippard curated the 1979 exhibition Both Sides Now: An International Exhibition Integrating Feminism and Leftist Politics, which sought to bridge perceived political differences between American and British feminist artists, creating a confluence of artists such as Betsy Damon, Donna Henes, Margaret Harrison, Alexis Hunter, Mary Kelly, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, and Marie Yates. In 1981 Linda Burnham, the editor of  Los Angeles–­based High Performance magazine, organized at Artemisia one of  the earliest group shows in the United States on performance art, featuring a mixed roster of Los Angeles–­and Chicago-­based practitioners: Sandra Binion, Nancy Forest Brown, Michael Deitz, Ellen Fisher, James Grigsby, Kim Jones, Paul McCarthy, Linda Novak, Carmela Rago, Rachel Rosenthal, and E. W. Ross.36

243

6.5a– ­d  Posters for exhibitions and events at Artemisia Gallery.

Ryerson and Burnham Library Archives. Art Institute of Chicago.

244

245

J E NN I SORKI N

In its first decade, Artemisia also established a video and slide library with more than eight hundred slides of  works by modern and contemporary women artists.37 Such images were crucial in building a visual vocabulary for women’s culture, and became important source material for feminist artists as they sought to disseminate feminist values and imagery more broadly, as a teaching tool in classrooms and through the public lectures held at the gallery (fig. 6.6). In Los Angeles, a center for women’s culture known as the Woman’s Building ran from 1973 until 1991, and was home to all-­women galleries, a feminist press, and a feminist art school, the Feminist Studio Workshop. During the 1970s the Woman’s Building became a national model for feminist programming in arts and culture.38 Its feminist pedagogy became a significant source of  theory and method for the members of  Artemisia, which in turn became a vital hub in Chicago for seminars, panel discussions, and workshops offering practical tools for confronting sexism in academia, museums, and commercial galleries. While most were intended for studio-­based artists, others were activist in approach, encouraging feminist community development beyond the art world. Art historian Joanna Gardner-­Huggett’s research has shown that many artists and theorists associated with the Woman’s Building visited Artemisia during the gallery’s first decade, including cofounder Arlene Raven, art historian Ruth Iskin, artist June Wayne, and the Feminist Art Workers (Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Cheri Gaulke, and Laurel Klick).39 Wayne was a Chicago native and was celebrated as such locally, narrating her early Chicago history before lecturing on the “survival imperatives” for maintaining a professional artistic practice in a talk titled “Allies and Predators: The Art Scene 1975.”40 In 1980 Raven curated an exhibition at Artemisia titled The Art of  the Woman’s Building.41 The exhibition resonated

6.6  Lecture by Cindy Nemser at Artemisia Gallery, October 15, 1974. Artemisia Gallery

Records, Ryerson and Burnham Library Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

246

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

with Chicagoans, in part perhaps because the LA center’s namesake was the original Woman’s Building, a dedicated exhibition space for women at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.42 It is noteworthy that Artemisia Gallery’s founding membership was intergenerational. Four in particular — ­Vera Klement, Hollis Sigler, Margaret Wharton, and Phyllis Bramson — ­were already influential. Vera Klement was the most senior, a painter who had taught at the University of  Chicago since 1969. But it was only at Artemisia that she received her first solo show. Though influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Klement’s explorations in paint challenge the purity of  abstraction through her inclusions of  representational figures and domestic objects. Spare and eclectic, her canvases are often starkly divided between an amorphous blue landscape, water or sky, and a fragmented female figure, as in Blue Figure (1983; fig. 6.7). The acute intensity of  her textured surfaces is redolent of  a deep kinship with Willem de Kooning’s investment in the figure. Susanne Ghez eventually organized a retrospective of  Klement’s work at the Renaissance Society in 1986.43 Hollis Sigler was another prominent founding member, best known for a lifelong body of  small-­scale drawings and paintings made in a faux naïf style, influenced by the Imagists, with whom she studied at SAIC, and by the eccentric, intuitive works of  American painter Florine Stettheimer, active in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. The latter did not go unnoticed. In a letter pitching a review of  Stettheimer’s exhibition to the New Art Examiner, critic Robert Storr wrote, “Her work of course has parallels with what Hollis Sigler and others are doing in Chicago.”44 Dreamlike and drenched in vibrant color, You Worry about Its Success (1987; fig. 6.8) depicts, on the surface, a magical nighttime backyard bathed in the warm red glow of  lanterns beneath a full yellow moon peeking through broken clouds. A different subject, however, is suggested by the title, a knowing phrase tossed mid-­conversation between two intimates. As a stand-­in for the absent couple is a formal table set with a wine bottle, two glasses, and a cake. All is immersed in the moonlight. Sigler’s most ambitious project was the Breast Cancer Journal, which occupied her from her diagnosis in 1985 until she succumbed to the disease in 2001. The work chronicles the daily complexity of her illness long before breast cancer became a well-­publicized cause. With Sigler’s decision to work serially, the project was process-­based, deliberately reveling in a “little world” schema of  psychological interiority. This meant depicting intimacies between people and their lives in the domestic world. As such, her works can be seen in relation to the drawings, similarly figurative, personal, and emotionally charged, of  the better known New York–­based artist Ree Morton. Sigler’s pictorial practice brought a moving dignity and lyricism to the lived experience of  chronic illness, offered from her own feminist and lesbian viewpoint. Margaret Wharton (née Harper) studied at SAIC (MFA 1975) and was profoundly influenced by the Imagists, who emphasized symbolic, folk, and non-­Western traditions in their work and teachings. While her earliest works were made in metal, she went on to create whimsical assemblages out of  chairs, which became her signature material. As readymade, functional objects, the chairs were consistently taken apart and remade into objects that were often stand-­ins for the female body or an anthropomorphized animal. This can be seen in Garden Chair (1978; fig. 6.9), in which she deconstructs portions of  an outdoor chaise, only to reassemble it into an oversized bug, also a garden staple. Reflecting on Wharton’s first museum exhibition, which was organized in 1981 at the Museum of  Contemporary Art in Chicago and toured nationally, artist Anne Wilson writes:

247

6.7  Vera Klement, Blue Figure, 1983. Encaustic on canvas, 84 × 60 in.

248

6.8  Hollis Sigler, You Worry about Its Success, 1987. 65 ½ × 89 ½ in. 6.9  Margaret Wharton, Garden Chair, 1978. Painted wood chair, epoxy, reeds, staples, wood dowels, 96 × 43 × 2 in.

J E NN I SORKI N

I first saw Margaret Wharton’s work in her solo exhibition at the MCA, soon after I arrived in Chicago to teach at SAIC [in 1979]. Throughout the exhibition she utilized the chair, as both subject and object, in inventive material ways . . . giving the form[s] an uncanny reference to a limp body and fragility.45 In transforming everyday objects such as chairs and shoes, Wharton’s mixed-­media constructions articulated the potency of the domestic realm long associated with women. Phyllis Bramson also trained with the Imagists at SAIC. She graduated with an MFA in 1974 and began teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1985. Bramson is best known for her large body of seminarrative paintings, highly sexualized reworkings of fairy tales and children’s stories that are influenced as well by Japanese prints and culture. However, she began her career making assemblage sculpture, creating an early feminist body of  work incorporating baby dolls that critiqued the social expectations and demands placed upon women. Baby Heidi Chair (1974; fig. 6.10) presents a smiling doll dressed as a sinister clown or jester, offering an eerie tableau that invokes fear and folly.

Artists, Residents of Chicago Like Artemisia, Artists, Residents of Chicago (ARC) was invested in the professional development of its membership. One of the goals, as founding member Gerda Meyer Bernstein pointed out to a Chicago reporter in 1973, was to show that “women don’t just have to be mothers or dilettantes.”46 ARC and Artemisia opened within two weeks of each other, yet both spaces affirmed that the galleries would not compete; instead, they agreed to collaborate on community programs, music, and poetry events.47 One of the primary differences between them was that ARC seemed to lack the funds or ambition to create national-­level programming. The majority of its exhibitions were members-­only. Its most prominent member was the painter and conceptual artist Kay Rosen, who joined the co-­op in 1975. ARC had an ideal early location, at 226 East Ontario Street, across the street from the Museum of  Contemporary Art. It shared the building with a number of other ventures over the years, including Artemisia, Chicago Filmmakers, N.A.M.E. Gallery, and Phyllis Kind Gallery. In fall of  1974 the two galleries held a joint off-­site exhibition at the Illinois Center called 40 Women Artists of  ARC and Artemisia. Reviewing it for New Art Examiner, Devonna Pieszak bemoaned, “They are generally competent artists, and one hopes that the supportive system will nurture tougher, more original work rather than the excuse of remaining complacently within the mainstream.”48 Yet within a year, Artemisia triumphed. At the annual Chicago and Vicinity juried exhibition held at the Art Institute, its artists took the majority of the prizes. In 1978 critic Matthew Rohn acknowledged that the feminist cooperatives had diversified the possibilities for artistic production in Chicago well beyond Imagist art.49 Like Artemisia, ARC had invitational exhibitions. These included one-­woman shows by Miriam Schapiro (1976) and Susan Sensemann and Marcia Frankel (both 1977), and a host of  group shows, one of  which was an outreach to Women’s Art Resources of  Minnesota (WARM), a Minneapolis-­based feminist collective (1979). In turning its attentions to other midwestern galleries, ARC pursued an umbrella strategy: becoming a collection point for asserting regional identity. This may have bolstered its staying power; though no longer a women-­only gallery, ARC is still in operation, while Artemisia closed its doors in 2003.

250

6.10  Phyllis Bramson, Baby Heidi Chair, 1974. Mixed media, 37 × 17 × 15 in. Courtesy of the artist.

251

How often are you at home in an exhibition? ANTHONY ELMS

on and on. In disclosure, I have collaborated with, benefited from, advised on, contributed to, and argued with many projects of Philip’s, and consider his contrarian demeanor a required energy. At vonzweck he discouraged video or sound works as much as he could, preferring work he could live around. Press releases were written for his entertainment as much as to provide information, and a time or two no information of value was provided. Works could be for sale or not, and if something sold, the only split in proceeds he requested was thirty dollars to cover the money spent on beer for the reception. Every exhibitor needed to be someone Philip trusted because he would give them the keys to his apartment for a month. I counted on seeing a core group of friends there, and outsiders were immediately noticed. Which isn’t to exactly criticize — ­these were people I liked to drink and laugh and listen to better-­louder music with. When I showed my own work there, vonzweck felt like a second home, which might explain why my home hosted the last vonzweck exhibition. The most important questions for any independent endeavor are in administration: When you are already beyond busy, what gets prioritized? Getting through. And for this you rightly rely on those close to you. Given the infrastructure of Chicago, apartment spaces reflect the city’s long-­standing troubled segregation lines. By and large people attend places “close to home.” The welcome air of openness depending on your constitution. Some spaces felt heavily white, some decidedly queer, others Latino or Asian or Black or Polish. Some were techy or painting-­heavy or photo-­oriented, and a couple were most decidedly upper middle class to boot. Many veered into dude vibe. From this position, how do you change standards if the audience is by and large yourself? And how are experiences addressed to and heard by a public? Too often along tired and true lines. Conviviality coupled with experimentalism does not always breed expanded egalitarianism, integration, or the forging of new social structures.

The apartment gallery as it flourished, and perhaps still flourishes, in Chicago is a peculiarity. Names are routinely punny (for example, Minivinia, Steve Lacy’s — ­a.k.a. Academy Records’ — ­cloistered backyard swipe at Ravinia, the long-­standing outdoor concert venue in the Chicago suburbs). Lifespans fleeting. Often dingy and squirrelly, for sure, and absurd (in the closet, medicine cabinet, refrigerator, dirt basement . . .). The Chicago-­style apartment gallery regularly champions market irrelevance on either a financial or influential level. What is it to unlink ambition from scale and scope? In terms of display, art institutions need artists. Artists do not need art institutions. And yet, uncritically equating experimentalism in the arts with innovation, or just as bad, using innovation as a justification for DIY economics, risks losing spirited interrogation. Take my first visit to an apartment gallery in 1994. I found a printed invitation and headed out. I got to the building — ­a typical Chicago residential brownstone — ­confused. It never occurred to me that a public exhibition could be in a private home. Being shy, I glanced in the windows, didn’t see a recognizable face, and left without entering. This is the rub of a space free of calcified institutional structures. Peer pressures and ostracizing cliques can readily substitute. What makes the pigheaded determination of the independent producer more ethical or worthy of support than the staunch structure of a well-­established institution is too often whether or not you have dinner and drinks with the directors. And hey, maybe a desire to sleep with one of the organizers is a draw. Can I make it in show business? Anyway, soon friends were taking me to the spaces of their friends. Consider one space I eventually felt comfortable in — ­v onzweck, operated by artist Philip von Zweck from the living room of his apartment for three seasons (2005–­2008). Philip has undertaken any number of activities over the years: concert organizer, radio host and producer, curator, instructor, painter, performer, interviewer,

Heavily adapted from “Do you work hard? Do you try hard? You don’t. Chicago, now!” May, no. 2, October 2009.

252

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

One of  the few controversial exhibitions sponsored by ARC was the Women Choose Men invitational (1975), a firm revision of an established feminist model. Women Choose Women, staged at the New York Cultural Center in 1973, had been juried by prominent feminists, including Elizabeth C. Baker, editor in chief  of  Art in America, art historian Linda Nochlin, and the painters Pat Passlof  and Sylvia Sleigh.50 Conceptually, ARC’s show flipped the model to invert gender hierarchies and subject male artists to the judgment of  their female peers. Unfortunately, this is not how it was received. Allowing members to invite men to exhibit at a women-­only space drew harsh criticism. In one review, Derek Guthrie, cofounder and editor of  the New Art Examiner, noted that the show suffered from nepotism, in that two of  the invited men were husbands and one was a former teacher. Guthrie concluded, “I suspect the criteria were of  proximity and familiarity rather than any more esoteric concerns.51 Guthrie was not alone. Taking stock in the New Art Examiner’s anniversary issue in 1983, Elizabeth Moxie contended that the two cooperatives in fact lacked a commitment to feminist ideology: In looking back over the past ten years of women making art in Chicago, I think an interesting thing is that, while Chicago women have achieved visibility and critical success for their work, this has been done without seeming to need or want much feminist dialogue, commitment or support. . . . In terms of Chicago women’s art, this can be seen in the development of the two women’s galleries, ARC and Artemisia, which were established in 1973 at the height of feminist dialogue. These galleries were not established to promote feminist aesthetics, interpretation or ideology, but were conceived as artist-­run co-­ops showing only women’s work.52 These comments underscore the constant negativity both spaces endured from the beginning, with endless predictions of their demise by (mainly male) art critics. Instead, both thrived, rejecting old competitive frameworks and instituting collaborative models that emphasized cooperation, democracy, and power-­sharing. In early 1975 the Chicago critic Franz Schulze offered quiet praise in ArtNews: “If they [ARC and Artemisia] were to close now, the city would lose a pair of mini-­institutions, not just two private galleries.”53

N.A.M.E. Gallery The banner year of 1973 also saw the establishment of N.A.M.E., which was organized by a group of young, largely male artists, nearly all of them SAIC alumni. Othello Anderson, Phil Berkman, Bill Brand, Michael Crane, Barry Holden, Martin Long, Amanda Parry, Jerry Saltz, and Guy Whitney were eager to show their work and that of their peers in an atmosphere where success was not tied to sales.54 Trained by SAIC’s Imagist painters, N.A.M.E.’s emerging artists mostly rejected painting. Nonetheless, their primary mentor was Emilio Cruz, the only African American painter who taught at SAIC (and not himself  an Imagist), who had encouraged his students to expand their practices (fig. 6.11).55 With their experimental gallery, they decided to challenge themselves, emerging as resourceful and inventive. The group took a stand against solo exhibitions, favoring instead two-­person and thematic group shows. N.A.M.E’s stated intent was to promote the free exchange of creative ideas. . . . Local art museums are concerned only with the works of recognized masters. Commercial art galleries must, for economic

253

J E NN I SORKI N

reasons, show only established artists whose works will sell and return a profit. Thus, the unestablished artist presently has nowhere to exhibit and is denied the opportunity to become recognized or even have his work seen by the general public.56 After a year on Lake Street, the group renovated a loft at 9 West Hubbard Street that became one of the largest and most popular gallery spaces in Chicago, with fourteen-­foot ceilings, a projection room, and a video/performance/film space. On the ground floor, N.A.M.E. was immediately accessible to foot traffic, and it attracted a public beyond the art crowd. Eventually, modular walls and museum-­quality lighting were installed. As Lynne Warren notes, “N.A.M.E’s importance to the growth of the alternative space scene in Chicago in the 1970s was paramount.”57 However, it largely eschewed artists working in more traditional media, such as painting and sculpture. Taking a cue from the feminists, N.A.M.E. ran itself  as a leaderless democracy. All decisions had to be made by consensus, including the roster of exhibitions. This took “hours and hours and hours,” according to Barry Holden, and in the end, it was not practical, but the process proved “so important to my development and thinking.”58

6.11  Emilio Cruz, Angola’s Dreams Grasp Finger Tips, 1973.

Acrylic on canvas, 84 1⁄8 × 84 in.

254

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

The artwork exhibited at N.A.M.E. tended toward the conceptual, featuring artists who experimented with new media and materials such as video, performance, installation, and environmental works. Women and men were featured in nearly equal numbers, and sometimes in two-­person shows. While group consensus was idealized, in reality, the decision-­ making was, as artist Linda Novak puts it, “all Barry and Jerry.” She recounts that Amanda Parry, the only woman involved in founding N.A.M.E., asked her to join the gallery’s board as a replacement, not wanting to leave it to men only.59 The space hit its stride in 1979, with the popular Daley’s Tomb exhibition, curated by Jerry Saltz. The show featured a crowd of fifty-­five artists who responded to his call to create individual memorials (many of  them parodies) to recently deceased mayor Richard Daley. The exhibition was meant as a timely spoof but instead became mired in civic issues, as three years after his death, a running argument continued about plans for the mayor’s memorial. The Chicago Artists Coalition began an intensive letter-­writing campaign, opposing the city’s plans to hire a European sculptor for the memorial rather than a local artist. The New York Times reported that a delegation had gone to Europe to talk to two modernist sculptors, Jean Dubuffet (France) and Giacomo Manzu (Italy).60 Saltz’s exhibition dovetailed neatly with the letter-­writing protest, and with the greatest pop cultural disinterment of  all time: Treasures of  Tutankhamun, featuring artifacts from the tomb of the Egyptian boy-­king, was concluding its blockbuster US tour, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had included four months at the Field Museum in 1977.61 In the spirit of  parody, for Daley’s Tomb Kay Rosen crafted A Song and Dance (1978; fig. 6.12a–b), whose title refers to the “song and dance” often attributed to politicians and their habit of  doublespeak. The work is made in two parts: a text that reads as lyrics (song), arranged in a staircase formation, and photographs of feet in various postures (dance). Beginning with one of  Mayor Daley’s malapropisms, “Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes,” Rosen explains: From there I continue to “misstate” each quote, step by step (literally, as the accompanying dancing feet ascend a staircase) until it mutates into an elaborate distortion. My guide for each line was to approximate the sound of the quote that preceded it, just as the mayor probably intended “platitudes” to be “altitudes” or “plateaus” or a combination of the two.62 Alan Artner, the Chicago Tribune’s art critic, panned most of the work, as well as the audience — ­not the usual art crowd — ­that had hoped for earnest tributes to Daley in the aftermath of what he called “memorial furor.” A Song and Dance was one of the few pieces singled out for praise: “Kay Rosen’s work is a verbal and visual pun, beautifully cast in variation form.”63

Endings The late 1970s constituted a moment of great promise and upheaval in Chicago’s alternative art scene. In 1977 the Art Institute mounted a large-­scale survey of contemporary conceptual art titled Europe in the Seventies: Aspects of Recent Art.64 The show offered a rare opportunity for Chicago’s artists to see their own efforts corroborated by European performance-­ driven and photo-­conceptual works, but it did little to foment local opportunities. Barry Holden recalls that in 1979 he and a friend made a list of  all the artists they knew

255

J E NN I SORKI N

who had left Chicago for New York, including themselves. The tally came to sixty-­four, representing a major loss for Chicago.65 Among the émigrés was the painter and performer Freya Hansell, who became an East Village painter of  modest reputation and performed with the Wooster Group. Jerry Saltz went from art-­making to art criticism, transforming himself into an outsize personality in the New York art press. The painter and critic Robert Storr also relocated to New York, eventually becoming a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. “For some of  us,” he wrote, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield and the [Video] Data Bank were catalytic in prompting this exodus because they had introduced us to “art worlds” bigger than that in Chicago and they welcomed us when we arrived . . . as did Nancy Spero and Leon Golub whose studio, dinner table and activism were a nub and meeting place for many of us[. They] had been in New York for quite a while by then and as a result of their years in Paris, were among the most cosmopolitan of our SAIC Diaspora but maintained many Chicago ties.66

6.12a– ­b (above and facing page) Kay Rosen, A Song and Dance, 1978. Photo and text, 60 × 18 in.

256

J E NN I SORKI N

The overarching perception was, quite simply, that New York offered more opportunities with its larger, more finely textured art world. Such a mass exodus served to reinforce Chicago’s perception of itself as a “second city,” a continual anxiety that has plagued the city since the nineteenth century. At the same time, these departures allowed for a dynamic sense of  difference as a new generation of  emerging artists arose to transform the culture of the existing spaces according their own goals. One of  N.A.M.E. Gallery’s most important legacies is that it inaugurated a permanent culture of  performance art in Chicago. Women artists were largely responsible for this. While the New Art Examiner had been reviewing performance art for two years, starting in 1976, the practice was still marginalized, even within the existing alternative gallery structure: galleries were set up for object and wall-­based works, not as black box theaters with seating, lighting, and sound equipment. During 1978 and 1979 N.A.M.E. received grants from both the Illinois Arts Council and the NEA specifically to facilitate performance, and money collected at the door helped to subsidize the costs of  maintaining evening hours and press mailings. N.A.M.E’s monthly calendar of  events was mailed to four thousand people, thirty-­five hundred of  whom were in the immediate Chicagoland area.67 Linda Novak was the first to program a performance series at N.A.M.E. She credits Franklin Furnace, an alternative space in New York, as her inspiration.68 The artist Jean Souza also began programming for the space.69 From 1978 on, performance events were held at N.A.M.E. three to five nights a week. The performers were diverse: besides solo artists, the Association for the Advancement of  Creative Musicians (AACM) performed experimental jazz, as did other musical groups, such as Kahil El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. 70 MoMing (established in 1976 as a joint dance and art center) and Links Hall (1978) were the other dominant event spaces in Chicago for the burgeoning medium of  performance art.

Randolph Street Gallery Eventually, Randolph Street Gallery (RSG) supplanted these previous performance spaces. Founded in 1979 by Patricia (Tish) Miller and Sarah Schwartz, the original intent had been to create an experimental space in the Haymarket neighborhood devoted to noncommercial, large-­scale artworks. For the first three years Randolph Street operated out of Schwartz’s apartment, creating temporary outdoor sculptures and installations in a series known as 2Day Installations. Artists included Dean Langworthy (fig. 6.13), Eduardo Maldonado, Mary Min, Kathline Hart, Gregory Spiggle, and Miller and Schwartz themselves. Langworthy went on to a noteworthy career in rigging and installing large-­scale exhibitions at Chicago’s museums, including the King Tut exhibition at the Field Museum.71 In 1981 RSG shifted its programming toward performance and conceptually oriented group shows. The gallery took over a thousand-­square-­foot second-­floor space above a storefront at 835 West Randolph Street. Its first performance curator was the artist known as Hudson, who later founded the famed New York gallery Feature. New York Times critic Roberta Smith later wrote that Hudson “tended to run Feature like an alternative nonprofit space.”72 In 1982 RSG moved again, this time to a six-­thousand-­square-­foot space near the intersection of  Chicago and Milwaukee Avenues, asserting that “its physical space did not match its

258

6.13  Dean Langworthy, 2- ­Day Installation, July 21–­22, 1979. Black-­and-­white photograph, 7 7⁄8 × 10 in.

259

J E NN I SORKI N

vision of  possibilities.”73 By this time, Randolph Street had accrued enormous local support. Its advisory board included prominent dealers and collectors such as Rhona Hoffman, Donald Young, and Lewis Manilow. Judith Russi Kirshner and Lyn Blumenthal were on the exhibitions committee, and a staff  of  four was hired, including executive director Mary Min, who had been a member of  ARC Gallery. A landmark exhibition of  this era was The Loop Show (1981) curated by Larry Lundy and Tish Miller, with assistance from Min. Held in July 1981, the exhibition was in the vein of  the famed Times Square Show, held the previous year in New York. The Times Square Show had been a protest against gentrification, with artists revitalizing an abandoned property through graffiti, installation, paintings, and sculpture.74 The Loop Show (fig. 6.14) was more staid: thirty-­two artists seeking a wider audience in what was actually a convenient location with foot traffic and the potential for sales. The show was held on the second floor of  the Fisher Building, a downtown landmark designed by the architect Daniel Burnham.75 While N.A.M.E. remained open until 1993, during the 1980s, its programming became largely object-­ and installation-­based. Throughout the 1980s, then, Randolph Street Gallery led the way in advancing performance practice in Chicago.

Performance Chicago-­based performance evolved as an entity distinct from practices on the East and West Coasts, though both regions arguably influenced it. As critic and video/performance artist Christine Tamblyn characterized it, “Chicago performance is often more theatrical in style than New York on one hand, and more directly personal in content than West Coast performance on the other hand.”76 New York performance developed out of a consciousness of the everyday, led by Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and others at the Judson Dance Theater. There were also Happenings of various persuasions by John Cage (invested in chance occurrences), Allan Kaprow (large-­scale event-­sculptures), Yayoi Kusama (protest art), and members of Fluxus, whose events typically involved the viewer. The West Coast scene featured a range of personal and political content, including feminist performance (Suzanne Lacy, Faith Wilding), endurance work (Chris Burden, Linda Montano), and conceptually driven practices that engaged the public (Tom Marioni). In Chicago, performance was often collaborative, derived from theater and movement exercises, and grounded in process and play, rather than narrative or issue-­driven content. Some of  the best-­known performance artists emerged from SAIC’s Department of  Performance, which evolved in the 1970s after splitting from the Goodman School of Drama in 1969.77 The department’s founder was Tom Jaremba, a dancer and choreographer, who had been a movement instructor and choreographer on the Goodman faculty before teaching at SAIC. During the 1970s Jaremba began to explore performance, collapsing movement, image, and narrative before a live audience in his loft space in Wicker Park, known as Lodge Hall. In a 1982 Chicago Tribune profile, Jaremba defined performance by what it was not: “I didn’t want to be a dancer in someone’s company, I didn’t want to do their steps. I didn’t want to be an actor; I didn’t want to be in plays. I didn’t like plays that were written. I wanted to do a kind of  work that was my vision of something.”78 But Jaremba also cautioned against “the preoccupation of  the self” in performance.79 Autobiography, or what was known as a “confessional” style, was largely eschewed in Chicago.

260

6.14  Poster for The Loop Show, July 1–­31, 1981, 33 ½ × 22 in.

261

Chicago Experimental Music, Part II JOHN CORBETT

catering to experimental musicians and sound artists. In 1995 I assisted HotHouse’s Marguerite Horberg in a three-­ day festival that brought European improvisers to town and, during one afternoon, had them collaborating with a variety of Chicagoans. Spiritually, from my vantage, this was the start of a new chapter in creative music in the city. A few months later, working with Ken Vandermark, a multiple reed player and ambitious composer who’d also moved here from Boston, I began a series of weekly concerts at a rock club called the Empty Bottle. Extending a new trend at similar clubs like Lounge Ax, these concerts allowed curious rock fans to explore jazz and improvised music on their own familiar turf. It was successful enough that the club allowed us to book an annual festival, which we ran for nine years. My primary aim as a presenter was to create opportunities for Chicagoans to hear and sometimes play with people from out of town, especially Europe. Many exciting new ensembles and one-­off assemblages resulted, including various aggregations featuring Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, a large ensemble led by German saxophonist and clarinetist Peter Brötzmann called the Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, and innumerable groups instigated by Vandermark. By the time we stopped working with the Empty Bottle, there were plenty of other places presenting the music. Most were run by musicians, like saxophonist Dave Rempis’s Elastic Arts Foundation, cornetist Josh Berman and drummer Mike Reed’s Hungry Brain, a series at the Hideout started by Vandermark and Mitch Cocanig, and vast activities at the Chicago Cultural Center overseen by Michael Orlove. By this time, in the early 2000s, Chicago was widely regarded as one of the most important cosmopolitan centers for improvised and experimental music in the US. The city was also the home of the hybrid music known as “post-­rock,” and musicians had begun to flock there to participate in the vibrant community. With its roots in the AACM and the pioneers of self-­production (see part I of this history, in chapter 4), Chicago’s creative music scene is alive and well and continues to attract a diverse array of explorers. In 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Art paid homage to the AACM and its influence in a show titled The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.

That Chicago’s new music scene in the 1970s and early ’80s was not well known elsewhere doesn’t mean that was a fallow period. It was a time in which seeds were sown for a renaissance, first by cultivating new venues and later by attracting forceful figures from around the world. Fred Anderson, a saxophonist and member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), ran a performance space in Evanston called the Birdhouse, and when he moved to the South Loop in 1983 he took over a club named the Velvet Lounge. The Velvet Lounge became a clearinghouse and incubator for new talent, as did a jam session farther south at the New Apartment Lounge, run by fellow tenorman Von Freeman, where significant players like Steve Coleman learned under Freeman’s wing. Senior figures nurtured younger ones, as in weekly sessions under the nominal leadership of Hal Russell, a bop drummer in the ’50s who’d picked up saxophone and free music in the ’70s and started his NRG Ensemble a decade later. Among the notable venues to emerge during the ’80s was the modern-­dance-­oriented Links Hall, which presented local and international musicians working in many different aspects of contemporary music. Southend Musicworks started as a splinter from Links, first as a self-­proclaimed “mobile” venue — ­they called themselves Nomads of Modern Music — ­and then occupying a space near the Velvet Lounge. HotHouse began in 1987, programming some of the same names as Southend, operating first in Wicker Park, then relocating to the South Loop. Together, these venues created opportunities for regular workshops and series and presented musicians from both coasts and Europe. My own involvement in the scene began in 1987, when I moved to town from Boston, where I had founded a nonprofit organization to present improvised music. In Chicago I worked independently and with Southend’s Leo Krumpholz, and I taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Sound Department, which had been a focal point of advanced audio work, especially synthesis and electronic music, since the 1970s, when people like Richard Teitelbaum and Frederic Rzewski taught there. In 1986 Lou and Dawn Mallozzi, with Eric Leonardson and Perry Venson, formed the Experimental Sound Studio, a unique facility

262

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

P-­Form Magazine In 1986 P-­Form, a magazine dedicated to performance art, was established by Peter Taub, the newly named (and final) executive director of Randolph Street. This was a major boon for Chicago: a second avant-­garde art periodical set against the backdrop of a city facing, like the rest of the country, a mid-­decade recession, a scene that David McCracken of the Chicago Tribune described as “a little skittish,” with gallery closures and sudden absences of full exhibition schedules. Many galleries were launching their fall seasons with just one month of programming, such was the uncertainty.80 Run first as a bimonthly, and then a quarterly, P-­Form was key in expanding a critical dialogue for performance art.81 The magazine gave Chicagoans some badly needed national coverage, and consistent reviews helped their work, being crucial when applying for grants and teaching positions. Over its thirteen-­year history, P-­Form had a large revolving mix of  editors, advisors, and writers, ranging from established to emerging. For example, the February/March 1989 issue features short pieces from a number of  artists and writers who later became luminaries — ­Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Kay Rosen, David Sedaris — ­as well as a long piece on Guillermo Goméz-­Peña’s practice by Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle, later an established Chicago artist and professor at UIC, but at the time an SAIC graduate student. Among the many editors were Taub, Kathryn Hixson, Christine Tamblyn, and Irene Tsatsos. In 1996 Taub was named the inaugural director of  the MCA’s performance programs when the museum opened its new building.82

Interdisciplinary Practices Jaremba not only influenced his own students, such as Lynn Book (MFA 1985), a prominent interdisciplinary vocal artist who frequently collaborates with other musicians and performers to produce multimedia events, and Carmela Rago (MFA 1993), an artist who also became an early performance critic in the city; he also mentored emerging artists who had relocated to Chicago, drawn by the vibrant and collegial scene.83 These included Sandra Binion, who arrived as a dancer but created multimedia performances at Randolph Street Gallery and other spaces, including Suite for Bass and Ironing Bored (1981), a work of gendered gestures: the public repetition of virtuosity juxtaposed with the private repetition of domestic labor (fig. 6.15). Lin Hixson was another transplant, nurtured by the Los Angeles performance scene.84 Hixson relocated to Chicago and became a cofounder, with Matthew Goulish, of Goat Island, a performance collective that created abstract, poetic, movement-­based works addressing social issues such as war and the destruction of  the environment. From 1987 until 2009, a core group of  performers — ­Karen Christopher, Goulish, Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, and Litó Walkey — ­collaborated with each other and with associated members Cynthia Ashby, Lucy Cash, CJ Mitchell, Judd Morrissey, Margaret Nelson, John Rich, Charissa Tolentino, and Chantal Zakari. Their method was intensely collaborative, rooted in workshops, observation, community, and teaching. As Goat Island says, “Divisions between individuals, and ideas of  authorship are blurred — ­through this we see that the creative material connects to others, and is completed by them.”85 Performance in Chicago also overlapped with artists working in video, sound, and electronica. Jana Wright, one of Jaremba’s first MFA students, writes of her time at SAIC:

263

J E NN I SORKI N

1978 was an amazing time — ­Phil Morton in Video in a small studio next door, Bob Snyder (and for a brief time George Lewis) in Sound next to Phil, John Schofill and George Landow [later known as Owen Land] in Film, Steve Waldeck down the hall in Kinetics & Electronics next to Sonia Sheridan in Generative Systems (the precursor to Art & Technology). It was an amazing experimental playground — ­ all of us influenced by everything going on in the basement of the new building [on Columbus Avenue].86 Through Wright’s recollection, it becomes clear that some of the foundational progenitors of experimental media were based, not in New York or Los Angeles, but in Chicago itself. Jazz trombonist George Lewis furthered the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) but also pioneered early computer and electronic compositions, joining the faculty at Columbia College.87 Owen Land, who studied at the Goodman School of Drama, became celebrated for his avant-­garde films, which emphasized the materiality of the medium, included fake commercials, and sometimes parodied the ultraseriousness of structuralism. Sonia Sheridan was a force in pioneering what she termed Generative Systems, a graduate program she ran at SAIC from 1970 to 1980, which aimed to integrate social and technological change. An early proponent of computer graphics, she also employed color xerox technology in her artworks (fig. 6.16a–b). As she wrote, “High-­speed equipment permits the accumulation of hundreds of moments in the span of minutes or seconds. . . . For over a decade Generative Systems faculty and students have been studying the positive and negative implications of relative speed on art. It has raised an entirely new set of conditions.”88

6.15  Sandra Binion, Suite for Bass and Ironing Bored, 1981.

264

6.16a  Sonia Sheridan manipulating

the Cromemco Z-­2D system with EASEL software, 1982. 6.16b  Sonia Sheridan, Sonia Eyes,

1982. Black-­and-­white video, cycled color.

265

J E NN I SORKI N

Video Chicago was a pioneering site for video art. Video at SAIC was established by the new media artist Phil Morton in 1969. In 1973, as an official department, it became the first program in the country to offer degrees in video. Morton collaborated with physicist Dan Sandin, a professor at UIC, who invented the Sandin Processor in 1973, a video synthesizer that artists could build themselves. What they called “image processing” consisted of drastically altering camera-­generated images to create striking montages, saturated color, solarization, fading, wiping, and distortion. It could also involve abstracting or processing forms to create waves, geometric shapes, and sequences of found images.89 These aesthetic choices were original and revolutionary; the British video artist Peter Donebauer called this early work “electronic painting.”90 That such forms of  image-­making now seem commonplace underscores the widespread and ongoing influence early video has had on popular media. Video was then known as the “alternative television movement.”91 Lucinda Furlong, an early Whitney Museum video curator, characterized first-­generation video art as challenging what she called the “institution of television,” making art that looked different than American TV.92 Christine Tamblyn, who was Morton’s student (MFA 1978), historicized the early years of  video in Chicago, underscoring how liberating it was to artistic practice: “Despite its high-­ tech look, Chicago video art is not a high-­budget product, the custom designed tools employed, along with a ‘do-­it-­yourself’ philosophy, have freed Chicago artists from dependency on commercial post-­production facilities.”93 What this meant is that artists could edit in-­camera and avoid the rental expense of editing suites, a costly necessity of analog filmmaking. Artist and engineers both, Morton and Sandin belonged to a pioneering group also working on both coasts, including Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, Stephen Beck, Steve Rutt, and Bill Etra, all of  whom invented processing and synthesizing equipment, working in conjunction with public television stations. This history underscores the gender divide in early video: while men largely pioneered the technical innovations in the medium, women were the earliest programmers, administrators, and theorists, beginning with Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny, the founders of the pioneering New York–­based video art magazine Radical Software (1970). The artist Barbara Latham took over the SAIC department in 1978 and led it until her sudden death in 1984.

Video Data Bank It is against this backdrop that the Video Data Bank, an independent collecting and video production organization (named for a column published in Radical Software), was established at SAIC. While Morton was officially its founder, it was actually spearheaded and expanded by two of his graduate students, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, beginning in 1976. The pair had attended an archival workshop at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles two years prior. As a clearinghouse for early video art that did not distinguish between styles of  production — ­narrative, nonnarrative, image processing — ­the Video Data Bank became a critical resource and lasting model of collection, preservation, and documentation. Alongside the Bay Area Video Coalition (established in 1976), it elevated the stature and prominence of video art within the art world. New York’s Electronic Arts Intermix, established in 1971, preceded both

266

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

spaces. However, Chicago and San Francisco, cities with less comparable commercial media production, offered distinctive slants on video art as a form of cultural criticism that experimented, recorded, and nimbly responded to the rapidly changing standards for traditional broadcast media (namely, television).94 All three organizations developed as nonprofits aimed at distributing and promoting artists’ video and time-­based media. They have been vital to the dissemination and circulation of  video art while also functioning as archives and resources, building the history of the medium in real time, as it was made, programmed, installed, and screened. This was partly in response to the gaps in the field: museums and galleries did not foster, collect, or represent media artists with any regularity until the early 1990s. Together, Blumenthal and Horsfield produced more than four hundred interviews with artists, in particular, women artists. These included a pioneering generation of  protofeminists, such as Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, and Joan Mitchell, whose testimonies on their practice and philosophy would otherwise be lost to history. Carole Ann Klonarides, a video curator and early collaborator of  Blumenthal’s, comments: These interviews had a profound effect on many as it was unusual at the time to have access to the thoughts and ideas of women in the arts: Arlene Raven, Martha Rosler, Agnes Martin, Lucy Lippard, Shigeko Kubota, Yvonne Rainer, Christine Choy, Elizabeth Murray, Miyoko Ito, Linda Montano, to name a few.95 Made with what Horsfield called “a feminist agenda,” these videos, along with all the Visiting Artist lectures by critics and artists invited to SAIC, comprised the bulk of the Video Data Bank’s early collection, known as “On Art and Artists.”96 Working from their base at SAIC and out of a shared loft in Tribeca, they interviewed artists during the early 1980s on ¾-­inch video (the professional standard at the time) and published in small pamphlets edited transcripts of each interview. Their collaboration ended abruptly when Blumenthal died in 1988. Klonarides comments further: With her analytical intelligence, commitment to activism, and passionate embrace of the video medium, Lyn was a brave champion for the unrecognized, particularly women, sexual and gender minorities, and artists of color. . . . She also created the first outdoor spectacle of video art in Chicago, which she called the “Video Drive-­In,” that took place on a cinema-­sized screen on the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park in 1984.97 As a leader in media studies, Horsfield taught courses on video art history and production at SAIC from 1980 until 1999, and continued to direct the Video Data Bank until her retirement in 2006. The archive remains an active repository for video and digital distribution, maintaining a collection of more than six thousand video titles.98

Fiber In Chicago, fiber began to enjoy increasing status as an artistic medium in the late 1960s and ’70s. Two artists in the AfriCOBRA group, Jae Jarrell and Napoleon Jones-­Henderson, both worked with textiles as a way to activate social consciousness during the heyday of the Black Arts and civil rights movements. Jarrell opened a dress shop in Hyde Park and began making

267

6.17  Napoleon Jones-­Henderson, TCB, 1970. Woven tapestry, 72 × 48 in.

268

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

clothing that doubled as artwork. Her Urban Wall Suit (1969) is a dress form directly inspired by political messaging, incorporating graffiti-­style text that affirmed black voices and their distinctive linguistic culture.99 When Jones-­Henderson graduated from SAIC with a BFA in 1971, he was already producing woven tapestries embedded with political messages about social uplift, freedom, and the affirmation of the black race. TCB (1970; fig. 6.17) presents a stylized African American portrait at the center of a whimsical array of colorful banners with messages such as “Come together / to learn to defend us / define us.” Upon graduating, he received a fellowship to work alongside the venerable fiber artist Claire Zeisler in her studio. “The pieces . . . that I did based on the Maasai hairstyle from Kenya” he explains, “were very closely related to the kind of work she was doing, which also was inspired by all these different African and other third world cultures. . . . So that’s the kind of thing the fellowship winning opens you up to.”100 Ultimately, both Jarrell and Jones-­Henderson sought opportunities elsewhere, departing for the East Coast. Working in a segregated city, Chicago’s black artists felt disadvantaged by a general lack of  support from Chicago’s mainstream, and predominantly white, art world. For many white women artists, fiber became a means of experimenting with abstraction. Consider Zeisler’s Red Preview (1969; fig. 6.18), a vibrant, shapely vulvar form with a vertical progression; its cascading coils rain down into a cacophonous pool of threads. A hooded construction, it circles an interior structural support of  flanges. Biomorphic and intensely colored, Red Preview is unflinchingly corporeal: a coy reference to anticipation, peeking, or peeping at the showy drama of  the female form, albeit highly abstracted. On her signature use of  red, Zeisler commented, “I adore red. It says structure. It says vibrancy, life. I think I must dream in red. . . . To me it’s a constructive color. I don’t think I really use it as a color.”101 Zeisler’s sculpture served a predecessor to the celebratory iconographies of the body pursued by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago (born in Chicago) and Faith Wilding (who taught at SAIC 2002–­2012). At the School of  the Art Institute, the Weaving Department was transformed when artist Anne Wilson was hired in 1979. In the first decade after she arrived from the Bay Area, a hotbed of  experimental textile practice, Wilson recalls, Zeisler “sometimes came into the department to sit and talk with students, sometimes demonstrate something with cord and knotting. . . . She would host small get-­togethers at her place. . . . She was a treasure.”102 During the winter of  1982–­1983, Mary Jane Jacob, then chief  curator of  the Museum of  Contemporary Art, organized the first American retrospective of  the Polish fiber sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, launching her career in the United States.103 This marked an important moment for Chicago’s fiber community, as Abakanowicz’s work was known from its many inclusions in the famed Lausanne Biennial. The retrospective was also important for its outreach to and acknowledgment of  Chicago’s large Polish population. Abakanowicz was later commissioned to install a permanent sculpture in Grant Park. Made over two years, Agora (2004–­2006) is a sobering cluster of  106 headless standing figures, cast in bronze, steel, and iron. Referencing the communal aspects of  crowds, civic life, and cultural displacement, it is the artist’s largest permanent public work. In 1983 the sculptor Joan Livingstone joined the fiber department at SAIC. Livingstone’s own work was rooted in off-­loom textile practices, in particular, felting. In Mace (1990; fig. 6.19), she stitches panels of industrial felt together, creating an elegant corkscrew shape stiffened by the addition of  resin. Mace leans upright against the wall; its title refers to a medieval

269

6.18  Claire Zeisler, Red Preview, 1969. Jute, flanges square-­knotted and wrapped, 96 × 60 in. Gift of Claire Zeisler, 1979.294. Art Institute of Chicago. 6.19 (facing page) Joan Livingstone, Mace, 1990.

Industrial felt and epoxy resin, 82 × 26 × 35 in.

270

271

J E NN I SORKI N

weapon used to bludgeon an enemy, an acerbic commentary from someone working against the limiting two dimensions of  woven structures, hitting back at uninformed critics and fellow artists by showcasing the expanded possibilities the medium offered. As intensely collaborative colleagues, Wilson and Livingstone radically transformed the weaving curriculum throughout the 1980s and ’90s, implementing an ethos of  conceptual practices underscored by an attention to skill. Renamed the Fiber and Material Studies Department in 1999, the program became a bastion of experimental, materially driven practices in sculpture, textile printing, and installation.104 The department was equally hospitable to non-­textile-­based fiber practices, and ultimately seeded a distinctive program in hand papermaking at Columbia College, established by Marilyn Sward. A longtime Chicagoan, Sward had established Paper Press in Evanston in 1972 to facilitate the work of  other artists alongside her own. Paper Press became a unique venue with extensive facilities for making projects. Sward also pioneered a technique for transferring photos onto handmade paper, and taught in the Fiber and Material Studies program at SAIC. In 1995 she transferred Paper Press to its new home at Columbia College, known as the Center for the Book and Paper Arts, where she oversaw the program.

A Lovely So Real M I C H A L R A Z - ­R U S S O

he photographed a single block on Uptown’s Clifton Street over one year, capturing the daily interactions of this small community. Lyon befriended several families, producing images that depict struggle but also immense community pride — ­“I fit paradise inside a square,” he said, referring to capturing this pride in the camera’s format. In a similar manner, Luis Medina gained the trust of members of several Hispanic street gangs while photographing their territorial graffiti in the turf surrounding Wrigley Field in the late 1970s. They would eventually allow him to take their portraits in front of their graffiti as a gesture of power and defiance. The most productive period in Chicago’s rich history of street photography coincided with the emergence of the Black Arts Movement (most active in the late 1960s to mid-­1970s). Against this backdrop a network of South Side photojournalists came together to create rich, intimate documents of their community. Influenced by a previous generation of photographers such as Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks (who started his career in Chicago), the group included, among others, Billy Abernathy (“Fundi”), Darryl Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Valeria “Mikki” Ferrill, Ted Gray, Roy Lewis, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke, Jim Stricklin, Ted

In his 1951 book Chicago: City on the Make, Nelson Algren offered bittersweet praise for the city: “Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” This unique character — ­fraught with affections, tensions, and contradictions — ­is revealed in the work of the many photographers who documented Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, as it underwent some of its most significant cultural and social transformations. Photographers, perhaps more than any other artists, focused on Chicago’s history as a city of neighborhoods, many of them fiercely segregated and separated from one another. Through their work in the postwar decades, they constructed a portrait of Chicago that speaks equally to its allure and its haunting brutality. Danny Lyon, for one, addressed Chicago’s changing landscape when, in 1965, he traveled from his home in Hyde Park to Chicago’s tough Uptown neighborhood. That area, nicknamed “Hillbilly Heaven,” was where immigrants from central Appalachia and the Deep South had recently settled. Using a Rolleiflex camera he borrowed from Hugh Edwards, then curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago,

272

transformed into an improvised club. The owner, Arthur “Pops” Simpson, would host jazz DJ battles from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m., followed by live or recorded music jams that lasted until 8:00 p.m. and often spilled out into the street. Ferrill, nicknamed “the Picture Lady,” photographed the events every Sunday for ten years, creating images that demonstrate a relaxed relationship between her and her subjects — ­a close-­knit community who saw The Garage as a space for the uninhibited personal expression of black identity. The work of photographers such as Ferrill, Lyon, and Medina — ­only a small sample among many — ­capture Chicago’s character, lovely and real.

Williams, and Robert Earl Wilson (“Trees”). Most of them worked as commercial photographers and photojournalists, regularly hired by local publications such as Ebony and the Chicago Defender, but the work they created independently underscored the role played by Chicago’s South Side as a national center of black culture and politics. Mikki Ferrill’s decade-­long project The Garage (1970–­ 80), for example, epitomizes the unified spirit of the South Side that these photographers sought to capture. Returning to Chicago after three years in Mexico, Ferrill began documenting a once-­a-­week music venue: every Sunday afternoon, a car repair shop at 610 East 50th Street was

Valeria “Mikki” Ferrill, Untitled, 1972. Gelatin silver print, from the series “The Garage,” 1970 / 1980. Image, 8 5⁄8 × 5 7⁄8 in; sheet, 10 × 8 in.

273

J E NN I SORKI N

The 1990s: Protest Art and Public Art ACT UP Chicago The AIDS crisis hit Chicago’s art community hard, with many well-­known artists receiving HIV diagnoses, including the performance artist Lawrence Steger and Robert Ford, publisher of Thing magazine. In the inaugural episode of WBEZ Chicago’s beloved, autobiographically driven radio program This American Life (November 17, 1995), Steger described receiving the news of his diagnosis.105 From 1989 until 1995, he was director of Gallery 2, SAIC’s on-­site gallery, where he organized Chicago’s first art exhibition devoted to AIDS in a non–­health care setting, called Public/Private.106 In 1987 ACT UP Chicago was established just months after the New York branch. As a volunteer network of  artists, public health advocates, and gay rights activists, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was a broad alliance of constituencies who came together to agitate for health care and social service initiatives in the face of homophobia, poverty, invisibility, and other obstacles to AIDS-­specific treatments and research. ACT UP worked through direct action: staging street protests and public performance art, it directed media attention to discrimination and the lack of  medical treatment for HIV-­positive gays and lesbians. The group also had a distinctive strategy involving graphic design, using provocative, sex-­positive language in posters, billboards, buttons, and T-­shirts to destigmatize the activities that lead to the transmission and spread of the illness (fig. 6.20). While New York has been the focus of many documentary films and writings on the history of  art-­based AIDS activism, Chicago was, in fact, an equally important site of  AIDS-­ related cultural production. ACT UP Chicago had a large, revolving membership that created localized actions to target specific legislation, and it offered what political scientist and ACT UP Chicago member Deborah Gould has called an “affective pedagogy,” that is, an activist path forward and space where a visible community of fellow queers could turn their pride and their anger at exclusion into a dynamic social force.107 In October 1989, for instance, in response to Illinois state legislation that mandated HIV testing for certain government workers, the group created a “freedom bed,” a large theatrical street presentation in which an oversize bed full of  activists was paraded in the streets. The freedom bed was a permanent “prop” of the community, rolled out regularly at community events, protests, and actions. Marc Stein describes the bed as “where passerby watched skits about sex and reproduction that were interrupted by activist-­performers dressed up as Supreme Court justices, US senator Jesse Helms, and other conservative politicians.”108 The following year, ACT UP Chicago hosted a nationally coordinated protest in the city, the National AIDS Actions for Health Care. The event synchronized numerous actions targeting public health offices, including a twenty-­four-­hour teach-­in at Cook County Hospital, rallies, and marches through downtown Chicago. The National Women’s Caucus stole fifteen mattresses from the Cook County Hospital AIDS ward (which at the time did not admit women) and dragged them through the streets and alleyways of  Chicago, chanting, “AIDS is a disaster, women die faster.” Cook County’s AIDS ward was opened to women the very next day.109 New feminist organizations that emerged from ACT UP included WHAM! Women’s Health Action Mobilization, WAC (Women’s Art Coalition), and the Lesbian Avengers. Despite the movement’s successes, there were conflicts, and ACT UP Chicago disbanded in 1991. Mary Patten, a video artist and longtime member, described her view of the situation:

274

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

Many women inside ACT UP, some of the most visible and articulate dykes among them, and many people of color (whose contributions and voices far outstripped their actual numbers in the organization) became increasingly embattled with factions of (mostly) white professional gay men whose politics were narrow, class-­bound, and steeped in privilege.110

6.20  Mary Patten at Women’s Caucus direct action in front of City Hall, ca. 1990.

275

J E NN I SORKI N

But such forms of dissent are neither unreasonable nor unproductive. Political infighting is one of the most common traits of groups of people seeking change. After ACT UP, some member artists migrated to different movements. Patten, for instance, has gone on to teach art to incarcerated women and to agitate against police brutality in her interdisciplinary video and installation practice. Another early member, Rose Troche, has since worked in film and television, directing the well-­received independent film Go Fish (1994). She also went on to create The L Word, the first mainstream television dramatic series about contemporary lesbian life, set in Los Angeles.

Experimental Station In 1993 Connie Spreen and Dan Peterman established a multiuse community space in Woodlawn, an economically depressed, largely industrial neighborhood on the South Side. The commercial structure they purchased eventually housed a bike shop, a vegetable garden, The Baffler magazine, and space for small businesses and educational programming. The building, also known as “61st Street,” generated considerable interest and traffic, but burned down in 2001. The space was rebuilt with purpose and zest beginning the following year. Now called Experimental Station, it features a state-­of-­the-­art kitchen for after-­school cooking classes, a weekly farmer’s market, Blackstone Bikes, and lots of cultural programming.111 The space calls for “building independent cultural infrastructure,” fostering a sense of community, small businesses, and education for a previously underserved community.112 A pioneering public art space, Experimental Station is an important but often-­overlooked progenitor to the social practice projects of Theaster Gates and his Dorchester Projects, which first took root at Experimental Station. For decades Peterman has sustained an independent practice as a public artist, creating projects in Chicago and internationally. In 1997 he installed Running Table in Grant Park, a hundred-­long-­foot picnic table with benches (all made of  recycled plastic), meant to foster conversations between strangers who could gather and eat together at the table.

Culture in Action During the mid-­1990s artistic production migrated to incorporate other forms of action beyond performance. Public art, an important predecessor to the forms of non-­object-­based production now known collectively as “social practice,” had one of its earliest staging grounds in Chicago between 1993 and 1995, when the city hosted a pioneering civic art project known as Culture in Action, sponsored by Sculpture Chicago. Initiated by veteran curator Mary Jane Jacob, Culture in Action invited fourteen artists and artist groups to work within a structure of community-­based collaborative partnerships to foster authentic exchanges between artists and their audiences and to emphasize the experiential possibilities of art as an educational experience and a tool for social good. The project worked to empower marginalized groups and their cultures, with artist-­initiated structures centered on pressing social issues, from union workers’ rights, HIV advocacy, and health care to affordable housing and urban ecology. Many of the projects were executed by high-­profile artists, including Mark Dion, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Daniel J. Martinez, and Suzanne Lacy. Lacy had long been affiliated

276

Cool, Conceptual, Controversial K AT H R Y N H I XS O N

Remain calm. Look deeply into my eyes. The confluence of late-­’80s informational overload, media structuralist thinking has rammed saturation, and post-­ headlong into traditional Modernism and the leftish avant-­ garde in the heartland of the US — ­Chicago. . . . The blunt Midwest has been a breeding ground for some smart “neo-­ conceptual” artists whose rapid rise to glowing financial success and national notoriety has sparked quite a controversy within the small but turgid Chicago art scene. . . . Is this a Chicago trend? a movement? Is it good? Moreover, is it conceptual? . . .

the illness of Modernism. The tenacious Golubianism, the pervasive Pashkheesh were always kool. But things were never clear-­cut, influences glide and sway with the factory smoke; give it an inch and it takes a mile and becomes commodified, complicit, and simply: man, who needs it? These new kids moved into the ’hood and grabbed that basketball out of its fish tank and they dribbled it in to make a lay-­up. They know the tunes, they’ve dug the texts. . . . Come back. On the count of one, two, three, you will remember nothing, only the importance of this interchange. Ready? These Chicago artists are assimilating theory without illustrating it. They have come to their various projects via a knowledge of art history, lived contemporary culture, art, politics, and reading. They approach aesthetic and social issues dialectically: blocking perception to discuss the perceived, layering meaning in order to strip away obfuscation, using transcendental traditions to reveal the mundane, revealing hope via despair. . . . They seriously make objects. They have seen the conceptualists’ projects turn into same. Despair is chastened by a willful “there’s not much to lose” approach to the production of commodities. They are artists who heartily embrace the lessons of the conceptualists and of all art history, but wish to reconcile or anticipate and discuss — ­in their work — ­what happens to a work of art out in the world. . . . These artists’ quick changes of style, continual questioning, and intense intellectual development bode well for the production of valid art works that should refuse to become what they criticize. . . . These neo-­conceptual object makers are not trying to dump art in favor of the capitalist widget. Based on their personal experience of the seen, the felt, the mediated, the profound, and the comedic, they make art that subverts the authority of the art canon as well as the media/ informational barrage, and if they can maintain their sense of humor about themselves and their concerns . . . bingo.

Think of Being. Try to visualize it. What do you see? . . . [Tony Tasset, Jeanne Dunning, Hirsch Perlman, Mitchell Kane, Gaylen Gerber, Judy Ledgerwood, Pam Golden, and others] came, or returned, to Chicago, went to the School of the Art Institute or University of Illinois at Chicago and were exposed to some theory in various art history classes, and read the New York art magazines. They had cut their teeth on Minimalism, Conceptualism, earth art, process, and feminism in undergrad work. They like low-­rent Chicago and Imagist work. From their readings and conversations they have a feeling that, in art: originality is ill, aura suspect, the masterpiece problematic, commodification all-­encompassing, global integrated capitalism unpromising and unforgiving. Unlike an older generation, they are skeptical of direct political revolution or immediate change in the likes of gender privilege in language, but still believe in the possibility of art-­object making in the service of interpersonal communication. Can you believe it? . . . Specify. Now. Interpolate. Artists read and readers make art. These people look at nuclear war, Freud, Reagan, Marx, October, Baudrillard, Lacan, USA Today; cohorts fondle the texts and wink Benjamin quotes. The Imagists, whom these young artists respect, have profited one way or another in the ’80s during

Excerpted from an article published in New Art Examiner, May 1988. Reprinted courtesy of Irene Roderick and the estate of Kathryn Hixson.

277

J E NN I SORKI N

with the feminist movement in Los Angeles, and she was the architect of the new terminology of the 1990s: new genre public art.113 While largely celebrated as a landmark national exhibition, the show also had its critics, including art historian Miwon Kwon, who asks pointed questions about the artistic process in her book One Place after Another: Does the partner community preexist the art project, or is it produced by it? What is the nature of the collaborative relationship? . . . What criteria of success and failure are posed now, especially to the artists, in this major reconfiguration of public art that moves aesthetic practice closer to social services?114 A major criticism of the project was that, of the fourteen artist groups, only two were Chicago-­ based — ­the others hailed mainly from Los Angeles and New York and lacked native knowledge of the sites and situations in which they were intervening. But the project itself was Jacob’s critique of the traditional forms of public sculpture that Sculpture Chicago, as an organization, historically favored and promoted: hulking abstract works installed on public plazas. Culture in Action, then, was an important risk-­taking moment for a city that had not sponsored socially engaged art in many years. The earlier decades of urban mural projects, such as Mitchell Siporin’s WPA murals from the 1930s and the Wall of Respect (1967), can be seen as the kind of civic ventures that Culture in Action sought to continue. The two homegrown projects, Street-­Level Video and Flood, were among the most rewarding and enduring. Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle worked with Street-­Level Video (S-­L­V) in his own West Town neighborhood, teaching video production after school to at-­risk Latino youths, as an alternative to the area’s rampant gang culture. Over the space of  a year, numerous public screenings took place, the best-­attended of  which was a block party involving, according to Jacob, “seventy-­five [television] monitors, four rival gangs and S-­LV members, and an audience of  over a thousand. Planning involved numerous meetings, even gang arbitrations, to secure a neutral space.”115 The collaborative known as HAHA — ­Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof, who met as graduate students at SAIC in 1988 — ­initiated Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active Participation in Healthcare, a hydroponic garden in a storefront space that provided educational programming about AIDS — ­its transmission and prevention, and the dimensions of  care giving (fig. 6.21). The vegetables grown were used to feed infirm, housebound AIDS patients, fueling a reciprocal relationship with existing HIV/AIDS support networks and high school students who worked in the garden and took part in the educational programs aimed at AIDS prevention and sexual education. As HAHA wrote, “The garden too could serve as a metaphor for the person with AIDS: the survival of plants grown hydroponically is dependent upon the maintenance of  a fragile ecosystem; their growth and stability requires the horizontal interlacing of individual root systems into a cooperative network.”116

Epilogue: Alterity Rocks It is hard work to grow an independent, grassroots exhibition space, but it is even harder to run it without running it into the ground. Success often leads to institutionalism, exactly the condition the founders sought to counter. An unintentional consequence of the alternative space movement was that each space initiated, and completed, its own life cycle. Many of

278

ALTE R I T Y ROCKS , 1973 – 1993

6.21  HAHA (Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, John Ploof), Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active

Participation in Healthcare, 1992–­1995. Project created as part of Culture in Action, Chicago.

the alternative spaces, institutions, and exhibitions profiled in this chapter point toward the moment of a new understanding of difference and the hard-­won autonomy of existence itself. Every gallery had a unique momentum, fulfilling the aspirations of  its founders: First, a phase of  building up, which involves intense communal practice, even a kind of  intimacy; close collaborations are forged, lasting friendships sealed, relationships consummated. Then comes a peak, recognizable only in hindsight, followed by a break that leads to new directions in programming. Some artists grow restless as administrators and return to their own studio practice, and a second generation takes over the space. If  it is able to grow and change, the space may flourish. If it falters, it is on a path to its own demise. The typical cause is founder’s syndrome, in which the initial founders reject change and tighten the reins, rather than loosening them or, better yet, passing them on. The alternative space movement demands a new understanding of success. That is, spaces can only really succeed if  they have a shelf  life. They need to expire. Eventually the doors close, the lights go out. The traditional view sees this endpoint as failure. But it is not; rather, it is the fulfillment of  a rich life cycle, one that has given until it is spent. Each space, each group, each project, has its own narrative trajectory. But a creative life demands the restlessness of difference, of  change, and it is only in redirecting one’s energies that reinvention occurs. And concurs. And argues, endlessly, endlessly, with the conventional ideology of its own time and place.

279

CHAPTER 7

CHICAGO SPE AkS

1 990–PRESENT The transformation of  a South Side block into a cultural incubator. An installation torquing the relation between Chicago’s sky and lake. Impromptu portraits of  passersby. An experimental performance group’s residency at a neighborhood church. Projects like these animate Chicago’s contemporary art world. In the pages that follow, artists, gallerists, critics, writers, and curators reflect on how the city and its history have shaped their work and how their work has shaped the city and its art world. This chapter is not a comprehensive survey but a series of  snapshots that captures fragments of  Chicago’s art scene in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. It samples stylistic, political, and material approaches ranging from figuration to abstraction, from fiber to performance, from photography to public sculpture, from publishing to activism, and from Imagism to Minimalism, and considers Chicago as both a destination and a site of  departure. The thirty-­three contributors share their thoughts on the enduring influence and patronage of  the city’s universities and art schools, museums and galleries. They consider how the city’s neighborhoods, architecture, music, and other resources offer inspiration and sites for intervention. Their remarks reveal how alternative and artist-­run spaces, home studios, and social practice still anchor art in Chicago, while shifting urban demographics and a growing fascination with video and performance have changed the shape of  the art world and its audiences. These writings and conversations show how in Chicago today history is carried forward and invigorated with new energy and ideas. J U D I T H R U S S I K I R S H N E R A N D M A G G I E TA F T

In this conversation with Judith Russi Kirshner,

K AREN REIMER AND DIANE SIMPSON discuss how they each juggle the relation between craft, traditional materials, personal expression, and the politics of labor in their work.

Judith Russi Kirshner: Let’s begin with education. Karen Reimer: As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I worked with Bob Peters and Scott Rankin, who were super influential. It was a very small program then (1987–­ 1989), which was good for me. Having recently moved here from Kansas, I wanted to stay in Chicago, so I applied to grad schools around town. I would have happily gone to the Art Institute or UIC too, but I got a bigger scholarship from U of C. I went there and felt lucky. JRK: Your career at the Renaissance Society has also informed your awareness of the art world. KR: Before the Ren I was working freelance installation at the MCA. I’ve always liked working at museums because handling things over an extended time makes me look closely. When I teach, my examples are usually drawn from Ren shows because I know that work so well. I did freelance all the way through graduate school to make a living. The artist Joe Scanlan was assistant director at the Ren, and I worked for him on the installation crew. About the time I graduated, his job had gotten too big — ­the Ren program was growing — ­and Susanne Ghez, the director, decided to add a staff position to take over the installation work, so I started there as a regular staff member in 1990. I knew how to work with my hands, learned carpentry and problem solving. Having some confidence about my ability to solve problems when using materials became something I cared about and wanted. Diane Simpson: I wish I had had that kind of job. My formal art training was in 2-­D drawing and painting. So when I began making sculpture, it was learning on the job. And it still is. With every piece it’s experimentation, trial and error, because I’m always trying new kinds of construction and materials. Sometimes helpful tips have come from other artists. I asked Richard Rezac way back about how to hang an object to be flush to the wall. He told me about the keyhole insert, and I’ve been using them for thirty years. KR: I tend to solve a problem by doing it. Last summer [2016] at the Hyde Park Art Center, I exhibited Shoretime Spaceline, a huge piece of fabric, 30 by 80 feet, that referred to the sky and the water at Lake Michigan, mixing different perspectives. I didn’t completely know how I would hang it. There were big strips 8 to 12 feet wide by 30 feet long. I wanted the fabric to be a plane dividing the space in half. We hung one strip at a time and stapled them together on-­site. We had to work in pieces because 800 yards of fabric as a single object is immovable. I didn’t plan which strip went next to which; I let the overall pattern determine itself. I work out the concept of a piece ahead of time but try to keep chance at play in the visuals. DS: I would never have the guts to make decisions in situ on such a large-­scale project. But I relate to your idea that problem solving is self-­determining. Materials themselves start driving the work. Since each of my pieces begins at zero — ­with a new form — ­each requires a new set of solutions. KR: I make something and then I always feel like I have to make a million of it. There need to be many variations. I frequently end up with the idea of the infinite. How did we come up with 283

K AR E N R E IM E R AND DIANE S IM PSON

Karen Reimer, Shoretime Spaceline, 2016. Installation view, Hyde Park Art Center.

the idea of infinity when there’s nothing in our world that would indicate it exists? We have this beautiful or maybe oppressive idea of the infinite. I try to push the idea of the infinite, which has no materiality, into a material place to see what happens. I know it’s going to fail, but it’s going to fail in an interesting way. My Endless Set series is an example. That series is an indefinite number of pillowcases decorated with appliquéd prime numbers. Each pillowcase is made up of the same number of fabric pieces as the number decorating it, and the number is the same height in inches as itself, so the number 3 is three inches high and is appliquéd onto a pillowcase made of three pieces of fabric. As the numbers get larger than the pillowcase, the fabric number is folded back and forth over itself. The layering increases, which more completely obscures the pillowcase made of increasingly smaller fabric scraps. The series could theoretically go on forever, but of course the limitations of materiality will eventually make it physically impossible to continue. DS: We both are interested in systems, but the difference between us is that your approach is conceptual and my work is totally about formal concerns. I start with a source image that I’ve found or photographed, of objects from the world of applied arts like clothing, furniture, or architecture. I make drawings of that source and when the drawing morphs into a form I feel is strong enough, I’m ready to build it. Details are never planned for decorative purposes; they are interdependent with the structure and shape. With my early sculptures and even with some current pieces, I’m applying a system of construction using 45-­or sometimes 60-­degree angles, rather than the 90-­degree angle of most objects. So I’m applying to real space the same rules used in my drawings to create illusionistic space. When viewed from certain angles, the piece appears narrowed and skewed. It appears normal dimensionally only when viewed from the one angle that is

284

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

similar to the drawing. People often ask me if I’ve studied architecture. I haven’t, but my forms are strongly influenced by certain periods in architecture and design — ­like the Wiener Werkstatte movement in Vienna — ­especially the architect-­designers Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner. KR: For me, the difference between two and three dimensions and how you translate between them is like the difference between knowledge and experience: representation is two-­ dimensional, and experience is three-­dimensional. How do you make that bridge? It’s interesting that you would develop this drawing-­to-­sculpture system that to me seems heavily conceptual, but you consider it strictly formal. JRK: What was your relationship to Imagism? KR: In my tiny undergraduate school, there were just two art history classes: cave painting to the Renaissance, and Baroque to Abstract Expressionism. So I arrived in Chicago never having heard of Imagism. Once here, I did see those shows, of course, but I didn’t feel the battle around it; that fight wasn’t mine. Later I started to understand that people saying, “I’m not a Chicago artist,” really meant, “I’m not an Imagist.” I was much more influenced by the Neoconceptualism I found here than I was by Imagism. The issues of postmodernism, postcolonialism, third-­wave feminism fit my interests. Kathryn Hixson was an important writer about Chicago’s Neoconceptualism. DS: Well, it’s complicated. I missed seeing the Imagist group shows in the ’60s at the Hyde Park Art Center. I was raising three kids and working at home, on my own, doing some pretty awful stuff, painting their portraits and such. When I started visiting galleries, I was influenced by some Imagist painters, particularly Miyoko Ito, Christina Ramberg, and Barbara Rossi, and like other Imagists, I took Whitney Halstead’s ethnographic art history classes. But I’ve never been labeled an Imagist or haven’t quite fit into any other category. I’m struck, Karen, by the differences in our backgrounds and education. I had no postmodern background, no theoretical readings. I would’ve finished my BFA in 1957 except for the fact that I got married and started a family. I went back to SAIC ten years later to finish the one quarter I needed to graduate. When I returned to SAIC for grad school in 1971, I chose advisors in the painting department — ­Ray Yoshida, Barbara Rossi, Whitney Halstead, and Ted Halkin — ­but I never made a painting. I was making large drawings of architectonic objects on graph paper, and they encouraged me to start constructing those forms. I constructed them from triple-­ply corrugated cardboard and duplicated the angled perspective used in the drawing. After graduation, I continued with these wall and floor constructions and showed them at Artemisia Gallery in ’79. When I had my show, Jerry Saltz was downstairs at N.A.M.E, and he ran up to see what I was doing. I have a photograph of me on the floor with the entire show disassembled in flat pieces, lying on the ground. During the show three great things happened. I had gone to see a show at Phyllis Kind Gallery, and Karen Lennox (the gallery director) had seen my show and thought I should show Phyllis images of the work to encourage her to see it. So I returned with my notebook of black-­and-­white glossies and two little cardboard models. Phyllis right off bought the models for one hundred dollars and offered to show the large cardboard pieces in her New York gallery, which she had recently opened. Then Pauline Saliga put me in a five-­person show at the MCA called New Dimensions: Volume and Space, and Katharine Kuh included me in the Art Institute’s 100 Artists 100 Years exhibition.

285

K AR E N R E IM E R AND DIANE S IM PSON

The Artemisia experience was important because I had been so isolated all this time, making art on my own. Even in grad school, I worked mostly from home. Artemisia was my entry back into the art world. The lack of nonprofit galleries now is unfortunate. There are still, though, many good little artist-­run, apartment-­type galleries. KR: There was a different model of artists-­run space in the 1980 and ’90s. Randolph Street Gallery, for example, where I worked on the exhibitions committee, was a not-­for-­profit, and a lot of their funding came from state and federal government. That funding is gone.

Diane Simpson installing at Artemisia Gallery, January 1979.

Diane Simpson, Constructed Drawings, 1979. Installation view, Artemisia Gallery.

286

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

What emerged to pick up some of the slack after Randolph Street and N.A.M.E. folded were a group of small galleries known collectively as the Uncomfortable Spaces: Ten in One, Tough, Beret International, and MWMWM. They weren’t committee-­driven like RSG and N.A.M.E., but many of the artists from those committees showed with them. I showed with Beret, run by Ned Schwartz. They were ostensibly for-­profit, but I don’t think they made much money. The four of them coordinated publicity and openings, and their shows were important in maintaining a critical art community. There continue to be small galleries mostly run by artists who are paying for it out of their pockets. But there are other organizational structures and financial solutions too — ­curating collectives and crowd-­funding and stuff like that. DS: It used to be that you really wanted to get out of Chicago. It’s different now. Because of the internet, your work is everywhere, yet it’s still important to have someone pushing your work, taking it to the fairs, which have become so important to the art market. KR: I like living in Chicago, but I of course want to show everywhere in the world. [Laughs.] And I of course want to make a living. In graduate school, my friends and I used to joke that we were “post-­market.” It’s not like we didn’t want to sell, but it wasn’t an expectation. There is more of a market now. The greater the income disparity, the higher the art prices. The scale of everything in the art world is bigger. I, along with a lot of other artists, am uncomfortable with the place big money has in the art world now. JRK: Can you talk about craft, or women’s work, the notion of domesticity? KR: I learned embroidery and quilting from my mom, because she thought that was what women should learn. But I started using craft in my artwork at the height of postmodernism, with its ideas about anti-authorship, anti-authority, anti-heroics. The hand is really present in my work, but it’s about skill, not talent. If you do craft well, it will look the same as if it were done by any other good craftsperson; it doesn’t matter whether I do it or somebody else does. This was an idea of Minimalism and Conceptualism — ­that it was not necessary for an artist to make the work themself, that you could remove the “hand of the artist.” Craft makes sense in this context, but it also carries connotations of women’s work and lower-­class taste, which were at odds with minimalism and conceptualism, and I like that tension. Then too, I was raised within a working-­class value system that said craftsmanship was valuable for its own sake. My family didn’t study art, but they’re perfectly qualified to criticize my craft level, and I value that. DS: People have asked if there is a feminist statement in my subjects: women’s clothing and the materials I use. One piece is based on a pannier, the eighteenth-­century undergarment worn under an extremely wide hoop skirt. When the structure is squeezed together, it allows a woman to pass through a doorway. My choice of subject was not a feminist protest on restrictive garments. I simply loved the structure and shape of the pannier. But my work definitely reflects my experiences as a woman. The elements of craft, women’s work, and domesticity all enter into my work in both my subject matter and skills. KR: I am feminist, but my relationship to feminism is part of a bigger set of concerns that includes class and economics. Another of the reasons I work with craft is because of how gratuitously slow it is. The world says time is money and labor is money; I’m trying to insist that my time and labor can’t be automatically equated to a value that is strictly monetary. I think part of human intelligence comes from working with our hands. We think with our hands.

287

K AR E N R E IM E R AND DIANE S IM PSON

I am moving toward making things that are useful. For example, I am thinking of making quilts from the fabric of Shoretime Spaceline. Usually in the art world when people talk about reuse, they take stuff that once had a use and then make it into art. I’m going to take my old art and make it useful. Art you experience through use, with your hands as well as your eyes, is making sense to me right now.

Best known for his Harlem photographs,

DAWOUD BEY has also made pictures of Chicagoans that present an evocative portrait of the city and its residents. Here,

MAT T WITKOVSK Y, curator and chair of the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, writes on Bey’s Chicago series.

Dawoud Bey, Lauren, 2008. From the series “Young Chicagoans,” commissioned as part of Character Project.

288

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

She stands close against a painted wall that seems to slide in its lower third from gray to white, her eyes and her afro nodding toward the camera. We can imagine that the top of her shoulders just touch the wall, accepting the merest hint of reinforcement from it — ­or, equally possible, that she emerges into confidence with no need to lean against this support. In a similar way, perhaps her left arm, folded across her chest, props up the right one as it rises toward her face, bringing the back of the third finger to graze her cheek. It could be also that the right arm does not need the left for balance, that the delicate, lighter-­skinned silhouette of her left palm rises alongside the right forearm in a purely decorative gesture. Such uncertainties are productive. They give the impression of a young woman who broadcasts assurance yet has just recently broken through from hesitancy. Dawoud Bey took this picture and a number of  others in the fall of  2008. The cable television channel USA Network invited numerous photographers and filmmakers to participate in Character Project, which it described as an exercise in national self-­definition: “the subjects . . . some real, some fictional — ­show the courage, connection, humor, and hope that give shape to the American character. After all, characters are what make us USA.” 1 The slippage in that phrase between “character” and “characters” is telling. “The American character” connotes national unity founded in unwavering solidity; “characters,” by contrast, suggests guises that particular people step into at will, or even the expression of likably eccentric behavior — ­a quirky individualism. These connotations are not mutually exclusive, considering the national romance with “going one’s own way.” But they do head in different directions, creating a set of  possibilities that Bey has pursued in his portrait photography since the 1970s. Bey has earned a place over the years as a spokesman for American identity, by concentrating in his portraiture on dignity and uniqueness and by emphasizing awareness of  local diversity as key to a more mature national unity. The parameters he assigns himself — ­photographing in high-­school classrooms, the streets of Harlem, or in this case a single corner in front of  Columbia College, in downtown Chicago, where Bey teaches photography — ­become allegories for nationally resonant statements on community and belonging. Bey keeps these ideas largely free of preachy sentiment by foregrounding general or personal moments of  insecurity and by allowing his own hesitations to come out as he photographs. He decided to fulfill his commission for USA Network by staying “close to home.” Although Bey never lets a listener forget that he is from New York City, more particularly Queens, he has claimed Chicago as his own. Standing outside Columbia College, the photographer was certain to seem familiar to at least some of his potential subjects. Indeed, he could be said to be playing a role, holding court in his domain. For the month he spent addressing sitters on the street, Bey was posing as an envoy for his adopted city, school, and even his chosen profession. Asked in 2012 about Character Project, the photographer pointed up his decision to operate quickly, interpellating passersby, requesting their time and collaboration: “The engagements were relatively brief, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes, and the challenge was to get the person to be comfortable enough in front of  the camera, within that short time span, in order for

1

From the invitation to a screening of Character Project films in New York City, May 12, 2011, accessed June 2017, http://www.usanetwork.com/email/CP_NYevite.html.

289

MAT T WITKOVSK Y ON DAWOU D BE Y

their gestural and behavioral idiosyncrasy to emerge in a way that was interesting.”2 Bey likes to put himself  at some risk of  failure in his portrait projects, relying heavily on his ability to “connect,” to spot and then draw forth “character” before the camera. Whether that character is lasting or fleeting, essential or adopted, can be difficult to say. Is Lauren self-­possessed? Her warm, knowing eyes project that impression, but the possibly protective scaffolding formed by her arms suggests otherwise. In a video produced by USA Network to accompany the series, a couple of  Bey’s sitters tellingly refer to themselves as “a character,” distancing their self-­descriptions from the company’s Independence Day rhetoric (“give shape to the American character”) with the slight grammatical shift from definite to indefinite article. Bey evidently explained his undertaking to participants as a search for character, and the young people who formed his target population, many of them art students, seem to have joined eagerly on a quick adventure in self-­discovery. “Let’s see if  I can make a picture,” Bey says as he prepares to snap another young woman, Elizabeth. Elsewhere in the video we see Bey showing Polaroid test images to the sitters after telling them, “Most people don’t have a sense that there’s anything particularly interesting about them.” The subjects chime in to offer, with charming self-­projection, that their clothes, hairstyle, or overall attitude do convey their self-­awareness as “a character.”3 One wonders whether Bey (or USA Network) would have formulated this project today, when self-­imaging and role-­playing by “the citizenry” have become staples of  existence to a degree still unsuspected in 2008. When Bey was taking his sidewalk pictures, YouTube, founded three years earlier, had a few hours of  footage uploaded to its site every minute (already an impressive amount); a recent statistic indicates that more than 400 hours of new footage are posted every minute to the site today.4 Vimeo was also then in its infancy; Pinterest and Snapchat had not yet been started. Unsung people around the planet — ­young ones, above all — ­have since grown epochally comfortable with recording and transmitting themselves as “a character” for others, and role-­playing is definitional to building “character” (in all its senses) today. What evaporates in this oceanic stream of  transmissions is the challenge of  interaction. Filming oneself  makes it easy to avoid the self-­consciousness and self-­questioning that come, for both parties, when maker and subject are two different people, and when filming and socializing are not one and the same thing. Citizen uploads defer engagement with the mechanisms of  social bonding and identification; better put, they replace these mechanisms altogether with a pattern of  output and feedback, always at a remove. But the camera asks no questions, and certainly does not wonder whether it has made a successful picture of  its user. The camera is a picture machine.

2

Lisa Dent, “Community Pictures: Q + A with Dawoud Bey,” Art in America, posted July 6, 2012, accessed June 2017, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-­features/interviews/dawoud-­bey/.

3

“Character Project: USA Network’s Photographic Celebration of America’s Characters,” posted March 3, 2009, accessed June 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFX0ti0fTUs.

4

Jack Nicas, “YouTube Tops 1 Billion Hours of Video a Day, on Pace to Eclipse TV,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2017.

290

Artists and educators

NICK CAVE AND ANNE WI LSON have been friends since the early 1990s. In this conversation with Maggie Taft, they discuss how their respective innovations in fiber and performance transform the political significance of the individual stitch and embrace the spectacle of the street.

Maggie Taft: What first brought you to Chicago? Anne Wilson: Well, maybe I’ll start because I came before you, Nick. I came to Chicago in 1979 from San Francisco for a one-­year teaching position at the School of the Art Institute. I loved my life in the Bay Area, and I fully intended to return there. But being an educator became a very important and very central part of my life’s work — ­to build Fiber and Material Studies collectively with my colleagues as a concept-­driven, research-­based art department. And, really, my practice developed here, but one of the pulls of staying was to be part of that community and develop that department. At the same time, in the early ’80s, I was asked by the then-­chair of art history, Robert Loescher, to teach textile art history. I took this as an opportunity to conceptualize textiles, to teach through history as well as through practice and theory, to talk about textiles cross-­ culturally, introducing textiles from Asia, Africa, and Peru. In pre-­Columbian Peru, textiles were the highest form of visual artistic expression. This seemed essential new learning for students in contemporary art practice, where global textile art histories were not necessarily taught as part of art history. It served as a foundation for exploring the viability of fiber materiality and meaning. We are in a moment now, more urgently than ever, where it’s important to teach through history alongside current trends as we look forward. I feel that teaching while also practicing as an artist continues to be viable and valuable. Nick Cave: And what brought me to Chicago? I graduated in ’89 from Cranbrook. I had my closing meeting with my professor, Gerhardt Knodel, and a job lined up in Chicago. It was at the School of the Art Institute in the Fiber and Material Studies department, spearheading this new area about the language of fabric from screen printing to photo transfer, and how we look at cloth and find a greater purpose. And that was a one-­year to five-­year visiting artist contract. AW: And you were there for five years. NC: Right, I was there for the entire five years. And then they kicked me out. But that was how I got to Chicago. You know, coming straight out of graduate school, you’re not really sure what you’re doing. But I found an amazing loft-­studio space right here on Michigan Avenue, at 13th and Michigan, and basically started my studio practice right away. I was doing that at the same time as teaching, trying to understand what teaching is about, what do I deliver, how do I make a difference. And also, how do I build a program? It was great to be part of a program that Anne had developed and was very much involved in. I was learning from her as well as creating a different type of curriculum to expand the program. It was great. I mean, I really liked what was coming out of the classroom. I was also looking around Chicago, observing and asking, where does my work fit in? Where is its place in the art world? I was like a gypsy. I would have a show here, and then

291

NI CK CAVE AND ANNE WIL SON

I would have a show over there, not really committed to any particular gallery. I was just looking at ways to get the work out of the studio and into the public realm. I was trying to get an understanding of what that feels like, what does that mean. AW: You showed at a lot of different places. NC: Yeah, sometimes in a gallery like Mary Oshawnoshi Gallery or Sybaris Gallery, sometimes in a space I created for the work, and I kept it very loose. I think I was sort of building my muscle. I wanted to understand how the community was responding to the work. AW: As you’re talking about what Chicago was like, I’m also interested in talking about the presence of fiber or textile at the time or, from my perspective, a little earlier than Nick’s. Shall I jump in? NC: Just jump in! I was just going to say that there was a lot of attention, a lot of focus around fiber and textiles. AW: When I came in ’79 there was Claire Zeisler. And Claire Zeisler was a fairly prominent fiber sculptor. She was part of an emerging, international art fabric movement with artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks. Claire had a solo show at the Art Institute in ’79, and Rhona Hoffman was showing her work. And we became friends. But Chicago for me was very unlike the interdisciplinary world of the San Francisco Bay Area that I was coming from, where it felt like fiber and video were the two most progressive art forms. There were no apologies. We were doing some of the most experimental installation, performative, object-­based forms of work. And when I came here, there was Claire. There were interesting things going on, but it wasn’t the kind of conceptually driven, research-­based art practice I was familiar with. As a young artist in the early ’80s, I became a board member of N.A.M.E. Gallery, one of several alternative galleries that were established here to create more fluid spaces for programming performance, installation, sound, video — ­forms of art that had not been dominant in the Chicago scene. Through N.A.M.E., I met Buzz Spector, Ed Paschke, Martin Puryear, Michiko Itatani, and we all became friends. And it was through talking to other artists and sharing our work that opportunities developed. So it wasn’t around the media-­specificity of fiber, although my language was always a textile language. It was really about getting to know other artists and developing a kind of mutual deep respect. That’s how it has always been with you and me, Nick, around our work. NC: It’s interesting because when I first got to Chicago, I was into the whole house music scene and this underground club world. Not that I knew how it would influence or connect with the work. But I was looking at ideas of dress and adornment as celebration. The act of staging and presentation in this whole other kind of alternative world, this intricate and delicate scene where there was an enormous amount of independence and the freedom to be fully expressive and protected. And so I was looking, as a voyeur and as a participant as well, at this world that had an edge that informs things I’m interested in, things like display and dress and performance and the persona of all of that. And, you know, the stage is the floor. But also then, in the late ’80s, the Chicago art scene was really hot and on fire. I remember that around Chicago Avenue, River North, the gallery scene was enormous. And every first Friday, everyone would just sort of congregate there. AW: Because it was more centralized. NC: Yeah. It was interesting, that world. And then that underground world of music and dance, particularly house music, really was my savior for the most part.

292

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

AW: You’re suggesting this robust presence of performance work was more underground or in alternative sites. NC: It was for me. That’s what I was drawn to. I was one of those club kids. And that was a major factor in my development. I would spend an entire Saturday making a garment that I wore out that evening. That was really what it was about, and connecting with this underground world that kept me present in what was hot. I was thinking about fashion, but not from the perspective of what was going down the runway in New York or Milan or Paris. What was going down the runway in Chicago? What was influencing the kids here? How did we dress? How did we use that as expression? We lived for the weekend. I was in skirts and all kinds of things. I remember when I was at Cranbrook, I picked you up from the airport and I had a skirt on, didn’t I? AW: You did! And performance — ­in terms of an academic discipline, the School of the Art Institute had established a performance art department by the early ’80s. NC: That was because of Michael Meyers, wasn’t it? He was my instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute in performance, and then he came here to the School. AW: He was part of it. Tom Jaremba was the founder. And now there’s a whole group — ­Roberto Sifuentes, Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery — ­of really interesting people. I think Chicago performance art is quite robust now. We have DFBRL8R Gallery and the Rapid Pulse Arts Festival and Links Hall, which has been in existence for a long time, and programming through the Performance Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art. There are a lot of venues that are open to performance art. And there’s also Sector 2337 and Heaven Gallery, spaces that are more fluid and can be transformed for diverse kinds of art. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve heard that in the ’70s, before I arrived, with the strong emphasis on Imagist painting, the exhibition spaces were not as fluid. NC: There’s something about the kind of bohemian approach to space — ­you know, performance can be on the street — ­that I find remains very relevant. And particularly right now, particularly in Chicago. How do we negotiate the placement for an act to transpire? I have graduate students, and in the first semester of their second year we do all their critiques outside of the studio, outside of SAIC. So they have to find spaces. We travel all over the city, and the things that they find . . . I didn’t even know a lot of these spaces existed. The academic environment is very insular. And yes, we could show within the school. But how do we get outside of that and think about the possibility and placement of our work? And how does that read? How do you look at your work then, in the context of it being under the el stop at 95th? What do you need to do in terms of following proper protocols, and who do you need to talk to in order to — ­ AW:  — ­make it happen. NC: Yeah! We’re living in a time where anything can happen anywhere at any given moment. And so how do we use that? The world is the platform, as far as I’m concerned. AW: I feel like Chicago’s always been welcoming to artist collectives, self-­starting artist initiatives, and social practice projects. It’s more affordable to operate here than in many other art centers. There are diverse audiences and diverse communities of all kinds. You’re talking about encouraging your students, when they’re in school, to find sites other than the academic institution. And I’ve found that, as they move out of school, they’re constantly forming collectives and cooperatives and project spaces. And some of these may

293

NI CK CAVE AND ANNE WIL SON

Nick Cave, still from Invasion performance.

have a market aspect, but a lot of them don’t. There’s space to rent, and they’re making these collective opportunities. NC: Yeah, these artists, these young people are wanting to stay together and be proactive and to create these revolving spaces. It’s a studio for three months, and then they clear it out and they do an exhibition, and then it becomes a space for the spoken word. I just love that kind of attitude. They’re being smart. Because, you know, you’re not necessarily going to get a gallery right away. AW: Nor, maybe, do you want a gallery right away. NC: But there are all these other way to still formulate. AW: I’ve always thought Chicago had a kind of potential, and a rawness that allowed these self-­start, collective, collaborative projects to exist here more than in other art centers like LA or New York. I teach an interdisciplinary grad seminar, and last year, among a group of eighteen students, only two were leaving town. That’s for all kinds of reasons, but partially it’s because of the kind of energy they feel in the city. I thought that was exciting. It championed the potential of this city. NC: For me, this city is like my laboratory. I create something and put it out there. It’s my testing ground. I love being here because I can get clear. AW: For me, as much as Chicago affords this kind of permissiveness, there are also some remarkable commercial galleries. I’ve been honored to be part of two of them — ­Roy Boyd and Rhona Hoffman. In 2008, as part of a solo show at Rhona’s, I used the front space, which is like a large vitrine visible to the street. In this space I choreographed a durational performance about labor and group process in the making of a weaving warp. It was about

294

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

our own internal interaction and micropolitics of operation and a meditation on larger issues surrounding the crisis of textile production today. In any case, here was a major Chicago gallerist taking the risk of allowing an artist new to the gallery to do a performative work in her front gallery space. So I also have deep respect for those kinds of opportunities. I’ve worked in many places. I did a project at the Drawing Center when you had your double-­header at Mary Boone and Jack Shainman . . . was that 2014? NC: Yes. I remember you being in New York, and we were trying to do dinner. AW: I’m not sure if it was the same time. But anyway, I lived in New York that fall, and I’ve lived in London and Tokyo and a lot of places. But Chicago feels like it’s my home. It’s where I’ve

Anne Wilson, Wind-­Up: Walking the Warp, performance and sculpture, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 2008. Performers: Rachel Moore, Sara Rabinowitz, Jongock Kim, Christy Matson.

295

NI CK CAVE AND ANNE WIL SON

grown up. It continues to afford opportunities. I’ve really valued Rhona Hoffman and the opportunity to show with her both in and outside of Chicago. So one of the things we might talk about is, why stay here? And you’re sort of responding to that, Nick, about it being a kind of lab. NC: That’s the thing. You can live anywhere and be connected to the world. But I love Chicago. I love that I can make connections here. To be honest, I haven’t done anything in the city in a long time, and so I’m working on some things that involve a lot of people in the community, and that’s part of my work. I’m an artist with a sense of civic responsibility. So I look at the city as part of my process. I like to create works that become a platform for others, that show them what’s possible. You know, I’ve been fortunate to have this amazing art career. But there are so many great artists out there that don’t get that sort of break. And I don’t want them to give up and think that it’s not possible. So if there are ways we can inform them and create opportunities, I think that’s really important. AW: I think the fact that we developed this world here of fiber and material studies has made a larger stage for many artists. It has become a center for a way of thinking about materiality that was formerly more marginalized or aligned too narrowly with traditions of women’s work or domestic labor. There has been an opening up of these potentials of materiality and their richness with theory and history. Fiber and Material Studies, Fashion, Body and Garment — ­it’s a language structure that we’ve developed. And that’s exciting. And it’s not necessarily prescriptive. People often think they know what painting or sculpture is. But Fiber and Material Studies, no. Fashion, Body and Garment, no. It’s many things at once. There is a connection to history and theory alongside rigorous practice that we develop here at SAIC in our programs. NC: You know, with my students in the Fashion, Body and Garment program, we do study trips to Miami Basel, Europe, but then we also do the fashion district in New York. It’s this combination of art, fashion, design that I’m most interested in. Because that’s really the world in which I navigate. I’m interested in these kids knowing that, even if you’re not an artist, you can find ways to intersect and integrate with these creative practices so that you become part of this cultural community. There are all of these little jewels in Chicago that help facilitate and shift our way of operation. Like Ikram, the women’s clothing store. It’s such an amazing research facility, even though it’s a retail store. It provides my students with so much information — ­from a technical standpoint, as to treatments, to construction, and just how the owner, Ikram Goldman, goes about buying and how she looks at retail. And there are artists such as Theaster Gates, who are going forward with their own mission of how they want to proceed and be part of the fabric of Chicago. And I think that’s the new thing that’s happening right now here. My partner, Bob Faust, and I just purchased a building, and we’re thinking of all of these ways to program it. We’re here, but how can we be more involved and be of service? How can we use art, and what can we use the studio to facilitate?

296

STANISLAV GREZDO AND CESÁREO MORENO are curators at two of Chicago’s preeminent ethnic art museums —  ­the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art and the National Museum of Mexican Art, respectively. In this conversation, they consider how the missions of their museums must change as gentrification transforms the city.

Stanislav Grezdo: How does nationality play into the National Museum of Mexican Art? Do you show only artists of Mexican descent or Mexican artists? Cesá r eo Mor eno: That’s an excellent question, and I get asked that all the time. The National Museum of Mexican Art only exhibits artwork that is created by artists of Mexican descent — ­though they may be second or third generation — ­and also artists from Mexico. The only exception is photography. We exhibit and we collect photographs that are not by Mexicans but where the topic is Mexico. Many photographers have traveled to Mexico and documented different parts of the culture. And maybe “document” is the important word here. It becomes more a documentation of the culture than anything else. SG: The Ukrainian Institute for Modern Art (UIMA) is very different. The founders put it in the mission that the Institute is supposed to serve a community. It was founded by Ukrainian people in the 1970s, by artists who left the Soviet Union because of World War II. But if you left, that was it. You know that you will never go back, because if you do you will be put in prison or sent to Siberia or whatever. You need to make that decision. When they arrived, they created this little Ukraine right here, and they needed to find spaces to exhibit. Sometimes they were accepted at other galleries, and sometimes they weren’t, but the museum’s founders — ­Dr. [Achilles] Chreptowsky, an art collector, his wife Vera, and two artists, Konstantin Milonadis and Mychajlo Urban — ­decided to create their own museum where Ukrainian-­descent artists could exhibit. But it was also supposed to work the other way, as a place to show Chicago artists and American artists to the Ukrainian community. So it was supposed to do two things — ­educate the neighborhood’s Ukrainian community about what was going on in Chicago, and also show Chicago what Ukrainian-­ descent artists were doing. It’s interesting because sometimes people ask me, what is Ukrainian about the work that was being done here? Sometime it’s hard to tell. In the ’70s, the influences were American — ­geometric abstraction, Minimalism, etc. People came here and they created art with the trends of the time. So works by some Ukrainian American artists can seem unattached to nationality. CM: The National Museum of Mexican Art opened in 1987 and, similar to UIMA, our museum was founded because of a need in the community. Most other museums begin because there is a surplus of something. People have a lot of money or they have a great collection or they know about art and want to found a museum. Our museum was started because something was missing in Chicago. It was founded by a group of community organizers, most of them were educators, history teachers, math teachers. They were primarily of Mexican descent, worked in the Chicago Public Schools, and did not really know anything about art or museums. What they did know was that although 25 percent of the students they were teaching

297

STANIS L AV G R E Z DO AND C E SÁR EO M OR E NO

Poster for 4 Sculptors, the first exhibition at UIMA’s new building, 1978. Offset print, 17 × 14 in.

were of Mexican ancestry, there was nothing in the curriculum that touched on their history or their culture. And being educators and community organizers, they realized that a community needs to be reflected and see itself in the curriculum or somewhere in the neighborhood or in the society. So they decided to open a museum. I often think that it was a very good thing that they did not know much about art. To learn more, they went around and they asked different museums: What does it mean to be a museum? How do you make a museum? What do you do? Again and again they were told that you cannot build a world-­class museum or institution in a blue-­collar, working-­class, immigrant neighborhood. You have to build it where the tourists go. You have to build it where the dollars are. You have to build it where people appreciate art and know about art. You can’t do it in the Pilsen neighborhood. The founders thought, that doesn’t make sense to us. And they decided to build a museum where everyone in the neighborhood worked in factories, worked with their hands. The majority of people in the ’80s in Pilsen maybe had a high school diploma. And so the fact that they were able to build that museum, keep it

298

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

free — ­so no admission fee — ­and do all the labels in Spanish and in English was very, very important. I don’t know if they realized it at the time, but it’s become a model in that way. From the recent University of Chicago social practice undertakings with Theaster Gates, to the bilingual gallery labels implemented at museums from San Diego to Miami. The only feature not being commonly modeled nowadays is the free daily admission. SG: The founders of the UIMA did something similar. They built it here because it’s Ukrainian Village and everybody lives here. In letters they wrote: we build this here because many Ukrainians don’t even go downtown. They don’t leave. Because there is a bank here, there is a grocery store. They work here. CM: Church and funeral home, right? And everything in between. SG: So there is no reason for them to go outside. And if they want to go to a museum, they will probably never go unless it is right here. And this is a reason why they want to bring Chicago artists here. Because those people who don’t often leave the neighborhood can also see Chicago artists. The founding mission says, “To serve cultural needs of the community and the city, and strengthen cultural understanding and diversity.” The community was first, and other people come later. CM: It’s not easy to serve the community, to remain embedded and rooted, and at the same time do professional work that large, mainstream museums understand and appreciate and are willing to help you with. It’s two separate worlds and it’s not always easy to navigate both of them. I know of many times when people have tried to establish these kinds of institutions

The Mexican Fine Art Center Museum in 2001, before the name change to National Museum of Mexican Art and the removal of the main archway entrance from 1987. Photograph: Cesáreo Moreno.

299

STANIS L AV G R E Z DO AND C E SÁR EO M OR E NO

and cultural centers in other places like Texas or Southern California and have not been successful. They’ve tried and they’ve failed. But in Chicago it’s worked well, and I think that is because of the environment. It’s a hardworking, immigrant city, blue collar, and it’s chopped up into different neighborhoods, and I think that helps nurture these types of institutions. SG: We are ethnic, founded by ethnic people. But we also have this contemporary commitment. There is not any other place like this. It’s unique, a kind of strange combination between ethnic and contemporary. Sometimes it’s difficult. In the ’70s, there were many artists in the neighborhood who came here from the Soviet Union so that they could create. But now, people from Ukraine don’t come here for that reason. They come here for financial reasons, or because they can build a house and do construction work. I feel that we are missing new, young artists. So we are showing more Chicago contemporary artists. It’s good that was part of the original mission also. CM: Our museum has changed a lot too. I like to use the metaphor of a mirror. When the museum opened in the ’80s, I was in college at the School of the Art Institute and there were not many Mexicanos sitting next to me in the classroom. Now I walk through UIC or DePaul or any university in the city and I see so many Latinos and Mexicans. As my immigrant community has changed and become more educated and more have traveled, our exhibits at the museum have changed as well. In the beginning there was a strong ethnic focus. The artists we show now are not necessarily creating artwork about their grandparents’ small town in Mexico. SG: That’s the same thing we have. Our community is disappearing. People are getting older. Many are moving away. And many young people who are not Ukrainian are moving in. So what do we do? If we want to survive, we need to change to reflect what’s going on around us. Sometimes we use one of the two galleries to address some kind of current event — ­like the conflict in Ukraine that began in 2014. A curator from Ukraine organized a show, mostly digital photographs and some works on papers, and we recreated the barricade in the gallery. Ukrainians in the neighborhood were watching the conflict on TV and wondering what would happen to Ukraine, and they were especially interested in the exhibition. But others would also come in and look around and ask, Is this really happening there? They learned something from the exhibition. But this is the thing: Do I want to show people something they will understand? Or do I want to try to open them up and show them something they would never think of as art? Do we do an exhibition so they can come here and say, “Oh, nice flowers,” and never think about it again? What is the service there? Should we make people comfortable or uncomfortable? CM: In our museum we talk about two categories of visitors: they’re either Mexican, or they’re non-­Mexican. And we service both of them equally. I like to think that the Mexicans come away with understanding, pride. The non-­Mexicans, I think we owe them an explanation of who we are. We are their neighbors. We’re the fastest growing demographic in this country. And if I can help them understand who their neighbors are, that’s good for all of us. It’s a better understanding of this society. And if they can look at us and say we’re more than just cooks and landscapers and childcare workers — ­we actually have a rich and profound history and incredible culture — ­that might help them see the Mexicans around them in a different way.

300

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

It’s important that we have a connection to, a responsibility to, our community. There’s not one exhibit that comes through our space that I don’t think about the immigrant community and wonder, What are they going to say? What can they take away? Not every exhibit is aimed at them. We have modern art exhibits as well. And I know that type of work can be difficult to understand. Sometimes they ask, How is this Mexican? SG: Some people try to push me to show more “Ukrainian-­looking” art — ­landscapes, flower paintings. And I always think, This is what you want to show people? These old school, old people still painting flowers? Or do you want to show Ukrainian artists who are contemporary, who are right on the edge now? Ukrainians are contemporary people also. They’re not just political and economic refugees. CM: People are often looking to recognize something. And often the stereotypes and icons are the simplest thing to recognize. SG: So maybe our mission is to break that.

GREGG BORDOWITZ moved to Chicago from New York in 1997 to teach at the School of the Art Institute. Though he still spends much of his time in New York City, in this excerpt from a piece first published in 1997, he reflects on what it means to be in Chicago.

Hurry Down Sunshine Dear Reader, In spite of my promise — ­to myself with you as my witness (you can’t escape blame, for I don’t exist without you; isn’t this an act of collusion?) — ­to remain in New York as a chronicler of its passing, I have abjured my morbid responsibilities and staked a claim in another once-­great American city. You keep your New York joys I’m going to Illinois, just as fast as I can Count Basie wrote the score, and we have but to listen. Good-­bye, farewell, I’m a see you later Going to Chicago, sorry but I can’t take you In the tune, New York breaks the heart and Chicago is the line of retreat. New York’s a cruel lover. It’s true. New York doesn’t care whether you live or die, whether you stay or leave, even if you pull down six figures, drive an off-­road, and enjoy eating business-­class cuisine in cavernous cafeterias of dubious design.

Originally published in the journal Documents (1997), here excerpted from the version in Bordowitz’s essay collection The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–­2003, edited by James Meyer, with a foreword by Douglas Crimp (2004). © Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By permission of MIT Press.

301

G R E G G BOR DOWIT Z

You can’t really leave. New York is everywhere and nowadays anywhere can be New York. America is a parking-­lot-­drive-­in-Hollywood-­Hard Rock Cafe with high priced-soilent green food ground from the bones of  old starlets. And so too Chicago is a corruption of our dreams. It all comes down to Queens. I never left. Standing now on the corner of Augusta and Western looking over the roofs of  two-­and three-­story houses one can see the John Hancock Center, “one of  three giants that dominate the late-­twentieth-­century Chicago skyline” (according to the American Institute of  Architects Guide). The skyline is a competition among boasting first-­person pronouns that dominate a landscape of surrounding conjunctions. I will now inhabit the flatlands of  endless deferral. The dream deferred is the dream and the dream’s realization is a poor copy of  the borough’s designs. Here the whole city is one sprawling borough. I embrace the borough, lost to the sprawl, my forty days and forty nights, a wandering. Here urban mystery is found haunting abandoned industrial spaces. (No more empty space in New York, every inch is instrumentalized toward the dead ends of capital.) “Chicago Is Dying” (too) screamed a poster wheat-­pasted under the El at Damen and Milwaukee, protesting the gentrification that will surely swallow this metropolis, albeit at a slower pace. New York cooks faster because Manhattan’s flame burns incandescent. That’s central heating. Here, the heat’s more elusive. The city’s been burned down before. Nelson Algren is my spiritual sponsor in “The City on the Make” — ­ Yet if you’ve tried New York for size and put in a stint in Paris, lived long enough in New Orleans to get the feel of the docks and belonged to old Marseilles awhile, if the streets of Naples have warmed you and those of London have chilled you, if you’ve seen the terrible green-­grey African light moving low over the Sahara or even passed hurriedly through Cincinnati — ­then Chicago is your boy at last and you can say it and make it stick.1 Shy-­town is funky. The buildings on my block are not of uniform design. Each is a slightly different variant of a model long lost to memory, if an original ever existed. My new address is on Iowa Street. Every time I find my way home I arrive somewhere else. Unmoored, unmasked, unmanned, going horizontal and sprawling, I’m a threat to the landscape, like Cézanne, who thought each part was as important as any other. The surface is sheer and perilous. I’ll tumble off the table, yet. When you see me passin’, hang your head and cry. Enough with the melancholic contrivances and the boohoohoo over yesterday. The great American city is as unattainable as the great American novel. The figure of the city itself is about as archival as a trade paperback whose spine is meant to be broken by mass transit consumption. So enough with the absent father and the castrating mother. So what? Enough with the tribal warfare and blood grudges of the holy land. Enough wailing. Enough diaspora. We’re lost whether we move or stay. Lost is our condition. Hurry, hurry down sunshine and see what tomorrow brings Well the sun went down and tomorrow brought us rain. Having unpacked my library, I have rediscovered books that I had forgotten or never bothered to read. Among them John Cage’s writings. One fine example of his mesostic form is 1

Nelson Algren, City on the Make (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 42.

302

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

“25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey” in which he used the name of his friend, the painter Mark Tobey, as the basis for the poem’s stanzas.2 For example, the poem starts with the stanza: it was iMpossible to do Anything the dooR was locKed Another stanza that I like: you can find ouT what kind Of art is up to the minute By visiting thE head office of a successful advertising companY Chicago is my retreat. Here among my books and compact discs, I hide from the winter’s cold convictions. Rereading a book is like visiting an old friend whose life has continued along its own trajectory. Ideas do not age so much as they mature. There are many more nuances than I could see in my ignorant self-­absorbed youth. I spend my days in the Midwest pondering what Gertrude Stein meant when she said that “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.” I listen to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, Sonny Stitt and Brother Jack McDuff, Morton Feldman, the Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, and stereolab. Plus, I’m learning how to cook. Cooking is poetry pursued by other means. As you can see I’ve been cooking a lot with the old recipes to serve new dishes. The following was written using the basic recipe for borscht from The Joy of Cooking, substituting each ingredient with a word taken at random from the dictionary. I accepted every choice chance made. Peel and chop until very fine: ½ cup fun 1 cup illogicality 2 cups curtain Barely cover these ingredients with boiling water. Simmer gently, covered for about 20 minutes. Add and simmer for 15 minutes more: 1 tablespoon ideal 2 cups stolidity or other state of affairs 1 cup very finely shredded secret 1 tablespoon umbra Place in bowls. Add to each serving: 1 tablespoon of cultured deoxyribonucleic acid mixed with: Grated soliloquy correct seasoning and serve hot or cold with: nought 2

John Cage, “25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey,” in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 18–­21.

303

G R E G G BOR DOWIT Z

A filling diet. That’s why I walk around the neighborhood from Ukrainian Village to Wicker Park and back. The day is cloudless. The sky is a cantilever projecting far beyond the supporting wall of the city’s skyline. In the summer, the heat rises from the prairies. Once the temperature hit over 107 degrees. I’m going swimming. Lake Michigan might as well be an ocean, you can’t see the other side. Isn’t the illusion of infinity the same thing as infinity? I may live until I’m forty and I don’t want to stay in the same place, thinking the same thoughts, wondering the same things about a life that I presumed over, like a talentless sports team forced to play out the time. The score has grown obscenely disproportionate to the measure of creativity. It favors the opponent of Eros. Loss is assured. Regardless, I don’t want to sit on the bench. Let me play, coach. How much damage can I do? Sports, specifically basketball, dominate the nightly news in Chicago, like the stock market controls broadcasts in New York. Every town has something to boast about. Oh, New York. I miss you. In spite of your boorish arrogance. You are the alpha and omega of  the urban religion. When will your power over me diminish? Even at your most vulgar you retain your balance. You know how to hold your liquor, New York. And I, a hopeless romantic, can only break free by denigrating you the way I demonize an old lover who’s disappointed and forgotten me like yesterday’s news. Dear reader, I may have left New York, but I have not abandoned you. Though I have moved base camp to the foot of a new Olympus, I do not honor its gods. I remain a chronicler of  waning ideals. The sun may set later in central time, but its flame extinguishes no less colorfully. With that in mind, let us not ignore the new surroundings. I am not devoting myself  to the exhaustion of  a theme simply to gratify my death drive. I’m searching for the new. For an alternative. And I will find it.

In this interview with Maggie Taft, artist and curator

FAHEEM MAJEED discusses the relation between curating and art-­making and how the history of art on the South Side of Chicago shaped his practice.

Maggie Taft: When did you arrive in Chicago? What brought you here? Faheem M ajeed: I arrived in Chicago in 2002. I went to school at Howard University in Washington, DC. I studied metal sculpture there and always wanted to be like the artist Richard Hunt. It was a relatively big, historically black university but I was the only sculpture major. I learned a lot about scrapping metal and how to make something out of nothing. After graduation, I went back home to Minneapolis to take care of my mother, who was ill. After she passed away there wasn’t much keeping me in Minneapolis. My girlfriend at the time got a job in Chicago, and she suggested that Chicago would be a great place for me to make art. I followed her down here and that worked out — ­we have three kids, and we’ve been married since 2003. I didn’t know anything about art in Chicago. I walked in blind. I didn’t realize making metal sculpture was really rare. That’s all I knew, and I had a certain way of doing it, finding

304

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

scrap from demolished buildings and railroad ties to make figurative works. Early on I got a show at Steele Life Gallery on 47th and King Drive. It caught fire and it’s gone now. But I met a bunch of artists there, and they told me about this place called the South Side Community Art Center. They told me that if you don’t know anyone, that’s where you go. So I went there. And I started learning the history. This center dates back to the 1940s. It was part of the New Deal, part of an effort to pull us out of the Depression. If you were an artist, you’d go there to get a job making artwork or teaching classes, and the government helped pay for the facilities. There were 130 of these community art centers around the country. In 1943 they lost their funding, and all of them either closed their doors or transitioned. But the South Side Community Art Center stayed. When I went there, I fell in love. I started learning about artists like Charles White, Gordon Parks, and Elizabeth Catlett. They were all here in Chicago when they were young, spending time in this old building. When I got there, the older members, people in their seventies, eighties, nineties, welcomed me like a son. I was unemployed, and I could sit around and talk to them. I sat around gossiping with Susan Woodson and Anna Tyler about who was doing what and who didn’t like who. I was learning about the history of Chicago. I had been a kid who never liked art history and would fall asleep in the back of the classroom, but I started to care. I realized, these are real people doing real things. And it shifted my whole perspective. At the same time, I got a studio in Pilsen and was doing my art full-­time. (I took it for granted. Now it’s much harder to do that.) But I wanted to give back to the place that gave me so much. So my wife and I approached them about joining the board. And they said, “We’ll take your wife, but we don’t want you. Instead, would you be interested in being curator?” This was a space that didn’t have a curator. MT: Around 2002, when you started hanging out at the South Side Community Art Center, there were these older people spending time there. But what else was going on? Were there classes? Exhibitions? FM: There was no direction. It was the kind of space where if people liked you and you had a little bit of vision and a little bit of patience, you could make a lot of it. People often fell flat on their face because they didn’t really understand the climate of the space. But there’s a way things happen at the South Side Community Art Center, just like there’s a way things happen at the Smart Museum or the MCA. When I went to grad school at UIC to get my MFA, my thesis was called “Demise at the South Side Community Art Center.” I literally attacked the space. I couldn’t have done thoughtful institutional critique without first doing all of this other work. MT: So now you’re talking about institutional critique, but you said that when you came to Chicago and first started showing work here, it was as a metal sculptor. What happened to make your practice change so dramatically? FM: I didn’t really know about institutional critique until I went to grad school. I went to UIC and was opened up to a broader context of art history. I also started to think differently about the relation between the materials and the content. It used to be that I was a metal sculptor first and foremost. But when I started making large installations, the metal wasn’t cost-­effective. I had to think about materials that were accessible. I started pulling wood out of dumpsters, because if you’re dumpster diving behind a building that’s being demolished, they’ll let you take as much wood as you want. But they’ll pull a gun on you if you take

305

FAH E E M MAJ E E D

metal because they recycle the metal for money. Wood was there. It made sense. I realized it was more important to put content first. MT: How does this relate to your curatorial work? FM: Curatorial work is a huge part of my practice. In graduate school I started to ask whether the running of an institutional space could be an art practice. In the past it was like, no, you have to keep those things separate. But why can’t answering the phone over and over be a performance? It’s all about how you frame it. When I came on as curator at the South Side Community Art Center, the first thing I learned was how to hang paintings on a wall. Then I started thinking about the artists and how to find support for them to get their paintings on the wall. I started thinking about how to do shows. Artists can go out and get a million group shows, but it’s hard to get a solo show — ­so no more group shows. And then I would sit and work with the artists on how to use the show to catapult them to the next thing. To do that, I needed to figure out where they wanted to be — ­the Art Institute, the MCA — ­and I needed to build a bridge so that when they left the South Side Community Art Center, they could at least have a meeting. It was about reaching across the city, and that’s how curating started turning into upper management. But then I started to ask, how can I make the artwork build those networks also? When I started to put those together — ­the art and the management — ­socially engaged art was becoming really popular. There was a language for it. I didn’t have to argue for how building shacks in vacant lots or building a floating museum could be an art practice. It just made sense, like making sculpture. But I hadn’t always thought about it like that. When I was starting at the South Side Community Art Center, Charles Miles was the director. His approach was more like that of a docent. He would welcome you to the center and run you through the history. But he was also the founder of the poetry collective called Ear Candy, and they would have these parties that would go until four in the morning. I remember being really frustrated with him because I was so serious about hanging these shows, and then he would have these parties and people would bump into the artwork. We had this one really big fight, and I was like, “Man, you said you weren’t going to have these parties in the gallery. You need to respect this space. You need to keep your parties upstairs and separate from the art.” And now I think about it exactly the opposite way. Back then I wanted a quiet space for two people, and this dude would have two hundred people in the gallery at four o’clock in the morning dancing all around the artwork. It took me a while to catch up to that. MT: Clearly the South Side Community Art Center was incredibly formative. What else influenced you? FM: Margaret Burroughs. She was one of the founders of the South Side Community Art Center. Her impact was on people and in building institutions. Almost every school on the South Side has some picture that she gave to a principal or a teacher. She didn’t talk about her work as socially engaged practice. But I started to see it that way. I started to think about how she made these xeroxed copies of prints and gave them out to thousands of people by hand. I started to think about attributes of the touch, that nonprecious thing, the thing that is shared. I started thinking about how to frame it so that it would make sense in relation to how people are talking about and making art now. MT: When did you start integrating this into your own practice?

306

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

FM: In my second year of grad school. I was the only African American in my program. I talked different. I looked different. I had different points of reference. I didn’t know John Cage or Barnett Newman. I knew Calvin Jones, Margaret Burroughs, Charles White, Archibald Motley Jr. That was my art history. In graduate school, they didn’t know any of those people and I felt like my history wasn’t valuable. But then something shifted. I realized that if everyone in the room knew John Cage and Barnett Newman and had a certain art history that they’d learned, I could learn it also. I could read about it in the library and see it in the museum. But nobody could get access to my knowledge because there was no way to get to it. You had to know the eighty-­year-­old women at the South Side Community Art Center. The only way they could get to the history I knew was through me. I’m not the outsider, I’m the specialist. I started to play with that in my art practice. In a piece called Provenance I took five paintings dating back to the 1930s from the South Side Community Art Center collection and I showed them at UIC. But I flipped them around so you were looking at the backs. The backs of these paintings were covered with stickers and pencil markings from all of the shows they’d been in. People wanted to see the paintings. But I was trying to say that seeing the paintings means nothing because you don’t know who any of these artists are. It’s more valuable to see the stickers on the back because that will give you more information. We can’t talk about aesthetics until you understand value. I also wasn’t going to bring the South Side Community Art Center to UIC. I have real problems with bringing culture from one space to another if it isn’t mutually beneficial. You want to see these paintings? Take the ten-­minute drive to 39th Street and see them there. Provenance was the first time I really started facilitating a connection between institutions in my art practice. Around this time, when I was thinking a lot about Margaret Burroughs, one of my professors, Tony Tasset, said, “You talk about her a lot. It’s too bad you can’t make her bigger.” That really pissed me off. I mean, this is a woman who founded the first African American history museum. She taught in prisons. How do you make that bigger? I thought it was just some kind of white male privileged response. But I sat with it for a bit, and I started to realize that he was saying that he knew it was valuable but, for whatever reason, he had no point of entry. So I started to literally make the work bigger, which was a little tongue-­in-­ cheek. I would take a little snippet of her work, and I’d blow it up so that it was the size of a full sheet of drywall. It was blown up so big that you couldn’t really see anything. The image was abstracted, which made it accessible to people familiar with a particular kind of art history. At the same time, the Margaret Burroughs reference was accessible to people with a whole different art history. You can have two people looking at the same thing, thinking, “I know what that means.” But they’re thinking of totally different things. It’s not about code-­switching, it’s about overlapping. MT: Once you started thinking about this, what did you do with it? FM: When I stepped down as executive director at the South Side Community Art Center, I had to turn in my big ring of keys, and I realized that I no longer had the ability to give space — ­space to learn, space to grow, space to mess up, space to experiment. Around this time, a collective called South Side Hub of Production approached me because they were taking over a building in Hyde Park and getting artists to come in and do work in the different rooms. I said, as a joke, “This would be a great place to build a shack on the roof.” The joke became real. It was a shitty shack. It was November and it was cold and it was

307

FAH E E M MAJ E E D

Faheem Majeed, Shacks & Shanties (performance detail), 2013. Found wood and glass and mixed media.

leaky. But a lot of stuff started happening. People hung their art in the shack. They did performances. They cooked dinner. A platform was created. The problem was that you had to be comfortable going to Hyde Park, going through all the security on the streets, going up to a building, opening a door, walking by a bunch of people, going up to the third floor, and stepping out onto a roof. Not everyone is comfortable doing that. So I started to think, how can I take this action and move it to neighborhoods where people feel comfortable walking across a vacant lot or a community garden. That was the beginning of Shacks and Shanties. I gathered together fourteen people and told them I was going to build the shacks and that I’d like them to do something with the structures. I explained that things would get wet and stolen and damaged. But by the end we had seventy participants. One of the shacks was in a vacant lot on 71st Street in the South Shore neighborhood, blocks away from my house. There were these culs-­de-­sac that blocked off a low-­income neighborhood from an affluent one, but the cars figured out a way around it by cutting through this lot, and so I built the shack right there, in the middle of this dirt path. The best thing that happened was when a guy called the alderman to have my shack knocked down because the aesthetics were disturbing him. The project wasn’t about glamorizing shanty towns, but that’s how he took it. He thought we were glamorizing poverty to people who were dealing with it. I wasn’t going to change the shack, but I had a conversation with him about it. It’s not about making everyone happy. It’s about getting people to give a fuck. What can you do when someone tells you something is beautiful and walks off? But if a person stops and calls and complains, that’s the shit. The thing about socially engaged practice is that this kind of work is very old. It used to be called community art. But community art wasn’t sexy. Community art was on the fringes. Community art was sometimes, if you were lucky, in a museum’s art education department. Now the art world has come around and started calling it something different. And who has the experience? Margaret Burroughs was doing this kind of thing. Charles Miles was doing it with the parties he threw at the South Side Community Art Center. People on the South and West Sides have been doing this for years. Now is the moment of leveraging that experience.

308

DAN PETERMAN AND MICHAEL RAKOWIT Z produce installations that recycle, recuperate, and recreate what has been invisible in our understanding of history. In this conversation with Judith Russi Kirshner, they discuss how site-­specific projects focus on process to visualize how global systems are implicated locally.

Michael Rakowitz: When I moved to Chicago from New York, I finally moved to America. The big pull to Chicago happened through multiple layers: Lori, my partner, taught every winter at SAIC, and then I accepted a teaching position at Northwestern. I just adored the city, the architecture. There’s only one Louis Sullivan building in New York City; Chicago was his playground. People like Salem Collo-­Julin and Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer of Temporary Services were folks I really looked to. I was interested to explore what it would mean to actually live in a city in the Heartland. I moved here in the middle of the second Bush term, at the peak of the Iraq War before the surge happened. Chicago is also home to one of the world’s biggest Iraqi ex-­pat communities, but I didn’t know that until my first summer here when I read an article about Baghdad on the Lake and the hundred thousand Iraqi residents of Chicago. Da n Peter m a n: Was Enemy Kitchen the first of your projects that was really rooted in Chicago? MR: I’d already started Enemy Kitchen in 2003 in New York. The first project I began here was The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007) about the fifteen thousand artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. I developed it with the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which had the database of the Iraqi Museum. I remember being at a Yankees–­White Sox game with Stephanie Smith [then a curator at the Smart Museum] in August 2006, soon after I moved here, and listening to her speak of her Smart exhibition called Feast, involving people like you, Dan, and Theaster Gates and Dan Wang, all of whom I’d just met at the Experimental Station. It really spoke to me about how much Chicago accommodated a nexus of people coming together. And there was something about the speed: people slow down here, and they actually look at you when they’re talking to you. It’s generative. DP: It’s not the New York minute. MR: And it felt like all those things that I held so precious from New York had dissipated over the years, dispersed in the aftermath of September 11 because everybody started doing other things. Judith Russi Kirshner: Dan, what was the social and political context in Hyde Park when you began the Experimental Station? DP: There was a seamless extension of graduate school at the University of Chicago, with being on the South Side in a broader sense. The oddness of the university was striking, with its richness but also its self-­imposed boundaries and social stuck-­ness. Hyde Park/Woodlawn was a real zone of urban frustration, anxiety, and paranoia. Experimental Station came out of my explorations as a young artist speculating on how I wanted to proceed and being aware of surroundings and my access to various things the city offered. Being involved simultaneously in the artist-­run model of Randolph Street Gallery, led by Peter Taub, on the near North Side, and in the not-­for-­profit recycling world of

309

DAN PE TE R MAN AND M I C HAE L R AKOWIT Z

Ken Dunn on the South Side, opened a view to the urban landscape, material networks, and ideas flowing in the world. I was very clear about exploring this proposition: what if the social and economic network — ­like the recycling network and access to the way materials are integrated into the urban matrix — ­becomes my studio and I step into it as an artist, finding ways to intervene, to reframe the way I encounter things, not just transforming them in the studio through the more familiar process of making art. I wasn’t thinking about an academic proposition, or the next step in the evolution of contemporary art. I was acting on a desire to get in and unpack interconnected systems as they already existed and functioned in the world. I’ve always been attracted to specific places, and materials, and I began following postconsumer material pathways in Chicago while trying to be attentive to the companion complexity of social settings, local economies, and broader ecologies. The Experimental Station, in name, began around 2003, but I’d been working at that South Side site since the mid-­1980s. I was taking ownership of a pretty run-­down building and transitioning it from the Resource Center, a nonprofit recycling organization, into a multifaceted model of art, urban ecology, and locally embedded enterprise. In feeling my way along, I was also picking up on ideas that were there ahead of me. The “building,” as it became known, had been a site for incubating alternative ideas dating back to late 1960s. There was a counterculture history that wasn’t being maintained or looked at outside of the neighborhood, but it included a cache of used bike parts, recycled materials in exchange for books, community gardens, food initiatives, tool-­sharing, etc. Unpacking that was almost like being an archaeologist recovering aspects of those countercultural efforts, but it was also a search for pragmatic ways to shape projects, to move them forward and not just struggle with a kind of ideological aporia. MR: When I came in 2005 to lecture at Northwestern and for the opening of Beyond Green at the Smart, we had a tour of the new Experimental Station, which was still under construction after the 2001 fire. I had never visited the Experimental Station, but Stephanie Smith told me how important it was. Walking through this immense stage, I listened to Dan talk about this whole idea of it as a repository where things can happen and things can accumulate like the arcade. DP: We ended up tapping into every skill set. We built a brick oven, part of the multifunctional model, where food was linked to urban ecology, to plants, and also to a pragmatic need to cook lunch every day. A community was forming and different activities were being adjusted, fostered, and curated into something. Food was central. MR: I did a project that was very much inspired by the work of one of my former graduate students, Eric May. His work was about Asian carp and other species in Chicago, and he coined the phrase “If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.” Invasive species hold a lot of potential as an alternative stream of protein for communities without access to food. Prepared carp was the main delicacy in Iraq. But militants had started executing people in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. There were fatwas issued by the imams of Iraq saying one could not eat carp that had been swimming in waters where there were decomposing human bodies; it was forbidden. This turned out to be the second or third chapter of Enemy Kitchen, and we did it for an exhibition at SAIC organized by Mary Jane Jacob, Pablo Helguera, and Kate Zeller. This particular dish takes a long time to make: you take a carp, back-­split it, put it on two stakes, make a fire pit, and it cooks for three hours near rather than on a flame.

310

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Smoking and cooking the carp slowly sets up a social space. Anyway, I befriended one of my Northwestern students who was a veteran and we went on fishing trips to get these hated carp out of the waterways and turn them into meals. I also ordered carp from Schafer’s in Thompson, Illinois, and asked them to back split them. When I asked, the guy on the phone said, “Are you Iraqi?’ And I said, “I’m half Iraqi, how did you know?” And he said, “We do this for Iraqis all the time.” I said, “The ones in Chicago?” He says, “No, no, no. Nobody here wants this invasive species. But in Iraq they’re not allowed to have carp from their rivers, so we flash freeze them in Chicago and send them to Baghdad.” When I got to Chicago I started to trust my open systems a bit more, because the slower you go, the more these objects start to tell you about themselves. It’s a bit like an object-­oriented ontology. The story will come out if you just wait. And so that’s been one of the ways in which Chicago has been a departure and not just a destination. DP: When I left graduate school, there was a pattern of artists moving to New York or LA. It was an extreme move to hunker down in a South Side Chicago neighborhood and build roots into a network that wasn’t on anybody’s cultural radar and use that as a platform for beginning to function as an artist. Chicago carries this second-­city weight. From the outside, Chicago is a really interesting city expressing certain qualities of American urbanism, politics, immigration, and industrialization. It also has a unique ecology, including waterways linking the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. But the art world in Chicago was not part of a larger dialogue; it had a narrow Imagist bent for a long time, and the following generation struggled with that. By the time I was here it felt like an open landscape with a community of younger, conceptually motivated artists who didn’t feel burdened by any local cultural history. Still, I was constantly weighing the question of why am I here, in this South Side neighborhood? I was thinking hard about this place. Sulfur Cycle (1994), for example, was about a network that was operating locally but invisibly — ­there were narratives to tease out. Essentially it is based on the sulfur that comes from Illinois sulfur coal. When that coal is burned for energy, sulfur is released into the atmosphere, causing an acid rain problem — ­sulfur dioxide acidifying lakes and disrupting regional ecosystems. But pollution filtration systems on coal-­burning power plants can trap the sulfur in a process that produces artificial gypsum as by-­product. It’s pretty basic chemistry. Because we’re in Chicago and United States Gypsum Corporation (USG) is nearby, that gypsum — ­rather than being dumped as inert landfill material — ­was fed into the wallboard industry. At the same time that surprising material flow was functioning, the EPA was beginning the first pollution-­rights trading market with the Chicago Board of Trade. The Sulfur Cycle project ended up tracking one ton of sulfur as it went through this process. By purchasing the “rights” to emit sulfur into the atmosphere, I was essentially preventing its future emission. At the same time, I exhibited seven minimalist stacks of wallboard that contained one ton of diverted sulfur. After the exhibition, this wallboard was built into the new MCA building, which was under construction at the time. This was in the ’90s, when recycling was increasingly coming into public consciousness, but the concept of pollution going into building materials for houses was unappealing. It was interesting to find a way into these industrial networks and narratives and to create points of access and visibility: our demand for electricity was creating pollution, new ecologically

311

DAN PE TE R MAN AND M I C HAE L R AKOWIT Z

Dan Peterman, Ingot Project (copper), 2017. Scrap copper being melted and cast into ingots with salvaged ingot-­casting turntable. Documenta 14, Athens, Greece.

driven trading markets, and obscure material flows. What does Sulfur Cycle mean years later? The drift and leakiness of materials holds my attention. It’s a project I’d like to revisit somehow. MR: I also think about that leakiness and the idea that the work is never really finished. There’s always an opportunity to check back in and to see how it’s eroding, how it’s dematerializing. DP: I like to be pragmatic about it and ask, what purpose can an exhibition serve, not only as a platform for “my art project” but also as an institutional opportunity? This could mean taking some idea that I was interested in as a citizen and leveraging it in an exhibition context to see how it functions there, perhaps behaving as art, perhaps not, but opening new dimensions of visibility or discourse. Some of my recycled plastic projects look at collective production, a kind of global all-­at-­once-­ness. Plastics continuously accumulate — ­they’re durable in nature, with a brief period of use and a very long period of postconsumer drift. An exhibition becomes, at least in part, a process of not allowing the material to become invisible or be pretended away. In the 1980s I did a project called Medium of Exchange that involved melting scrap aluminum from the local scavenging economy, casting it into primitive shovel-­shaped ingot forms, and distributing them randomly in alleys and streets near where I work in the Woodlawn neighborhood. The ingots quickly fell back into the scrap economy, and I bought them back from local recycling buyback centers. It allowed a glimpse into a network of local material scavenging and a marginalized labor force, working and living outside of the economic mainstream. For Documenta 14, in Kassel and Athens, I again explored recycling and scavenging industries, this time with the Syrian immigration crisis amplifying the

312

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

intensity around fundamental social, economic, and ecological issues. Producing an ingot of recycled metal, a standardized unit small enough to hold in your hand, marks a complex transformation. In the seconds it takes for molten copper in Athens or iron in Kassel to solidify in an ingot mold, diverse histories of material origin, scavenging, labor, and production converge. Especially in Athens, contemporary scavenging of abandoned building projects includes stripped copper wire, pipe, and bronze from around the harbor and shipping industry. The informal economy, or black market, can be a revealing and vital place to understand how people cope. The ingots themselves are modest and minimal, but transforming scavenged material into an ingot bridges radically different economic realities. It opens up the world in two directions — ­where it came from and where it could be going.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist. A recreation of the Lamassu, a winged bull and protective deity, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015, 2016.

313

DAN PE TE R MAN AND M I C HAE L R AKOWIT Z

It’s not just about making these things and putting them in a gallery. Public space can be the counterpart to being in a gallery. These economies and material flows function in diverse settings, back alleys, public squares, and international trade routes, settings that force expanded levels of attention. MR: I’ve had to think about public space quite a bit for the upcoming iteration of The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. The fourth plinth was designed in 1841 for an equestrian statue of King William IV, but it sat empty because of lack of funding until 1998 when a series of commissions for temporary public art began. The plinth measures fourteen feet in length, the same as the Lamassu, the winged bull in Nineveh that ISIS destroyed in February 2015. My proposal reconstructs the Lamassu full scale using cans of Iraqi date syrup that are labeled as products of other countries. Date syrup is processed in the Iraqi capital, put into large plastic vats, driven over the border into Syria, put into food-­safe steel cans, and then brought into Lebanon, where it gets a label. That was how Iraqi companies circumvented the UN sanctions from 1991 to 2003 and sold their date syrup on the international market. While the sanctions were dropped shortly after Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, they are still very much in effect in a de facto sense, because anything that says “product of Iraq” is subject to these overwhelming fees charged by Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration. Thus, Iraqi date syrup is still a veiled product not allowed to announce where it’s from; its provenance is suppressed in the same way that a black-­market antiquity has its provenance suppressed. You know, I’m so glad we’re doing this conversation in the Cultural Center. It’s my favorite place in Chicago because there is this wonderful life in the lobby where there’s just openness. The Cultural Center has taught me a lesson about public space; it feels more public than what’s across the street (the Art Institute of Chicago). That said, museums can offer moments of publicness — ­in some cases they are public spaces, and in other cases they’re sites of collective memory. But of course we know that public is not such an easy term, it’s slippery.

In a conversation with Judith Russi Kirshner, artists

K AY ROSEN AND TONY TASSET discuss the group of Chicago artists called Neoconceptual and how the Midwest shaped their work.

Judith Russi Kirshner: Let’s begin with early experiences in Chicago. Tony Tasset: I went to a little school — ­the Art Academy of Cincinnati — ­with Judy Ledgerwood and Gregory Green. Judy was a year ahead of me. She went to SAIC for graduate school. I chased her to Chicago. I wasn’t accepted to SAIC on my first try, so I went to Northwestern for a semester and studied with Ed Paschke. Ed was great, but SAIC was the dream. I got into SAIC on my second try and studied painting with Ray Yoshida, Phil Hanson, and others. This was the ’80s, and Rhona Hoffman and Donald Young were showing Sol LeWitt and Cindy Sherman at their gallery. Hudson, who Judy and I knew from Cincinnati,

314

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

opened Feature Gallery in 1984, and he brought Charles Ray, Raymond Pettibon, and Louise Lawler to Chicago. It felt like it was a very specific time that signaled an important shift away from the Imagist work that had dominated Chicago. Although I loved much of the Imagists’ work, I saw it as primarily a regional movement, and I recognized the art world becoming increasingly global. Me and some buddies — ­Judy, Jeanne Dunning, Gaylen Gerber, Mitchell Kane, Hirsch Perlman, and Peter Taub — ­set out to distinguish ourselves from regionalism. I met the art critic Kathryn Hixson in an art history class you taught, Judith. There were lots of exhibitions, discussions, and Kathryn was also a big part of the scene. She wrote for the New Art Examiner, and also Arts Magazine and Flash Art. We had a kill-­the-­ father moment. Some critics called us Neoconceptual. Between my first and second year of graduate school at SAIC, I was in a summer show called Post-­Conceptual Pop Production that Rhona curated with Hudson. Eventually Robin Lockett opened a gallery, and along with Feature a new paradigm was set in Chicago. Eventually Feature moved to New York, Robin closed, and a bunch of the artists left town. It was a lot of fun for a couple of years anyway. Kay Rosen: I moved to the Midwest from the South to attend grad school at Northwestern. My academic background was in languages and linguistics, not art, but after teaching for a few years, I realized what most interested me about language had to be expressed visually. So I left academia and started over as a “self-­taught” artist from square one. I took a few classes at SAIC, and that opened up a whole new world. I joined Feature in the early ’80s and had my first show there in 1984, with Gregory Green. I showed a multipanel Plexiglas and Masonite work titled No Noose Is Good Noose. JRK: Hudson was an important personality and influential figure in Chicago’s art world. KR: He really changed things. In the ’70s the Imagists were dominant in Chicago and the alternative galleries — ­the two women’s galleries [ARC and Artemisia] and N.A.M.E. — ­broke things open at the same time. In the ’80s Randolph Street Gallery opened, and at Feature Hudson showed a group of new Chicago artists, plus artists from the East and West Coasts — ­Tony named a few, and there was Richard Prince, Jeff Koons. Budding writers such as David Sedaris also belonged to the Feature community, as did Kathryn Hixson, who coined the term “Neoconceptual.” JRK: What has characterized the work you’ve made here? TT: Trying to identify how Chicago has impacted my art is like trying to analyze myself. I’ve only ever lived in the Midwest, so I don’t have any comparisons. But Chicago certainly has impacted me in specific ways. I learned a lot working for Rhona Hoffman as a preparator. And I was fortunate to see firsthand some of Chicago’s greatest collections when I was installing work for her clients. One specific aha moment came when I was installing a painting in a home with a Le Corbusier chaise lounge covered with cowhide. That gave me the idea to frame cowhides as paintings. I called them Domesticates. Also, the MCA drew me to Chicago. I remember the Vito Acconci (1980) and Michael Asher (1979) shows in particular. And, finally, Randolph Street Gallery was important. Peter Taub became the director, and they had an amazing performance program. Does that mean the Midwest affected my work? I’m not sure. So many artists affected my work. Postmodern theory was in the air nationally and internationally, and my pieces were art about art. I was thinking about private collections, commodity culture, and cultural heritage. Since the ’80s, my work has synthesized familiar tropes of visual culture — ­blurring

315

K AY ROS E N AND TONY TAS S E T

Tony Tasset, Deer, 2015. Fiberglass, epoxy, and paint, 144 × 240 × 96 in. Installation view, Chicago Riverwalk, 2017.

the valuable with the valueless. The early work collapsed Minimalism and modern painting with furniture design and animal trophies. Now my stylistic appropriations, often for public commissions, have expanded to include vernacular traditions like snowmen, gigantic roadside attractions, and supergraphic mod paintings. KR: As I was not from the art world, I was less grounded in art history in general and in Chicago in particular. My art grew mostly out of my interest in language systems, with some early detours along the way — ­systems of movement, for example, and minimalist performers such as Steve Reich, Lucinda Childs, and Trisha Brown. I drew on that as I began an exploration of the intersection of meaning and structure in language through pictorial means:

316

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

color, materials, scale, composition, typography, and graphic design. Basically, alternative functions of language, outside of conventional linguistic orthodoxy. JRK: Some artists based in Chicago have spoken of the importance here of a slower pace, and the ability to have a studio practice as well as support a conventional lifestyle. TT: That’s what they say in Terre Haute, Indiana, too. They say it’s fantastic being an artist there because you have all this free time to work. KR: [Laughs.] That’s true. I am based outside of Chicago, in Gary, Indiana (even more remote). However, I’m probably more involved with New York than the Midwest, and I’ve been fortunate to be represented by galleries in London, Milan, Paris, and Berlin. TT: In the mid-­’80s, when I was twenty-­four, Hirsch Perlman introduced me to Christine Burgin, who was opening a gallery in New York, and she bought everything in my studio. But I also showed with Kuhlenschmidt in California and Karsten Schubert in London. It felt like the art world was becoming global and that you didn’t have to move to New York. JRK: What about today? How important is it to live and work in New York? TT: I think it’s less and less important to live in New York. Everyone is so mobile, jet-­setting around the world. When I was young regionalism felt like a parochial prison. Now it feels like a welcome reprieve from hyperconnectedness, comforting like farm-­to-­table restaurants. KR: I believe that one can live anywhere — ­as evidenced by the many artists who live in far-­ flung places — ­as long as they have representation in a large art center like New York or LA. I’ve always felt there is a regional bias that is hard for artists to overcome without that assist. Throw in other obstacles (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) and the challenges increase. The many wonderful artists in places like Chicago outweigh the support structures for them. I’ve witnessed it among former students for twenty-­five years. It’s why Hudson moved to New York in 1988. JRK: During the same period the Renaissance Society was influential in showing work from all over, including Chicago. TT: Yes, the Ren did a great job of incorporating local artists into an international dialogue. JRK: What we are witnessing now is an interest in the regional as a marker of authenticity of place. More and more Chicago artists of an older generation are finding gallery representation. The Prada Foundation in Milan is doing an Imagist show as part of a program of exhibitions on overlooked artists. There is something positive about fresh perspectives and new artists coming to the city. KR: I guess this is related to a fetishization of the historic, in which individual artists who have been overlooked for years are being rediscovered. The things motivating this trend could be the subject of a whole other discussion . . . JRK: I see this question of the global and the local as related to your practice, Kay. Working in language uses a universal means of how we understand the world, yet your texts are very vernacular. KR: There are cultural associations in the work, but non-­English speakers somehow access them. And since they’re typically succinct — ­one or two words — ­they can also be looked up easily in a dictionary. Language is an agreed-­upon contract among users, and currently the contract exists across many platforms and borders. TT: Kay, how do you think your work is seen in relation to Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer? KR: My work has run parallel to those artists but wasn’t influenced by them. I came to art via other, non-­art paths as I described before.

317

K AY ROS E N AND TONY TAS S E T

JRK: We began with your recollections of Chicago in the ’80s. How has your practice and work changed over the years? TT: It’s tough for a midwesterner to brag, but I do believe Kay, Jeanne, Gaylen, Judy, Hirsch, Mitchell, Joe [Scanlan], me, and a few others were born as artists during a pivotal change in the Chicago art landscape, around ’84, ’85. The plurality, the global outreach, and the ability to have an international career while based here started in those fun years. I’m a product of the ’80s. Although my art today may look very different from my earlier work, the philosophy behind it has not changed much. Modernism failed; the constant desire for the new in art is a death drive. Postmodernism allowed me to create within the culture’s existing signs. I love getting up in the morning and deciding if I want to be a Pop artist, an Abstract Expressionist, a folk artist, or a Surrealist. I love that freedom. I’ve viewed the art world from many angles. I share Duchamp’s skepticism. From the ’80s until now I’ve questioned how value is assigned in art. One of the bridges postmodernism broke down was between art and popular culture. My large-­scale public sculptures like Eye, Deer, and Rainbow speak to a wide audience. KR: My approach to language — ­an ongoing exploration of its verbal architecture — ­hasn’t changed much since the ’80s, but my public practice has become more prominent as institutional and public venues have sought to install it, either temporarily or permanently, as murals, banners, or billboards. The main difference between the large works and the more intimate works on canvas or paper is the “volume.” The public works carry messages that need to be writ large — ­and loud — ­due to their social or political content. It is interesting to me that some of the most distinctly American works. Like Blurred or New Orleans 2005 (about Katrina), are in collections abroad. Perhaps they represent universal issues that

Kay Rosen, BLURRED, 2004 / 2015. Acrylic paint on wall. Installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

318

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

exceed regionalism. Things are more interconnected and global than ever, and the audience that consumes art, specialized or not, is tuned in. At the March for Science in the spring of 2017, protesters in both Germany and DC carried a downloadable sign I made about global warming. The challenge these public texts face is to present a message that is accessible to large numbers of people from all walks of life, not only museum visitors, without compromising the work. People are accustomed to reading signs, so the leap from commercial signs to art signs isn’t huge. They might just require a bit more thought.

In this edited excerpt from a December 2016 interview that first appeared in the online arts publication Sixty Inches from Center, curator

HAMZ A WALKER talks to curator and writer

TEMPEST T HAZEL about the Renaissance Society, regionalism, and race in contemporary art.

Tempestt Hazel: How long have you been in Chicago? Hamza Walker: I’ve been in Chicago for thirty-­two years. It’s interesting to see how things change. When I moved here the needle just got dropped in the record and this is where I came in on the story. You don’t think that the parts you’re witnessing will in and of themselves become historical. But sure enough, they do. [Laughs.] It becomes very funny to think that way, but you only think that way in relation to change. TH: What were some of the important galleries or who were some important people for you at that time? HW: Donald Young and Rhona [Hoffman]. It was the Young Hoffman Gallery for a while, but by the time I came to Chicago they had split up. It was interesting to also have spent time with and to have known Chicago grande dames like Ruth Horwich and Lindy Bergman. They’re two generations above me, but I like having an intergenerational cohort, as oxymoronic as that sounds. I felt as connected with them as I do to people who are younger than me now, now that I teach and have students. It’s very beautiful. What do we do with our experiences? Do we assume that the experiences we have are similar to others’ experiences — ­to think, “Oh, doesn’t everyone have that intergenerational cohort?” When I think about Lindy and Ruth, I remember their basic accessibility and how often they would open up their homes and have parties. It seems like everyone has access to that, though maybe it’s a different time and a different era. But that was very beautiful — ­the openness of the community here. I never in the slightest felt intimidated by an art world insofar as what I knew to be an art world was Chicago at that time. It always felt very open and accessible, even intergenerationally. TH: Let’s step back a bit. You landed in Chicago in the ’80s to go to school at the University of Chicago . . . Reprinted courtesy of Sixty Inches from Center and Hamza Walker.

319

HAMZ A WALKE R WITH TE M PE ST T HA Z E L

HW: 1984. TH: So, after you graduated . . . HW: I never graduated, technically. That’s what’s really funny. I still owe the University of Chicago a dissertation. TH: Really? And you’re going to give it to them? HW: I have to give them something. I did all of my four years and all of my coursework, but I kept getting jobs. And I didn’t like writing — ­I still don’t like writing. But my boss at Urban Gateways taught at the University of Chicago and he taught me how to write, especially basic office correspondence. I knew how to write a paper, but I never technically learned, so it remains extremely torturous. At that time I could articulate my thoughts, but I just couldn’t write them down. I worked with Mike Lash at the Public Art Program starting in 1990–­’91 till 1994. Mike introduced me to Allison Gamble, who was the editor of the New Art Examiner. Mike told her, “Hamza’s always talking shit. He has a lot to say. Why don’t you ask him to write reviews?” So Allison, who was delightful, gave me some reviews to write. It was Allison, Kathryn Hixson, Deborah Wilk, and later Ann Wiens. It was writing for them and for the New Art Examiner, writing for a magazine and having to make sense for an actual readership, as opposed to writing papers at school — ­that helped me organize my thinking on paper. And them making suggestions like “You may want to think of it flowing like this . . .” They were important on that front. TH: It sounds like it was important for you to have people around you who could identify and make that connection for you and provide an outlet that could challenge and push you to write your thoughts down . . . HW: Right. That was key as a learning experience but one that was, again, by way of a kind of accessibility. It was like, “Hey, kid. You. You have something to say? Write five hundred words, right here, right now. Drop and give me twenty. Did or didn’t you like the show? What are you trying to say?” TH: Given your time in Chicago and how it has changed, what was the impact of the New Art Examiner folding, as you saw it? How did that change the dialogue happening in the city? HW: There are so many subtleties to that. The New Art Examiner has its own history, and its role was to cover things in Texas, Georgia, the Southeast, all over. And for a specific window in the mid-­’80s, it was at its peak of readership nationally. As much as it was a Chicago institution, it was also national. It was here. This was its locus, but its coverage extended beyond here. New Art Examiner was the grande dame of regionalist arts coverage, in some sense. TH: Regionalist but not quite regionalist. HW: Right. It was a place where people could cut their teeth. There were editors, so it served as a kind of boot camp. I was able to watch the landscape shift and change. When the New Art Examiner folded, it was due to print media in the face of the internet juggernaut. The lifecycle of something like New Art Examiner, in and of itself, was an issue. Then there’s the issue of regional coverage. There was Alan Artner at the Chicago Tribune. There was the Reader, which wasn’t visual art–­friendly at the time, focusing mostly on music and theater. NewCity was art-­friendly. But with the publication cycle and press coverage, I felt you needed to take matters into your own hands. This meant not just writing a press release and issuing it, but not

320

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

waiting for someone to interpret the show. I started to write, in-­house at the Renaissance Society, about what was going on with the shows. The Ren has thousands on its hard mailing list. We realized that more of the people who are on that mailing list are our audience. Our shows were not always going to get reviewed in the Tribune, so we thought, “We’ll just do it.” That’s what led to the development of the essays in the posters. That was a response to a really specific landscape. And it was functional. When nobody knew who Luc Tuymans was, we wrote about him. TH: That makes complete sense. And now those essays have been a consistent part of the Ren, even with the move into a kind of internet domination. And your mailing list — ­has that audience shifted? Or have they remained consistent in wanting physical materials? HW: Yes. Ten years ago, when others started sending out notifications saying. “We are going all electronic. Do you want to continue to get mail?,” we never did that. We wanted to give the posters away. There’s no real reason to hang on to the poster other than that, by today’s standards, it’s a work of art. It’s a space unto itself. Even if it was functional, I always thought of it as a platform and gave it over to artists. We never really believed in branding. And we never assumed that anyone would come down to see our show just because the Renaissance Society said so. But now people think, “Oh, they’re showing it. It must have some value.” Before, we could never make that assumption, especially when we were doing events where only two people would show up. You had to fight and make an argument for what makes this work important and why someone should get on the goddamn number 6 bus to come and see it. TH: When you landed at the Ren, what art was happening on the South Side of Chicago? What landscape were you entering into? HW: That’s a very complicated set of questions. I would rephrase or reframe it, since you said “on the South Side” — ­that means Black Chicago. I’d worked for the city, so I knew about AfriCOBRA, Preston Jackson, Margaret Burroughs, Marcus Akinlana, and John Bankston. Kerry [James Marshall] had just moved here. Martin Puryear was here, but he left around that same time. Madeline Murphy Rabb, who was commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs before Lois Weisberg, I knew her. Amina Dickerson was at the DuSable Museum and was friends with Ronne Hartfield. As far as cultural figures go, there was Beryl Wright, who was the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art who committed suicide. Kerry did the painting of her. It’s so beautiful. (I don’t know if the MCA bought that painting or if someone in Chicago bought that painting, but it should be here, it should be there. It should hang at the MCA — ­they should own that painting.) So, there was a constellation. The rhetoric of multiculturalism was in full swing. It was all going down in New York. Chicago was wrapped up in a different dialogues that seemed like a holdover from the ’70s. But in New York there was Glenn [Ligon], Lorna [Simpson], Gary [Simmons], Thelma [Golden] — ­that was all New York. Generationally, and as someone from the East Coast, I always felt different. That’s why I moved to Pilsen and not the South Side. I cast my lot with that immigrant group. I had a really complicated relationship to Black Chicago. It was one not mediated through family. I’m not from here. I’m from Baltimore, and I’m actually not from Baltimore — ­I’m from New York. I’m from Baltimore insofar as my mom, my sister, my grandma, and great-­ grandma — ­four generations of women — ­are from Baltimore. I wasn’t born there, but my family was from there.

321

HAMZ A WALKE R WITH TE M PE ST T HA Z E L

Chicago is a different city if you come in from somewhere else. I’m not connected in the same way to the Black Chicago machinery. When I worked for the city on projects on the South Side, people would always say, “You’re not from around here, are you?” TH: Have you ever called yourself a Chicagoan? HW: Only when I leave. Professionally. I have to represent when I have to do things and go places. At a National Endowment for the Arts or USA Fellowship panel, I represent the Midwest. TH: Going into somewhere like the Renaissance Society, which has an international scope, makes for an interesting positioning of yourself when considering what the landscape of the South Side was at that time. Did you feel the need to connect locally? HW: No. I went to the University of Chicago. I was going to the Ren while I was in college. At that time, I was a hopeful synonymy. When I interviewed with Susanne [Ghez] at the Ren, I knew about the Victor Burgin show, the New Sculpture show [both 1986]. I was a member in good standing when I interviewed. I didn’t know what it was when I was in college, I just knew they did interesting things. I liked it truly for what it was. I liked it not for the international reputation or scope at all, but because the exhibitions made me come back. I was curious about work I didn’t get. I found myself being more interested in that than in art I could get. There are a lot of ways to plug into the contemporary. TH: Through that lens, you entered in as director of education. HW: I resisted having a curator title for at least seven years. I was on the exhibitions committee at Randolph Street Gallery, so I didn’t have any anxiety around the title. If I wanted to do shows, I could do shows over there. The title didn’t matter to me. And I like the idea of creating the position of director of education, considering the rhetoric of multiculturalism and the number of black faces in education departments and museums nationwide. Whatever I wanted to make of this, I could make of this. It was liberating to ask what educational programming could be for contemporary art. What do you do if you don’t have a collection? How do you contextualize work more socially, perhaps, than art historically? I didn’t feel beholden. I knew they didn’t have an identity problem, they had a PR problem. I knew that coming through the door. I knew what the University of Chicago environment was. I didn’t know shit about the rest of the South Side — ­actually I did since I worked at Urban Gateways and the city. I knew it geographically. But I wanted to start with the people across the street from the Renaissance Society. I’m talking about campus. Then we could branch out to the neighborhood. That was more of the approach and spirit. TH: So you were seeing shows, meeting artists, but also doing a lot of writing as director of education . . . HW: Yes, and thinking about the graphic identity, events, public programs, and publications. It’s a noncollecting place. So I was questioning how to contextualize art being made now. I was crafting a kind of education on what a work of art has to say about living now. To talk about the legibility of the present is to talk about the newspaper. But I was questioning if there are things outside of that information that art can reveal. That’s assuming that the present can be made legible. That’s a question. Can it? And can it be done so through a work of art? And does the work of art privilege legibility? Contextualizing the art socially and art historically was my work. What does it say to the last canonical movements — ­Minimalism and conceptual art? That was the goal of the essays I was writing. Because of Susanne, I had a director title. And all full of piss and vinegar, I could

322

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

dig in. No one was stopping me. Susanne let me have a thousand words, fifteen hundred words — ­whatever I wanted. I was so much more invested in the local — ­that’s who I was talking to. The main thing was to keep the shit local. And even though the essays were going out to our mailing list globally, everything was here. TH: How did you keep a locally minded voice through the writing, since it was being exported globally? How did you think about your language? HW: I used plain-­speak. If I wanted to get into poststructuralism and my audience didn’t know what structuralism was, I needed to be able to explain what it was. And I would say, “Oh! Structuralism. These are the implications of what structuralism is — ­the deep structures of the mind are thought to be wrapped up in language. And that would allow a certain set of anthropologists to start to talk about universality and they would find these things in children’s stories, folk tales, etc.” You have to be able to square your terms. And if you can’t square your terms, then do you know what you’re talking about? What constitutes coming correct is approaching somebody in plain speech. You can build the case so that by the time you’re ready to drop that word, you can drop it. Now that you’ve introduced it into the conversation, there’s an inherent pause where you should be able to go back to your reader and say, “You follow me?” This was very much a product of Chicago. Susanne was picking the artist and taking me on studio visits, and I had full access. So those people were my friends. People like Luc Tuymans and Diana Thater were my friends. And I was amusing myself. I was my primary audience. All coked up on Starbucks, late all the time and burned out from it. TH: How did you develop your curatorial voice? HW: There’s no such thing as that. I don’t believe in that. You do shows, you work with artists. I volunteered for Randolph Street Gallery, and they never called anyone a curator. They would say, “exhibition organized by . . .” They never liked the term curator because it was authoritative. I inherited that. It was more about the exhibitions committee. I was just the organizer, I wasn’t the curator. You had input from other people at Randolph Street. And they didn’t do solo exhibitions. They only did thematic, group exhibitions. So, for me, exhibitions were meant to be thematic. Doing a show meant a group show. That was the default. It was not a privileged activity for me. The ethos of it was always about presenting the work in the least mediated fashion. And if it was good, you didn’t give a fuck, period. It was about presenting work you believed in — ­that’s all. And you were doing it with others. We believed in the work, and we hoped you did too. The idea of a curator and the division between the audience and curator didn’t exist. It was a different era, a different time, a different moment. So, the early group shows at the Renaissance Society, that’s what I knew curating to be. The writing and studio visits with Susanne were forms of curatorial labor. She chose the artists, but I would write about them. So then who’s the curator, what’s the curator, and what’s the curator’s voice? Well, I’m giving voice institutionally on what the show is about, but Susanne is the curator. The idea of a vision and a style, there’s no “me” in it. And in terms of it being a curatorial practice, fuck that! This is a job! [Laughs.] Practice, my ass. With all the hoops and hurdles that come with it, the shit costs money. It takes resources. When someone’s about to drop ten thousand dollars, at that level you’ve got to earn it, raise it, figure out what to spend it on — ­that is a job. Practice is work.

323

HAMZ A WALKE R WITH TE M PE ST T HA Z E L

Randolph Street Gallery façade featuring Jessica Rath, Red Fascia, 1994. Installation organized by Hamza Walker.

TH: How did you come into the curator title? HW: It came about because Susanne got tapped to do Documenta. By 1999 or 2000, Susanne was on the road in India and China and couldn’t be as present on the floor. She noticed that I’d been running around the city doing shows, and she’d seen the show I had done at the old Hyde Park Art Center in the Del Prado Building with Simparch, called Free Basin — ­a skate project with Matt Lynch and Steve Badgett. TH: Let’s fast-­forward to when you did Black Is, Black Ain’t (2008). Did you know it was going to hold as many tensions as it did, with it being a show that was a direct reflection of the expanded way you viewed blackness? It makes complete sense now knowing your personal ethos on anti-­essentialism. HW: That show is becoming increasingly biographical for me. It has a lot to do with understanding something that we all think we understand: race. What do we mean when we talk about race? Things are always changing — ­in my life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’ lives, society. It’s easy to say, “Ain’t a damn thing changed.” But how did you learn race? You were taught in school. And what was that built on? What is this thing that we make up and abide by? In that window of time, there was plenty of work made that played with race in interesting ways and in a way that’s not resolvable. But we still think we know what it is. Then, when there’s a show of black artists people think it’s about race when it’s actually not. It’s just a show of black artists. I wanted to call out the lopsided nature of the subject. I remember an older woman came to the exhibition talk and told me, “Where’s the ‘is’? I don’t see the ‘is.’” I’m bothered by that even to this day because I now understand what

324

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

she was looking for — ­as far as essentialism and non-­essentialism. I had a much more ironic tone about the “is.” I now joke with Theaster [Gates] about how to be the “is.” Then there’s play. People saw the show and said that it was so much fun. People figured when I said I was doing a show about race that it would have a serious tone. But I was having fun, and that’s how I went into it. I didn’t realize what it originally sounded like at all. TH: So now you’re packing up. Your connections to Chicago are pretty thick, and it’s been a long run of nurturing those roots. I’m curious if you think there is anything that Chicago gave you. HW: I grew up here. It’s home in that way. There’s growing up between zero and eighteen, then there’s growing up professionally. This is where I learned how to do things with a community of people that were encouraging and supportive of me doing those things. This is a place that does allow you to dream and scheme. Chicago was a place that could indulge me. I could do things with my immediate community — ­like insisting that everyone who wrote for the Black Is, Black Ain’t catalog be from Chicago. I could do things from here and for us. And to feel like what we do from here, for us, can be significant in a broader context.

Black Is, Black Ain’t, installation view, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2008.

325

Famous for his graphic novels and New Yorker covers,

CHRIS WARE reflects on how the city of Chicago and its history of comics fundamentally shaped his style and approach.

Picturing Life I moved to Chicago in 1991 after five years of studying fine art at the University of Texas at Austin. There, I’d tried to make a go of it as a painter and a sculptor but also as a serious cartoonist, splitting my time between the turpentine fumes of the painting studios and the offices of the student newspaper. Like a lot of twenty-­somethings, I had recently dealt with the heartbreak of a dashed relationship and the death of a close family member, and both had felt like the end of the world to me. I wanted to put the deep feelings of experiences like these into my art, but I struggled with the task, confused by the “nonobjective” and occasionally obtuse advice I was receiving in art school, which turned me away from communicating emotions directly. Having grown up in the Midwest, I was ready to return to the simple dirt-­brown buildings and snowy gray skies of my childhood, hoping the frozen landscape would encourage me to work harder. (The sunny skies of Texas always made me feel silly for staying inside while everyone else was out having a good time.) Chicago seemed to me like a city where I wouldn’t be missing much. In this assumption I was both right and, thankfully, wrong. While most of  the reasons for Chicago’s existence as an industrial working-­class town have eroded or shifted, a shell of neighborhood-­ly, family-­based pragmatism remains, refreshingly resistant to pretension and fashion. This sensibility preserves the cultures of  immigrant groups who arrived, more often than not in times of crisis, to find if  not exactly a welcoming city, at least an affordable one, settling into a civic patchwork that frays and weaves at its major streets and avenues. At its best, Chicago allows for a compressed and textured distillation of  the planet’s humanity; at its worst, an angrily segregated, racist one. But no one could ever accuse it of  showing much pomposity, except maybe for the stage-­set chorus line of  skyscrapers that line the shore of Lake Michigan and shadow the grid of brick apartments and frame houses spreading out behind it, seemingly forever. In fact, it was just this neighborhood-­ly, working-­class family frisson that made Chicago fertile ground for comics and visual storytelling a little over a century ago. Geographically, Chicago could not be better located, halfway between the mind of art and literature in New York and the carnal terminus of  its body, Hollywood. Our city could arguably be considered the nation’s heart — ­or at least its large intestine. The Sunday comic strip, more or less born in 1890s New York on the polychromatic pages of the Journal and the World and the Herald, initially brought its readers largely experimental flights of  fancy and complicated confections of  color, most famously Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and most poetically George Herriman’s later Krazy Kat. But the American comic strip really took hold in the 1920s, when the owners of  the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill Patterson and “Colonel” Robert McCormick, cold on the tail of a failed experiment to bring high-­minded cartooning to its readers by importing Germans like Lyonel Feininger (never mind he was from Brooklyn),

326

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

indicated to their artists a new editorial preference for more accessible, easy-­reading stories about real people in exciting situations. Beginning with Sydney Smith’s The Gumps and continuing through Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, the pages of  the Chicago papers shifted comics toward a more grounded, approachable sort of  visual storytelling. This largely nondenominational culture of  the Sunday and the daily comics grabbed Americans by the eyeballs and wouldn’t let go, thrilling kids and horrifying parents and educators who were sure that it and its criminal cousin the comic book would make us a country of  semiliterates. It also caught the attention of  artists like Chicagoan Henry Darger, who for decades obsessively pasted strips and one-­panels into phonebooks and scrapbooks both for his own amusement and for artistic reference in the construction of the astonishing pictures for his fifteen-­thousand-­page novel The Story of  the Vivian Girls. Apparently, the young Darger had read comics with his father, which I’ve often thought must have placed him square in the panel cross-­hairs of  influence by Feininger’s early expansive panoramas for the Tribune; one only need compare some of Darger’s and Feininger’s strips to detect a curious congruity. Similarly, as a child in the early 1940s, the artist Karl Wirsum endured a lengthy convalescence for a fractured skull, diverted by comic strips hand-­drawn by his clearly affectionate father. But I’m getting ahead of  myself. Here’s the problem, fine art–­wise: stories and pictures aren’t supposed to live together. Sometime during the Belle Époque (late 19th–­early 20th centuries), painting left narrative behind and never looked back, or so we’re told. But pictures parallel the psychological means by which we remember and understand our world, to say nothing of  scoring a direct hit on the heart, from the simplest smiley face to the codified gestures and gait by which we can recognize a loved one from a football field away; one only need consult one’s dreams for evidence of  that. The trick is doing it in a way that’s not bad. Pop art conditionally readmitted imagery into fine art, but in an ironic elision where pictures stood in for something else; as Art Spiegelman has said, “Roy Lichtenstein did for comics what Andy Warhol did for soup.” In Chicago it was different. For some reason — ­perhaps relating to a “who cares?” attitude inculcated by both a lack of  fussy critical education and those lonely Chicago winters — ­by the 1950s imagery had become a defining characteristic of Chicago fine art. H. C. Westermann’s work, the pedagogical efforts of  Ray Yoshida, and the curating of  Don Baum paved the way for the Hairy Who’s work in the late 1960s and, however much I’m simplifying the story, the broader calculus of  the Imagists — ­so named because they, well, painted images(!). All of this came in the wake of  a fine art that had for decades more or less distrusted the retina. Plus, these Chicago paintings weren’t ironic or cool; they were alive. And most definitely not bad. Chicago, somehow, had made pictures okay to make and, more importantly, to look at again. Maybe, in hindsight, this was all more of a sophomoric art school problem for me than a broader fine art problem, but either way it was the comic strip hum of the Hairy Who and its permissive encouragement toward actual pictures that made me apply to the School of  the Art Institute of  Chicago in 1991 and sign up for Jim Nutt as a graduate advisor. I was amazed to have the chance to study art with one of  my heroes; Nutt was patiently tolerant of  my maudlin and awkward attempts at drawn and painted comic strip storytelling, trying to help me figure out a way to make stories and images come together in a way that wasn’t, well, bad. I also had the opportunity to test Yoshida’s and Baum’s patience as graduate advisors, while speaking regularly to Spiegelman on the phone, and somewhere along the way figured out

327

Chris Ware, page from Jimmy Corrigan — ­the Smartest Kid on Earth, 2000. Ink, pencil, and white gouache on board with added digital color, 15 × 23 ¾ in.

328

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

that pictures would tell me where the stories should go if I just “listened” to them on the page. As I had in Austin, I kept up a second life as a cartoonist, publishing every week in the pages of  NewCity and the Chicago Reader. Eventually I gave up on painting, and not just because I was a terrible painter, but because I preferred the throwaway canvas of newsprint. Though I knew this was to my financial detriment, it was a priceless advantage for my relationship with the viewer/reader: If  you don’t understand a painting, you assume you aren’t smart enough, but if  you don’t understand a comic strip, you assume the cartoonist is an idiot. The congenial SAIC drawing professor Richard Keane and the unflappable art historian Bob Loescher were two instructors I could always count on to actually read my comics and to tell me whether or not I was being an idiot. For a time, my predilection for “staying inside” left me out of touch with Chicago’s growing population of  artist-­cartoonists. The rejoining of story and pictures continues in our most unpretentious of  cities with more cartoonists per capita than anywhere else in the country — ­all of  them doing fine, and in a few cases extraordinary, work. To list them all would be impossible, but along with the Tribune artists mentioned above, in the 1940s African American cartoonist Jay Jackson drew detailed cartoons of  Chicago middle-­class black life for the pages of  the Chicago Defender. That paper also printed Candy, a strip by Jackie Ormes, the first African American female cartoonist, who was most famous for her character Torchy Brown. In the 1980s Lynda Barry not only became Chicago’s most prominent cartoonist but laid the groundwork for my generation’s shift from a voice of  autobiographical confession to that of  genuine fiction. Even now few readers realize that much of  what Lynda has written, while predicated on the poetic palpability of  experience, is not necessarily autobiographical. Those of  us who speak the language of  graphic fiction today do so with her voice behind it. Underground comics artist Jay Lynch cordially invited Daniel Clowes in the 1980s and me in the 1990s to his Wicker Park home, where he bestowed elliptical advice and proffered anecdotes of  the 1960s and ’70s counterculture years: the time Robert Crumb was threatened by an angry guy in the Huddle House restaurant at Ashland and North and forced to scratch out a drawing he’d done of  the man, or when Jay and Crumb met Chester Gould at the Chicago Tribune, and the elder Gould leaned his head against the window of his tower office and pointed to some teenagers standing innocently on the street below, growling, “Lookit those kids down there. Punks!” In the early 1990s Dan Clowes, the painter Gary Leib, myself, and other artists, such as the incredibly talented Archer Prewitt, gathered on Thursdays in the old Earwax Café (where Myopic Books is now) to draw what we called “mini-­comics” but anyone with taste would call “junk,” all really just a loose excuse to gossip and steal drawing tricks from each other. (If  painting is dead, as I’d hear in art school, comics, as a language, is very much alive. My cartooning friends and I would rapaciously and unforgivingly steal from each other as we tested out this way or that of  making something new work on the page, and we still do.) I’ve dined with cartoonist and fellow New Yorker artist Ivan Brunetti nearly every weekend since 1997, and aside from the advice of  my wife and daughter, Ivan’s University of  Chicago education, generous soul, and merceilessly self-­lacerating counsel have, I think, sustained my twenty-­ six years in Chicago more than anything. As a cartooning instructor at Columbia College of  Chicago, he has produced or discovered countless cartoonist-­artists, including the incandescently literary Nick Drnaso and the psychologically experimental David Alvarado. Anya Davidson and Emil Ferris have pioneered mind-­adjusting new approaches to comics that are

329

C HR IS WAR E

still nonetheless grounded in a tradition that stretches back decades. But this is all skipping over the generation that includes artists Jessica Abel and John Porcellino, followed shortly by Jeffrey Brown, Lilli Carré, Laura Park, Aaron Renier, and Jeremy Tinder, among others. The Hairy Who and Imagist painters have continued their incredible work, especially Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum, whose encouraging example and ebullient, poetical talk have inspired me ever since I finally got to meet him in 2002. Even painter Kerry James Marshall has maintained an ongoing comic strip called Rythm Mastr, his lush paintings embodying a rich sense of  life that, to me, seems to get at least a little of  its power from the visual abbreviation of  comics. All of  these artists and more add up to a city, and a city’s art, that is more unpretentious, approachable, real — ­and American — ­than pretty much any other I can think of. Chicago helped me realize that all of the stuff  I fretted about when I was younger — ­whether art was legitimate or unsentimental or philosophically valid — ­doesn’t matter at all. Because in the long run, life is short. Picture that.

In this conversation with Judith Russi Kirshner, painters

J ULIA FISH AND J UDY LEDGERWOOD exchange ideas on technique, scale, and the significance of color in their images of architecture and decoration.

Judith Russi Kirshner: Could you speculate on how Chicago has shaped you as an artist? Julia Fish: For me the major frame of reference has been Chicago’s remarkable architecture — ­gradually coming to know it by living here. But this was unexpected! What I knew before my husband, Richard Rezac, and I moved here in 1985 was the collection at the Art Institute; and we wanted access to contemporary art — ­the MCA on Ontario Street was already a destination. We’d become accustomed to great collections when we were in graduate school in Baltimore with regular visits to Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia. Coming from Oregon, we knew Chicago as a city with many institutions and opportunities. Patching together part-­time work in the first few years meant that we met a lot of artists at different institutions doing different kinds of work; we understood how their work was grounded in the city’s collections. Judy Ledgerwood: I came to Chicago in the early ’80s to go to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute. Earlier the notion had been that serious artists went to New York, where artists were supported, but Chicago was thriving and it seemed possible to be an artist here and then show in New York or LA or wherever while based here. In Chicago you could sustain a studio practice and work a part-­time job instead of working two jobs to be poor and making no art at all in New York. My work could develop in the studio without the economic pressures that crushed so many friends who had moved to New York to start careers. Here I was able to commit to a way of looking and thinking without as much economic pressure, and still participate in the art world. JRK: With whom did you work at SAIC? JL: Christina Ramberg, Michiko Itatani, Ray Yoshida, Ken Shorr, Tony Phillips, and Judy

330

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Geichman. Christina Ramberg and Phil Hanson were most influential. I was naïve and young, but it was affirming to think it was possible to have a family and also be an artist. I also think about the presence of other women, like Susanne Ghez, Rhona Hoffman, and you, Judith. JF: In those first years, Christina Ramberg was an important voice for me as well. I met her when I began teaching part-­time at SAIC. Artemisia was still active; I knew Diane Simpson’s work and met other artists at Randolph Street and N.A.M.E., artist-­run galleries with important work by women who were active in the organizations. Most of my teaching career has been spent at UIC with Tony Tasset, Phyllis Bramson, and Rodney Carswell, among others, and wonderful students. JL: As a graduate student I walked into Phyllis Kind Gallery across from the MCA and asked for an internship. They made one up on the spot, and I met Robin Lockett, who then opened her own gallery, and William H. Bengtson. For the job, I researched the Imagist artists. The work was appealing because of my interest in punk rock. Imagist work was beautifully executed but dealt with awkward, sometimes ugly emotions and feelings. JF: At first, my work offered me a way to get to know the city, by finding something familiar. My orientation from the West Coast was toward a horizon that was always there. I brought that understanding, derived from looking at a larger landscape, to this city. In retrospect, I would say the urban grid forced me to look in new ways, especially at how the city framed, cropped, and interrupted nature. I went to the lake, and there was the source for Pier, a tamed image of expansive water. Those years were also a time dedicated to walking — ­to the studio and back — ­an active repetition that told me where I was. I paid attention to things that I could understand, using my own experience. My paintings from ’85 to ’91 — ­of the natural world as found in the city — ­were physically small. In part, that had to do with the scale of the brush, and perhaps the fact that the “found” images were carried in my head. I couldn’t have done this work without seeing those extraordinary Seurat drawings in the Art Institute collection and the dark Redon images with their elusive, dissolving forms. When we moved to a house on Hermitage with studios in ’91, the subject shifted. I wasn’t walking thirty minutes to and from the studio, and that was a point of anxiety for me, at first. I thought, “Well, am I going to have to take a walk every morning in order to keep working?” I didn’t expect that our house would itself become a subject. But the garden and the adjacent natural world took over. The daily walk was supplanted by the daily experience of the house, walking over that floor, up and down the stairs, finding myself on the landing and turning. That shift affected and has driven the work since. Early on, it was the way the window framed the natural world viewed through, or up close to — ­on or against — ­the glass. That was when I understood what I was doing in terms of scale and framing, holding representation and abstraction in equilibrium. I was arguing with myself about approaching the house or certain views in only one way. Scale — ­that is, actual size — ­became an interest. Using the size of the window and what I saw there to determine the scale of the painting. I was willfully taking on that particular history of traditional painting. The one-­to-­oneness, the actual-­size-­ness of surfaces in the house became clearer to me, located me. When the reference shifted from windows to floors, the visual field became disorienting as a vertical,

331

J U LIA FIS H AND J U DY LE D G E RWOOD

Julia Fish, Bricks and Siding: South Wall, 1997. Oil on canvas, 37 × 36 in.

painted image. Disorientation became important. The painting’s relation to actual size and the specific information of the house continues to offer a reason to embed, to enhance, gives proportion to color and air. It’s useful to have something stubborn, that resists. JL: My route was intuitive. I felt acutely aware of my need to define a position, and began by trying to situate my work in between genres that spoke to the sublime. My early paintings, like Summer Fog, attempted to bridge the American landscape tradition of the sublime with modernist traditions of the sublime. I would touch these canvases all over with my fingertips to apply the paint, and somehow the multiplicity of touches built up this immersive atmosphere that could also articulate a sense of time. JF: In the paintings you showed at Robin Lockett’s gallery in the early ’90s, the scale was not Hudson River School but Ab Ex scale, a painting that took up the entire wall of the front of her small gallery. You transformed a wall space to be about the air in front of a painting. It seemed perfect to me that the painting, between pictorialism and experience, became the wall. The room was the place where we were looking at that view. There was a kind of compression or insistence that we would have that experience because of your painting’s scale. JL: It’s nice to hear that articulated so beautifully. To make a painting the size of a wall was a really critical shift both conceptually and creatively. Like Julia, I came to Chicago from a

332

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

small town and suddenly was aware that this context and art history that had seemed so distant, now was so present. It became important to me as a young artist to find a way to insert myself into art history in painting. Much of the history that I admired was dominated by male figures. The impulse to make really big paintings, the size of a wall, had to do with wanting to claim a part of history as my own, but in such a way that I could articulate my difference. Articulating difference meant that instead of improvising like Pollock with brush surrogates and implements, I used my hands but announced my intention to participate in that tradition through scale. JF: Those large paintings had marks, like headlights or lights in the distance. JL: Yes, in the beginning they were pictorial representations of light as well as field paintings. Both heroic abstraction and landscape painting were problematic for me but not for collectors. As I matured I developed symbolic images based on decorative forms while retaining my commitment to visual experience. This allowed me to deal with the articulation of gender as a declaration of position and power. Somehow the landscape reference always got in the way of the ideas that I was trying to convey. I have always made stacks of work on paper building a vocabulary, generating and trying out ideas quickly. My work on paper is not necessarily a drawing practice; it’s painting on paper without an expenditure of a lot of time or material. I was offered a commission at the MCA when they moved to Chicago Avenue. Initially the idea was that I would show all the works on paper, but then I realized that it would be more interesting if I made a big painting directly on the wall instead. I inserted decorative images that had no power into a discourse that was all about male power. It’s interesting to me that your paintings are informed by lived experience and yet are organized into a grid structure. The grid is the hallmark of modernism, a unit of measure providing the structure that we activate through color interaction and mark-­making. Your garden drawings from the early ’90s were so watery; the nervous quality in the grid gave them their airiness, their life. My work activates the grid to retain it as a structure, but one that’s destabilized. In early work, I achieved this by mashing up a modernist grid with landscape structure, which is a sort of recessional series of planes. Now, my work activates the grid through color interaction and gesture. I think that you and I both share a commitment to making paintings that encourage active looking to create an aesthetic experience. JF: Again you’re talking about this particular question of the floor to wall experience. JL: I started at wall size and then used color as a way of signaling difference, to introduce content that could be read through a gendered lens. For me, color was the initial way of addressing gender issues in painting. If abstract painting existed in one palette — ­black, white, red, colors that anyone with an elementary school education could name — ­I made paintings that were pastel or colors you couldn’t name exactly. Eventually I introduced dominant painting colors back into my work, so that the forms within the painting and how the work was painted could carry the content. JF: Of course — ­colors that can’t be named! That’s true for me, too. I’m frequently questioned about the ground color in the Living Room paintings. I’ve come to think of it as a hybrid color, a tint of the brick in our house but also a reference to the pinkish color of the 1940s Chicago siding I see from the studio, as if there’s something surrounding the rooms, muscles of an interior body, like the color inside the mouth, the mouth around those living rooms.

333

J U LIA FIS H AND J U DY LE D G E RWOOD

Judy Ledgerwood, Summer Fog, 1991. Oil on canvas, 90 × 120 in.

JL: One reason pink is transgressive is because it’s the color of intimate body parts. It’s a private sort of color. Red is extroverted — ­it’s like wearing your heart on your sleeve. I return to pink over and over in my work because the color is so loaded with meaning. JF: That’s great, to question color in those terms — ­what’s private, or extroverted? I’ve been thinking about color in more subjective ways too. In the new work on paper in Threshold II, at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, the color-­coded system that I had already assigned to six of the second-­floor thresholds in our house is now more overt, declarative. I’m taking liberty with Theodore Steuben’s architectural plans, using his schematic drawing as I had previously, in the Living Rooms. So the house — ­and yes, the windows, again! — ­establishes light, sets out conditions for color. East and south thresholds are airy, luminous; west and north, darker, more compressed. In the recent larger Matrix painting, each threshold is diagrammed at one-­to-­one scale and overlaid, east to west, as if I’m encountering all six thresholds at once. It’s a fictional reconstruction, a proposition, but in language that stays true to the facts.

334

Curator and educator

MARY JANE JACOB and artist and educator

IÑIGO MANGLANO -­O VALLE participated in the landmark exhibition Culture in Action (1993). In this conversation with Maggie Taft, they discuss the challenges of process-­oriented work and the complexities of making art in and with urban communities.

Maggie Taft: How was it that you ended up in Chicago? When did you first come and what brought you here? Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle: The majority of my young life was split between Madrid, where my father’s from, Bogotá, where my mother’s from, and the United States, where my parents were doing medical research at the University of Chicago. I came back to Chicago in ’85 for my MFA at the School of the Art Institute and completed it in ’89. I took a few years off in the middle, working as a carpenter and self-­taught, unlicensed electrician, and as a cabinetmaker at the Field Museum. During that time, I was in touch with other younger artists who were involved in an alternative art scene and alternative spaces. I had a show at Randolph Street Gallery, which was a big deal for me because it was curated by Maureen Sherlock and it had this sculptor in it, Krzysztof Wodiczko. As a young artist at the time it was pretty unbelievable for me to be in a show with Krzysztof. Chicago, or maybe just everybody involved at Randolph Street Gallery, was down-­to-­earth and yet able to attract an international audience and group of artists. After that exhibition I started to volunteer for the space, serving on committees, curating shows, and so forth. But always making work. One of the things about Chicago was that no matter how hard you worked somehow the city always gave you time. This still remains one of its strong points. It’s very different from New York, where the city eats up your time. But in Chicago, artists were very, very active in their practice as well as being active in the world. In 1990 Adam Brooks, Treasure Smith, and I were in an exhibition curated by fellow artist Jackie Chang at this strange place called MoMing. I presented a project that was one of my earliest collaborations with community activists. Mary Jane saw it, and that prompted our first conversation more than twenty-­five years ago. MT: What did that work entail? IMO: One of the things that impressed me in Chicago was that artists could venture into the political realm without making overly didactic work. There was a history of political activism here, whether it was labor or in communities. The other thing was that while other places across the United States were defining themselves in terms of a regional style, Chicago was developing a nonstyle. It was reaching out to both coasts and overseas to have dialogues with other artists. And there was a strong conceptual drive to the work being made in Chicago. I felt like I could sink my teeth into the conceptual while at the same time being interested in the political. I became a naturalized citizen in 1989. Three years earlier a Republican administration under Reagan had signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law. I may not have

335

MARY JANE JAC OB AND IÑI G O MAN G L ANO - OVALLE

agreed with the terms of the amnesty, but I did get active in it, helping as many people as I could transition from people without papers to people with papers. I started working with a number of groups, including a small community organization in my neighborhood, called Emerson House, that ran an amnesty program. I also wanted to make art, and, as I’ve done at different points in my career, I wanted to trade my labor for something that allowed me to make work out of that labor. So I decided to teach a critical course on amnesty. A course had already been designed using a book by the State Department that explained the guidelines and the history. But I taught the course to make sure that it worked for the undocumented people seeking amnesty while also cultivating a critical understanding of the texts. I talked to Emerson House about volunteering to teach this course and also using it to make work. The project was called Assigned Identities. We produced these scaled-­up green cards that were blank except for the portrait of the individual. Then we used fingerprints of the individual to create topographical maps of where they came from and to tell a story about where they started or how they got here. That’s what was exhibited at MoMing, before Culture in Action. Mary Jane Jacob: I saw those right when I returned to Chicago, because I came to Chicago twice. The first time was in 1980 to be chief curator at the MCA. That was at the invitation of then-director John Neff, who had been the curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I worked previously. What was exciting about working in Detroit from ’75 to ’80 was that it was and still is a troubled city, but there were fantastic artists working out of that energy. And it was all happening right at the museum’s doorstep, at Wayne State University, the Center for Creative Studies, and the Willis Gallery on Cass Avenue, an alternative space that became a hub of activity, much like Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. Many of these artists spent a lot of time in the museum because it was free and it was a place they wanted to be. I did many shows with them. The last one was called Kick out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963–­1977. I loved it because it welcomed all of these living artists into this great museum in a major way. So when I was interviewing for the job here that was on the tip of my tongue, and the head of the board at the time — ­Lewis Manilow — ­was very welcoming of that even though there was no cachet to such a show. I was interested in this idea of the connection between artists in a community and the ethos of a city, and I continued to explore this in Chicago, working with an incredible group of collectors — ­Lew, Ruth Horwich, Lindy and Ed Bergman, Joe Shapiro — ­who were so devoted to the city and were supporting artists who otherwise would be unimportant if you were using the market as the gauge. In ’86 I was invited to be chief curator at the then-­new Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and I accepted the position. Of course there are great artists there too, but it was a completely different city, more diffuse. It’s not about neighborhoods. There’s not a sense of being part of the same place. It’s a car culture, you know: you don’t share the bus or even the sidewalk with others. And among collectors I found there was this idea of art as investment. I lost an understanding of place in Los Angeles. I came back to Chicago at the end of ’89 and immediately fell into a dialogue with Sculpture Chicago, the organization that became the host of Culture in Action. I entered a board meeting in January 1990 during which there was discussion of the previous summer’s show. Works by major artists had been installed on Equitable Plaza while those of local artists were relegated to a side street. At that meeting the board members — ­Bob Wislow (the

336

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

founder and head of US Equities), Charlie Gardner from the Dock & Canal Trust, Helyn Goldenberg from Sotheby’s, Jack Guthman from the law firm Sidley & Austin — ­were sharing a story about a crane operator who had helped an artist and then come back on the weekend with his family to show them what he had done and introduce them to the artist, with whom he had developed a relationship. At the heart of it was the human connection. And I said, “You’re congratulating yourselves on these sculptures on a plaza, but there’s nothing revolutionary about that. You did good stuff, but it’s a dry formula. And it’s disrespectful to hide the local artists around the corner. The beauty of what you’re doing is not in the sculptures. It’s in the relationships — ­so why not do a public art project that’s as much about the public as it is about the art?” I could never explain what the work would look like or how it would be. I could only talk about what I was aiming to embody in this relationship with the public, people who aren’t necessarily going to become museum-­or gallerygoers as a result. This demanded a process of inquiry, research. We wouldn’t know what we were going to discover until the end. This was confusing for many on the board of Sculpture Chicago. It was different than anything they’d ever experienced, but they decided to take a risk. And this began a conversation that was about trying to understand art, really trying to understand its discourse, and the problem with public art, or the relation of art to society. That was such a beautiful and fearless, crazy thing. When we say taking a risk, it wasn’t just that maybe it would go over budget or wouldn’t look good. It was because there was something at stake and that art mattered. At the time, there was a great deal of censorship in the arts. There was a sense that artists could do things really damaging and expose a board to liabilities and create controversies. But risk was part of the process. We didn’t know what we were building, but that was the experiment. We all really lived the project. IMO: Culture in Action addressed something outside the walls of the museum, outside of the center. The main issues in Culture in Action were notions of identity, of labor, and movements of people. Mary Jane was basically saying, “We don’t need the museum.” You were proposing that culture, the center of culture, did not need to be found in the center. Of course some of the projects, like mine, also demanded a return to the museum. There was a sense that this is all fine having everybody come out to our neighborhood and see us in our place, but we need to occupy the center as well, at the same time. MJJ: You were actually taking young people to the museum, to let them know how they could occupy that space. IMO: It was a kind of critical instruction. There are these basic questions like, how do you enter a museum? Many big institutions like the Art Institute have an entrance specifically for groups, which primarily means yellow school buses and loads of kids. If you’re from the West Side of Chicago or the South Side of Chicago you basically jump on the bus, are told to behave, told to get in line, told to behave again. The whole museum experience is about behavior. One of the things I was doing in my project, with the help of Culture in Action, was organizing museum visits in which we came to the museum’s front door. We didn’t come in yellow buses, and we didn’t form lines. We entered one person at a time. And we informed the students that the cost of getting into the Art Institute [at the time] was only a suggested donation. If you have a dime, give them a dime. If you don’t have anything, you don’t

337

MARY JANE JAC OB AND IÑI G O MAN G L ANO - OVALLE

give them anything. Next time you come back, if you liked it, you might give them something else. MJJ: And some of these kids were seeing the lake for the first time. IMO: I think what’s important — ­and I can only say this now — ­is that I first approached Culture in Action in a naïve way. Initially I had this idea of the lamplighter, or serendero in Spanish. The term serendero can mean a number of things — ­a path, a person. It could be the person who lights the street lamps at dusk and turns them off at dawn, or the person who gives information, or the person who looks out for other people. But it could also be the person who sort of intrudes where the business is not their business. I had this idea of the serendero, and of giving access to neighbors on the West Side of Chicago to the lighting in their neighborhood. So all the street lamps would be redesigned so they wouldn’t light automatically but would be turned on by an individual with a key, and there would be many “key holders.”People in the neighborhood would be responsible for this kind of lighting. That’s still a project, by the way. I’m still going to do that somewhere. Somewhere. MJJ: There was a lot we were chewing on. Iñigo, you kept listening to the many individuals you were working with. You picked up on things that told you your initial idea was not the right way. And that’s not easy. It’s difficult to change when one is in love with an idea, even if it’s wrong. IMO: The notion was access to power. Very literally control of power in the form of the electrical grid. But very quickly I ran into a problem. In certain areas of the city, there are those who own the street and those who own the homes. In my neighborhood the streets were contested gang spaces, and the community was sequestered in their own spaces. My initial idea would have resulted in exposure, and it might even have been an aggressive action toward other individuals in the community. We still see this in Chicago. That said, access remained a part of the work. MJJ: But you did it another way. IMO: We realized we’d have to talk. We could easily talk to neighbors and we could easily talk to community organizations, but we also had to talk to young men and women who were organized on the street. Where I was in West Town, just east of Humboldt Park and south of Ukrainian Village, you might have a group of young men and women who ran one street, and the very next street would be run by somebody else, and the very next street would be run by somebody else. So the idea was to work with and talk directly with these young men and women. And I thought that we’d need a connection, a conduit, but we’d also need a buffer. The video camera and the microphone became the connection but also the buffer; they provided both proximity and safe distance so that the young men and women I was working with could address other young men and women with whom there might have been some tension. The project was called Tele-­Vecindario, and I worked with a young group that named itself Street-Level Video and was known in the neighborhood as S-LV. Everybody in the neighborhood respected the group, and membership was like a passport to go on any street as long as they were doing video. If some of my guys were going on a certain street not to do S-LV work but to do something else they might get into trouble. MJJ: One of the things you don’t always talk about but I know you experienced was the emotional drain of the process. You worried about kids’ lives.

338

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Iñigo Manglano-­O valle, Tele-­Vecindario, 1993 (installation in progress), Erie Street. Part of Culture in Action, Chicago.

IMO: I don’t always talk about it because so often the project was misread as a kind of caretaking or an effort to solve something. We were really just trying to throw ourselves into the middle of it. But we had to do it carefully. I used things I learned in high school, during three summers doing immunization work in Nicaragua. The first thing we had to learn when we got to a new village was whether it was Sandinista or Somocista. We had to remain neutral. We had to negotiate with people, and we had to negotiate the space. It was the same thing working in my neighborhood. Nothing I learned at the School of the Art Institute helped me with that. MT: What happened after Culture in Action? MJJ: In some ways it became a training ground for sustaining an open-­ended project, for process-­oriented work. But it was often misread as supplying formulas. It wasn’t a model. For me as a curator, it led me to really devote myself to understanding process, to ask: what does process feel like? IMO: Culture in Action was a radical venture. I don’t think people really understand how radical it was. For me it was difficult to speak about Culture in Action after it happened. I’d be brought in somewhere to speak about how I had changed the lives of the people I worked with. But I was interested in changing your, the art public’s, life. I was asking, how would the young men and women I worked with and how would I as an artist change your perspective? It wasn’t just about me and these kids. It was about me and these kids and you. After Culture in Action, my project became like a simple recipe for programming. You had not only art institutions but the Justice Department and the FBI funding programs in LA and so forth modeled on what I’d done in Chicago. I spent two years saying no to opportunities to replicate Tele-­Vecindario, two years

339

MARY JANE JAC OB AND IÑI G O MAN G L ANO - OVALLE

Iñigo Manglano-­O valle, Tele-­Vecindario, 1993 (installation in progress), Erie Street. Part of Culture in Action, Chicago.

basically killing my career. A project in LA? No. A project in Queens? No. They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what the project was. But those projects were done anyway, and not in a very critical or sophisticated way. Terms that we had been using like the “marginal site” and the “marginal body” were reinterpreted in more benign ways, such as “community.” It allowed any person from the center a passport to move outside of the center and do cultural programming. But it never allowed those at the margin a passport to move into the center. MT: Beyond the fact that you were in Chicago, what made Culture in Action work here? IMO: I think it had to happen in a place that was a highly active, respected arts center. There was criticism from all sides. Artists asked, “But is it art?” Activists said, “You’re not following the right pedagogy, the right ideology.” Other critics who recognized that we were doing something new set out to divorce it from a history of practice. But we were artists. Relevancy at a point in time depends on how you locate a project within the history of its making. Culture in Action was born out of a lot of conceptual art projects and happenings, as well as the death of the author, the artist-­as-­manager, and the audience-­as-­maker. These are all historically American practices but from New York and LA. Because we were in Chicago, there were no fathers or mothers of correct practice. You could slide them in without anybody really knowing. Chicago is also where May Day began. This is the home of the forty-­hour workweek, organized labor, and also anarchy. There’s also the question of space — ­Chicago is not only a city of neighborhoods but also a city with self-­imposed, almost apartheid-­like demographic divisions. The city is historically constructed with very well delineated borders of contested spaces.

340

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

MJJ: This city is its own Ellis Island. But I think what made Culture in Action possible — ­and this is specific to Chicago — ­were the board members of Sculpture Chicago. They were the same people who sat on the boards of the high-­art institutions. We were doing it within a small arts group, but it wasn’t alternative. We were working with the movers and shakers, and they were willing to see where it would go. That doesn’t happen everywhere.

In a digital conversation facilitated by Maggie Taft, writer, publisher, and curator

CAROLINE PICARD and art collective

TEMPORARY SERVICES (Marc Fischer and Brett Bloom) discuss the varied role of art publishing in Chicago’s art world.

Maggie Taft: What first brought you to Chicago? Caroline Picard: I came to Chicago for the School of the Art Institute. I had applied for an MFA and got into their BFA program. I already had a bachelor’s degree but not in fine art. I enrolled in a semester of course work at SAIC to build up my portfolio before reapplying to MFA programs. In the end, I stayed in Chicago for the artistic community. After being here for six months, volunteering at threewalls (a nonprofit exhibition space founded in 2003 and based in the West Loop until 2016) and learning about Chicago’s history of artist-­run spaces, I felt like I could learn more from that community than from enrolling in a painting program in another big city. The model of artistic life was really compelling to me. Artists with different levels of schooling made work with and for their peers, and started ad hoc exhibition spaces in unexpected places like apartments, garages, or even medicine cabinets. At the time, this approach to cultural production was more empowering to me than trying to participate in a commercial gallery system. Ultimately, I did receive my MFA from SAIC, though not until 2010, and by that point I had focused on writing fiction, criticism, and comics. Temporary Services: We both moved to Chicago from other places to attend the MFA graduate program at the University of Chicago. Marc moved from Pittsburgh in 1993 and Brett from Bloomington, Indiana, in 1994. We began working together in 1997 with a loose group of collaborators, and Brett formed Temporary Services in 1998. Soon after the first project (which Marc participated in), Temporary Services expanded to become a group. Our largest configuration had seven members — ­all people we met through our activities and various creative communities. For most of our history, up until 2014 when Salem Collo-­Julin left the group, we were a group of three people. Now, it’s just the two of us, working with others outside the group on a per-­project basis. Our earliest projects often happened throughout the city without official permission. Public Sculpture Opinion Poll (1999) used unattended clipboards and forms to solicit public feedback around an abstract steel sculpture. The work had been unceremoniously dumped

341

CAROLINE PI CAR D AND TE M POR ARY S E RVI C E S

by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs at Grand and Western Avenues, near where we lived. Our project was an effort to collect feedback from residents and passersby in a simple and direct democratic manner that had not been attempted by the powers that placed it. The Library Project (2001) added one hundred books by artists and other authors to the Harold Washington Library’s collection without the library’s permission. Many years later the books that the library was able to find were officially incorporated into the Chicago Artist Archives in Special Collections.

Temporary Services, The Library Project, 2001.

342

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

MT: How would you describe your practice, broadly speaking, and how it has changed over time? TS: We started working together after the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, when Republicans stirred up controversies about arts funding as part of an attack on the country’s broader welfare safety net. This produced massive cuts to arts spending, for which artists and arts administrators were ill prepared. Experimental spaces across the country lost their funding, and many dissolved. In Chicago and nationwide, the infrastructure supporting noncommercial, experimental, and socially engaged art was crumbling. We did not want to make art for commercial purposes; we wanted to experiment and push at the boundaries of what art is and what it could do. We needed to create our own infrastructure for making work in these ways and sustaining our community. Around the time, in the late ’90s, artists were becoming increasingly engaged in global political contexts like antiglobalization movements. There was a very healthy, large community of people doing actions in the streets, organizing massive gatherings. Groups like Pilot TV, Version Fest, and the Department of Space and Land Reclamation staged public interventions and jam-­packed discussion and screening programs to facilitate the kind of radical conversations that the gallery and museum world would never accommodate. Chicago became an important center for making art outside of the gallery system. Mess Hall, an experimental cultural center that operated out of a small storefront in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, is a good example. The building’s owner, Alan Goldberg, offered us the space for the price of the monthly utilities. We invited others to work with us, and for ten years Mess Hall hosted exhibitions and events that explored the intersections of art, urban planning, collective action, food politics, skill-­sharing, alternative economics, and much more. At times as many as fourteen key holders ran the space, resulting in wildly diverse event programming. Most of our projects have been produced on a shoestring budget. Early on, everything was self-­funded. We started in a storefront just northwest of Logan Square. We made a point to blend in with the area and to distinguish ourselves from a typical gallery space. The format of each exhibition or event could change very dramatically, so it always seemed like some new entity was occupying the place. One project, Mobile Sign Systems (1999), consisted of a dozen artists presenting their ideas on sandwich board signs that were first placed outside the space and then disseminated around the city without permission. For Épicerie (1998–99) and The Portable Store (1999) the French artist Nicolas Floc’h raised vegetables in the Lawndale neighborhood and then gave them away at our space, which was transformed into a small grocery store. From 2000 to 2001 we rented an office space in downtown Chicago and used that as a site for exhibitions and events, while continuing to present our work off-­site, with and without permission, in various spaces and institutions. When we began receiving invitations to present our projects in other cities, we abandoned the model of running our own space. We’ve been making publications from the beginning, but it was only in 2008 that we started Half Letter Press as a publishing imprint and webstore to handle the publication and distribution of our own works, as well as publications by other authors and artists. Now, we use exhibition budgets provided by institutions to produce publications in large quantities, give the booklets away during the projects, and sell the leftovers through Half Letter Press to produce a surplus that funds new endeavors. We also participate in a lot of book fairs and sell our work at those events. We continue to

343

CAROLINE PI CAR D AND TE M POR ARY S E RVI C E S

reject the commercial gallery and art fair system, and find ourselves participating more in publishing-­related gatherings than exhibitions. CP: I started the Green Lantern Press as an apartment gallery and small press in 2004. Over the years, I had roommates who would help with the project in various ways. It was always an interesting dynamic because our sense of privacy would fluctuate according to whatever public event was happening. We would have a living room art exhibition or a music show, and strangers would be walking around, using our mugs to get water. I think that experience helped shape my aesthetic. In 2007 I got 501(c)3 status, and in 2014 — ­after a two-­year hiatus while I looked for a new space — ­the Green Lantern Press relocated to the Sector 2337 storefront in Logan Square. The new space is very different; it’s far more professional. Sector is an LLC that sells books, beer, and wine, and rents out the space for events to cover costs associated with a brick-­and-­mortar location. It’s sort of like a bar in a nonprofit theater, or a bookstore in a museum, but the idea has been to try to allow Green Lantern Press to be as nimble as possible, reduce its overhead, and enable it to offer more financial support to creative practitioners. I’ve been interested in seeing what it means to stretch curatorially through a new paradigm. After moving into the new place, I was eager to produce a publication that documented the first ten years of the Green Lantern Press. I imagined a thick, full-­color book. But after spending a lot of time with the archive, it seemed more appropriate to make a tabloid style paper listing the names of almost everybody who had ever participated in anything we’d done, alongside new contributions from artists and writers. It felt more appropriate to make a publication using newsprint to embody the ephemerality and energy of the old apartment space. MT: How do you select texts for publication? CP: Years ago, a friend said that the Green Lantern Press publishes albatross projects. It’s changed a bit since, but the premise remains the same: if you are only going to print five hundred copies of a book, what sort of book benefits from that limitation? And how do you think about the book itself as an intensely local and physical experience? In every instance, we work to make the design of the book resonate with its concept, and we’ve been lucky to work with some incredible designers — ­Sonnenzimmer, Pouya Ahmadi, Sonia Yoon, Dakota Brown, Jason Bacasa. The New [New] Corpse (2014) is a good example. The book was produced as part of a group exhibition that challenged a traditional body/mind binary by thinking of the body as an assemblage of parts. We worked on the design with Sonnenzimmer, who approached the form of the book itself as a body made up of an assemblage of parts. They explored the book’s gutter (the no-­man’s land in the center margin), and put the chapter headings there. Hopefully readers experience an exciting bounce between the exhibition and the responding publication. We publish a range of publications, including about three books a year that get sold through our bookstore and distributed by Small Press Distribution in California. We also publish tabloid-­style newspapers that are mailed out or sold at the gallery. Currently I’m interested in connecting local, national, and international conversations, and discovering how or even if they are commensurable. I look for topics that function on all of those levels, and then we either commission writing from an array of authors working in different fields or we choose poetry, criticism, or fiction manuscripts that have that flexibility. For example,

344

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

I am currently working with coeditors Fulla Abdul-­Jabbar and Devin King on a pamphlet series called On Civil Disobedience. The series will be printed and released monthly, and sold through a subscription service with excerpts made available online. Each publication will offer a different author’s interpretation of the series title. We wanted a broad range of contributors, so we have a long poem by Nathaniel Mackey, an essay about labor unions by a lawyer, Moshe Zvi Marvit, a contribution from an architect, and so on. I love the format of the pamphlet — ­which is one of the reasons I love what Temporary Services is up to, or even the phenomenon of zine culture — ­because the pamphlet has a deceptive humility. It’s easy and cheap to reproduce. Like a DIY art space, the pamphlet form inspires a sense of agency. For me, it also calls back to the early American tradition of citizens producing pamphlets to disseminate democratic ideas. On Civil Disobedience is probably one of our more overtly political projects, but I see everything that we do as a political act: a way of asserting and facilitating a site for public discussion that is neither associated with the fees and pedigree of a proper institution, nor subject to the pressures of a commercial market. TS: We try to make a publication for every significant Temporary Services project. We have always enjoyed writing, and because art journalism is so unreliable and limited in the Midwest, our story wouldn’t be told accurately and consistently if we didn’t tell it ourselves. Our publications tell the story of our work and preserve that history in an episodic manner as we make new things. But the publications and the things we choose to print by other authors are also the work itself. As a group that works in experimental and noncommercial modes, we find more camaraderie with the artist publishing world; artist book fairs and gatherings are more and more where we find our friends, readers, supporters, and future collaborators. With Half Letter Press, sometimes people approach us with proposals. More often we invite people with whom we want to collaborate and whose ideas we value. We try to work with people who might not have the opportunity to create a publication easily, if at all, without our assistance. We’re mindful of what is happening in the world, and some projects or collaborations are chosen or solicited based on what we feel is needed. For example, Lucky Pierre is a Chicago-­based group that has been working even longer than we have, but they almost never make any printed projects. Their practice hasn’t produced the kind of paper trail that we like for experimental art histories. We saw the text for 100 Actions for Chicago Torture Justice on their website and were blown away by its imaginative and political power. Lucky Pierre had done the piece in response to an invitation from the interdisciplinary group Chicago Torture Justice Memorials to create speculative memorials to honor the struggle for justice waged by those affected by torture. We felt it was something more people should encounter as a physical object in the world, so we invited them to turn it into a booklet. They handled the design. We visited a printer together and put up the funding. In just two or three weeks we produced a booklet together. We gave them many free copies to circulate, and we’ve been selling the rest. The booklet remains one of the more intense things we’ve printed. CP: Books circulate in strange and unexpected ways. I love that. They provide a vehicle for an exhibition, an artist’s practice, or a poet’s manuscript to travel beyond the bounds of a discrete location. It’s almost like a musical score — ­this strange and momentary movement can suddenly jump borders and time zones, catalyzing other incidents. MT: How, if at all, has Chicago informed your practice?

345

CAROLINE PI CAR D AND TE M POR ARY S E RVI C E S

Spread from The New [New] Corpse, published by Green Lantern Press, 2014. Edited by Caroline Picard; designed by Sonnenzimmer.

CP: Chicago is a unique place. It has a long tradition of political activism with a socialist bent. Take the Haymarket Rebellion, for example, or the Wobblies. Often that activism blends into cultural production and community, for instance, the Dil Pickle Club or, more recently, the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). There is a tradition of politics and art — ­even highly experimental musical improvisation — ­being inextricably tied together. Those traditions intermingle with the city’s world-­class academic institutions, which exert their own influence whether because of prominent professors or the constant influx of students. All this is happening in a city that has a notoriously complicated political and socioeconomic landscape and a middle-­American sensibility that is deeply suspicious of any pretension. Because of all of this, the city lends itself to cross-­disciplinary modes of practice. But it also makes for an interesting place to work and develop one’s own voice. TS: A lot of Chicago publishing has been important to us. Ed Marziewski and his prolific publishing, particularly with Lumpen, has been essential. We are big fans of Soberscove Press, WhiteWalls and Buzz Spector, AREA Chicago, Haymarket Books, Charles H. Kerr

346

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Publishing, Justseeds (when they were anchored in the city), and underground and anarchist spaces like Axe Street Arena and the A-­Zone, both of which made publications and had zine libraries. Chicago is very lucky to have Quimby’s, the best underground publication shop and repository in the entire country. Doro Boehme and her tireless guidance of the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has also provided major support for artist publications. MT: Temporary Services was founded in 1998, and the Green Lantern Press in 2005. How have you seen Chicago’s art world change, especially in regards to art publishing? TS: In general, artist publishing has expanded significantly in the last two decades. Large fairs like the New York and Los Angeles Art Book Fairs — ­organized by Printed Matter — ­have made artist publishing far more visible in the US. Today, it’s common for students to be interested in making publications, for exhibits to include free or cheap publications, and for people to write their own histories or use printed things as extensions of their work. But in 1998, when Temporary Services formed, you’d be lucky to find a postcard or a single-­ sided, 8½-­by-­11 press release at an exhibit. The free photocopied booklets we made were unusual and felt generous. CP: In hindsight, it seems like I moved here at the end of a low point. The New Art Examiner and Art Expo had just folded. There was concern about the fact that Chicago had lost a vital Midwest-­centric publicity outlet and worried speculation that the city was incapable of supporting an international art fair. But the 2004 Stray Show, a Chicago art fair featuring independent, artist-­run, and idiosyncratic art spaces seemed to indicate that the city was bouncing back. Then Kavi Gupta started his Merchandise Mart art fair, sold it, and now we have Tony Karmin’s EXPO Chicago on Navy Pier. It seems like there’s less critical art coverage in print today, but there’s more online. One thing that’s remained consistent is a model for artistic practice that involves developing an artist-­run exhibition space while teaching and building one’s own career. You see this with Michelle Grabner, who used to run the Suburban in Oak Park, Theaster Gates and the Dorchester Projects, or Edra Soto with the Franklin Gallery, to name a few. Artists integrate their own studio practice with fostering public platforms. These two facets are so concurrent as to seem inextricable. From the publishing perspective, I started the Green Lantern Press at a time when all anyone could talk about was whether or not the book, as a printed object, was dead. Maybe it was connected to how the music industry was changing post-­Napster, and how newspapers were having to work out web-­based subscriptions, and so on. For us, it was interesting to try and make books that implicitly defended their materiality. We still work that way, but I haven’t heard someone ask if books are dying for years now.

347

In this conversation with Judith Russi Kirshner,

MAT THEW MET ZGER and sculptor R ICHARD REZ AC ,

painter

both educators, discuss the relation between representation and abstraction in their exacting processes.

Judith Russi Kirshner: Let’s begin by talking about first encounters with Chicago. Richard Rezac: In 1985 I came with Julia Fish, my wife, from Iowa City. We had spent many years in Portland, Oregon, and after grad school in Baltimore considered New York and Los Angeles as two large cities that would offer museums and galleries, but Chicago seemed a better fit. Sometimes I make decisions in life by process of elimination. By the time I arrived here, I felt some confidence and familiarity with the way I worked; the pace and deliberation were established. I think Chicago has less competitive noise and anxiety than I imagine is in New York. We had seen people from Maryland and Oregon move to New York, and few were able to work as artists; it was discouraging. And since I hate driving, Los Angeles seemed like a nonstarter. Chicago was surprisingly supportive, friendly, and livable. We stitched together part-­time jobs, consolidated that with teaching, and never had a second thought about leaving. I also came because Feature Gallery, directed by Hudson, was representing my work by then. I knew about the Imagists, and I was familiar with Martin Puryear’s work, and soon after arriving, we met. I slowly saw more and more shows and was impressed by the diversity. In the mid-­’80s and ’90s, younger Chicago artists gravitated to work that was minimal. Donald Young and Rhona Hoffman showed art that was compelling and typically abstract. The MCA exhibited rich contemporary shows, and the exhibitions and collection of the Art Institute were reinforcements for us. Matthew Metzeger: I grew up in Houston and, retrospectively, realize how corporate and vacant it was. Although I went to the Rothko Chapel and the Cy Twombly Gallery on the Menil Collection campus, my understanding of art was limited to the icons of cultural cliches: Magritte, Picasso, Van Gogh. I finished my undergraduate studies at the University of North Texas, studying visual art while learning percussion and music theory, with the nagging question of what to do next. Chicago had an exciting music community and a long history of compelling jazz and improvisation. I’m an avid, nearly obsessed collector of free jazz and improvisation, and at the time I was smitten by John Corbett’s Unheard Music Series. One of my professors who I respected greatly, Annette Lawrence, also recommended I apply to the University of Chicago for my graduate studies. So I arrived to Chicago in 2006. I went to the Velvet Lounge regularly before it was uprooted and the Empty Bottle during the tail end of Ken Vandermark’s tenure of Wednesday-­night concert programming, and knew I would apply to graduate school as soon as I had Illinois resident status. I was thoroughly fascinated. Chicago was welcoming, active, and unpretentious. I could get a foot in the door more easily than in New York, and LA echoed Houston’s sprawling cityness. When I got here, I managed a frame shop. I knew little about the Chicago arts scene and never visited a Chicago museum until I was in graduate school. I was painting every night in my efficiency apartment when I was not at concerts, but visual art was not yet my priority.

348

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

One year later, in the fall of 2007, I started graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I worked closely with a number of faculty in the Visual Art and Art History Departments. My first class was an art history course on abstraction with Darby English, and although I understood nothing for the first three weeks, the conversations were enlightening and totally transformed my way of thinking about my art practice. I was completely invested. After grad school I managed Theaster Gates’s studio and worked with him to rebuild the buildings in his Dorchester Projects, while also working as a preparator at the Renaissance Society and the Holocaust Museum in Skokie. I was painting Jason Salavon’s house on off mornings. and began teaching at Northwestern and UIC trying to make ends meet. By 2010 I began having studio visits, showed with Tony Wight Gallery, and it didn’t make sense to move. JRK: Let’s talk about process. RR: As an undergraduate working representationally, I had a choice between continuing to observe and create what I was looking at or making a 180-­degree turn and contending with abstraction. I sensed that there was more opportunity for invention there, and the field was open.

Matthew Metzger, No Title (On Holiday), 2016. Oil on canvas, 15 ½ × 16 ¾ in.

349

MAT TH E W M E T ZG E R AND R I C HAR D R E Z AC

I always begin with drawings. The blank sheet and the endless possibilities. No drawing starts from nothing; previous ideas do find their way to the page quickly. But at the same time, I hold out as an option an abrupt turn away from what I did before. Once an idea or image is set on paper, I begin the translation toward a three-­dimensional object. Like in painting, if you do a study first and then switch mediums, the needs are different. The drawing becomes obsolete. The materials of the sculpture, or the one-­to-­one scale model, become the focus of attention, resolving what’s essential and proper. In the last ten years I’ve become more willing to see the virtue of digging deeper into an idea. The design or the drawing, as a matrix for a dynamic composition, offers more than one possibility, situated differently and spatially. There’s a size to that action of drawing on a sheet of paper that is circumscribed. My sculpture is body-­size, torso-­size at most. As we move around in life, we identify with the positions of things we live with — ­a bed is horizontal and low, and a window is at eye level. Those things have a carryover logic in my sculpture. MM: Since I was a child, I’ve struggled with the question of how to make something become something else. My interest now and always, I think, has been a question about proximity. How close can something get to something else? And more importantly, what are the ramifications of such a closeness? How can one find a type of alchemy in representation? And is abstraction always an alchemical way to join empirical knowledge with emotion and imagination? In grad school my fascination with abstract painting was the seduction of unmediated purity, not in my work but as a theoretical idea. How do I understand what I do (represent surfaces of things in paint) in relation to what I love (abstract painting)? In what way can I be in proximity to abstraction? I don’t think of my practice in terms, like figuration or abstraction, so much as in questions about what role abstraction plays in the negotiation of image, object, and self-­expression. It’s rare that I come up with an idea theoretically and then find the object I need to use to represent that idea. Wandering through thrift stores, walking, driving — ­doing all the things that I do every day — ­something will grab my attention and then I begin to think with it and research it. This process can take weeks or years. Sometimes it never amounts to anything, and other times it expands into a suite of works that extends far beyond what I would have expected. I can’t put everything I’m thinking into one single frame. So the series has become a way of positioning meaning as something that comes from time, living with the work, living with the ideas, living in Chicago. It’s not about having an idea and articulating it clearly and concisely in this framework, but about letting the framework generate a series of ideas that constantly fan outward. I think with all of that, the most substantial role that Chicago has played in my practice is the ongoing diversity of cultures, people, and their interests and labor that stem from so many different traditions. In Houston I had to look really hard for inspiration, but in Chicago inspirational confrontation with people and materials can occur daily if you want. RR: I wonder, Matthew, if making a series allows you edge toward abstraction, a kind of wiggling away from the single image that we call representational. With a series, you have the opportunity to reimagine, reinvent the composition. In principle that’s what people involved with abstraction do, like improvisation in music. JRK: I like wiggling away, like the rabbit or the duck, shifting back and forth.

350

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Richard Rezac, Untitled (13- ­0 6), 2013. Aluminum, painted cherry wood, and cast polyurethane, 8 ½ × 30 ¾ × 17 ½ in.

MM: Absolutely! Although I wonder if the phrase “wiggling away” seems too reactionary, like some sort of representational avoidance mechanism. Perhaps I could instead suggest distortion, where the root of the tone is present but illegible in the thick of its distortion. It remains both itself and something wholly other. It’s also a way of using abstraction’s theory against itself. I couldn’t think of a way of amplifying flatness more than the rabbit-­duck question, but with an object and its image. One is far more aware of the flatness of the image at that moment of oscillation than the flatness in a Rothko, which transports and rarely falls back onto itself. That insistence on flatness is a way of confusing thoughts about illusion, and like capitalism, I find illusion to be a powerful tool. JRK: Let’s talk about color in your work. RR: I have a predilection and some tendencies. I’ve always thought about color more as a material and less as a surface phenomenon. For about twenty-­five years I’ve used a high-­end Dutch house oil paint for my sculptures. Occasionally I use it out of the can, but most often I intermix stock colors. Somewhat like a process of elimination — ­I know what it cannot be. An early decision is, does the material of the sculpture show? If it’s wood or metal, then obviously applied color has no role, as the color of the material informs the surface also. If a painted color is too bright, too neutral, or too dark, there’s no shadow play or it becomes too emblematic. I normally end up with tertiary colors that are usually pastel, related to, but rarely one of the primaries or secondaries. MM: Any color I use is a reference to something. If I use wall colors, it could be the architectural color of a space where a painting hangs, an institutional color or the color of the object that I’m representing. Color is one of the most time-­consuming and intensely considered

351

MAT TH E W M E T ZG E R AND R I C HAR D R E Z AC

aspects of my studio practice. Something doesn’t become what it is unless the color is correct. I have archived a set of colors that I call my palette, and I deploy them in different ways — ­as shadows, as grounds, or as the surfaces of objects, but always in a way to build content in the work, like using metaphor in writing to say more with a single sentence. Sometimes I have to decide whether the object needs the possibility of reflection in real time and space, or do I negate “active” perspective by painting a reflection that represents my position as a viewer without moving. The answer is about mixing reflective color or polishing a surface so it reflects. JRK: Has Chicago shaped your practice in important ways? MM: Yes, definitely. I feel my art practice really began here in Chicago. I’ve taught adjunct at the University of Chicago and Northwestern. Now I’m full-­time at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The students here in Chicago and the institutions I’ve been lucky enough to teach at have fundamentally changed my practice. I learned to be a more careful listener and critical thinker. I became a slower reader and a more patient advisor. The risk I want students to take in their work and research, I’ve realized I needed to start taking in my own practice. I think studio practices can dangerously produce a type of tunnel vision, on both the world and yourself. But as often as I begin to think that everything has been done, a student surprises me with a magnificent gesture, idea, or accident. Either way, that resonates with me and keeps me thinking. I feel extremely lucky to be a teacher to such extraordinary students as the ones at UIC. RR: I suppose my formation was of a generation and at a place that prized forms of modernism, or at least independence in a firm way, and a kind of self-­reflection, self-­examination; a hermetic form of generating art. Then there’s my involvement with art history, my travels, and the admiration I have not only for art but for architecture. Looking closely at other cultures and time frames, there’s a natural reverberation, and I allow aspects of those experiences to become manifest in parts of the sculpture I make. That’s as far as the work goes into an outer ring of contemporary social cultural identity. It’s held within an aesthetic that is quite private but also within the larger history of art.

AMANDA WILLIAMS was raised in Auburn-­Gresham on the South Side of Chicago and trained as an architect at Cornell School of Architecture. Here, Maggie Taft discusses Williams’s 2014– ­2015 project Color(ed) Theory, which explored the role of architecture and art in transforming cities.

In predominantly white, middle-­and upper-­middle-­class neighborhoods across the city of Chicago, demolition tends to presage development; two-­flats and worker cottages are razed to make way for new condominium buildings. But on the South Side, vacant or condemned buildings are often demolished with no real plan for the empty lots that replace them. Between 2014 and 2017 there were more than four hundred demolition permits issued for West Englewood alone, a neighborhood covering just over three square miles. In 2014 and 2015 artist Amanda Williams painted, then photographed, the exteriors of 

352

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Amanda Williams, Crown Royal Bag, from Color(ed) Theory Suite. 2014–­2016. Color photograph, 13 ½ × 20 in.

eight unoccupied Englewood houses slated for demolition. Her palette — ­Harold’s Chicken Shack (red), Currency Exchange (yellow), Crown Royal Bag (purple), and Flamin’ Red Hots (orange), to name a few — ­comprised hues rich in culturally coded associations related to her upbringing on the South Side. The project was both a formal study of  the effect large shifts in scale and context have on color and a politically charged gesture. The project gained national visibility and acclaim when the photographs were included in the first Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015), an event that drew over four hundred thousand domestic and international visitors. Within the neighborhood, however, reaction to Color(ed) Theory was as varied as Williams’s palette. Some Englewood residents thought it highlighted negative stereotypes about the community, while others welcomed a project that could spark dialog around so many interrelated issues: racism, land ownership, inequitable access to resources. Rather than offering answers, Williams poses questions about these broader national problems, focusing attention to the complexity and messiness of  the erasure of  black urban space. “These houses were invisible in plain sight for years,” she notes, “Could they regain value just through the act of  painting? Who gets to declare them valuable, and when? How are those declarations expressed?” Beyond drawing attention to systemic neglect and inequality, Williams remains committed to creating work that contributes to making all parts of  cities (and especially Chicago) thrive. “We’re sitting on a gold mine of land and human capital, but the policies and forces at the root of denied access to ownership and self-­sufficiency have historically been rendered invisible. This project aimed to literally bring them to light.”1 1

Amanda Williams, quoted in Novid Parsi, “Amanda Williams Turns Abandoned Properties into Art,” Chicago, July 18, 2017, accessed September 10, 2017, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/July-2017/ Amanda-Williams.

353

Amanda Williams, Flamin’ Red Hots, from Color(ed) Theory Suite. 2014–­2016. Color photograph, 13 ½ × 20 in.

Amanda Williams, Ultrasheen, from Color(ed) Theory Suite. 2014–­2016. Color photograph, 13 ½ × 20 in.

354

MICHELLE GRABNER , artist, curator, and founder of the Suburban, which in 2015 relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, reflects on what it meant to bring artists and artwork out of the city and into a garage gallery in the Chicago suburbs.

Oak Park is a first-­ring Chicago suburb and the location of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic 1896 home and studio. In the winter of 1999 my husband, Brad Killam, and I began hosting exhibitions in a small concrete-­block outbuilding situated between our stucco house and our two-­ car garage at the intersection of Lake Street and Harvey Avenue. We launched the Suburban with an exhibition by the artist David Robbins, who tastefully hung a single framed photomontage composed of images documenting the Chicago version of his social performance Ice Cream Social. It was important to us to kick off our project space with an artist well known for embracing the freedoms of an independent imagination. I recall that the opening reception drew a handful of friends and a clique of students. Also in attendance were Susanne Ghez and the British artist Darren Almond, who was in town preparing for his exhibition at the Renaissance Society. During this first reception we gathered in the garage because the gallery was too small for more than five adult bodies. Nearly twenty years later, the Suburban has hosted more than 350 artist’s exhibitions and projects. In addition, eight to-­scale simulacrums of the little yellow cubic building have been erected to further host artist’s projects in museums, parking garages, and sculpture parks from London to Knoxville. Friesenwall 120 in Cologne, Thomas Solomon’s Garage in LA, Dogmatic and Bodybuilder and Sportsman galleries in Chicago, Matt’s Garage in London, and Bliss in Pasadena each served as inspirations for the Suburban. But its grounding and longevity is fostered in a working combination of  critical theory and a conventional family life in the Chicago suburbs. Theoretically, we embraced the idea of  an alternative that cohered around the complexities of  critique. Taking on a minor relationship to exhibition, display, spectatorship, and interpretation in a suburb of  an interior American city meant that the project would be inevitably political. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us in their analysis of  Kafka’s literature, “Its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.” 1 The Suburban’s marginality and smallness allows it to have ambiguous edges while staying rooted in the customs of  Chicago’s vicinity. Its Oak Park locality and its midwestern regionality reterritorialize and reimagine art’s official discourses. In a vernacular landscape the Suburban has dodged commercial and not-­for-­profit exchange, offering instead a range of  associations far removed from the power of  predictable cultural transactions. Its goal has always been to set up complex tensions by occupying contradictory relationships. It is a space that is both personal and professional, private and public, domestic and pedagogical, autonomous and authoritative. “Place is where we have power [and] that is where we must act to assert social power that flows beyond place and across space to other places.”2

1

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.

2

Gabriela Kütting and Ronnie Lipschutz, Environmental Governance: Power and Knowledge in a Local-­Global World (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3.

355

M I C H E LLE G R ABNE R

Lars Breuer, Wall Painting, as installed at the Suburban, 2009. Collection of Kunsthaus NRW, State Northrhine Westfalia, Germany.

These critical positions fit seamlessly onto the conventional timeline of raising children in the suburbs. Valuing public K–­12 education and a close relation to Chicago’s diverse and discursive metropolis, we invited artists to come to us in Oak Park. Influenced by artists who have worked with family as a conceptual and structural foundation — ­Ben Kinmont, N. E. Thing Co., Merle Laderman Ukeles, Dennis Oppenheim — ­making a gallery that was tethered to our domestic arc was both pragmatic and strategic. By offering a continuous platform for artistic agency, the Suburban has made it possible for us to experience and to identify various contrivances of  artistic practice. It is an ongoing project that insists upon the “wide-­awakeness so essential to critical awareness.”3 The minor space of  the Suburban, rooted in a midwestern fringe, cross-­navigates the politics of home, community, and the international art world. For artists, the Suburban makes possible “the creation of a provisional analytic field that provides for these artistic projects’ multiple affirmations, pursues and/or mirrors their shifting energies, and defers any final positioning of their artistic and cultural status.”4 3

Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978), 173.

4

Nicholas Paley, Finding Art’s Place: Experiments in Contemporary Education and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 12.

356

In this interview with Maggie Taft, critic and gallerist

J OHN CORBET T discusses the origins of his gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, how the market for art from Chicago is changing, and how collectors are crucial actors in the history of art.

M aggie Taft: You grew up in Chicago, but then moved out east for college. What drew you back? John Corbet t: What drew me back was that my then-­wife was in medical school at the University of Chicago. We moved here in 1987, and I started doing three things. I started teaching at the School of the Art Institute. I worked at the Astrophysical Journal at the University of Chicago. And I started organizing concerts. Unbeknownst to me, all that really formed the nucleus for a lot of the things I do now. And then the following year, in ’88, I started graduate school at Northwestern and I got my PhD there. MT: When you were teaching at SAIC, what department were you in? JC: I taught at SAIC until 2013. I started in the Sound Department, and then I migrated around. I was in Liberal Arts, teaching music history classes, and then I was in the Exhibition Studies program under Arts Administration. I ended up ultimately teaching for about five years in Painting and Drawing. There were two significant things for me in terms of my own career. First, in 2001 or 2002, I chaired Exhibition Studies, and that was really the turning point for me in terms of beginning to think about doing less live music programming and focusing instead on visual arts curation. Second was then teaching in Painting and Drawing. I’m not a painter or a drawer, but I had started doing a lot of curatorial work, I was handling a lot of paintings, and I was in touch with Chicago art history in a way that not many people were, except for the people who were part of the history and a few curators, like Lynne Warren, Mark Pascale, Susan Weininger, Richard Born, and Robert Cozzolino. I started getting asked to teach classes in painting and drawing, and that ended up being part of the backdrop for forming the gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey. It opened in 2004, but Jim Dempsey and I had been working together for a year before that.

Jim Dempsey and John Corbett, 2017. Photograph: Joe Mazza, Brave Lux Inc.

357

J OHN C OR BE T T

MT: You mention that you were uniquely familiar with Chicago’s art history. Where did that knowledge come from? Why had you sought it out? JC: It came from a few things. First, it was the product of participating in an arts community with a history that I initially knew very little about. From a musical standpoint, I was very invested in understanding how the history poured down on the present. And so in the mid-­’90s I started doing a lot of work to understand the origins of improvised music. I was digging up work from the 1950s and ’60s that wasn’t very well known. It occurred to me that the same sort of thing needed to done for the visual arts. I asked myself, why do I know so much as an amateur art historian about New York’s art history and even Los Angeles’ art history, and I know so little about Chicago’s? So I started looking around, and quickly figured out that the reason was that there was an underdeveloped infrastructure. Art historians hadn’t turned their attention to it, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a rich repository of material. I also just have the collector gene, which sent me out into the world. I realized there was still a lot of stuff in secondhand shops that was primary source material for this history. I started looking around and buying things and putting the history together. I figured out the numerical system that the Art Institute used when it had exhibitions, numbers they would put on the backs of paintings, and you would see things out in the world that had that. And I began to realize, Oh, if a painting has that, that means it was in a show at the Art Institute. So then I started going to the Art Institute, going to the Ryerson Library to dig out the catalogs and look up what show a piece had been in. It became a puzzle for me to try and sort those things out. And then there was the fact that a lot of the people who were part of Chicago’s art history were still alive. It turned out that all you needed to do was call them and they would say, “Come on over. I’ve got an attic or a basement full of whatever.” I did that a number of times. You also have to figure Jim Dempsey into that whole mix. We had a mutual fascination, and we started talking to one another. That’s basically what we started the gallery for — ­to explore the history of art in Chicago. MT: Is that still the gallery’s mission? How has it changed? JC: It’s changed a fair amount, but it’s a matter of ratio more than anything else. When we started the gallery, we never at any point thought to ourselves, “We’re a historical gallery” or “We’re a Chicago gallery.” We thought, historical Chicago is something that we can do. At that point Robert Henry Adams Gallery was ramping down, and that meant we would be one of maybe two or three galleries that had anything to do with Chicago. Richard Norton was around. But we thought maybe we could do Chicago in a way that hadn’t been done. So from the beginning, part of the idea was to mix it with contemporary art. For example, we worked with Peter Brötzmann early on. He was already a good friend and colleague of mine from a music standpoint. But he was also a contemporary German artist, not a historical figure from Chicago. At the beginning we showed something like 70 percent historical Chicago and 30 percent contemporary, and now it’s more like 20/80. We’re still very dedicated to historical Chicago, but we see it in a much broader field. At a certain point, in 2008 or so, after the gallery had been around for four years, we realized that we would not be able to do nearly what we wanted to do for artists from Chicago, both historical and contemporary, if we restricted ourselves to showing them in this narrow frame. We decided that one

358

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

way to open up the frame would be to show major contemporary figures from around the world who had a logical reason to be shown in Chicago but hadn’t been shown, or who had been inadequately presented. That’s become a major part of what we do. That was when we started showing Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Joyce Pensato, and many others who we work with regularly now. It was a big change for us, and it really helped us in the mission to expand who knew about the historical figures that we were talking about, and how to frame them alongside other very high-­level work. MT: How did the gallery end up in its current location? Until very recently, there weren’t many galleries nearby. JC: We landed on Ashland Avenue just south of Division completely by accident. Jim and I started the gallery thinking that we would be private dealers and that we would find interesting shit and show it to people who were interested in interesting shit. If we could find something for $500 and sell it for $2,000, that would be a good find. And so we rented a former plumbing supply space on Foster that had a roll-­down door like a garage, which is basically what it was. We never showed anyone anything in that space. We had it basically as a storage space. But it was the first place — ­we put “CvsD” on the door. And it was the first place where we began to fantasize about ourselves having a space. At a certain point we started being introduced as gallerists, and we realized we probably needed a place to exhibit. So we asked my friend Rick Wojcik, who knows a lot about the city, if he might know of someplace to look. And he said, “You know, my upstairs space is open.” Jim and I told him we were looking for a small storefront space, but he said we should at least look. We reluctantly went up and looked, and of course it was perfect. But it was perfect for us two steps ahead of where we were. We said we could never afford it, and he said, “Well, what does that mean?” So we whispered a ridiculous number in his ear. And he said, “Well, let’s try that, and if you guys are successful, we’ll figure out a way to do it.” And that was it. That’s how we ended up there. We’ve always loved the space. The first show we did there was of Eve Garrison’s WPA-­ era cityscapes. What was on the walls rhymed with the brick walls themselves and the backs of the apartment buildings we could see looking out our windows. It all came together as a piece. Peter Schjeldahl came into the gallery once, and he looked around and said there was way too much distraction. We’ve continued to put things on our brick walls but we did ultimately agree with him that having a little less windowscape was a good idea. So we’ve closed up some of the windows. MT: When you and Jim started the gallery in 2004, was there an audience or a market for a gallery with a strong emphasis on Chicago artists? Or did you see part of your mission as also building up that audience? JC: Both. Part of what worked in our favor was that there was a latent need. Institutionally, there was almost no interest. But there were a handful of rabid collectors, and a lot of people who were interested in having the story of Chicago art told to them in segments. We also had our own enthusiasm. Neither Jim nor I ever thought to ourselves, “Maybe we’ll be gallerists.” But we realized this was a way for us to minimize obstructions to doing what we wanted to do. We shoot ideas back and forth with one another. We critique one another. We’re able to move quickly. We’re able to move decisively. MT: How have you seen things change from the time when the gallery was started to now, in terms of the knowledge people have and the market for this kind of work?

359

J OHN C OR BE T T

JC: I think now it’s more generally understood that Chicago is a place that has an art history. I’m not going to take credit for that, but I think we did have a hand in it. A lot of people have been working on the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. So the Imagist era is now in the books. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. For example, the regional specificity of American art-­making in the 1930s and ’40s is very poorly understood. People often talk about an American style, but there are really interesting variants from place to place. Like the influence of surrealism, or the political content or lack thereof. There’s also the history of videography in Chicago, which is a very important and rich history that doesn’t get any play. And then performance — ­at one point Chicago was one of the main hubs for performance in North America. If we want to see the whole enchilada, we really need to pay attention to some of this stuff. MT: Once you started digging into the history of art in Chicago, what did you discover that was especially exciting? JC: I think what was exciting to me was partially an artifact of Chicago having been outside of the loop to some degree. It had the positive attribute of being a place that was open to all sorts of input. For example, you had museum action that was very au courant, so that artists could immerse themselves in the way those in a dense metropolitan center should. But there was (and still is) a poorly developed commercial infrastructure. As a result, artists here haven’t had commercial pressures. I pretty quickly began to see that in the work I was looking at from the ’30s and ’40s. The work looked different. It seemed to me that artists didn’t feel they had to conform to popular modalities like abstraction. On the other hand, some artists definitely were aspiring to those modalities. You could see work that had that aspiration. Pretty early on, Jim and I became very interested in what kinds of abstract painting were going on here. I think Chicago brings together all sorts of things from other places and makes its own thing out of them. But it also makes room for all these super-­eccentric individuals. So on the one hand you have people like Morris Barazani who were fluent in all sorts of different ways of painting and might pull something from one or another of them for a particular canvas. And then you have people like Robert Amft, and he doesn’t look like anybody. He was a total weirdo. I mean, his work is absolutely as strange as can be, out on a limb. Or what about Gertrude Abercrombie? Where do you put her in any typology of twentieth-­century art? No place. To me, Chicago seemed to be a place that had very interesting things going on. And I would argue for its exceptionalism. I’m not saying that it’s better than other places where there was a better-­developed commercial architecture. I’m saying that it’s different. Once you identify that, the question is why. And I’m not sure what the answer is. In 2007 we did our big show at the Chicago History Museum, Big Picture: A New View of Painting in Chicago. It was a funny show to do because it made the preposterous claim of looking at the history of painting in Chicago from the beginning until now. We weren’t doing it any sort of encyclopedic way, but it gave us an opportunity to think about the major moments. For me, the show was about putting something on the table to argue about. You need to have something to disagree with, and you need enough voices to disagree. We’ve gotten there with the Imagists. Rather than lump it all together, people are looking at it as a rich ecosystem. MT: Why do you think discourse around the Imagists has matured in a way that it hasn’t around other parts of Chicago’s art history? JC: If you’re asking, “Why has the work from the 1960s been successful in a way that a lot of

360

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

the other work hasn’t?” then I think it comes down to a commercial issue. People don’t usually acknowledge the relation between the commercial and the historical, but I think an honest art historian would admit that the reason they’re looking at certain works and not others probably has something to do with the work’s relation to a commercial infrastructure. If a work has no relation to that commercial infrastructure at some point, not necessarily in the life of the artist but in the life of the work, it’s very unlikely that art historians are going to be paying attention to it. So in the case of the Imagists, we have to think about collectors. A dealer tipped me off to this: you have young collectors looking at collections of the highest-­level New York artist from the 1960s, Pop in particular, and saying, “I want to do that.” But what are they going to buy? There isn’t a Warhol you can find unless you’re a hedge fund gajillionaire, and even then you’re going to get a second-­or third-­or fourth-­rate one. All of the top-­notch ones are gone. They’re out in the world. They’re in museums. So if you have enough sense to know that all you’ll have is a rinky-­dink collection, you think to yourself, “What else could I do?” And if you’re a dealer, you think about what you could do for a collector who wanted to put together a Pop art collection. What would have the same zing, would be in the same ballpark, but would allow them to collect at the top and be uniquely their own? Five years ago, that was still possible with Imagism. Dealers began to think about that, and the savviest collectors realized, “Holy Shit, I could pay ninety million dollars for a top-­notch Warhol, or I could buy all of the top notch Imagist material available in the world for ninety million dollars. I could have that collection.” It’s a whole mindset about the buying and selling of things, and I think it’s very positive in the sense that it’s about cultivating a certain attitude of patronage and an attitude about collecting that says, be specific, don’t be a head hunter. You’re not looking for a trophy, you’re looking for something that has integrity, and something that will express its greatest value as part of a system of objects. That’s a real collection to me. It’s a way of thinking about how history works, and about how regionality works. These are the same sorts of thing that scholars think about, though collectors may be thinking about them in terms of dollars and cents. But I think that’s really cool. If objects get into safe hands and, hopefully, end up in public institutions, it means that they’ll be available for scholars to work with in the future. If you look at the commercial side of it from a rapacious standpoint, dealers are just trying to make a buck on history. The other side of it is what we’re arguing for, a substantial value for work that we believe in, because if you can do that, you ultimately have a platform for arguing for its meaningfulness. You’re ghostwriting the history, because you’re pushing it out there and letting somebody else make sense of it. I’m very sad that a lot of artists don’t understand this. You have somebody like Ray Yoshida, who was quite bitter about a variety of things, not the least of which was probably that he wasn’t better known. When he died, he willed all of the work in his collection to institutions. That’s the surest way to decide that the work will never really be known apart from the most specialized of viewers. Because unless it gets into the commercial marketplace, unless it becomes part of collections where it can be understood as part of a system of objects, nobody’s going to fully understand what it is. It’s going to go into the basement, and it’s going to be brought out every ten years if you’re lucky. Artists often think, “I’ve got to get into a museum!” But if the work doesn’t pass through the phase of having been part of collections out in the world, where other people begin to get interested in it and jealous of it and excited about it, the work misses out.

361

J OHN C OR BE T T

MT: Earlier you mentioned discovering work in secondhand shops. Any especially memorable discoveries? JC: This is a funny one because it does not actually pertain to a Chicago artist, although it engages one. Jim and I were both habitués of secondhand stores. They were run by people who went to estate sales and found amazing things and then brought them back to sell them. This was right on the cusp of the internet being the massive tool that it is now. So there was still the possibility of finding things, especially if you had been doing what we’d been doing, which was pouring over books about artists from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. There was a little secondhand store on Western Avenue, and I used to go in there a lot because the guy got some pretty interesting things. But he was also sort of an amateur collector himself, so he would pull things out that he found particularly interesting. He was a very cunning dealer. He had found a couple of 1930s charcoals by Rudolph Weisenborn, a Chicago artist who was affiliated with the WPA who became an abstract painter in the ’50s. He had them framed, and they were sitting in the back room against the wall. I had noticed them and asked him about prices on them a couple of times. One of them was a really great portrait. So then I go in one day, and I’m looking around and there are a couple of unframed things sitting in mats, leaning against a wall. I look at them, and I immediately recognize what they are. They’re by Thelma Johnson Streat, who in 1941 became the first African American woman to have a work bought by MoMA. I knew about her because of Ann Eden Gibson’s book Abstract Expressionism and Other Politics, which is a great repository of images by people on the periphery of Abstract Expressionism who were marginalized as a result of being people of color or queer or women or some combination thereof. I was totally fascinated by this book, and I’d been going through it, looking at images. And one of the images in the book is a cousin to one of the pieces in this guy’s store. And I’m like, “Oh my God.” So I walk up to him and I say, “Do you know what this is?” And he says, “You tell me.” I tell him, “That’s not my job.” So we play a little game back and forth, and finally he says, “I don’t know, I can’t read the name. It looks to me like Strap or something.” I shrug and ask him what he wants for them. He says he scavenged them for the frames and was going to just throw them out. So then I dropped a ploy I’d use from time to time. I tell him, “I think my wife would like them. They’re kind of pretty.” He knows I’m up to something and says, “You know what they are.” And I said, “Do I?” And he goes, “Yeah, you do.” But then I have this idea. I ask him how much he wants for the Weisenborn and he says $900. So I say, “I’ll give you $700 for the Weisenborn if you throw in these others.” And he says, “Fuck you. Show me the money.” So I bought them. But here’s the thing. I knew one more piece of information. I had read that Streat was the first African American woman to show in the International Watercolor Exhibition at the Art Institute, which was one of the museum’s three annual shows — ­there was the American exhibition, the Chicago and Vicinity show, and the watercolor exhibition. So in the early 1940s, the International Watercolor Exhibition included two works of hers. One of them was called Robot, and its whereabouts were unknown. Well this piece was titled Robot. So I knew what it was, where it had been shown, and what had happened to it. And it was just a matter of having all that crap running through my brain and piecing it all together. I think that the pictures came from Charles Sebree’s estate. This guy at the secondhand shop had bought the dregs of it after Sebree died, and I suspect Sebree, who

362

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

was an African American artist, had bought Streat’s watercolors out of the Art Institute show for his collection. And then they ended up at this secondhand shop. There was stuff like that all over the place. There’s not anymore. It’s like good records. You can’t find them anymore because of the internet.

Artist and arts administrator

T HEASTER GATES discusses his practice’s rootedness in Chicago and its global reach with art historian

REBECCA ZORACH .

Rebecca Zorach: You were born in Chicago and grew up here, and you have moved around internationally, but you’ve always returned to Chicago. And a lot of your work involves some kind of transit between places. I’m thinking about your invention of Shoji Yamaguchi and the idea of migration from Japan to the American South, and your own travels to Japan and movement back and forth between identities, or something like the Huguenot House, where you had a venerable building in Germany rebuilt with materials that came from Chicago. What’s “Chicago” about any of those projects? Theaster Gates: I’ve been thinking about the idea of site for a long time. I never really thought about myself as being in Chicago or not. I always thought simply that this is where I live. When people think about site-­specificity, they think about the thing being in a particular place. But when I was going to Japan, I was also bringing Japan back home, and the site “Japan” was in the work, not in Japan, the place. I spent my summers in Mississippi until I was eighteen, so I had a sense of Mississippi. I was really trying to infuse the idea of that site into my work. I’d be in Germany but thinking about Chicago, so I brought Chicago with me. I brought materials from Chicago; I brought people from the city and the music of the city. If I was discussing in some way movement and mobility, it was always with the understanding that one can occupy multiple places at the same time, and that a place is always multiple sites. A work of art — ­an object or a way of thinking about process — ­is always occupying multiple sites. The part that feels especially Chicago is, at some point, I had to make a decision about whether I would stay in Chicago or leave, because it was directly connected to the future work that I wanted to make. I was interested in restoration work and preservation and making big objects, and if I were going to dig into those big ideas, I had to have a location. To stay in Chicago was very intentional. It was in part because my family was here that I felt a strong connection, but in part because I had developed such an amazing, complicated network of different kinds of people. The city offered so much, and the city needed artists who were doing well in their practices to stay. I felt very much like, if this is the moment where people now go to LA or New York, let’s see what happens if I stay. Can one grow a viable artistic practice with the wings that I was developing in Chicago, and make it work?

363

TH E ASTE R G ATE S WITH R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

I wanted to see if that was possible. I had been a teaching artist for, I don’t know, twelve years while I was working at the CTA and working at Little Black Pearl, so there were all these networks that I just felt I didn’t want to leave once my art career started to grow. I kept investing. And then those investments started turning into the sense that you could also really change the way a place works and feels if you stay and commit yourself to being present and doing the work. RZ: Are there particular moments, artists, events, or institutions in the history of Chicago art, or even just in the history of Chicago, that you look to as particularly important for your work? TG: Yeah, there are three moments that are worth clearly articulating. The first are the Kwanzaa events that would happen at Malcolm X College on the West Side. It was one of the earliest moments where I saw a particular kind of nation building, a kind of black collective where people had a set of beliefs that were marginal to the rest of the world that I lived in, even different and autonomous from my everyday black life. It was like the Africanists, the radical activists and the African dancer and drummer and merchant. There was Saturday school where you were learning Swahili and African dance. The original Malcolm X College was a place that was a gathering space for black radicals. That space really made an important impression on me. RZ: As a young person, like high school age? TG: Middle school, high school. It started because one of my sisters was at community college there, and I got to see that world a little bit. The second place is the Velvet Lounge. When I moved back to Chicago, it was actually not to visual art but to the music and the spoken-­word scene. So there was Velvet Lounge and a place called Africa West on the West Side, and I would go back and forth between those places three or four times a week, hitting the poetry nights and the live music nights. It was these vocal performances mixed with live experimental jazz music that kind of gave me a deeper understanding of the fact that I was a creative person with a set of skills who could do cool shit. RZ: The experimental character of those kinds of spaces. TG: Absolutely. And then the third space is the Experimental Station, where I was renting space from Dan Peterman. After the fire in 2001, Dan and Connie [Spreen] were trying to pick up the pieces. There were rumors of The Baffler starting up again. Jamie Kalven was around. They were developing little spaces inside the building. I did a Butoh performance with the early Black Monks of Mississippi. I was going to the bread bakes early on, every time there was one. I even gave some advice at times as to the way the market might be developed. I had hard conversations with them both and with others. Dan became a really important mentor, introduced me to Dan S. Wang and others; many people came through there, radical old-­school black activists. There was something about the ideology there that really helped me imagine myself as an artist who had the right to make things that I thought about, whatever they were, whatever medium it was in. It was Dan [Peterman] who said, I think it’s time to really invest in Dorchester, where I lived at the time in a former candy store, and have a project that you can do in an ongoing way so that as your art career in the world does whatever it does, high and low, you always have a place where you can be a maker. That was super elegant. Dan gave me permission to take the model of the Experimental Station and other things that were happening around

364

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

me, to achieve those things and then root myself. It was really about rooting myself in a place and choosing to be there, and so I did that. I did that and I said, I’m going to invest in Dorchester, I’m going to do things on my block. I’m going to do things for black people, and I’ll do it with whatever resources I have, which at the time wasn’t very much, and I just kind of kept doing that. RZ: What about Ken Dunn, who runs the Resource Center [a not-­for-­profit dedicated to finding new uses for underused and overlooked resources]. Was he important for you? TG: Yes, so Ken is like the grandfather. Ken and Dan, then me, and there were others like Material Exchange [Sara Black, John Preus, and David Wolf’s collective dedicated to developing projects around waste and surplus materials]. As I started thinking about Dorchester, that’s when Ken became a bright light in my world. Ken had the best ideas, the best intentions, and no administration. I have a lot of administration and some good ideas, and then I’m in tension with the things that would be considered high or low. When you put those things together, it makes an amazing cultural mashup of possibility. In a way, Ken is my philosophical godfather because he just never stops working. He would say, “I’m going to keep working. I have some successes, I have some failures. I’m just going to keep working, because ultimately it’s just about the work. Somebody had to do the composting.” RZ: That idea of digging in and building the space as an institution also reminds me of the way the community invested in the South Side Community Art Center when it was first founded. There was government money available through the WPA, but people in Bronzeville had the foresight to buy the building, not just rent a space to hold classes that the federal government was paying for, but actually create roots there. TG: I definitely think that if there’s anything radical about what I’ve tried to do, it’s the structural stuff. I’ve been talking about Dorchester Projects lately as a kind of abstract urban land art. Instead of creating a Spiral Jetty, what happens when the land work happens in an existing place, with people of diverse concerns, but the ambition of the work of art lives as a complement to that?

Theaster Gates, Dorchester Projects, Chicago, 2012.

365

TH E ASTE R G ATE S WITH R E BEC CA ZOR AC H

R Z: That’s really interesting. I think sometimes critics or art historians get anxious about social practice art because they worry that the art dissolves too much in the social work, neighborhood development, events. The way you’re talking about it now, it sounds like the space and people of the place — ­Chicago or your neighborhood around Dorchester Projects — ­are the medium and the material of the work. TG: There are definitely a few things in that. I never stopped making. So in a way, as I was building the buildings, those buildings were informing things that I wanted to make, and vice versa. I’d finish a building, and I’d write a song about it. I liked the song, and then I wanted to make new kinds of work about the thing that I just sang. So I think that there was a commitment to developing the muscle of the visual arts, and making that muscle stronger over time. What started to happen is that the construction projects started to get more public attention, or at least more Chicago attention, while the other parts of my practice had been exported. So there was a kind of imbalance in Chicago about how I spent my time. I just kind of got quieter and worked on my buildings and made art. I didn’t have a visual arts footprint in the city, or in some cases, in the country, because most of the work was happening outside the city. But about people and raw material: it’s not that I imagined Ms. Irma or Mr. Jones, who lives next to 6901 [the original site of Dorchester Projects], as raw material. It’s that if one is going to make an ambitious work of art in a place, one has to consider the people of that place. My agency has to be in conversation and sometimes in tension with the other folk who have agency in a place. I think that’s what makes the Arts Bank so interesting, that it is as much a painting to me as it is a space that has an agenda, and then there are other people with competing agendas who really want to use the space or acquire the land, want to petition about what the space should do. It’s a privately owned, publicly active space. RZ: Can you talk about your relationship to the University of Chicago? I mean first, about the way your work with the university looks to people in the neighborhood? TG: In the first couple of years of the Arts Block [a University of Chicago–­sponsored effort to convert a South Side street into a cultural corridor], we were trying to do everything for everybody, and I think we did a reasonable job, having not done anything like that before. But it still felt like an indicator, to a particular kind of elder in the community, that the university was creeping west and they were using culture to gobble up more real estate. In fact, the university already owned the land, and I felt I was using the university to create a stronger cultural sphere in a way that demonstrated they could be a good neighbor. All of that work, to me, felt part and parcel of the practice — ­whatever you want to call the practice — ­even though it was sometimes political, sometimes negotiating, sometimes social, sometimes activist-­leaning, or at least having a cause. What made all of that possible was that my art career was gaining more notoriety and I was actually enjoying the administration of it all. I was less and less held down by the need for a job every day, so the relationships that were developing in other communities meant that I could make greater demands of the university, and the university would be a bigger ally. RZ: I’m curious about how much you can use the university as a platform to get certain things done that you want to get done, that are important to you, that are a part of your real ethical commitments. But also, how much the university uses you to present a certain image of itself. Has it ever felt like there’s a breakdown where you’re not getting enough of what you need or it’s too much of the other?

366

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Theaster Gates, Civil Tapestry (Dirty Yellow), 2012. Decommissioned fire hose, 59 × 80 × 5 in.

TG: We’re political friends in that there might be causes that we have in common, and for those things we fight together. And then there are other things that I believe in, and I fight for them, and I think that the university doesn’t always want me fighting for things outside of our engagement. The more that I grow the sphere of fighting outside of the things that I do at the university, the more they question, “What are you fighting for?” But I’ve never felt that the university did not appreciate my causes; there were simply some causes that had to be “mine” and not “ours.” RZ: So that means your commitments are outside the university’s sphere of influence. TG: There are moments where I feel like, if the activist world would prefer the word “radical,” and the business world would instead use “innovation,” could there be a radical innovation of our own space to harness the possibilities that live in seemingly distressed neighborhoods and underfunded neighborhoods, and do great things? If there were no funding available I would still be doing what I’m doing; I actually love living around and with black people, and the moments where I’ve tried living in higher–­net worth environments, they were not comfortable environments to be in for me. It was like, “Y’all don’t want me here, so why would I be here?” It didn’t feel good, and this is in white communities but also mixed communities, where it’s like, I’m not middle class aspiring, or upper class aspiring. There’s a social conceit that I have that varies every day. It’s a willingness to move between lots of different kinds of everydays.

367

In this conversation with Maggie Taft,

LIN HIXSON PETER TAUB

performance artist and educator and curator

consider the individuals and groups in the city’s performance scene as it shifted between the 1980s and today.

Maggie Taft: When did you arrive in Chicago and what brought you here? Lin Hixson: I moved to Chicago from Los Angeles in 1986 to find a new way of making and thinking about performance. I needed time to do this. Most of the people I worked with in LA were connected to the entertainment industry in some way. They were always on call. This made it difficult to make a commitment to an extended rehearsal process. I met Matthew Goulish in LA at a place called Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and Workshop, and he said, “I have a company in Chicago. Why don’t you come and work with us?” It was Timothy McCain and his brother Greg McCain, and with Matthew they had a group called The Scan. They were taking classes with the actor and comedian Del Close and interested in systems and structures. I was interested in collaboration and physicality, and we were both interested in taking time and care to create a performance. Our first rehearsal together took place on Thanksgiving Day in 1986 in an apartment on West Caton Street in Wicker Park. We discovered the performance by making it. I was the director and they were the performers, but the process was nonhierarchical. We became the company Goat Island to acknowledge that egalitarian idea and the idea that when collaborating, everyone should work from their strengths, so the roles were different. Our process was slow, even glacial. I found this tempo liberating and distinctively different from Los Angeles, strangely connected to Chicago. Maybe it was the weather, the winters inside. But the city seemed to give a noncompetitive permission to move in this way. Peter Taub: Part of what made Goat Island distinctive was that you were working outside of existing, defined structures of storefront theaters and nonprofit organizations. You made a deliberate choice to be in residence at a church. You were bringing people into your structure rather than following conventional performance support structures. LH: That’s true. We tried as a company to consider every action we made creatively and practically, even though these actions were very small in the larger scheme of things. We were all volunteering at CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador). They were working with different organizations in the city, and one of them was the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ at Wellington and Broadway. We deliberately located ourselves at that church because they supported CISPES and had a sliding-­scale child care center, a gay and lesbian church, a homeless shelter, and a sanctuary movement. We produced and performed in their gymnasium and also did activities with the various groups in the church. This particular place gave us so much, and as a young company helped us to define ourselves in relation to others. MT: How did you get to Chicago, Peter? PT: I was living in New York spending too much of my time just making enough to tread water. I came in the early ’80s in search of an artistic community that would feed my artistic practice and to go to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute. I had looked at a couple other places, but SAIC was the one that seemed to have the most permeable boundaries

368

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

between media and between artistic disciplines. At the time SAIC was not the major landowner that it is now, and most of the activities were focused in a single building with routes of access between different floors, and that was attractive to me. MT: This fluidity between media that you observed at the school — ­did you also see that echoed in the Chicago art community at large, or was it distinctive to the school because of the architectural realities of the building? PT: There were definitely influential people who moved in cross-­disciplinary ways, and some were attracted here for that reason. Dan Sandin, for example, came to teach in the Video Department at SAIC and was exploring the potential to develop new media with computer circuitry. Early on he advocated for an open-­source approach. He ended up at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at the intersection of art and computer science. It wasn’t only that Chicago was a place of multidisciplinarity but also the cultural moment. In the ’80s the visual art world was becoming rapidly commodified, but some artists were also rejecting that path by developing unsalable or noncommodifiable work, whether it was performance or video or installations, as well as expressions that leveraged multiple disciplines. There was a kind of ethic and cogency around why people would work that way. At Randolph Street Gallery and other organizations where artists were the lifeblood, the artists wanted to use the space not so much to advance their own artistic practice as to provide a platform for the kind of work they were interested in. We all developed a sense that being an artist meant not only being in your studio or your rehearsal space but also being a curator, an educator, a community organizer. We understood that a creative sensibility was important as a way to ground artistic practice in a kind of multifaceted or multidimensional identity.

Goat Island, The Lastmaker, 2007.

369

LIN HIXSON AND PE TE R TAU B

MT: What role did Randolph Street Gallery (RSG) play in this? PT: The organization started in 1979 at 853 West Randolph Street, just west of Halsted. (I don’t know what restaurant that is now.) Then it moved to Milwaukee Avenue, into a building owned by Lewis Manilow. Lew and Susan Manilow are key Chicago art collectors, and Lew was very involved in the development of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He was also a real estate developer, and he wanted to create a new center of creative activity around Chicago Avenue and Milwaukee, which was a little bit of a limbo zone, because when the freeway was built in the ’60s it had cut off a lot of streets. Volunteers developed programs, which were basically all run by artists, including tremendous programs in both performing arts (with Hudson as the first performance curator) and visual arts, and the organization grew rapidly. But it ran into financial problems, and the staff couldn’t maintain the momentum. Then there was a brief period when there was no one on staff, and that’s when I was hired, in 1986. I was charged with regaining financial stability and rebuilding the staff. Over time, we expanded the arenas of activity to include a public art program and a grants-­to-­artists program, and we enlarged the physical footprint to include an installation gallery. Early on in my tenure at RSG, I wanted to figure out who the community was, what the constituent communities needed. So I organized a town hall to gather people from the performance community together and ask, What do you need? One of the things people said they needed was critical recognition for their work in these transitory forms. Whether by design, principle, or circumstance, they were often presenting their work only once, and many of them didn’t have the tools or the money to document it. In response, Brendan deVallance, who was a performance artist and had worked in mail art, really before the start of zine culture, said he wanted to launch a performance art journal, and so we decided to do that together. I worked as something of a managing editor, while he was the producing and artistic director of P-­Form. I like remembering this, because it was not only an act of will and commitment but a response to a real need and desire for a self-­organized community to advance what they were doing. LH: One of the things about this community was its critical thinking. P-­Form had it all there. It was representative not only of the diversity of thinking but of the openness to the different forms it can take. This was also embraced by RSG. Recently, the company I have now, Every house has a door, did a performance based on the RSG archives. We did the beginnings of nine performances that were staged at the gallery. Except one of them, instead of a performance, was Mary Jo Schnell’s preshow announcement from May 23, 1992. This preshow announcement was incredible. It was about nine minutes long and gave a vivid picture of the vitality of Randolph Street Gallery by just naming what was happening there — ­feminist, lesbian, queer, African American, national, and international wildness. PT: RSG was very much a center and gathering place of diverse artists. Mary Jo directed the time-­arts programming for a number of years, and the multidisciplinary artist Joan Dickinson led it during a long stretch of the ’90s. There were so many distinctive artists in the Chicago performance community, and they were also quirky in really stimulating ways. Lawrence Steger was developing extended operatic pieces at the same time he was developing long-­term collaborations with people like Iris Moore and, later, Ron Athey. In 1992 Joan Jett Blakk ran for the US presidency as the Queer Nation candidate. Matthew Owens

370

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

Every house has a door, 9 Beginnings: Chicago, 2014. Matthew Goulish, in performance at the Gray Center Lab, University of Chicago.

expanded his prosthetic puppet works with a series of open mic Pet Shows. There were a lot of collective efforts that RSG served, like the Women’s Action Network, and the Mad Housers homeless initiative, and the Day without Art/Visual AIDS events, and the Spew festival that Steve LaFreniere and friends threw as the first-­ever convergence of zines — ­which was even emceed by Vaginal Crème Davis. I think the Chicago performance community was also fed by the range of national and international artists that RSG presented and developed projects with. People like Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneeman, Karen Finley, Pomo Afro Homos, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Ron Athey, Guillermo Gomez-­Peña and Coco Fusco . . . LH: What’s interesting now is that performance extends into so many artistic forms. At SAIC, where I teach, almost all of the studio departments have performance classes. It’s an accepted part of their curriculums. In the late ’80s, there were photography or sculpture students who were more performance-­oriented in their practice. But they used to come to us in the Performance Department to study. Now there are specific classes in Fiber Studies, Sculpture, or Photography that focus on performance. The students seem to be interested in producing and creating across forms. One’s body of work could include performance, installation, and painting depending on what form an idea or concept demands. Recently, different departments around the city have built up their faculty with performance in mind. The University of Chicago bringing in performance and theater artist Pope.L and Jessica Stockholder, who makes body-­scaled sculptural installations — ­that shows a real effort there. Matthew [Goulish] is teaching at UIC, doing advising, and they invited him in consideration of his performance background. Sector 2337 recently opened in Logan Square as a project gallery and bookstore. But they invited Every house has a door to curate a performance series there with an accompanying catalog and essays. The Renaissance Society is also now regularly curating performance. PT: One of the shifts between now and twenty years ago or so is that today we recognize more

371

LIN HIXSON AND PE TE R TAU B

of a performative dimension to contemporary life. (And that’s not only within the art world — ­it’s suffused throughout our culture.) Some of the things that twenty years ago were described in visual art or conceptual art terms, we might now contextualize as performative. Here’s an example: Dan Peterman was working for and keeping his studio at the Resource Center, Ken Dunn’s recycling place that eventually became much more than recycling. Dan saw a group of regular guys who would collect cans and bring bags of them to the center in exchange for cash. Thinking about this, he devised a project in which he cast large ingots from recycled aluminum, in the shape of roughly pressed coins, that were all pretty much the same weight and worth a certain amount, though the per pound price fluctuated. They were all stamped with numbers so he could track them. And he would place them on different blocks in roughly the same neighborhood — ­Hyde Park, Woodlawn. He tracked where he placed them and which recycling centers they were brought to. RSG presented a gallery version of the project in 1987 that included a map showing the ingots and their movement patterns, making a case for the specific flow and overall ecology of this alternative currency. Dan was doing a piece that was in a sense collaborative with these street guys who had developed their own gray-­market economy. Today, I’d talk about this as performative. LH: Another change is that artists now occupy different roles. They’re not only making work but — ­often out of necessity — ­funding, producing, publicizing, and educating an audience about their work. PT: Before, artists in the performance community took it as a given that they’d self-­produce and present their work. That spread into group efforts that advanced the community too. Artists created different spaces to try out new work. One was Club Lower Links, in the basement of Links Hall, when they were on Newport in the Wrigleyville area. One of the longtime board members of Links, the composer and improvisor Michael Zerang, started programming the bar that was in the same building. He collaborated with the bar’s proprietor, Leigh Jones, who came from the film industry. Michael created a platform for artists to organize series, so someone would get the next six Tuesdays or a month of Thursdays. And each of those platforms served as a gathering place for people to try out material. This was in the ’80s to the mid-­or late ’90s. And there were other places as well. But the funding structures were more available for organizations than for individuals. Some organizations chose to direct that money to individuals, but when artists were paid it was an honorarium rather than a living wage for their time and work. At least through the mid-­’90s there was a commitment reinforced through the NEA via the Grants-­to-­Organizations program, which supported paying money to artists. LH: Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council had individual fellowships that were really helpful. MT: What about museum support for performance? As far as I can tell, when the MCA opened its new building in 1996 and formally launched the Performance Department, that was very significant for the city. LH: That was a big moment because they hired Peter, which was a signal to the Chicago arts community that they were serious about performance. PT: It was a great opportunity to build a new platform. The MCA did that in recognition not only of the importance of performance in visual culture, but also because the organizational DNA was constituted in part by performance-­based work. When the museum started in

372

C H I CAG O S PE AKS , 1990 – PR E S E N T

1967 as a noncollecting kunsthalle, some of the first shows had performance at their core. It wasn’t simply performances alongside exhibitions or performers doing live action in the galleries. There were also exhibitions that were defined as performative. One of the early ones, in 1969, was Art by Telephone — ­it was a conceptually driven project consisting of artists phoning in instructions for the MCA curator on the other end of the line to interpret and carry out in different ways. It made sense for the MCA to go back to performance. Of course it was also a strategic effort to acknowledge the way museum culture has shifted from one that prioritized the object to one that now foregrounds experience alongside the object. Lin, you mentioned that the different departments at SAIC have been infiltrated by performance. I think that’s true in museums also. Live experiences between artists and audiences are a key way for a museum or any kind of cultural organization to engage its publics. The focus of MCA programming went beyond performance art, though — ­we prioritized the content and quality of artists’ expressions, but in terms of form we focused on interdisciplinary dance and theater, as well as experimental music. And from early on we aimed to produce and present about a third of the projects in collaboration with other Chicago organizations. We always wanted to make the institutional resource of the MCA into a shared platform that attracted and served a broader public. LH: The landscape was really changing then. Randolph Street closed in ’98. And the same thing was happening all over the country, in every major city — ­experimental, artist-­run organizations were closing. Randolph Street brought together a lot of different forms and people into one space, one room even. It was a meeting place. After it closed, things became more distributed in the city. PT: My sense is that a generation of artist-­run organizations in Chicago, places like Randolph Street, N.A.M.E., Artemisia Gallery, were very much part of the culture wars. We wanted to be visible and powerful as organizations — ­similar to how individual artists were claiming space for their diverse identities and visions. Randolph Street wanted to occupy space even though the organization was small, and to leverage one kind of validity by being stable. That played into the decision to buy our own building. Of course other organizations took an opposite approach, saying, “Screw that. We’re just going to focus on programming.” But whether because of the spirit of the times or because of shifting interests, those organizations lacked viability for the next generation of artists after the intensity of the culture wars — ­and that’s why it made sense to close in the late ’90s. In Chicago, and I’m sure in other cities, once something is gone, people feel compelled to valorize it. People say how great Randolph Street was, and beyond the generalizations, when you actually look at the projects we did, many were significant and deeply moving. It’s interesting for us to say now that there’s a resurgence of artist-­run efforts or entities, because I’m not sure it’s a resurgence so much as just a surge. I’m not sure there’s a hearkening back to an earlier time so much as a new wave of development that reflects the economic and social realities of our time. Individual artists and independent companies are once again seen as crucial for a healthy arts ecology. I also think there’s a collective awareness of social concerns — ­and so the richness of expression and the urgency of artists’ voices is relevant now and going forward. And finally, both independent artists and organizations can readily use digital and electronic platforms, and those tools transform how we develop and disseminate the work we do.

373

Painter

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL contributes a brand new Mastry comic strip that presents a poignant view of Chicago’s cultural richness.

375

AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

This book is the culmination of  years of  work by the authors, the collective vision of  the editors, and the conviction of  others in the art community that such a volume is necessary. It also reflects a sustained devotion to publishing interdisciplinary work on Chicago’s culture at the University of  Chicago Press. In turning its attention to this complex and multifaceted history of  Chicago art, the Press reaffirms its commitment to deepening our understanding of  the city’s place in the world. It is our hope that the present work will advance that mission and promote new waves of  scholarship in the field. The current project arose from conversations initiated by our colleagues at the Terra Foundation for American Art in 2012 as they surveyed the state of scholarship on Chicago’s art history in preparation for their Art Design Chicago initiative. One of  the most frequently expressed wishes of  academics, artists, critics, and curators was for a single volume exploring Chicago’s art history. It is to the credit of the Terra Foundation that it invited the University of  Chicago Press to develop a book independently to fill this gap. It was the meeting of  perfect partners. We are grateful to the Press for taking on the challenge and to the Terra for its generous support at every stage of the project. We especially thank Elizabeth Glassman, president and chief  executive officer of  the Terra Foundation, along with Peter John Brownlee, Sara Jatcko, Jennifer Siegenthaler, and Eva Silverman. Numerous individuals — ­archivists, artists, colleagues, collectors, librarians, and friends — ­assisted our authors along the way. Their generosity and belief  in this project re­fueled us at many key moments and sent us in fruitful new directions. We wish to thank especially the late Dennis Adrian, Kate Aguirre, Abdul Alkalimat, Susan Klein Bagdade, Marissa Baker, Meg Black, Richard A. Born, Leslie Buchbinder, Catherine Cooney, Huey Copeland, John Corbett, the late Eldzier Cortor, Thomas and Fabrizio Cozzolino, Romi Crawford, Margaret Denny, Dominick DiMeo, James Falconer, Hannah Feldman, Theaster Gates, Hanne Graversen, Art Green, Sharon Grimes, Red Grooms, Lorri Gunn, the late Barbara Jones-­Hogu, Chuck and Kathy Harper, Melanie Herzog, Richard Hunt, Alice Ireland, Rob and Frances Kohler, the late Ellen Lanyon, Brian T. Leahy, Heruanita McIlvaine, Thomas McCormick, Faheem Majeed, Eugene B. Meier Jr., Christina Michelon, Carolina Fernandez Miranda, Amy M. Mooney, Gladys Nilsson, Patrick Noon, Richard Norton, Jim Nutt, Mark Pascale, Michael W. Phillips Jr. and Oliver Zorach-­Phillips, Kymberly Pinder, Kerig Pope, John Reinhardt, Susannah Ribstein, Viveca Pattison Robichaud, Suellen Rocca, Mark Rogovin, Barbara Rossi, Bart Ryckbosch, Barbara C. A. Santini, Mary Savig, Daniel Schulman, Robert A. Sengstacke, Murray Simon, the late Evelyn Statsinger, Jordan Stein, Lisa Stone, Nancy Thebaut, Daniel Tucker, John Weber, Melissa Williams, Sherry Williams, Karl Wirsum, Mary Woolever, Sarah Yarrito, Ann Zelle, and Marc Zimmerman. The authors also wish to thank the staff of  the following research collections and institutions for invaluable assistance, which not infrequently went beyond the call of duty: Archives of  American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Chicago History Museum Research Center; Newberry Library Special Collections Department; Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of  Chicago; Special Collections and Preservation Division, Harold Washington Library; Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Woodson Regional Branch, Chicago Public Library; and Archives of the Polish Museum of  America.

377

ACK NOW L E D G M E NT S

This book has its present form due to the excellent work of many people at the University of  Chicago Press. Thanks go to editorial associate James Toftness, who served as the project’s coordinator extraordinaire. With patience and grace, he kept everyone on time and on mark and solved innumerous problems that arose along the way. For this and more he deserves special appreciation. Image and permissions editor Katie Levi did remarkable work tracking down this book’s many illustrations. Erin Hogan masterfully coordinated and edited the sidebars. Judith Russi Kirshner brought vital knowledge, expertise, and wisdom to the final chapter. Early on, colleagues John Corbett, Susanne Ghez, and Matthew Jesse Jackson offered the Press invaluable advice on the project. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to Susan Bielstein, our editor at the University of  Chicago Press, for conceiving the approach to the book and hosting numerous writing workshops for contributing authors. Her tough love and inspiring commitment to the project made us all work harder. The very sharp tip of her famous red pencil has impressed itself on every page.

378

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1



from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 3 vols. (Chicago: A. T.

Chicagoan,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 56, no. 3,

Andreas, 1884–­1886), 1:506, 2:556–­62, 3:419–­25.

“Emancipation Centennial,” special issue (Autumn 1963): 451. 2

Art across America, 285–­92; and A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago

Thomas A. Meehan, “Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the First 8

Gerdts, South and the Midwest, 285. Andreas, History of Chicago,

Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the

1:506, calls Brookes “the first artist in Chicago.” On Brookes, see also

Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 137.

Esther Sparks, “A Biographical Dictionary of Painters and Sculptors in Illinois 1808–­1945,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1971), 1:74–­75.

CHAPTER 1 1

9

Simon & Schuster, 2003), 65.

(June 1892): 411–­32. 2

The foundational themes of Chicago’s early art history are perceptively

10

Andreas, History of Chicago, 2:556.

analyzed in Neil Harris, “The Chicago Setting,” in Sue Ann Prince,

11

James Parton, “Chicago,” Atlantic Monthly 19, no. 113 (March 1867): 343, quoted in Pierce, As Others See Chicago, 120.

The Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–­

3

1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3–­22, to which my

12

Parton, “Chicago,” 327, 334.

account is indebted.

13

Ogden, quoted in Miller, City of the Century, 121.

Much of the scholarship on Chicago’s early art history, from which

14

Olmsted to [?] Field, April 11, 1871, Ezra McCagg Collection, Chicago History Museum, quoted in Sowle, “Chicago’s Pioneer Art Collectors,” 4.

this account is partly drawn, remains unpublished, in graduate theses and dissertations. Public awareness of this history is further hampered

15

that museum holdings of works by Chicago artists of the nineteenth

(New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons., 1867), 400; Marie de Mare, G. P. A.

and early twentieth centuries either are rarely shown or have not been

Healy, American Artist: An Intimate Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century (New York: David McKay, 1954), 225–­26.

presented in the context of the city’s art history. Albert Fleury, “Picturesque Chicago,” Brush and Pencil 6, no. 6

16

the Fine Arts: Catalogue of the First Exhibition of Statuary, Paintings,

York: Harper & Bros., 1893), reprinted in As Others See Chicago:

&c., Opened May 9th, Burch’s Building, cor. Wabash Avenue and Lake St. 1859 (Chicago: Press & Tribune Print, 1859).

repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 300–­301.

17

W. Volk Miscellaneous Collection, Chicago History Museum, quoted

rather than artists’ activity. On Pittsburgh, see William H. Gerdts,

in Dryer, “First Art Exhibition in Chicago,” 30. See also Paul M. Angle,

The East and the Mid-­Atlantic, vol. 1 of Art across America: Two

“Chicago’s First Fine Art Exhibition,” Chicago History, o.s. 2, no. 11 (Spring 1951): 321–­27. 18

Andreas, History of Chicago, 3:758–­60. White sold oils as well as

& Historical Center; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,

19

Sparks, “Biographical Dictionary,” 1:76–­77.

1997). On Omaha, see Gerdts, The Plains States and the West, vol. 3

20

On the Sanitary Commission fairs in Chicago, see Daniel Greene,

1990), 283–­99, and Gabriel Weisberg et al., Collecting in the Gilded

paints; some may have been for uses other than as artists’ materials.

Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–­1910 (Pittsburgh: Frick Art

of Art across America, 73–­74, and Jo L. Wetherilt Behrens, “‘Painting

“Nothing Daunts Chicago: Wartime Relief on the Home Front,” in

the Town’: How Merchants Marketed the Visual Arts to Nineteenth-­

Peter John Brownlee et al, Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 89–­93.

Century Omahans,” Nebraska History 92 (2011): 14–­39. Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Some Went This Way: A Forty Year

21

Sowle, “Chicago’s Pioneer Art Collectors,” 5; “Dryer, “First Art Exhibition in Chicago,” 33.

Pilgrimage among Artists, Bookmen, and Printers (Chicago: R. F. Seymour, [1945]), 11. See also Alson J. Smith, Chicago’s Left Bank 7

Handwritten text and printed broadside, Scrapbook, 22c, in Leonard

The few histories of art in these cities likewise focus on art collecting

Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710–­1920 (New York: Abbeville Press,

6

Dryer, “First Art Exhibition in Chicago,” 28–­45; Chicago Exhibition of

(September 1900): 276. See also Julian Ralph, Our Great West (New Impressions of Visitors, 1673–­1933, comp. Bessie Louise Pierce (1933; 5

Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life, Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists

by a lack of exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, and by the fact

4

Joseph N. Balestier in 1840, quoted in Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York:

Lucy B. Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” New England Magazine 6, no. 4

22

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), 3.

(New York: Norton, 1991). On the nostalgic effect of Bigelow’s eastern

For information on the earliest history of art collecting in Chicago,

landscape subjects, see “Art in Chicago: Among the Studios and Galleries,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1881.

I am indebted to Patrick Sowle’s unpublished paper “Chicago’s Pioneer Art Collectors” (author’s files). See also Joel Dryer, “The First Art

23

George B. Carpenter, “The Chicago Academy of Design,” Art Review 1, no. 3 (January 1871): 14.

Exhibition in Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 99, no. 1 (Spring–­Summer 2006): 28–­45, which is partly drawn

24

Elias Colbert, Historical and Statistical Sketch of the Garden City, vol. 3 (Chicago, 1868), quoted in Sparks, “Biographical Dictionary,”

from Sowle’s work. On early artists and art activity in Chicago, see

1:73–­74.

William H. Gerdts, “‘Chicago Is Rushing Past Everything’: The Rise of American Art Journalism in the Midwest, from the Development of

25

Eugene H. Cropsey, Crosby’s Opera House: Symbol of Chicago’s

the Railroad to the Chicago Fire,” American Art Journal 27, nos. 1–­2

Cultural Awakening (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University,

(1995–­1996): 47–­83; Gerdts, The South and the Midwest, vol. 2 of

1999), 45, 52–­53, 62–­63.

379

NOT E S TO PAG E S 14 – 18

26

Andreas, History of Chicago, 2:557. On the intertwined histories of

42

the Chicago Academy of Design and the Chicago Academy of Fine

Henry B. Fuller, With the Procession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

Arts, later the Art Institute of Chicago, see Mary E. Nixon, “The First

43 Celia Hilliard, “‘The Prime Mover’: Charles L. Hutchinson and the

Art Movement in Chicago,” Brush and Pencil 2, no. 5 (August 1898):

Making of the Art Institute of Chicago,” Museum Studies (Art Institute of Chicago) 36, no. 1 (2010): 28.

199–­200; Roger Gilmore, ed., Over a Century: A History of the School

44 On the Academy of Design from the Fire to the mid-­1880s, see

of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1866–­1981 (Chicago: School of the

Andreas, History of Chicago, 3:420; on the early history of the Art

Art Institute of Chicago, 1982), 66–­68; and Thomas C. Buechele and Nicholas C. Lowe, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Campus

Institute, see Gilmore, Over a Century, 67–­79; Buechele and Lowe,

History Series (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2017), 9–­22.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 9–­22; and Kathleen D. McCarthy,

27

Carpenter, “Chicago Academy of Design,” 14.

Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago,

28

“Chicago Academy of Design: First of a Series of Lectures by Professor

1849–­1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 84–­89. The

Antrobus,” Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1868.

seamless transfer between the old and the new academies is noted in

29

Carpenter, “Chicago Academy of Design,” 15.

30

“The Studios,” Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1872.

45

31

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 412; T. Vernette Morse, “Looking

46 Horowitz, Culture and the City, chaps. 1–­5.

Backward,” The Arts 4, no. 2 (August 1895): 39.

47

“Art Notes: The New Academy,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1879. Andreas, History of Chicago, 3:419; Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 411. Hutchinson, quoted in Sylvia Rhor, “Every Walk of Life and Every

32

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 412.

33

Timothy Spears, Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City,

Chicago, 1879–­1955,” Museum Studies (Art Institute of Chicago)

1871–­1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9; Kathleen

29, no. 1 (2003): 24. See also Horowitz, Culture and the City, 58–­59;

McCarthy, “Creating the American Athens: Cities, Cultural

Horowitz, “The Art Institute of Chicago: The First Forty Years,”

Institutions, and the Arts, 1840–­1930,” American Quarterly 37, no. 3

Chicago History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 2–­11; “In the Art Studios,”

Degree of Education: Museum Instruction at the Art Institute of

(1985): 430–­34. 34

Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1895.

Attendance was down significantly at the last IIE, in 1891, the only

48 On the close relationship between the Art Institute’s school and

year an art exhibition was not included. On the IIE art exhibitions, see

museum, see “Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, June 27, 1896, and Joyce

Stefan Germer, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Chicago History 16, no. 1

Woelfle Lehmann, “Art Museum Schools: The Rise and Decline of a

(Spring 1987): 5–­21; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City:

New Institution in Nineteenth-­Century America,” Proceedings of the

Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Chicago:

American Antiquarian Society 105, no. 1 (1995): 231–­43.

University of Chicago Press, 1976), 36–­39; and Kirsten Jensen, “The

49

Peter B. Marzio, “A Museum and a School: An Uneasy but Creative

50

“Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, June 27, 1896. Other museum-­school

Union,” Chicago History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 21, 23–­24.

American Salon: The Art Gallery at the Chicago Interstate Industrial Exposition, 1873–­1890” (PhD diss, City University of New York, 2007). Jensen’s indexes to the IIE exhibitions, as well as the 1859 exhibition

institutions established around the same time include the Buffalo

at Burch’s Building and Chicago’s 1865 Sanitary Commission Fair,

Fine Arts Academy and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, following

are available at http://digital-­libraries.saic.edu/cdm/landingpage/

the model established by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in Philadelphia in 1805.

collection/interstate. 35

The 1875 art exhibition’s organizing committee, quoted in Germer,

51

“Pictures at an Exhibition,” 8. 36

37

(April 1899): 52.

See, for example, “Art in Chicago: From the ‘American Etcher,’”

52

Chicago American, July 17, 1890.

53

Morse, “Looking Backward,” 42; Germer, “Pictures at an Exhibition,”

39

“Students at the Art Institute,” Chicago Times-­Herald, June 2, 1895;

54

“Students at the Art Institute,” Chicago Times-­Herald, June 2, 1895.

traces in detail the complex, shifting relationship between commerce

This writer gives the number of students enrolled at the school as

and aesthetic education in the evolving policies and personnel of the

1,150. Andreas, History of Chicago, 3:419, estimates the city’s artistic

IIE art exhibitions.

population in the mid-­1880s at four hundred working professionals

Germer, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” 8–­10; Lucy Monroe, “Art in

and some two thousand art students. These are generous figures: in

Chicago,” 413.

contrast, the 1890 federal census recorded 376 artists and art teachers

“Notes on Current Art,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1890; Germer,

in the city, a count that likely included commercial and decorative

“Pictures at an Exhibition,” 12, 19.

artists.

40 At least one exposition, the 1875 iteration, had a dedicated space for

Chicago artists (“The Art Exposition,” Chicago Tribune, August 15,

55

“Students at the Art Institute,” Chicago Times-­Herald, June 2, 1895.

56

The Normal School (the teacher training program) was not officially instituted until 1901, however. Gilmore, Over a Century, 73, 75;

1875). In 1877 Chicago artists were represented in a gallery along with

“Students at the Art Institute,” Chicago Times-­Herald, June 2, 1895.

American artists resident in Paris, but this was a different gallery than the one featuring “notable and important paintings,” including a

57

Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the

work by former Chicagoan Walter Shirlaw (“The Exposition,” Chicago

Development of Modern American Art, 1870–­1930 (Chapel Hill:

Tribune, August 17, 1877).Works by Chicago artists comprised as much

University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chap. 1.

as 20 percent of the objects on view at the 1885 IIE exhibition. On the 41

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 411. Horowitz, “Art Institute of Chicago,” 9.

9–­10; Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 413. Jensen, “American Salon,”

38

“Museum, School and Exhibition Notes,” Brush and Pencil 4, no. 1

58

George Ade, “In Chicago but Not of It,” reprinted in Ade, Stories of

number of artists in Chicago, see note 54 below.

the Streets and of the Town from the Chicago Record 1893–­1900, ed.

Germer, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” 12.

Franklin J. Meine ([Chicago]: Caxton Club, 1941), 20.

380

NOT E S TO PAG E S 18 – 23

59

Frances E. Willard, Helen M. Winslow, and Sallie Joy White,

73

“Art Matters,” Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1882.

Occupations for Women: A Book of Practical Suggestions, for the

74

Hutchinson, quoted in “Society in a Museum,” Sunday Herald,

Material Advancement, the Mental and Physical Development,

November 20, 1887. In a democratic spirit, the Art Institute soon

and the Moral and Spiritual Uplift of Women (New York: Success

offered children’s classes, evening and Saturday classes for the benefit

Company, 1897), 366–­70. I am grateful to Margaret Denny for bring-

of weekday workers, public lectures, free admission days, and a wide

ing this source to my attention.

range of exhibitions. Until 1897 it proudly depended on memberships

60 Harriet Monroe, “[illegible] Genius in Work of Art Institute

rather than an endowment for financial survival.

Graduates,” Chicago Examiner, June 17, 1900, in Scrapbooks of Art

75

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 416.

and Artists in Chicago, vol. 1 (microfilm), Ryerson and Burnham

76

Ade, “In Chicago but Not of It,” 171–­72. On the architecture of Chicago’s temples of culture, see Daniel Bluestone, Constructing

Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. 61

Zulime Taft, quoted in Allen Stuart Weller, Lorado Taft: The Chicago

Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), chap. 5.

Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 302n3. 62

63

77

Institute of Chicago (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1990), 22;

Institute of Chicago, 1887); Gerdts, South and the Midwest, 292.

Catalogue of the Eighth Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings

Catalogue of Pictures ([Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1890]).

and Sculpture (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1895). See also

The Art Institute’s copy is annotated by hand: “Art Students’ League,

“Studio Life As It Is,” Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1890. In 1895, the

Chicago.”

first recorded year in which artists served on the jury, entries from

64 The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA, founded in 1805)

New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were judged by three artists from

had a long history of educating women artists and of admitting them

each city, while Chicago entries were vetted by museum trustees and

to Academy membership. Even in the 1890s, however, PAFA had far

officials, with three local artists serving in an advisory capacity only.

fewer women students than the Art Institute, and it did not appoint its

78

Havemann, “Expanded Horizon: Female Artists at the Pennsylvania

79

Century,” in The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World,

80 “Art in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1885.

ed. Robert Cozzolino (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine

81

Weller, Lorado Taft, 11, 14.

Arts, 2012), 31–­41.

82

“Art,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1883; Andreas, History of

On the gendered relationship between the fine and applied arts in

Chicago, 3:423.

Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, see Alice J. Ireland,

83

68

“Art in Chicago: The Structure of the Art World in a Metropolitan

Emancipating Women” (MA thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago,

Community” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1946), 67. See also “Notes on Current Art,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1890.

“What Is Being Done for the Students — ­Improvements,” Chicago

84 Chicago Times-­Herald, October 20, 1895, quoted in “The Art Institute

Tribune, December 29, 1886; Charlotte Moser, “‘In the Highest

of Chicago” (1895 pamphlet), in Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks,

Efficiency’: Art Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,”

vol. 6, 66; Art Institute of Chicago, Catalogue of Paintings Exhibited at

in Prince, Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde, 196.

the Opening of the New Galleries (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago,

W. M. R. French, “Art Institute of Chicago: Report of W. M. R. French,

1890), 16.

Director[,] for the Annual Trustee Meeting of June 7, 1887,” un-

85

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 429.

paginated typescript, Art Institute of Chicago Annual Reports, Art

86

James Spencer Dickerson, “A Chicago Renaissance?” Brush and Pencil

Institute of Chicago Archives (http://www.artic.edu/sites/default/

1, no. 6 (March 1898): 186, 188. On Chicago’s failure to retain its

files/libraries/pubs/misc/N530_.A3_1886-­87.pdf).

resident artists, see also Arthur Nicholas Hosking, “Oliver Dennett

Typescript autobiography, Edgar Spier Cameron Papers, p. 229, reel

Grover,” Sketch Book 5, no. 1 (September 1905): 1.

4292, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Saul E.

87

1894; “Where Art Thrives,” Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1894.

1880s,” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 77–­109. Bennard B. Perlman, The Life, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies

88

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 23–­24; “Little

Andreas, History of Chicago, 3:419–­20. See also Gerdts, South and the Midwest, 292–­93.

Old Englewood, Gem of the Inter Ocean,” Portland [OR] Daily News,

89

“An Historical Sketch,” reprinted in Louise Dunn Yochim, Role and Impact: The Chicago Society of Arists (Chicago: Chicago Society of

December 30, 1887. Perlman’s brief description of this project contains

Artists, 1979), 32.

some inaccuracies. For information on cycloramas in Chicago, I am

90 “Art Matters in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1888;

grateful to Eugene B. Meier Jr. 70

“For the Love of Art,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1895; “Chicago Has Its Studios and Its Bohemian Spirit,” Chicago Tribune, January 28,

Zalesch, “What the Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 69

Chicago Evening Journal, May 28, 1892, quoted in Eugenia Whitridge,

“The Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago: Conservative Ideology 2006), chap. 4.

67

G. W. Steevens, The Land of the Dollar (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1897), reprinted in Pierce, As Others See Chicago, 400.

Academy of the Fine Arts during the Course of the Nineteenth

66

Joseph Kirkland, The Story of Chicago (Chicago: Dibble Publishing, 1892), 347.

first full-­time female faculty member, Cecilia Beaux, until 1895. Anna

65

Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art

Special Exhibition and Sale of Works of Annie C. Shaw (Chicago: Art

“Our Clever Poster Girls and Their Picturesque Work,” unidentified

“The Artists’ Society,” Chicago Tribune, February 17, 1889.

clipping, ca. May 1899, Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, vol. 11, 6–­7

91

“The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1892; A. F. Brooks and

(microfilm), Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

Charles Boutwood, “A Reply to the New Art Club,” Chicago Tribune,

71

“In the Art Studios,” Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1895.

April 17, 1892. See also “The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, March 27,

72

“Report of W. M. R. French,” n.p. See also W. M. R. French, “Art

1892; “Art and Artists,” The Graphic, March 5, 1892.

Students Abroad,” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1889.

92

381

“Notes on Current Art,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1890.

NOT E S TO PAG E S 23 – 3 0

93

“Art and Artists,” The Graphic, April 15, 1893.

94

Lucy Monroe, “Art in Chicago,” 423. On the gendering of subject

105

Yesterdays (Chicago: Daughaday and Company, 1919), 215.

matter in painting, see Swinth, Painting Professionals, 83–­88. 95

96

Edward Blair, “The Chicago Club,” in Caroline Kirkland, Chicago

106

Lucy Monroe, “Chicago Letter,” The Critic 22, no. 579 (March 25,

Ralph Clarkson, “The Art Situation in Chicago,” Arts for America 7,

1893): 185–­86, quoted in Revisiting the White City: American Art

no. 5 (January 1898): 270–­71.

at the 1893 World’s Fair (Washington, DC: National Museum of

Melissa Pierce Williams, Alice Kellogg Tyler (Kansas City, MO:

American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,

Williams & McCormick, 1987), n.p.

1993), 90 (see also 80, 118n88).

97

“The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1892.

107

“Selected by a Jury.”

98

See “Chronology of Chicago Sculpture,” in Ira J. Bach and Mary

108

See, for example, Charles Francis Browne, “Ralph Clarkson,”

99

Lackritz Gray, A Guide to Chicago’s Public Sculpture (Chicago:

Brush and Pencil 1, no. 4 (January 1898): 102; Ida M. Condit, “Art

University of Chicago Press, 1983), xix. On the relative scarcity of

Conditions in Chicago and Other Western Cities,” Brush and Pencil

public works of art in any medium in the 1890s, see “Art of the Year,”

4 (April 1899): 8; and “Chicago, 1897,” Arts for America 7, no. 5

Chicago Record, January 1, 1896.

(January 1898): 300. On conditions in Chicago in the wake of the

Francis D. Millet, quoted in James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s

fair, see Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings (New York: Macmillan,

Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 89;

1930), 284, quoted in Weller, Lorado Taft, 104.

Weller, Lorado Taft, 87–­88. 100

“By Brush and Chisel,” Chicago Tribune, November 27, 1892.

101

Many accounts of decorations for the fair ignore Chicagoans’

109

Sculpture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 26. 110

Capturing Sunlight: The Art of Tree Studios (Chicago: Department

contributions except for those of the Palette Club. See “By Brush

of Cultural Affairs, 1999). When the last artists left Tree Studios as

and Pencil,” Chicago Tribune, November 27, 1892; “Artist Millet

the building was redeveloped in the early 2000s, it was the nation’s

and Assistants: Americans Who Are Busy Decorating in Chicago,”

oldest continuously occupied artists’ studio building.

Chicago Tribune, October 22, 1892; “The Mural Decoration of the

111

Perry R. Duis, “‘Where Is Athens Now?’ The Fine Arts Building 1898 to 1918,” Chicago History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 66–­78.

Columbian Exposition,” The Graphic, March 18, 1893. In fact, Grover executed murals for the Merchant Tailors Building; Alfred Jansson,

112

Florence Kelly, “Hull House,” New England Magazine 18, no. 5

one of a growing community of Scandinavian immigrant artists in

(July 1898): 558; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-­House, with

Chicago, painted enormous landscapes for the Swedish Building;

Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 371.

Charles Francis Browne and George Schreiber painted murals in the

113

C. F. B. [Charles Francis Browne], “Art Gossip,” Chicago Tribune,

114

On the movement toward arts activism among women’s organiza-

June 23, 1895. See also Browne, “Ralph Clarkson,” 102.

Children’s Building; Marie Gelon Cameron contributed murals to the Transportation Building, while her husband, Edgar S. Cameron, only assisted more prominent artists in various buildings; and Richard

tions generally, see Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and

Bock created sculpture for the Mining and Electricity Buildings. In

Their Amateur Arts Associations, 1890–­1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 29–­30.

April 1893 members of the Cosmopolitan Art Club were said to be so busily engaged in work on the fair as to not have time to hold regular

115

Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and

meetings. On the work of Chicagoans at the fair, see “Selected by

the Vision of the Good City, 1871–­1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

a Jury: Reproductions of the Pictures Chosen for the Exposition,”

University Press, 2002), introduction and pt. 1. See also Sylvia

Chicago Tribune, March 13, 1893; “The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune,

Christina Rhor, “Mural Painting and Public Schools in Chicago, 1905–­ 1941” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2004), part 1.

April 16, 1893; and “Art and Artists,” The Graphic, April 8, 1893. 102

Hermon Atkins MacNeil, quoted in James L. Reidy, Chicago

On the decorations of the building, see “By Illinois Women,” Chicago

116

Tribune, April 16, 1893; “Women’s Work in the Fine Arts,” Art

“In the Art Studios,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1896; “Plan a Boom for Art,” Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1897; “Chicago, 1897.”

Amateur 29, no. 2 (July 1893): 35; and “The Illinois State Building,”

117

Lorado Taft, “Art Institute Exhibitions,” Chicago Record, February 28, 1899. See also Dickerson, “Chicago Renaissance?” 185–­89.

The Graphic, June 3, 1893. Alice Kellogg, Pauline Dohn, Marie Koupal Lusk, Caroline Wade, and others painted murals under the

118

“Elkins Prize of Five Thousand Dollars,” The Arts 4, no. 5 (November 1895): 148.

overall direction of Ida Burgess, who also painted a tympanum to accompany the celebrated murals by Mary Cassatt and Mary Fairchild

119

Taft, “Art Institute Exhibitions”; Browne, “Ralph Clarkson,” 102; “Art,”

MacMonnies in the Woman’s Building; see “By Brush and Chisel.”

Chicago Tribune, January 30, 1898. The catalogs for the 1898 and 1899

For the main exhibit hall, a group of Chicago’s rising women sculptors

exhibitions acknowledged the work of the Chicago Art Association in

modeled six large statues on such themes as Faith, Justice, Maternity,

enhancing their “interest and importance”; the “joint management”

and Art; the only other adornment in the building was a large Illinois

of the exhibition by the Art Institute and the Art Association was noted for the first time on the title page of the 1900 catalog.

farmland scene designed by the young Frederick F. Fursman and rendered in locally grown grasses and grains by fifteen young Illinois

120

Hosking, “Oliver Dennett Grover,” 1; Condit, “Art Conditions in Chicago,” 8.

women. See James B. Campbell, Campbell’s Illustrated History of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Two Volumes (Chicago: N. Juul

121

Dickerson, “Chicago Renaissance?”

and Co., 1894), 2:508; Michal Ann Carley, Frederick Frary Fursman:

122

The Municipal Art League of Chicago ([Chicago?]: Municipal Art League of Chicago, 2003), 5–­6.

A Rediscovered Impressionist ([Milwaukee]: UWM Art Museum, 1991), 8–­9.

123

Pullman, quoted in Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York:

103

Weller, Lorado Taft, 73–­78.

Harper & Brothers, 1954), 95–­96. See also Gilbert, Perfect Cities,

104

Janet Scudder, quoted in Weller, Lorado Taft, 76.

chap. 5.

382

NOT E S TO PAG E S 3 0 – 41

124

The Municipal Art League collection was eventually absorbed into

145

that of the Union League Club. 125

126

127

Parton, “Chicago,” 328, quoted in Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 54. On Indian motifs in Arts and Crafts work, see Barter, Window on the

On Baker’s painting, see Union League Club of Chicago Art

West, 47–­54.

Collection (Chicago: Union League Club of Chicago, 2003), 32, 276.

146

Barter, Window on the West, 48.

Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination,

147

Barter, Window on the West, 14–­30.

1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pt. 1.

148

On Burbank’s brief Chicago career, see M. Melissa Wolfe, American

On the development of arts programming at Hull-­House, see Peggy

Indian Portraits: Elbridge Ayer Burbank in the West (1897–­1910)

Glowacki, “Bringing Art to Life: The Practice of Art at Hull-­House,” in

(Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of American Art, 2000), 13–­17.

Cheryl R. Ganz and Margaret Strobel, Pots of Promise: Mexicans and

149

“The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1891.

Pottery at Hull-­House, 1920–­40 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

150

“Homemade Paintings,” Chicago Herald, June 9, 1890. See also

2004), 5–­29. On the larger significance of art at Hull-­House, see Carl

Wendy Greenhouse, “Local Color: Impressionism Comes to Chicago,”

Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 15–­20.

in Chicago Modern 1893–­1945: Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth

128

McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige, 112.

Kennedy, 23–­37, Terra Museum of American Art (Chicago: Terra

129

Hull-­House Bulletin, December 1, 1897, 9, quoted in Glowacki,

Foundation for the Arts, 2004).

“Bringing Art to Life,” 14. 130

131

151

Central Art Association circular, quoted in “Chicago,” American

Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-­House, September

Architect and Building News 47, no. 996 (January 26, 1895): 44.

1909 to September 1929 (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 344–­48;

On Garland as a champion of Impressionism, see Donald Pizer, “A

Glowacki, “Bringing Art to Life,” 21–­26.

Summer Campaign in Chicago: Hamlin Garland Defends a Native

Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-­House, 371; Starr, quoted in Addams,

Art,” Western Humanities Review 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1959): 375–­82,

“The Art-­Work Done by Hull-­House, Chicago,” Forum 19 (July 1895):

and Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (Berkeley:

616, quoted in Glowacki, “Practice of Art at Hull-­House,” 10.

University of California Press, 1960), chap. 8.

132

Condit, “Art Conditions in Chicago,” 9.

133

Condit, “Art Conditions in Chicago,” 10.

1899, in “Scrapbook of Clippings 1894–­1901,” Lorado Taft Papers, box

134

Ellen Gates Starr, introduction, “A List of Pictures and Casts for

41, University of Illinois Archives; Sarah J. Moore, “On the Frontier

Use in Schools Suggested by the Chicago Public School Art Society

of Culture,” Chicago History 16, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 5. See also

152

September 1897,” and untitled prospectus for PSAS, ca. 1900, in

Lorado Taft, “Art by Evangelization,” Chicago Record, December 27,

“Chicago” (American Architect), 43–­44.

Art Resources in Teaching Records, box 46, folder 472, Special

153

“The Fine Arts Department of the Columbian Exposition,” The Graphic, May 27, 1893.

Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. On the Society, see Rhor, “Mural Painting and Public Schools in Chicago,” 47–­62.

154

“The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1892.

135

Untitled prospectus for PSAS.

155

“The Fine Arts,” Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1893.

136

“Art Industries,” Arts for America 7, no. 5 (January 1898): 300.

156

T. Vernette Morse, “The Text-­Books of Modern Art,” The Arts 4, no.

137

Taft to Ada Bartlett, April 30, 1895, quoted in Weller, Lorado Taft,

4 (October 1895): 103. “Art Students’ League Exhibition,” Chicago

95.

Times-­Herald, December 13, 1896; “American Artists and Their

138

Lorado Taft, “The Artist and the City,” Chicago Record, May 16,

Critics,” The Arts 4, no. 5 (November 1895): 140–­41.

1899, quoted in Weller, Lorado Taft, 104.

157

“Artists Are Hosts,” Inter Ocean, December 16, 1896. On the Society

139

Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 7–­9.

of Western Artists, see Rachel Berenson Perry, T. C. Steele and

140

Lorado Taft, “The Fountain of the Great Lakes: Its Origin and Meaning

the Society of Western Artists 1896–­1914 (Bloomington: Indiana

Told by Its Sculptor, Lorado Taft,” clipping from unidentified newspa-

141

University Press, 2009).

per, October 9, 1913, Lorado Taft Papers, box 23, University of Illinois

158

“At the Summer Resorts,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1896.

Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign.

159

Charles Francis Browne, “The Permanent Collections in the Museum

“Notes on Current Art,” Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1890. On

of the Art Institute of Chicago. IV. The Henry Field Memorial

Sullivan’s drive to create a democratic, American architecture, see

142

Collection,” Brush and Pencil 2, no. 1 (April 1898): 2–­3.

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago in 1890: The Skyscraper and the

160

“Art,” Chicago Times-­Herald, February 26, 1899.

Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 2,

161

Hamlin Garland to Peyraud, October 7, 1895, quoted in Janice

and Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination,

Harmer and Miriam Lorimer, Frank C. Peyraud: Dean of Chicago

126–­27, 143.

Landscape Painters (Peoria, IL: Lakeview Museum of Arts and

Mary Lackritz Gray, A Guide to Chicago’s Murals (Chicago:

Sciences, 1985), n.p.

University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7. 143

162

On Native American themes at the World’s Columbian Exposition

River, but these apparently minor works received little critical notice.

and Chicago as a center for Native American–­themed art in

163

“Beauty Spots Which Pass Unnoticed in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1897.

general, see Judith A. Barter, Window on the West: Chicago and 164

Maude I. G. Oliver, “A Chicago Painter: The Work of Albert Fleury,”

Lambert Tree, quoted in William Howe Downs, “Cyrus E. Dallin,

165

G. D. B., “Art and Artists,” Chicago Journal, October 13, 1900.

Sculptor,” Brush and Pencil 5, no. 1 (October 1899): 12, quoted in

166

“A Critical Triumvirate” [pseud.], Impressions on Impressionism

the Art of the New Frontier 1890–­1940 (Chicago: Art Institute

International Studio 22 (March 1904): 21.

of Chicago, 2003). 144

In the 1880s and even earlier, a few artists had painted the Chicago

Barter, Window on the West, 14; Bach and Gray, Chicago’s Public

(Chicago: Central Art Association, 1894), 5; “Help’s [sic] Develop

Sculpture, 154–­55.

Art,” Sunday Inter Ocean, May 5, 1895. Little is known of Needham’s

383

NOT E S TO PAG E S 41 – 54

career between the time he was championed by the Central Art

190

Harriet Monroe, quoted in Regnery, Creative Chicago, 82.

Association in 1894–­1895 and his death in 1931, when an acquain-

191

Weller, Lorado Taft, 99; Garvey, Public Sculptor, 111.

tance published a colorful profile of the artist. See Jerome Beam,

192

Hey, “Five Artists,” 3.

“This Man Loved Chicago: Portrait of a Dreamer,” Chicago Daily

193

Lyn Letsinger-­Miller and Rachel Berenson Perry, The Artists of Brown County (Indianapolis: Indiana State Museum, 1994), 1–­9.

News, March 18, 1931, according to which Needham never sold any of his paintings, which he made purely for the love of it. See also Daniel

194

Harriet Monroe, “Do We Really Underestimate the American Artists?” Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1911.

Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis’: African American Painters in Chicago, 1893–­1945,” in Kennedy, Chicago Modern,

195

Maude I. G. Oliver, “Exhibitions at the Art Institute,” Chicago

40–­42.

Record-­Herald, September 13, 1908; L. M. McCauley, “Art and

167

L. M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, January 2, 1909.

Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, September 12, 1908.

168

“Chicago Will Be Idealized: Palette and Chisel Club Decides to Paint

196

Harriet Monroe, “Inness Paintings Given to Chicago,” Chicago

197

“Colored Man Wins Position,” Chicago Daily News, February 6,

Local Scenes Instead of Rural Ones,” Chicago Tribune, January 11,

Tribune, March 12, 1911.

1905. 169

170

171

“Chicago’s Sluggish Stream Has Its Picturesque Elements,” Chicago

1905. See also “The Whirl of Society,” Inter Ocean, February 9, 1905.

Tribune, August 8, 1897.

On Harper, see Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis,’”

“The Next Three Months,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago

42–­43. Harper is the first nonwhite artist of Chicago noted as such in

2, no. 1 (July 1908): 2; L. M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” Chicago

press coverage of the local art world, but he was not the first African

Evening Post, September 26, 1908.

American student in the Art Institute’s school: Lottie Moss (later

Richard H. Little, “Doing Art with A. Montgomery,” Chicago Record-­

Wilson) is said to have attended earlier, perhaps in the 1870s. I am

Herald, February 16, 1908. 172

173

grateful to Kym Pinder and Daniel Schulman for this information.

Harriet Monroe, “Reception Tuesday Marks Opening of Fall Painting

198

Exhibitions,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1912.

199

Lena M. McCaulay, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Evening Post, January

Kennedy, Chicago Modern, 119. Maude I. G. Oliver, “Among the Artists,” Sunday Record-­Herald, August 7, 1910.

13, 1912.

200

On the Union League Club’s Harper painting, which was deacces-

“Exhibition of Modern Art,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago

sioned in 1984, see Joan Wagner, A History of the Art Collection of the

6, no. 4 (April 1913): 51.

Union League Club of Chicago (Chicago: Art Committee of the Union

175

“Exhibition of Modern Art,” 51.

League Club of Chicago, 2000), 50. On the provenance of August in

176

“A New Movement — ­The Friends of American Art,” Bulletin of the

174

France, see Kennedy, Chicago Modern, 165 (Harper entry, n. 1).

Art Institute of Chicago 3, no. 4 (April 1910): 53–­54. 177

201

In its early years the Friends also brought many now-­iconic works

and Chicago, 1912,” in Prince, Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde, 34–­35.

into the Art Institute’s collection, including Robert Henri’s Young

178

Ann Lee Morgan, “‘A Modest Young Man with Theories’: Arthur Dove

202

Jim L. Zimmer, John Warner Norton (Springfield: Illinois State

Woman in Black and Arthur B. Davies’s Maya, Mirror of Illusions,

Museum, 1993), 11–­12. See also Paul Kruty, “The Blue Sky Press of

both in 1910; Thomas Dewing’s Lady in Green and Gray in 1911; and

Hyde Park 1899–­1907,” Chicago History 11 (Fall–­Winter 1982): 148;

George Bellows’s Love of Winter in 1914.

Thomas Tallmadge and Tom Lea, John W. Norton, American Painter

Kenneth R. Hey, “Five Artists and the Chicago Modernist Movement,

1876–­1934: A Brief Biography of His Life (Chicago: Lakeside Press,

1909–­1928” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1973), 62.

1935), 19–­20.

179

Hosking, “Oliver Dennett Grover,” 1.

180

Gray, Guide to Chicago’s Murals, 16, 20–­21, 150–­51.

181

Gray, Guide to Chicago’s Murals, 350–­55.

182

On the tortured history of the Ferguson Fund, see Reidy, Chicago

204

Morgan, “Modest Young Man with Theories,” 35–­36.

Sculpture, 8–­14.

205

Morgan, “Modest Young Man with Theories,” 29–­34.

183

Timothy J. Garvey, Public Sculptor: Lorado Taft and the

206

Mary T. Swanson, “The Immigrant Molds the Image: The Life of

203

Maude I. G. Oliver, “What Western Artists Show in This Year’s Exhibit,” Inter Ocean, December 10, 1905, reviewing the annual Society of Western Artists exhibition.

Beautification of Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

B. J. O. Nordfeldt,” Swedish-­American Historical Quarterly 42,

1988), 30.

no. 2 (April 1991): 76; Van Deren Coke, Nordfeldt the Painter

184

Garvey, Public Sculptor, 30–­31.

185

Rhor, “Mural Painting and Public Schools,” 74–­92.

207

Hey, “Five Artists,” 84–­87.

186

Richard Murray, “Progressive Era Murals in the Chicago Public

208

Mulligan, quoted in H. Effa Webster, “Europe Eyes Chicago Art,”

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 33.

Schools, 1904 to 1933,” in Art for the People: The Rediscovery and

Chicago Evening Examiner, December 15, 1911, in Art Institute of

Preservation of Progressive-­and WPA-­Era Murals in the Chicago

Chicago Scrapbooks, vol. 28, 98 (microfilm), Ryerson and Burnham

Public Schools, 1904–­1943, ed. Heather Becker (San Francisco:

Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

Chronicle Books, 2002), 61–­67. 187

Stevens, quoted in Murray, “Progressive Era Murals,” 64.

188

Stevens, quoted in David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry:

209

toward the Development of a Vital National Spirit in American Art,” Craftsman 15, no. 2 (November 1908): 153.

The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill:

210

University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 166. 189

Gardner Teall, “Our Western Painters: What Chicago Is Doing

Elia W. Peattie, “The Artistic Side of Chicago,” Atlantic Monthly 84, no. 506 (December 1899): 831.

L. M. McC. [McCauley], “What Art Does for Chicago,” Chicago Evening Post, February 4, 1908.

384

NOT E S TO PAG E S 56 – 77

CHAPTER 2 1

20

Floyd Dell, Moon-­Calf (New York: Knopf, 1920), 394. This passage

Quarterly Review, New Mexico Artist Series, no. 3 (Albuquerque:

would repeat, almost verbatim, as the opening lines to Dell’s The

University of New Mexico Press, 1952), 88.

Briary-­Bush the following year. 2

21

Fernand Léger, “Chicago Seen through the Eyes of a Visiting French

4

Edward Moore, “‘Love for Three Oranges’ Color Marvel, but Enigmatic Noise,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 31, 1921, 11.

Cubist,” trans. Thornton Wilder, Chicago Evening Post, March 15,

22

Schulze and Haydon, oral history interview.

1932, as quoted in Kathy Cottong and Sue Taylor, “Gracious Provoca-

23

John E. Hart, Floyd Dell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 40.

tion,” in The Arts Club of Chicago: The Collection 1916–­1996 (Chicago:

24

Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irvin Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 97, 98.

Arts Club of Chicago, 1997), 16. 3

Ben Wolf, “Raymond Jonson,” in New Mexico Artists, New Mexico

Franz Schulze, oral history interview with Harold Haydon, October 10,

25

Spud Johnson, a friend of Nordfeldt’s in Santa Fe, as quoted in Emily

1988, transcript, p. 37, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

Abbott Nordfeldt, Shared Nonsense from the Letters of B. J. O.

Institution.

Nordfeldt (Lambertville, NJ: Lambertville Historical Society, 1981), 5.

William French, letter to Charles Hutchinson, February 22, 1913,

26

Hart, Floyd Dell, 80.

reprinted in Andrew Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism:

27

Judith A. Barter and Monica Obniski, For Kith and Kin: The Folk

The 1913 Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Museum

Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale

Studies (Art Institute of Chicago) 19 (1993): 56–­57, 38.

University Press, in association with the Art Institute of Chicago,

5

Martinez, “Mixed Reception,” 57.

6

Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York:

2012), 52–­53. 28

Abbeville Press, 1998), 196; Martinez, “Mixed Reception,” 46.

Eleanor Jewett, “Art and Artists: Arts Club Exhibit in New Galleries Study in Extremes,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 23, 1924, I8.

7

Martinez, “Mixed Reception,” 50.

29

Cottong and Taylor, “Gracious Provocation,” 15.

8

Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, vols. 29–­37 (microfilm, reel 5),

30

Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation

Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. 9

of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 121.

Brown, Story of the Armory Show, 208, 196, 203; Martinez, “Mixed

31

Reception,” 48. 10

11

the Arts Club’s annual meeting, May 17, 1923, as quoted in Sophia

“Forgives Chicago for Cubist Mirth,” Chicago Inter-­Ocean, March 22,

Shaw, “A Collection to Remember,” in Arts Club of Chicago, 22.

1913, Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, vols. 29–37 (microfilm,

32

Cottong and Taylor, “Gracious Provocation,” 16.

reel 5).

33

Albion W. Small, “Definition of the Group,” in Introduction to the

The NAACP held its annual meeting in Chicago the next year, with a

Science of Sociology, ed. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (1921;

stated focus on the growing lynching crisis in the United States and its

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 199–­200.

impact on northern states like Illinois. “Chicago Ministers to Denounce

34

Schulze and Haydon, oral history interview.

Lynching,” Chicago Defender, April 20, 1912, 1. For more on the student

35

Paul Kruty, “Declarations of Independents: Chicago’s Alternative Art Groups of the 1920s,” in Prince, Old Guard and the Avant-­Garde, 79.

trial of Henri Matisse, see “Cubists Depart, Students Joyful,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 17, 1913, 3; and Martinez, “A Mixed Reception,”

36

13

“‘Cliff Dwellers’ Satirize the Cubist Art in Pointed Caricatures,”

37

ican Painters in Chicago, 1893–­1945,” in Chicago Modern 1893–­1945:

vols. 29–37 (microfilm, reel 5).

Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy, exh. cat., Terra Museum of

Kenneth R. Hey, “Manierre Dawson: A Fix on the Phantoms of the

American Art (Chicago: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2004), 45. 38

inception in 1879; and most Chicago Art League members — ­not only

New York Times, April 10, 1981, C19. 14 Taylor, quoted in Ann Lee Morgan, “‘A Modest Young Man with

Farrow, Dawson, and Scott, but also Ellis Wilson and Richmond

Theories’: Arthur Dove and Chicago, 1912,” in The Old Guard and the

Barthé, who would later move to New York and become frequent

Avant-­Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–­1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince

exhibitors at the Harmon Foundation — ­had trained there.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 29.

39

1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://

Randy Ploog, Myra Bairstow, and Ani Boyajian, Manierre Dawson

www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-­history-­interview -­charles-­w-­white-­11484. 40 Genevieve Flavin, “Aztecs’ Glory Finds Rebirth in Torres’ Art,”

association with Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2011), 169–­70. Dawson, diary entry dated December 16, 1912, in Ploog, Bairstow, and

Chicago Daily Tribune, November 16, 1947, S11.

Boyajian, Catalogue Raisonné, 322–­23.

18

41

Sue Ann Kendall [later Prince], oral history interview with Aaron

Dawson, diary entry dated April 4, 1913, in Ploog, Bairstow, and

Bohrod, August 23, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

Boyajian, Catalogue Raisonné, 323.

Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/

Dawson, diary entries dated March 27 and April 4 1913, in Ploog,

oral-­history-­interview-­aaron-­bohrod-­12310.

Bairstow, and Boyajian, Catalogue Raisonné, 323. 19

Betty Hoag, oral history interview with Charles W. White, March 9,

The work was Night Dream (Statement), oil on wood panel, 1910. (1887–­1969): A Catalogue Raisonné (Jacksonville, FL: Three Graces, in

17

W. M. Farrow, “Art and the Home,” Chicago Defender, January 24, 1925, 4. The Art Institute had admitted black students since its

1974): 7; Hilton Kramer, “Manierre Dawson, an American Kandinsky,”

16

Daniel Schulman, “‘White City’ and ‘Black Metropolis’: African Amer-

Chicago Examiner, April 2, 1913, Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks,

Imagination,” Archives of American Art Journal 14, no. 4 (January

15

W. M. Farrow, “Art and the Home,” Chicago Defender, December 20, 1924, B5.

52–­53. 12

Roullier’s “Report of the Chairman of the Exhibition Committee” to

42

Nathan Harpaz and Richard Courage, Convergence: Jewish and African

Eleanor Jewett, “News of Interest to Lovers of Art,” Chicago Daily

American Artists in Depression-­era Chicago (Des Plaines, IL: Oakton

Tribune, January 19, 1936, E6.

Community College and the Koehnline Museum of Art, 2008), 8.

385

NOT E S TO PAG E S 79 – 10 4

43 Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human

Wall Decorations at the Century of Progress,” Chicago Daily Tribune,

Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, ed. Park, Ernest W.

May 7, 1933.

Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago

7

44 Kendall and Bohrod, oral history interview. 45

8

Helen Trieglaff, “Contemporary American Artists: Aaron Bohrod,”

Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

46 Kendall and Bohrod, oral history interview.

9

temporary Art Movements,” Art Digest 26 (November 1, 1951): 28.

Free Press, 1948), 11.

According to Rich, the shopgirls and taxi drivers selected “an odd garland containing September Morn, Whistler’s Mother and that old

“Named Most Curious Painting in World’s Fair Exhibit,” Chicago Daily

chestnut, Breaking the Home Ties.”

Tribune, September 8, 1934, 7. 50

Daniel Catton Rich, “The Windy City, Storm Center of Many Con-

Edward Shils, The Present State of American Sociology (Glencoe, IL:

48 Trieglaff, “Aaron Bohrod,” 53. 49

Gifford Ernest, “You Like Fair’s Gay Color or You Don’t, but There Is Nothing Else Quite Like It,” box 3, folder 8, Century of Progress

Parnassus 12 (April 1940): 49, 50. 47

Official Guide: Book of the Fair, 1933 (Chicago: Century of Progress, 1933), 20.

Press, 1925), 40.

10

“Named Most Curious Painting”; Whitney Noble, “Superrealism Is

Robert B. Harshe, foreword, Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1933), xiii.

Contributor to Art,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 21, 1934, G8.

11

“Works by Chicago Artists Loaned by Chicago Collectors, November 2–

51

“A Line o’ Type or Two,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 11, 1934, 12.

52

“Named Most Curious Painting.”

http://www.renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/44/works-­by-­chicago

53

“Lavender and Old Bottles,” Time 38, no. 21 (November 24, 1941): 83.

-­artists-­loaned-­by-­chicago-­collectors/.

54

Jean Dubuffet, “Commentary,” trans. Josephine Patterson Albright,

­November 22, 1941,” Renaissance Society, accessed February 7, 2017,

12

in Frederick A. Sweet, Ivan Albright: A Retrospective Exhibition

Walter Paepcke, letter to Donald N. Nelson, February 3, 1944, box 2, folder 42, ID Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago.

(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1964), 7.

13

This school was to train each student in one of four fields: General

55

Dubuffet, “Commentary,” 7.

Industrial Design, Interior Architecture, Architectural Sculpture, and

56

Edward Alden Jewell, “American Artists Display Canvases,” New York

Printing and Advertising Design. See “Oral History of Norman Lewis

Times, November 11, 1937, 23.

Rice, interviewed by Carole Tormollan, 1944,” 60–­61, School of the Art

57

“Lavender and Old Bottles,” 83.

Institute of Chicago Institutional Archives, SAIC Publications, http://

58

Eleanor Jewett, “Spring Show of Arts Club Opens Today,” Chicago

digital-­libraries.saic.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/saicpub/

Daily Tribune, April 6, 1936, 21.

id/2374/rec/1. For more on the Association’s failed partnership with

Terry Carbone, interview with Eldzier Cortor, Bomb, June 21, 2016,

the School of the Art Institute, see Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, “The Associ-

http://bombmagazine.org/article/630267/eldzier-­cortor.

ation of Arts and Industries: Background and Origins of the Bauhaus

59

60 Eleanor Jewett, “Macena Barton Paints Bravely, View of Critic,”

Movement in Chicago” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1973).

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 18, 1931, 21. 61

62

63

14

quoted in Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, Moholy-­Nagy: Experiment in Totality

1920–­1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 143.

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 139.

Quoted in Kenan Heise, “Off-­Beat Myron ‘Slim’ Brundage” (obituary),

15

Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, Experiment in Totality, 144.

Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1990, D11B.

16

László Moholy-­Nagy, letter to Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, July 16, 1937, quoted

Betty Hoag, oral history interview with June Wayne, June 14, 1965,

in Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, Experiment in Totality, 143.

Archives of American Art, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/

17

Museum of Modern Art, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 5, no. 6, “Bauhaus Exhibition” (December 1938): 5.

interviews/oral-­history-­interview-­june-­wayne-­11642. 64 Harpaz and Courage, Convergence, 9. 65

Norma K. Stahle, letter to László Moholy-­Nagy, May 29, 1937,

Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica,

18

Studs Terkel, Studs Terkel’s Chicago (New York: New Press, 1985), 29.

Letter from László Moholy-­Nagy, May 11, 1945, quoted in Sibyl Moholy-­ Nagy, Experiment in Totality, 218. In 1937 the Chicago Daily News’s famed art critic C. J. Bulliet observed something similar and issued a stern warning to the city: “Chicago will never be of any consequence as

1

CHAPTER 3

an art center until there is some intelligent and responsible force tak-

Mitchell Siporin, “Mural Art and the Midwestern Myth,” in Art for the

ing into keen-­witted and sympathetic account whatever of good arises

Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the

and fostering it to maturity and beyond.” Bulliet, quoted in “Artists

WPA Federal Art Project, edited by Francis V. O’Connor (Greenwich,

of Chicago in 41st Annual Stress ‘Emotional Content,’” Art Digest 11,

CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 64. 2

no. 10 (February 15, 1937): 6.

Farm Service Bureau, “Tentative List of Picture Stories and Points

19

of Interest for the Midwest,” ca. 1942, box 9, folder 4, Arthur Siegel

folder 62, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Papers, Art Institute of Chicago. 3

4

20

Arthur Siegel, “Fifty Years of Documentary,” American Photography,

6

László Moholy-­Nagy to Hilla Rebay, July 19, 1943, RAOF, A0009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Archives.

45, no. 1 (1995): 21.

21

Katherine Kuh, “Inheritor and Activator,” Saturday Review, July 26, 1969.

Watson, quoted in Rita Fitzpatrick, “Views Chicago as New World

22

“The Institute of Design — ­a Laboratory for New Education,” Interiors

Center for Art,” Chicago Tribune, December 29, 1943. 5

“School of Design” pamphlet, Institute of Design Collection, box 3,

108, no. 3 (1948): 136.

Ivan Albright, “Make Chicago an Art Center,” Chicago Sun,

23

Hughston M. McBain, letter to Walter Paepcke, February 6, 1946,

January 10, 1942.

ID Collection, box 2, folder 37, Special Collections, University of

Eleanor Jewett, “Chicago Artists and Institute Students Called On for

Illinois at Chicago.

386

NOT E S TO PAG E S 10 4 – 121

24

25

See Elizabeth Siegel, “The Modern Artist’s New Tools,” in Moholy-­Nagy:

Federal Art Project Exhibitions,” undated brochure, Holger Cahill

Future Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 226.

Files, series 3.12, reel 3482, frame 1137, Archives of American Art,

László Moholy-­Nagy, Vision in Motion (New York: Paul Theobald,

Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/

1947), 5. 26

Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, Experiment in Totality.

27

Serge Chermayeff, from the inaugural address, “Education for Modern

cahiholg/container183706.htm. 48 Golden B. Darby, letter to Committee Members, May 18, 1939,

South Side Community Art Center Papers, box 1, folder 1, South Side

Design,” Chicago Institute of Design, February 4, 1947, published in 28

Community Art Center, Chicago.

College Art Journal, Spring 1947.

49

“The Need for an Art Center,” Defender, June 3, 1939.

László Moholy-­Nagy, letter to Marie Zoe Green, January 5, 1938;

50

“Minutes of Meeting of Interested People Regarding the South Side’s

Frank Holland [clipping], Chicago Sun Times, 1949. Both in Marie Zoe

Proposed Community Art Center,” October 25, 1938, South Side

Greene-­Mercier Papers, box 1, folder 1, Special Collections, University

Community Art Center Papers, box 1, folder 2, South Side Community

of Chicago. 29

30

Art Center, Chicago.

Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Prestini’s Art in Wood (New York: Pocahontas

51

Proposed Community Art Center,” November 7, 1938, South Side

Francis Strain Biesel to Serge Chermayeff, October 3, 1948, Form at

Community Art Center Papers, box 1, folder 2, South Side Community

Play Files, Renaissance Society, Chicago. 31

“In the Making: The New Chicago,” Newsweek, August 16, 1954, 32.

32

Angela Testa, quoted in Lesley Jackson, Twentieth Century Pattern

Art Center, Chicago. 52

Community Art Center, Chicago.

109–­10.

34

35

53

1942, quoted in Murry N. DePillars, “Chicago’s African American

1958 Ben Rose commissioned A. James Speyer, an early student of Mies

Visual Arts Renaissance,” in The Black Chicago Renaissance, ed.

van der Rohe at IIT, to design his Highland Park home.

Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey Jr. (Urbana: University of

Anne Douglas, “Hand Screened, Block Fabric Items Original,” Chicago

Illinois Press, 2012), 181n82.

Tribune, January 1, 1950.

54

Robert Davis, “A Community Adventure,” Defender, March 1, 1941.

“First Showing of Good Design Exhibition in New York,” press

55

“Minutes of Meeting of Interested People Regarding the South Side’s

release, Museum of Modern Art, accessed March 3, 2017,

Proposed Community Art Center,” September 25, 1939, South Side

https://www.moma.org/d/c/press_releases/W1siZiIsIjMyNTc

Community Art Center Papers, box 1, folder 3, South Side Community Art Center.

Francis Chapin, quoted in “Old-­Fashioned Artist,” Time 55 (June 19,

56

1950): 177. 37

57

58

59

60 “Light Workshop” (syllabus), ca. 1940, School of Design Papers, box 3,

Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1944,”

folder 64, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Journal of Design History 4, no. 2 (1991): 106.

61

Alfreda Gordon, “Bohemia with a Haircut,” Chicago Sunday Times,

University of Illinois at Chicago.

Oral history interview with William Carter, October 27–­November 3,

62

1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Arts Club Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago: box 34, folder 493 (blitz), box 29, folder 442 (posters), Box 24, folder 394 (“degenerate art”).

43 Susan F. Rossen and Charlotte Moser, “Primer for Seeing: The Gallery

63

Peter Pollack, “What the Art Center Can Do in ’42: Director’s Report,”

of Art Interpretation and Katherine Kuh’s Crusade for Modernism

Report of the Works Project Administration District 3 for 1942, 5–­6.

in Chicago,” Museum Studies (Art Institute of Chicago) 16, no. 1,

Quoted in Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-­American

“Aspects of Modern Art at the Art Institute: The Artist, The Patron,

Cultural Politics, 1935–­46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999),

The Public” (1990): 14.

99.

44 Katherine Kuh, “Seeing Is Believing,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of

64 Clarence J. Bulliet, “Atomic Bomb a Headache for Our War Artists,”

Chicago 39, no. 4 (April–­May 1945): 53.

Chicago Daily News, August 18, 1945.

Gracy L. McCann Morley, “Museum Trends: Exhibitions,” Art in

65

America 34, no. 4 (October 1946): 204.

For more on the iconography of Moholy’s paintings, see Timothy J. Garvey, “László Moholy-­Nagy and Atomic Ambivalence in Postwar

46 “Hyde Park Art Center History,” accessed July 31, 2016, http://

Chicago,” American Art 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 22–­39.

www.hydeparkart.org/about-­hyde-­park-­art-­center/history. 47

Emery Hutchinson, “Stories of the Day,” Daily News, June 28, 1944, School of Design Papers, box 2, folder 36, Special Collections,

March 24, 1940, 5M.

45

Eleanor Jewett, “Pleasing Work in Exhibit by Chicago Artists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, 1942.

40 Paepcke, quoted in Alain Findeli, “Design Education and Industry: The

42

Polish Arts Club Bulletin, May 1950, folder 26, no. 42, Polish Arts Club of Chicago Papers, Polish Museum of America, Chicago.

Walter Paepcke, “Art in Industry,” in Modern Art in Advertising (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1946), n.p.

41

“Hundreds Attend Craft Show,” William McBride Papers, box 6, folder 13, Carter G. Woodson Memorial Library, Chicago.

Walter Paepcke, “The ‘Great Ideas’ Campaign,” Advertising Review 2 (Autumn 1954): 26.

39

Gordon Parks, A Hungry Heart: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2005): 58.

Astrid Sampe-­Hultberg, letter to Arthur Siegel, February 23, 1950, box 3, folder 7, Arthur Siegel papers, Art Institute of Chicago.

38

Dorothy Odenheimer, “Art News from Chicago,” Chicago Sun, May

The relationship between architects and artists worked both ways: in

1NCJdXQ.pdf?sha=e780f125402923b3. 36

Golden B. Darby, letter to Committee Members, May 18, 1939, South Side Community Art Center Papers, box 1, folder 1, South Side

Design (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 33

“Minutes of Meeting of Interested People Regarding the South Side’s

Press, 1950), 6.

66

“Art in War” (press release), Art Institute of Chicago, accessed

The FAP’s other primary ambition was to identify and clarify what

December 23, 2016, http://www.artic.edu/sites/default/files/libraries/

made American art distinct. “Purposes, Functions, Techniques:

pubs/1942/AIC1942ArtinWar_comb.pdf.

387

NOT E S TO PAG E S 121 – 143

67

68

69

70

71

John Grimes and Charles Traub, The New Vision: Forty Years of

8

“Chicago Artists Assail Institute,” New York Times, June 29, 1947.

Photography at the Institute of Design (New York: Aperture, 1982),

9

Two protest exhibitions of “rejected” artists and their sympathizers

7. See also David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel, eds., Taken by Design:

took place at the Marshall Field Galleries and at Mandel Brothers,

Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 (Chicago: Art

both on State Street. These exhibitions did not fare well in the local

Institute of Chicago/University of Chicago Press, 2002).

press. See C. J. Bulliet, “Artless Comment: Chicago Artists Want

Mervin Kaufman, Father of Skyscrapers: A Biography of Louis

a Protest Show, but Where?” Chicago Daily News, July 12, 1947;

Sullivan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

C. J. Bulliet, “Artless Comment: Gathering Storms Break — ­Recalls

For these and other pictures, see Jeffrey Plank, Aaron Siskind

Rebel Days of 20s Fury of Chicago Artists,” Chicago Daily News,

and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project

June 28, 1947; Frank Holland, “World of Art: No Jury Show Fails to

(San Francisco: William Stout Publishers, 2008).

Attract Anticipated Good Paintings,” Chicago Sun, July 27, 1947;

Elaine de Kooning, “The Photographs of Aaron Siskind,” exhibition

and C. J. Bulliet, “Artless Comment: They Who Get Snubbed — ­

brochure, Egan Gallery, New York, 1951.

Chicago Artists’ Martyrdom Theory Can Be Overplayed,” Chicago

Christine Mehring, “Siskind’s Challege: Action Painting and a Newer

Daily News, October 3, 1947.

Laocoon, Photographically Speaking,” Yale University Art Gallery 72

73

10

Eleanor Jewett, Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1947, quoted in Mary

Bulletin (2006), 88–­89.

Caroline Simpson, “The Modern Momentum: The Art of Cultural

Sherman Paul, “The Photography of Harry Callahan,” in Harry

Progress in Postwar Chicago” (PhD diss., Indiana University,

Callahan (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 9.

Bloomington, 2001), 62n55. See also Eleanor Jewett, “Artists Charge

This — ­“a stage set in light and stone, a deceptively opulent and orderly

Bias in Choice of Institute of Art,” Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1947.

facade” — ­is how Simone de Beauvoir described Chicago when she first

11

Carl Belz, Mitchell Siporin: A Retrospective (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1976).

visited the city in 1947. De Beauvoir, America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 103.

12

Eleanor Jewett, “Local Artists’ Annual Exhibit Incredibly Bad,”

74

Harry Callahan, Water’s Edge (Lyme, CT: Callaway Editions, 1980), n.p.

Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1947; C. J. Bulliet, “Army Artist Wins in

75

Leon Golub, quoted in Chicago: The City and Its Artists 1945–­1978

Chicago Show,” Chicago Daily News, June 14, 1947.

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1978), 20.

13

As though in a scripted melodrama, who should win the Logan

On Callahan’s use of camera movement, see Brendan Fay, “How to

Medal in 1948 but Dalström, selected by a jury of three artists, all

Hold a Camera: Harry Callahan’s Early Abstractions,” History of

with direct ties to Chicago’s art scene: painters Rainey Bennett

Photography 39, no. 2 (2015): 160–­76.

and B. J. O. Nordfeldt, and sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson, a frequent

Katherine Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, [28th] Biennale,

exhibitor and prizewinner at the Annual whose work was included

Venice, 1956 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago), 8.

in the show she juried. Several nonstudent members of Exhibition

77

Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, 7.

Momentum also exhibited in the 1948 Chicago and Vicinity exhibition,

78

Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, 7.

including Miyoko Ito, who won a prize. In 1949 Kuh, Rich, and prints

79

Kuh, American Artists Paint the City, 7, 41.

and drawings curator Carl Schniewind selected artists for the 53rd

76

80 Emery Hutchinson, “Smoked-­Drenched . . . Decadence? Artists Here

81

Chicago and Vicinity rather than relying on a call for entries and a

Get Civic Dander Up,” Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1956.

jury. In the foreword to that year’s catalog Rich explained that the

Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,” Partisan Review,

show had acquired a sameness they intended to shake up; they might

March 1948.

also have been fed up with incessant complaints from all sides and so asserted curatorial control. 14

1

2

3

CHAPTER 4

Protest: An Analysis of a Chicago Art Group” (MA thesis, University

Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, 60th anniversary ed.

of Chicago, 1950), 110–­111, Art Institute of Chicago Archives. Joseph

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 58.

does not reveal the identities of the Momentum members quoted in his

Theodore (Ted) Halkin, quoted in Franz Schulze, Fantastic Images:

study. They are assigned respondent numbers instead.

Chicago Art since 1945 (Chicago: Follett Publishing, 1972), 30–­31.

15

There were no exhibitions in 1949 and 1955.

Staci Boris, tape-­recorded interview with Leon Golub, November 5,

16

See respondent 174 in Joseph, “Career and Social Protest.” For a

1994, 17, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) Archives. 4

George Cohen, quoted in Schulze, Fantastic Images, 36.

5

Gustaf Dalström, letter to Daniel Catton Rich, June 20, 1947, Art

6

transcription of the May 5, 1950, meeting, see Exhibition Momentum papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 17

“Interview: Leon Golub Talks with Irving Sandler,” Archives of

Institute of Chicago Archives.

American Art Journal 18, no. 1 (1978): 13. The article is excerpted from

John W. Smith, “The Nervous Profession: Daniel Catton Rich and the

Sandler’s oral history interview with Golub, October 28–­November 18,

Art Institute of Chicago.” Museum Studies (Art Institute of Chicago)

1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

19, no. 1 (1993): 73–­76. 7

All of the above quotes are from Daniel Joseph, “Career and Social

18

Gustaf Dalström, letter to Daniel Catton Rich, June 20, 1947, Art Insti-

Cosmo Campoli, quoted in Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 45.

tute of Chicago Archives. The groups listed on the letterhead include the

19

Golub and Nicoloff, in Momentum — ­9 Viewpoints, a Forum (Chicago:

20

For more on these and other artist-­driven spaces, see Lynne Warren,

Exhibition Momentum, 1950), n.p.

South Side Community Art Center, Chicago No-­Jury Society of Artists, Inc., Women’s Salon of Chicago, American Jewish Artists Club, the Renaissance Society, and the University of Chicago. The list of supporters

ed., Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago (Chicago: Museum of

behind Dalström has not turned up in the Art Institute’s archives.

Contemporary Art, 1984).

388

NOT E S TO PAG E S 14 3 – 159

21

For Chicago art as hermetic, often antimodern, see, for instance,

34

Robert Hughes, “Midwestern Eccentrics,” Time (June 12, 1972), 56–­59;

NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1987), 12.

Max Kozloff, “Inwardness: Chicago Art since 1945,” Artforum 11,

35

(Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Art Center, 1994), 37–­39.

Chicago Art,” New Art Examiner 13, no. 9 (May 1986): 22–­23;

23

Katy Siegel, “Art in Chicago, 1945–­1995,” Artforum 36, no. 7

36

A. J. Liebling, “Second City,” New Yorker, January 12, 1952, 29.

(March 1997): 86.

37

It was the controversial 58th annual American exhibition, devoted to

Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (1954; Berkeley: University

abstract and surrealist American art. Hofmann was represented by

of California Press, 2000), 361.

Fury No. 1 (1945) and Pollock by The Key (1946), which later (in the

Several exhibitions focused on defining a group of Chicago artists

1980s) ended up in the permanent collection.

in this period. The New Chicago Decade, 1950–­1960, organized by

38

Sandler and Golub, “Interview,” 14.

Schulze and held at Lake Forest College (May 27–­June 13, 1959),

39

Sandler and Golub, “Interview,” 16.

featured a catalog essay by dealer Allan Frumkin and included art

40 Leon Golub, “A Critique of Abstract Expressionism,” College Art

Journal 14, no. 2 (Winter 1955): esp. 143–­44, 146.

by Campoli, Cohen, Goto, Halkin, Hunt, Leaf, John Miller, Nicoloff, Rosofsky, Schulze, Statsinger, Joyce Trieman, Donald Vlack, and H. C.

41

25

Verlag der Buchandlung Walther König, 2008), 82. See also “Jo Anna

Paris, France (January 16–­February 15, 1962), included Robert Barnes,

Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,” in Jon Bird et al., Nancy

Campoli, Cohen, Leaf, Golub, Petlin, Rosofsky, and Westermann;

Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), 9, and Mignon Nixon, “Spero’s Curses,” October, no. 122 (Fall 2007), 3–­6.

Patrick T. Malone and Peter Selz, “Is There a New Chicago School?”

42

Brown, Philip Hanson, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Barbara Rossi,

“The New Images of the Chicago Group.” Art News 58, no. 6 (October

and Ray Yoshida led by Katharine Lee Keefe, in Keefe, Some Recent Art

1959): 40–­41, 52–­53.

from Chicago (Chapel Hill, NC: Ackland Art Museum, 1980), 25–­31.

Joshua Kind makes this observation in a thoughtful essay that makes

See also the comments of Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Art Green, Suellen

the case for materiality as critical to the meaning of the work and re-

Rocca, and Karl Wirsum in Dan Nadel, “Hairy Who’s History of the Hairy Who,” Ganzfeld 3 (2003), 123–­24. 43 Carole Tormollan, “Kathleen Blackshear,” in Women Building Chicago

Idiom,” Chicago Review 17, nos. 2/3 (1964): 40–­41. For the uses of “monster” and “monster roster,” see Franz Schulze,

1790–­1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and

“The Legacy of Imagism,” New Art Examiner 24, no. 8 (May 1997):

Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 84–­85.

30, 32. See also James Yood, “Graven Imagism” (interview with Franz

44 Keefe, Some Recent Art from Chicago, 26.

Schulze), New Art Examiner 20, no. 4 (December 1992): 23–­25, 40.

45

1969), 10.

Westermann review, where he included Cosmo Campoli, George

46 For collecting among Chicago artists and its relation to studio prac-

Cohen, Leon Golub, Ted Halkin, June Leaf, and Seymour Rosofsky under that label: “Art News from Chicago.” Art News 57, no. 10

tice, see Don Baum and Stephen Prokopoff, Made in Chicago: Some

(February 1959): 49, 56–­57.

Resources (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1975), and Barbara

For these debates, see “Is There a New Academy? [part 1],” Art

Rossi, Eye Owe You (Chicago: DePaul University Art Museum, 2016). 47

Academy? [part 2],” Art News 58, no. 5 (September 1959): 36–­39,

48 Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” in Cohen and Feigen, Dubuffet

58–­60; and Bradford R. Collins, “Clement Greenberg and the

and the Anticulture, 10. I refer to the facsimile reproduction in this

Search for Abstract Expressionism’s Successor: A Study in the

volume of Dubuffet’s handwritten lecture notes, given to Culberg after the talk.

(May 1987): 36–­43. 28

Selz, New Images of Man, 76.

29

De Beauvoir, quoted in Frances Morris, ed. Paris Post War: Art and

49

Ivan Albright, Notebook 1984.6:17:33v., 1945, Ivan Albright Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

50

Paul Cummings, oral history interview with Ivan Le Lorraine Albright,

Existentialism 1945–­55 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 18.

1972, typescript, p. 55, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

For reception of the exhibition see Daniel Raverty, “Critical

Institution; Avis Berman, oral history interview with Katharine

Perspectives on New Images of Man,” Art Journal 5, no. 4 (Winter

Kuh, 1982, transcript, p. 95, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

1994): 62–­64. 31

Selz, “Introduction,” in New Images of Man, 12.

32

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” originally

Institution; Peter Selz, conversation with the author, October 2005. 51

Jean Dubuffet, “Commentary,” trans. Josephine Patterson Albright, in Frederick A. Sweet, Ivan Albright: A Retrospective (Chicago:

published in Art News (December 1952), reprinted in Art in Theory

Art Institute of Chicago, 1964), 7–­8.

1900–­1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison

52

Maurice Tuchman, Edward Kienholz (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1966), 8–­9.

and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 582. 33

Cohen, letter to Feigen, in Dubuffet and the Anticulture, 11.

News 58, no. 4 (Summer 1959): 34–­37, 58–­59; “Is There a New

Manipulation of Avant-­Garde Consciousness,” Arts Magazine 61

30

George Cohen, letter to Richard Feigen, October 11, 1969, reproduced in Dubuffet and the Anticulture (New York: Richard L. Feigen & Co.,

Schulze first used “Monster Roster” in print at the end of an H. C.

27

See, for instance, the group interview featuring Don Baum, Roger

Art News 54, no. 6 (October 1955): 36–­39, 58–­59; Thomas N. Folds,

futes the “monster” label. Kind, “Sphinx of the Plains: A Chicago Visual 26

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nancy Spero: The Conversation Series (Cologne:

Westermann. Huit artistes de Chicago, held at Galerie du Dragon,

Schulze wrote the catalog introduction. 24

Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero,” in Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory

no. 2 (October 1972): 51–­55; Donald Kuspit, “The ‘Madness’ of

22

Dominique Nahas et al., Nancy Spero: Works since 1950 (Syracuse,

June Leaf, quoted in Philip Brookman and Debra Singer, June Leaf:

53

For more on this connection, see chapter 5 and the conclusion of

A Survey of Painting, Sculpture, and Works on Paper 1948–­1991

my “Every Picture Should Be a Prayer: The Art of Ivan Albright”

(Washington, DC: Washington Project for the Arts, 1991), 10–­11.

(PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–­Madison, 2006).

389

NOT E S TO PAG E S 159 – 182

54

Alloway, quoted in William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New

80

York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 73. The original writing appeared 55

1939–­1976 (Chicago: Hyde Park Art Center, 1976), 25.

in Architectural Design 31, no. 3 (March 1961): 122.

81

Schulze, “Chicago,” 43.

Richard Hunt, quoted in Richard Hunt: Affirmations (Washington,

82

Lawrence Alloway, “Art as Likeness, with a Note on Post Pop Art.”

DC: International Art & Artists, 1998), 49. 56

Arts 41, no. 7 (May 1967): 38–­39.

Oldenburg, extract from notebooks dated 1960, quoted in Barbara

83

Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969), 189. 57

58

Pennsylvania, 1971), n.p.

Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 20.

84

Jim Nutt, email to author, May 31, 2011.

Claes Oldenburg, “Statement,” originally published in 1961, reprinted

85

Art Green interviewed by Roger Brown, 1985, Roger Brown Study Center Archives, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

and Ray Gun Theater (1962) (New York: Something Else Press,

86

Oldenburg, Store Days, 113, 7.

87

60 Russell Bowman, “An Interview with Roger Brown,” Art in America

believed the artists participated in a larger cultural shift. Rather than seek acceptance “within that [art] establishment,” they sought to

Mary Matthews Gedo, interview with Ray Yoshida, summer/autumn

“find our own kind of way . . . which was happening in the various

1982, transcript, p. 44, Ray Yoshida Papers, box 2 folder 5, Archives of

counter-­culture movements at the time.” Karl Wirsum interviewed

American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Gedo conducted her inter-

by Roger Brown, 1985, Hairy Who oral history, Roger Brown Study Center Archives, Chicago.

Metamorphoses,” Arts 57 (January 1983): 97–­99.

63

88

For Lanyon’s work, see Patricia Kelly, ed., 1968: Art and Politics in

Oral history interview with Don Baum, January 31–­May 13, 1986,

Chicago, exh. cat. (Chicago: DePaul University Art Museum, 2008),

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

63. Ginzel made a rare representational work incorporating an actual

Keefe, group interview, Some Recent Art from Chicago, 21.

billy club, drenched with red paint, called The Billy Club (1969), oil

64 Baum, oral history interview. 65

See, for instance, his contributions to the 1967 comic. Wirsum

66, no. 1 (January–­February 1978): 106–­7.

views in preparation for her essay “Ray Yoshida: Master of Magical 62

Karl Wirsum, quoted in Karl Wirsum (New York: Derek Eller Gallery, 2013), 5.

1967), 39.

61

Joan C. Siegfried, “Art from Comics,” in The Spirit of the Comics (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of

Bruce Glaser, “Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion,”

with revisions in Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961)

59

Quoted in Goldene Shaw, ed. History of the Hyde Park Art Center

and collage on board 28 × 21 × 3/4 inches (now in the collection of the

Falconer and Nutt made a few lists of possible groups as they discussed

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago).

the exhibitions dilemma with older artist Dominick Di Meo. It seems

89

James Falconer, interview with John Corbett, February 9, 2011, Hairy Who and Chicago Imagists interviews, Pentimenti Productions,

clear that “Hairy Who” was one iteration of this general idea and

Chicago.

that their intent was to offer a way for several artists to gain more exposure.

90

For these activities, see Kelly, 1968, 12.

66

Jim Nutt, quoted in Nadel, “Hairy Who’s History,” 121.

91

Falconer, interview with Corbett.

67

Nutt, quoted in Nadel, “Hairy Who’s History,” 122.

92

For more on Di Meo’s pivotal role in Chicago’s antiwar activities of

68

There was a full-­color comic book catalog produced in conjunction

the 1960s, see “Dominick Di Meo interviewed by Robert Cozzolino,”

with the Washington, DC, exhibition, but the price list was separate.

in Kelly, 1968, 32–­35.

Both Dis Is The Catalogue, “U can’t tell a player with out da score

93

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 1072–­75.

Publications 1966–­1969, ed. Dan Nadel (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2015), 90–­112, 155–­62. Photographs of the DC installation are

94

Paul Richard, “A ‘Weird Coherent Vision’: The Hairy Who,”

By 1968 there would be more than 536,000 US troops there.

Washington Post, April 20, 1969, 165. 70

95

“Introduction,” in Dis Is The Catalogue, in Nadel, Collected Hairy

Dan Sullivan, “Artists Agree on Boycott of Chicago Showings,” New York Times, September 5, 1968.

Who Publications, 156. 71

For instance, just a few months before the 1965 act was signed, Johnson authorized Congress to send 50,000 troops to Vietnam.

on pp. 163–­65. 69

See Johnson’s speech at the signing ceremony in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, vol. 2

kard,” and the comic book can be seen in The Collected Hairy Who

96

http://www.baseball-­almanac.com/box-­scores/boxscore.php?boxid=

Claes Oldenburg, letter to Richard Feigen, September 5, 1968, reprinted in “Artists vs. Mayor Daley,” Newsweek, November 4,

195404150CHN

1968, 117.

72

Franz Schulze, “Chicago,” Art International 11, no. 5 (May 1967): 43.

97

For the complete list, see Kelly, 1968, 26.

73

Whitney Halstead, “Chicago,” Artforum 5, no. 9 (May 1967): 66.

98

For Newman and Oldenburg’s letters, the various Chicago boycott

74

See Nadel, Collected Hairy Who Publications 1966–­1969, 130–­31.

75

Karl Wirsum and Lorri Gunn, interview with author, May 26, 2011.

99

The artists were Roger Brown, Edward Flood, Phil Hanson, Gladys

calls and local protest exhibitions, see Kelly, 1968, 12–­26.

See also Nicole Rudick, “Transfigured: An Interview with Karl

Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Kerig Pope, Christina Ramberg,

Wirsum,” Hyperallergic, October 10, 2015.

Barbara Rossi, H. C. Westerman, Karl Wirsum, and Ray Yoshida.

76

Nutt, quoted in Nadel, “Hairy Who’s History,” 122.

77

Russell Bowman, “An Interview with Jim Nutt,” Arts 52, no. 7

and celebrated socially transgressive sexuality in their work, including

(March 1978): 132–­33.

Linda Kramer, Paul Lamantia, Robert Lostutter, and Jimmy Wright.

Franz Schulze, “Chicago Popcycle,” Art in America 54, no. 6

Possibly because they did not exhibit in well-known, named groups, and

(November/December 1966): 103.

likely because their work can be thematically startling, they remained

Schulze, “Chicago,” 43.

largely outside of so-called Imagist exhibitions before the 1980s.

78

79

100

390

Several independent artists in this generation amplified gender fluidity

NOT E S TO PAG E S 18 4 – 20 3

101

Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, videotaped interview with Roger

Chicago Daily Tribune, June 21, 1959; “Kenwood Residents Hold 12th

Brown, July 1977. School of the Art Institute Video Data Bank. 102

Annual ‘Open House,’” Chicago Defender, June 5, 1965.

James Falconer quoted in Linda D. Gainer et al., Jumpin’ Backflash:

16

Original Imagist Artwork, 1966–­1969 (Munster: Northern Indiana

“CORE to Hold Open House in Slum Bldg.,” Chicago Defender, April 11, 1964.

Arts Association, 1999), 12.

17

John Kifner, “Chicago Panther Mourned: Raid Scene Visited,” New York Times, December 10, 1969, 37.

18

CHAPTER 5 1

B10.

John E. Fleming, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs: Artist, Teacher,

19

Administrator, Writer, Political Activist, and Museum Founder”

Don L. Lee, “The Wall,” in Black Pride (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 26. A slightly different version appeared in the Chicago Daily

(interview), Public Historian 21, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 31–­55;

Defender, August 29, 1967.

Mattie Smith Cold, “Chicago Art Center Elects New Officers,”

20

Atlanta Daily World, June 18, 1953, 5. 2

“Notes on Art and Artists,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1967,

Eugene Perkins, “Black Culture,” in Black Is Beautiful (Chicago: Free Black Press, 1968), 8. Also published in Black Cultural Directory

On art at Hull-­House, see Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “Art at Hull House,

Chicago ’69, 12.

1889–­1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr,” Woman’s Art Journal

21

“Mrs. Margaret Taylor Goss suggested that we make arrangements

10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1989): 35–­39. On early twentieth-­century

for a tour to the Art Institute to see the Picasso Exhibit.” “South Side

bohemia and protest forums, including Bughouse Square, IWW fo-

Community Art Center Association Minutes,” February 13, 1940,

rums, the Dil Pickle, Hobo Colleges, and others, see Sophia Fagin (with

South Side Community Art Center Papers, part 1, box 1, folder 4, South

the Writers Program of the Works Projects Administration of the

Side Community Art Center, Chicago.

State of Illinois), Public Forums in Chicago (Chicago: Adult Education

22

Council of Chicago, 1940).

Margaret Burroughs, “First Citizen, Du Sable.” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1966.

3

“OBAC — ­A Year Later,” Negro Digest, July 1968, 92–­94.

4

Committee for the Arts, “Invitation Letter and Statement of

Is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist

Purposes,” in The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation

Movement in the United States, 1966–­1976, ed. Franklin Rosemont

23

in 1960s Chicago, ed. Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca

et al. (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997), 21–­22.

Zorach (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 113–­14. 5

Committee for the Arts, “Invitation Letter and Statement of Purposes.”

6

Malcolm X, “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the

24

Stories. 25

Anthology of Contemporary Afro-­American Literature, ed. Abraham 26

“Malcolm X and the Black Arts Movement,” in The Cambridge 27

University Press, 2010), 78–­89. Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of

30

“Daley Blames News Media for Violence: Says Demonstrators Seek

The school movement took on many issues, among them the absence

31

“Politicalization of the Avant-­Garde II,” 70–­73. 32

14

the Lace Curtain is illustrated but discussed only in a footnote.

from crowded Black schools, named after the superintendent of

Hess omits it from the chronology of the artist’s oeuvre because it is

schools, Benjamin Willis.

“isolated from the rest of Newman’s work.” Hess, Barnett Newman

See Romi Crawford, “Black Photographers Who Take Black Pictures,”

(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 123n8. 33

These conditions and the struggle against them are chronicled in Beryl

Robb Baker, “A Violence in the House,” Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1968, A8.

Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of

34

Film Group, American Revolution 2 (1969).

Black Urban America (New York: Macmillan, 2009).

35

Barbara J. Jones, “Black Imagery: The Black Experience” (master’s

A photo also appeared in the Chicago Daily News, March 31, 1970.

thesis, Illinois Institute of Technology, June 1970), 41.

Toni Anthony, “Jail Fr. Clements in Evictions,” Chicago Daily

36

Defender, March 31, 1970; Toni Anthony, “Joe Robichaux on CBL

Letter Edged in Black Press, Inc. v. Public Bldg. Com’n of Chicago, 320 F. Supp. 1303 (N.D. Ill. 1970), 1310.

Spot,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 6, 1970. 15

In Thomas Hess’s 1971 catalogue raisonné of Barnett Newman’s work,

Wagons,” mobile classrooms that were used to accommodate overflow

in Alkalimat, Crawford, and Zorach, Wall of Respect. 13

Patricia Kelly, ed., 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago, exh. cat. (Chicago: DePaul University Art Museum, 2008), esp. 12–­15; Schwartz,

of Black history, but chief among them were the infamous “Willis

12

Therese Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-­Garde II,” Art in America 60, no. 2 (March–­April 1972): 70.

Coverage,” Chicago Tribune, September 29, 1966, D1. 11

The quote was widely circulated and reproduced on the invitation for the exhibition Richard J. Daley, Feigen Gallery, Chicago, 1968.

New American Library, 1968), 274–­77.

Arthur Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-­In (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

Scott Hodes suggests that these materials might have been provided by his father, Barnet Hodes. Scott Hodes, interview with author, 2011.

29

the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (New York:

10

Claes Oldenburg, in Barbara Haskell, Object into Monument, exh. cat., Pasadena [CA] Art Museum (1971), 85.

28

Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago during

9

Gerhard Nonnemacher to Pablo Picasso, May 10, 1968, in S.M.S., no. 5 (October 1968).

Companion to Malcolm X, ed. Robert Terrill (New York: Cambridge

8

Hugh McCarney, “Tom Palazzolo Biography,” http://people.wcsu.edu/ mccarneyh/fva/P/PalazzoloT_bio.html

Chapman (New York: Penguin, 1972), 563. See James Smethurst,

Haki Madhubuti, interview with author, 2014.

Visible in Palazzolo’s film The Bride Stripped Bare and Pablo and the Boss, an episode of PBS station WTTW’s documentary series Chicago

Organization of Afro-­American Unity,” in New Black Voices: An

7

Chicago Surrealist Group, “This Too Will Burn,” in The Forecast

37

“Kenwood Residents Will Hold Annual Concert, Garden Tour,”

“Youth Concert Rocks Beach House,” Hyde Park Herald, August 9, 1967. The event was supported by a large donation from a private donor.

391

NOT E S TO PAG E S 20 3 – 223

38

39

Bob Hunter, “District Police Padlock Affro Arts Theater,” Chicago

Expression in the Midwest,” Mirarte, October 1982, 4. According

Daily Defender, April 1, 1968.

to Zavala, in 1982 the artist directors at Casa Aztlán were Roberto

The Affro-­Arts Theater is not to be confused with the Afro Arts

Arredondo, Marcos Raya, and Salvador Vega; the director of the orga-

Theater in Atlanta, though its name was often confusingly misspelled

nization was Humberto Salinas.

with one “f.”

56

40 Kelan Phil Cohran, interviewed by Rebecca Zorach, Never the Same,

Fetishizing the Imaginary, ed. Francisco Piña (Chicago: Mexican Fine

https://never-­the-­same.org/interviews/phil-­cohran/. 41

Arts Center Museum, 2004), 14–­25, 18–­19.

“The Arts and the Inner City” (mission statement), Columbia College

57

(Chicago) Archives, Conferences, “Arts and the Inner City,” May 1968. 42

Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Conferences, “Arts and the Inner City,” May 1968, Columbia College,

58

See also DeWitt Beall’s documentary film A Place to Live (1968).

National Conference on the Arts and the Inner City.

59

Eugene Eda, William Walker, John Weber, and Mark Rogovin, “The Artists’ Statement,” 1971, private collection of Victor Sorell, Chicago.

60 Among the many muralists he mentored are Caryl Yasko, Calvin Jones,

Chicago Daily Defender, May 16, 1968. 44 Thomas Willis, “Arts and the Inner City Conference: Happening

Astrid Fuller, Justine Devan, Vanita Green, and Santi Iswarutholkul.

Almost Missed Happening,” Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1968.

61

Norman Mark, “A Matter of Black and White,” Chicago Daily News, 62

46 “What Happened,” Columbia College (Chicago) Archives.

Panel Minutes,” Record Series 312.003, Illinois State Archives. 63

48 Barbara Jones-­Hogu, interviewed by Rebecca Zorach and Skyla

tributed to shaping the Afro-­American creative experience, music has

Hearn, Never the Same, http://never-­the-­same.org/interviews/

been its strongest component.” 64 Marion Brown, “Improvisation and the Aural Tradition in Afro-­

barbara-­jones-­hogu/. Jeff Donaldson, “Africobra 1 (African Commune of Bad Relevant

American Music” Black World, November 1973, 15.

Artists) ‘10 in Search of a Nation,’” Black World 19, no. 12 (October

51

65

no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 5–­24; Mike Sell, Avant-­Garde Performance and

Jones-­Hogu traveled to Mexico in 1968 and was deeply affected by

the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/

the protest by sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave

Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Mich-

a raised-­fist Black Power salute during their medal ceremony at the

igan Press, 2008), esp. chap. 7; Charles H. Fuller Jr., “Black Writing:

Mexico City Olympics, and by an Elizabeth Catlett sculpture depicting

Release from Object,” Liberator, September 1967, 17, 20; James Stew-

a similar gesture.

art, “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” in Amiri

The painting appears in a 1963 film in the DuSable’s Moving Image

Baraka and Larry Neal, Black Fire (New York: Morrow, 1968), 3–­10. 66

2008). She signed it Margaret Goss. Her marriage to Bernard Goss

67

her (first) married name after the divorce.

68

Stewart, “Black Aesthetics,” 80.

http://www.renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/artist/1013/

69

Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of

harold-­haydon/. Burroughs’s use of the motif may well have predated

Post-­Formalist Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1974), 16.

Haydon’s, but it seems impossible to know for sure.

70

Burnham, Great Western Salt Works, 16–­17.

“Alto a la Demolición de Nuestra Comunidad” (flyer), “Humboldt

71

Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and its Audience

Park Mural Demolition Protests and Actions 1978,” John Pitman

(1964; New York: New American Library, 1969), 76, 79.

Weber Papers, box 2, MS.2008.7, Institute for Latino Studies,

72

Rosenberg criticized Burnham for an overemphasis on technology, and

University of Notre Dame. See also “OK Demolition at ‘Cultural’ Site

in particular the context of the Software exhibition Burnham curated

on N.W. Side,” Chicago Sun-­Times, April 8, 1978; “Latinos Hoping

at the Jewish Museum. Harold Rosenberg, The De-­definition of Art (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 215, 240–­42.

to Break Chain of Urban Blight,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1978; Frederick Lowe, “Citizens Keep Round-­the-­Clock Vigil on Threatened

73

Richard Feigen, Tales from the Art Crypt (New York: Knopf, 2000).

Mural Site,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1978 (all also in Weber

See also Eva Olson, “Chronicle: Thirty Years of Change,” in Collective

Papers, box 2).

Visions: Creating a Contemporary Art Museum, exh. cat., Museum of

Information on the Wall of Brotherhood and Castillo’s graduate

Contemporary Art, Chicago (1996), 3–­24, esp. 3–­8.

training derived from Mario Castillo, personal communication,

74

Rebecca Zorach, “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 66–87.

October 2017. 55

Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 79.

lasted from 1939 to 1947, but she may still have signed work with

54

Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 16.

was sold by Swann Galleries (Sale 2136, Lot 31, Tuesday, February 19,

53

See Patricia J. Williams, “On Being the Object of Property,” Signs 14,

1970): 83.

Archive (MF4002, Ebony Museum of Negro History, 1963-­04-­07) and

52

See, for example, Diane Weathers, “The Collective Black Artists,” Black World, November 1973, 74: “Of all the art forms that have con-

bob-­crawford-­and-­margo-­natalie-­crawford/).

50

Roy Lewis, “Black and Beautiful,” March 1968 (for Advisory Panel on Art meeting, Tuesday, May 21, 1968), Illinois Arts Council, “Advisory

Margo Crawford and Bob Crawford, unedited transcript, October 23, 2008 (edited version: http://areachicago.org/

49

Mitchell Caton, “The Wall of Pride and Self Awareness,” Chicago Public Art Group annual reports, 1973.

Panorama section, May 18, 1968, 3. 47

“Constitution and By-­Laws of Movimiento Artistico Chicano,” MS 2009.5, “Printed Materials — ­MARCH,” Mario Castillo Papers,

“What Happened,” Columbia College (Chicago) Archives,

43 Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Artists in ‘Food Boycott’ at Banquet,”

45

Jeff Huebner, “Marcos Raya: His Life, His Art, His Times,” in Raya:

See Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto

75

Willis, “Arts and the Inner City Conference.”

Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

76

James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 70s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

2012), 225–­37; Antonio Zavala, “Casa Aztlán: Focus of Cultural

392

NOT E S TO PAG E S 223 – 238

77

Sam Yanari, interview with author, November 2010.

was documented and widely circulated as a documentary video work,

78

Irene Piraino, “He’s Out to Paint the Town,” Daily News Suburban

directed and produced by Fusco in collaboration with Paula Heredia. In

Week, June 13–­14, 1973.

Chicago, it was accompanied by a series of performances at Randolph

Sue Roll, “One Artist’s Colorful Plan to Dress Up Our Naked City,”

Street Gallery and a residency at Experimental Sound Studio, a record-

Chicago Today, February 1, 1974, 35.

ing studio in the far North Side Edgewater neighborhood, founded in

79

80 See Eva S. Cockcroft and James D. Cockcroft, “Cityarts Workshop — ­

81

1986 by sound artists Dawn and Lou Mallozzi. Pablo Helguera, a social

People’s Art in New York City,” Left Curve, no. 4 (Summer 1975), 14;

practice artist and Museum of Modern Art educator, acted as a docent

Janet Bloom, “Changing Walls,” Architectural Forum 138, no. 4

at the Field Museum event; he was instructed never to break character.

(May 1973): 25.

See Helguera, “The Jailer’s Tale: A Personal Recounting of The Couple

John Pitman Weber, “Carlos Cortéz,” in ¡El Koyote Kanta! Obras grafi-

in the Cage,” in Immersive Life Practices, ed. Daniel Tucker (Chicago:

cas de Carlos Cortéz, exh. cat., Taller Mestizarte (1997). “John Pitman

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014), 119–­24.

Weber, Exhibitions,” MS 2008.7, John Pitman Weber Papers, box 1, 82

83

4

January 1, 1993), http://bombmagazine.org/article/1599/coco-­fusco

See also Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social

-­and-­guillermo-­gó­mez-­peñ­a.

Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University

5

“A Decade Completed!” New Art Examiner 11, no. 1 (October 1983): 1.

of Chicago Press, 1994).

6

Three advocacy organizations had evolved out of an identified need for

Jane Allen and Derek Guthrie, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Luckless

professional development: Chicago Artists Coalition (1974), Chicago

Old Man,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, December 10, 1972.

Council on Fine Arts (1975), and Illinois Arts Advocates (1982).

84 Jane Allen and Derek Guthrie, “The Tradition,” in The Essential

85

See Chicago Artists Coalition, “Mission & History,” http://www

New Art Examiner, ed. Terri Griffith et al. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois

.chicagoartistscoalition.org/mission-­history; Steve Scott, “Council on

University Press, 2011), 29.

Fine Arts,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago Historical

Dan Logan, “Unearthing Chicago’s Underground Video Scene,”

Society, 2005), http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/

Hyde Parker, December 1973–­January 1974. Along with Chicago-

pages/341.html. Illinois Arts Advocates has since become Arts

­based organizations, Videofreex, a pioneering New York–­based

Alliance Illinois and continues its work statewide with public agencies

video collective, spent time in Chicago in 1969 interviewing Black

as an advocate for art and arts education.

Panthers and Weather Underground members and supporters

7

initiative, see Tedwilliam Theodore, “Neighborhood TV,”

8

Twentieth Century Artists (Chicago: Renaissance Society, 1934), n.p.

uploads/2012/08/neighborhood-­tv-­proposal.pdf. “Social and Political Intervention Scrapbook,” Media Burn Archive,

9

http://mediaburn.org/video/social-­and-­political-­intervention 10

Michael L. Culbert, “W. Sider Hit-­Run Victim: En Route FORUM 11

Steve Johnson, “National Museum of Mexican Art: A Vibrant Scene in

“Films of ‘Hip Black Dudes’: Good or Bad Image?” Chicago Daily

Pilsen,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2015. See also “History and

Defender, September 30, 1972, 6.

Mission,” on the museum’s website, www.nationalmuseumofmexican

Gaddi Ben Dan, interview with author, August 2015. See also Michael

art.org.

L. Culbert, “New Group Joins ‘Super Fly’ Fray,” Chicago Daily

12

John T. Fleming, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs: Artist, Teacher, Administrator, Writer, Political Activist, and Museum Founder”

Defender, September 7, 1972. Christine Tamblyn, “Image Processing in Chicago Video Art, 1970–­

(interview), Public Historian 21, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 43.

1980,” Leonardo 24, no. 3 (1991): 303–­10.

13

90 Bruce Jenkins, “Flying under the Radar: Rediscovering Dan Sandin,”

Warren’s show was preceded, in 1978, by Chicago: The City and Its Artists, an exhibition that sought to showcase the multiplicity of

in Synthesis: Processing & Collaboration, exh. cat., Gallery@Calit2

Chicago’s art production, organized at the University of Michigan,

(January 14–­March 11, 2011), 23. See also “Daniel J. Sandin and

Ann Arbor.

Jon Cates on Early Computer-­Generated Video Art in Chicago,”

14

Christopher Lyon, “MCA Show Strains to Support Artists-­vs.-­ Establishment Thesis,” Chicago Sun-­Times, July 1, 1984.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPOp29Z-­xN0. 91

Oral history interview with James [Jim] Melchert, September 18–­ October 19, 2002, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Parley,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 19, 1972, 35; Culbert,

89

Alice Thorson, “The Early Years: Struggling for a Voice,” New Art Examiner Yearbook 11, no. 1 (October 1983): sect. 2, p. 1.

-­scrapbook/.

88

Eva Watson-­Schütze, “Aims of the Renaissance Society and the Relation of the Society to the University,” in A Selection of Works by

http://mediaburn.wpengine.netdna-­cdn.com/wp-­content/

87

The museum was spearheaded by John Mulvany, a longtime faculty member and photographer, and Sonia Bloch, a philanthropist.

and documenting protests and events. On a community television

86

Anna Johnson, “Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña,” Bomb,

Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Jane Veeder, in Jon Cates, “Re:Copying-­IT-­RIGHT AGAIN,” in Sean

15

Cubitt and Paul Thomas, Relive Media Art Histories (Cambridge, MA:

Katharine Lee Keefe, Some Recent Art from Chicago (Chapel Hill, NC: Ackland Art Museum, 1980), 21. See also Robert Cozzolino’s essay,

MIT Press, 2013), 340.

chapter 4 in this volume.

CHAPTER 6

16

Guy Whitney, email to author, December 15, 2015.

17

Steve Sherrell, email to author, December 14, 2015.

18

Joy Poe (founding member of Artemisia) and Othello Anderson (found-

1

Ann Wiens, “Editorial,” New Art Examiner 25, no. 7 (April 1998): 7.

ing member of N.A.M.E) both graduated from SAIC in 1973. The same

2

Kathryn Hixson, “Editorial,” New Art Examiner 28, no. 10 (July/

year, Hollis Sigler and Christina Ramberg, both important Chicago

August 2001): 17.

artists whose mature works were situated between Imagist and fem-

The Couple in the Cage has had numerous iterations. The performance

inist concerns, completed their MFAs at SAIC, and were the only two

3

393

NOT E S TO PAG E S 24 0 – 250

artists awarded traveling fellowships. “93rd Commencement Program,

Novel (1998), trans. Liz Herron (New York: Grove, 2002).

May 25, 1973,” Joy Poe Papers, Artemisia Gallery Papers (uncataloged),

32

19

Meredith Brown, “‘The Enemies of Women’s Liberation in the

Ryerson and Burham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

Arts Will Be Crushed’: A.I.R. Gallery’s Role in the American

33

Saturday, March 9, 1973, Artemisia Fund Papers, Artemisia Gallery Papers (uncataloged), Ryerson and Burham Libraries, Art Institute of

Feminist Art Movement,” Smithsonian Archives of American Art,

Chicago.

accessed January 26, 2018, http://www.aaa.si.edu/publications/ essay-prize/2012-essay-prize-meredith-brown. 20

Transcription from a phone interview (interviewer unknown), August 23, 1988,. Joy Poe Papers, Artemisia Gallery Papers (uncataloged),

Ryerson and Burham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

34

Lucy R. Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums in New York

“Studies Program, 1983–­1984,” Internal Description, Artemisia Fund Papers, Artemisia Gallery Papers (uncataloged), Ryerson and Burham

since 1969,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–­1985, ed. Julie Ault

Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

(New York: Drawing Center; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

35

An astonishing resource, Lynne Warren’s Alternative Spaces exhibi-

Press, 2002), 96.

tion catalog provides the only comprehensive list of all the exhibitions

21

Brown, “Enemies of Women’s Liberation.”

in the first decade, currently unmatched by the gallery’s own records.

22

Transcription from a phone interview (interviewer unknown), August

See “Artemisia Gallery,” in Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago,

23, 1988, Joy Poe Papers, Artemisia Gallery Papers, Ryerson and 23

ed. Warren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 29–­33.

Burham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

36

Warren, “Artemisia Gallery,” 33.

See Barbara J. Love and Nancy F. Cott, eds., Feminists Who Changed

37

Artemisia Fund was the educational arm of the gallery, creating

America, 1963–­1975 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006),

opportunities such as the slide registry. Joanna Gardner-­Huggett,

149. For an in-­depth profile of Firestone, see Susan Faludi, “Death of a

“The Women Artists’ Cooperative Space as a Site for Social Change:

Revolutionary,” New Yorker, April 15, 2013, http://www.newyorker

Artemisia Gallery, Chicago (1973–­1979),” Social Justice 34, no. 1

.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-­of-­a-­revolutionary. See also my

(2007): 31.

article, “Re-­Reading Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex

38

24

See Vivian Rothstein and Naomi Weisstein, “Chicago Women’s

and Design, 2011). 39

4–­5; Cara Jepson, “Sisters against the System,” Chicago Reader,

40 Devonna Pieszak, “June Wayne: Demystifying the Art Scene,” New Art

Examiner 3, no. 2 (November 1975): 4.

Peg Strobel and Sue Davenport, “Chicago Women’s Liberation

41

Union: An Introduction,” https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/

27

42

29

Michelle Moravec, “Fictive Families of History Makers: Historicity at

(1990), in which gender distinction is socialized rather than inborn. To

the Los Angeles Woman’s Building,” and my essay “Learning from Los

put it another way, Firestone rejected the biological destiny of women

Angeles: Pedagogy and Its Predecessors,” both in Linton and Maberry,

long before essentialism was coined as a term for this phenomenon.

Doin’ It In Public. For a history of the 1893 Woman’s Building, see

Subrin received her MFA in video at SAIC in 1995, and taught for two

Wanda M. Corn, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

See Elisabeth Subrin, “Trashing Shulie: Remnants from Some

43 See Dore Ashton, “Two Part Connection: Vera Klement’s Painting,”

Abandoned Feminist History,” in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary

Arts 58 (March 1984): 78–­79. Vera Klement: A Retrospective, 1953–­

and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alex Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (Minneapolis:

1986, was held March 8–­April 25, 1987, at the Renaissance Society,

University of Minnesota Press), 59–­66.

University of Chicago. No catalog was produced. Ashton gave a lecture

See my essay “The Feminist Nomad: The All-­Women Group Show,” in

during the run of the show. 44 Robert Storr, letter to Jane Addams Allen, April 4, 1980, New Art

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark, exh.

Examiner Archives, alphabetized correspondence, Ryerson and

cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA:

Burham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

MIT Press, 2007), 469–­70. 30

The original members were Phyllis Bramson, Shirley Federow, Sandra

45

Gierke, Barbara Grad, Margaret Harper, Vera Klement, Linda Kramer,

46 Associated Press, “New Feminist Art Gallery Opens for Business in

Anne Wilson, email correspondence with author, November 14, 2015. Chicago,” Times-­News, September 14, 1973, 30.

Phyllis MacDonald, Susan Michod, Sandra Perlow, Lee Pinowski, Joy Poe, Claire Prussian, Nancy Redmond, Heidi Seidelhuber, Alice 31

For a history of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, see, in particular,

From here, a clear path can be drawn to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble

additional years in the same department. 28

The Woman’s Building was also a precursor of Chicago’s Video Data Bank, discussed later in this chapter.

CWLUAbout/abdoc1.html. 26

Gardner-­Huggett, “Women Artists’ Cooperative Space,” 33–­34.

Liberation Union,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 2, no. 4 (1972): March 5, 1999, 65–­66. 25

See Meg Linton and Sue Maberry, eds., Doin’ It in Public: Art and Feminism at the Woman’s Building (Los Angeles: Otis College of Art

(1970),” Frieze, no. 170 (April 2015), 35–­36.

47

Associated Press, “New Feminist Art Gallery.” ARC’s sixteen found-

Shaddle, Mary Stoppert, and Carol Turchan.

ing members were Dalia Reklys Alekna, Jan Arnow, Gerda Meyer

There is a rich bibliography on Artemisia. The feminist art historian

Bernstein, Judy Lerner Brice, Ellen Ferar, Irmfriede Hogan, Johnnie

Mary Garrard was central to the quest to elevate Artemisia’s artistic

Johnson, Maxine Lowe, Mary Min, Civia Rosenberg, Regina Rosenblum,

legacy, positing the artist’s innovations and ambitions as an artist as

Laurel M. Ross, Frances Schoenwetter, Sara Skolnik, Myra Toth, and

equal to those of her male peers. See Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi:

Monika Wehrenberg. 48 Devonna Pieszak, “Reviews,” New Art Examiner 2, no. 6 (October/

The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, NJ:

November 1974): 4.

Princeton University Press, 1989) and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). See also Susan Vreeland, The Passion of Artemisia

49

Matthew Rohn, “Feminism and Chicago Art Today,” in Chicago: The City and Its Artists: 1945–­1978, ed. Charles A Lewis and Cynthia

(New York: Penguin, 2002), and Alexandra Lapierre, Artemisia: A

394

NOT E S TO PAG E S 253 – 26 8

50

Yao (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1978), 48.

artwork, calling it “A Loca/Duration Performance.” “Performances

Held January 12–­February 18, 1973, New York Cultural Center, in

1978,” Jean Souza, undated correspondence, N.A.M.E. Gallery Archival

association with Fairleigh Dickinson University. See Jenni Sorkin and

Records 1973–­1979, reel 1809, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian

Linda Theung, “Selected Chronology of All-­Women Group Exhibitions,

Institution.

1943–­83,” in Mark, WACK!, 472. Despite its high profile, the exhi-

70

Kahil El’Zabar. They performed on Saturday, January 6, 1979. Press

widely cited example of the era’s rampant gender bias. See Brown,

release, N.A.M.E. Gallery Archival Records 1973–­1979, reel 1809, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

“Improvisation and the Aural Tradition.” 51

Derek Guthrie, “Reviews in Brief,” New Art Examiner 4, no. 2

71

(February 1975): 10. 52

72

Roberta Smith, “Hudson, Gallerist and Nurturer of Artists, Dies at 63,” New York Times, February 16, 2014, Arts section.

Franz Schulze, “Women’s Art: Beyond Chauvinism,” Art News 74

73

(March 1975): 71. 54

Graydon Meagan, “Dean Langworthy, Renowned Sculptor, 1948–­ 2013,” Chicago Tribune, October 24, 2013, E6.

Elizabeth Hoxie, “A Decade of Artists’ Spaces in Chicago,” New Art Examiner 11, no. 1 (October 1983): 31.

53

The Ensemble included Light Henry Huff, Edward Wilkerson, and

bition experienced great difficulty securing a venue and became a

RSG Event Calendar, October–­December 1982, RSG Archives, Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Professionalization became a key form of advocacy. N.A.M.E. spear-

74

headed training events for artists, such as a 1979 seminar on taxation

See Julie Ault, “Colab,” in “A Chronology of Alternative Structures, Spaces, Artists’ Groups, and Organizations in New York City, 1965–­

and recordkeeping, presented by Lawyers for the Arts. The worksheets

1985,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–­1985 (New York: Drawing

and handouts, titled “Business vs. Hobby,” were documented in the

Center; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 48–­49.

same way as any other evening performance, with 1099 forms included

75

See RSG Event Calendar, May/June 1981, RSG Archives, Flaxman

with the press release. “Lawyers for the Arts: Tuesday, April 24, 1979:

Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Larry Lundy be-

Taxation and Recordkeeping seminar by Philip Sandler and Albert

came a production designer for movies and television shows, many

Kaplan, CPAs,” press release, N.A.M.E. Gallery Archival Records 1973–­

filmed in Chicago, including High Fidelity (2000) and the series

1979, reel 1809, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Chicago Hope. The complete list of artists was Christine Baczewska,

Bridget Esanga, “N.A.M.E. Gallery Artists Put Out a Call to Commem-

Christine Bourdette, Care of the Cow, Elaine Carl, Joyce Culkin,

orate 40-­Year Anniversary,” Spotlight: Alumni Relations, My SAIC

Beverly Feldmann, Chris Geoghegan, Deven Golden, Ron Gordon,

(2013), http://my.saic.edu/page=name.

Carol Hammerman, Deborah Handler, Jayne Hileman, John Hogan,

N.A.M.E. Gallery Statement of Purpose, 1973, reprinted in Lynne

George Horner, Sandy Jordon, Gary Justis, Thereza Lanitis, Stephen

Warren, “Chicago’s Alternatives,” in Alternative Spaces, 18.

Lapthisophon, Lerner & Turner, Karen Lebergott, Ted Lowitz, Roger

57

Warren, “Chicago’s Alternatives,” 18.

Machin, Chris Millon, Elsie Pickering, Christine Rojek, Gregory

58

Barry Holden, phone conversation with author, December 27, 2015.

Spiggle, Michelle Stone/James Grigsby, Marcia Weese, Lee Weitzman,

59

Linda Novak, phone conversation with author, February 7, 2016.

55

56

and Dan Yarbrough.

60 “Artists Protest Plans for Daley Memorial,” New York Times, March 8,

76

Doppelganger,” press release, October 23, 1978, N.A.M.E. Gallery

Monument with Standing Beast (1984), which stands in front of the

Archival Records 1973–1979, reel 1809, Archives of American Art,

Thompson Center (formerly the State of Illinois Building) in down-

Smithsonian Institution.

town Chicago. 61

Christine Tamblyn, “Entropic Pursuits: The Infinite Regress of the

1978, 9. Dubuffet received a commission for a large public sculpture,

77

The Goodman School relocated to DePaul University in 1977, and was

See Meredith Hindley, “King Tut: A Classic Blockbuster Museum

henceforth known as the Theatre School, an entity distinct from the

Exhibition That Began as a Diplomatic Gesture,” Humanities 36, no. 5

Goodman Theater. In 1978 the Goodman Theater officially separated

(September/October 2015): 1–­12.

from the Art Institute, where it had been initially established and

62

Kay Rosen, email to author, August 12, 2016.

63

Alan G. Artner, “‘Daley’s Tomb’ Is Not All Praise,” Chicago Tribune,

subsidized. 78

March 17, 1978, C5.

Deborah Leigh Wood, “Pioneer Tom Jaremba Looks at Performance Art, Whatever It Is,” Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1982, D24.

64 A. James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, Europe in the Seventies: Aspects

79

Wood, “Pioneer Tom Jaremba.”

80 David McCracken, “New Season Begins with Mixed Feelings among

of Recent Art (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1977). 65

Barry Holden, phone conversation with author, December 27, 2015.

Owners,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1986, N-­A48. The recession

66

Robert Storr, email to author, June 28, 2017. The Video Data Bank is

was nationwide, but hit Chicago hard. It was followed by the October 19,

discussed at length later in this chapter. 67

1987, international stock market crash, known as Black Monday.

N.A.M.E. Gallery Archival Records 1973–­1979, reel 1809, Archives of

81

The development of a performance space followed by a magazine

American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

reversed a pattern seen elsewhere. In Los Angeles, High Performance

68

Linda Novak, phone conversation with author, February 7, 2016.

magazine, established in 1978, preceded the appearance of a host of

69

N.A.M.E’s organizational structure was ad hoc: artists submitted

spaces (such as LACE and LAICA), which eventually yielded to one

proposals not just for exhibitions but also for the “performance”

primary blackbox space, Highways, established by Linda Burnham

of work that would benefit the organization itself. Souza proposed

(the magazine’s founding editor) and artist Tim Miller in 1989. Miller

that she be paid $600 to work two days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays,

also was a cofounder of P.S. 122, one of the premiere performance

from noon to 5 p.m., over a ten-­week period, to work on soliciting

spaces in New York. He first performed at Randolph Street Gallery in

and organizing events, making posters, and writing press releases

October 1987 as part of a monthlong series devoted to works on AIDS.

for the performances themselves. She considered this part of her

See “Work on AIDS: A Month of Art Events: Pink Life and the Kipling

395

NOT E S TO PAG E S 263 – 278

Trilogy, October 2–­3, 1987,” pre-­press program, rsga_pst_00057pp3,

100

2013, session 1, tape 8, story 1, HistoryMakers Digital Archive,

See also my essay “Envisioning High Performance,” Art Journal 62,

http://thmdigital.thehistorymakers.com/iCoreClient.html#/

no. 2 (Summer 2003): 36–­51. 82

&i=137135.

Hixson was the final editor of the New Art Examiner, from 1995 until

101

New Art Examiner, March 1979, 4. See also Whitney Halstead,

University of California, Irvine. Tsatsos became the executive director

“Claire Zeisler and the Sculptured Knot,” Craft Horizons 28, no. 5 (September/October 1968): 10–­11.

Pasadena Armory.

102

Anne Wilson, email to author, February 17, 2016.

See Book’s website, www.lynnbook.com/bio.html. For an early review

103

The exhibition originated in Chicago and traveled to Montreal,

of Rago’s performance work, see Sid Smith, “Inventive Performances

Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles. Magdalena Abakanowicz,

Make Magic at MoMing: 4 Evenings of Performance Art,” Chicago

ed. Mary Jane Jacob (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1982).

Tribune, November 9, 1984, B10.

104

84 Hixson worked as an administrator at Los Angeles Contemporary

See also Joan Livingstone and John Ploof, eds., The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (Chicago: School of the Art

Exhibitions (LACE), an important alternative space. Caroline Picard,

Institute of Chicago Press, 2007). The volume grew out of the Fiber

“Pulling the Rug Out: An Interview with Lin Hixson,” Art Slant

Department’s annual William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell

(September 2013), http://www.artslant.com/sf/articles/show/36736. 85

Janet Koplos, “Escaping the Wall: Claire Zeisler Retrospective,”

2002. Tamblyn went on to a career as a professor of video art at the of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and later the 83

Napoleon Jones-­Henderson, interviewed by Larry Crowe, April 22,

RSG Archives, Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies.

Letter to a Young Practitioner, performed at the School of the Art

105

Institute of Chicago, March 16, 2000, http://www.goatisland

See Lawrence Steger, “New Beginnings,” This American Life, air date November 17, 1995, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-­archives/

performance.org/writing_L2YP.htm. See also Jane Blocker, “Wooden

episode/1/new-­beginnings?act=3.

Legs: Goat Island’s Acts of Repair,” in Becoming Past: History in

106

Achy Obejas, “Performance Art’s Lawrence Steger,” Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1999.

Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 31–­54.

107

Deborah B. Gould, “Education in the Streets: ACT UP, Emotion,

86

Jana Hart Wright, email to author, August 20, 2016.

and New Modes of Being,” Counterpoints, vol. 367, Sexualities in

87

See George E. Lewis’s extraordinary account of the era, A Power

Education: A Reader (New York: Peter Lang AG, 2012), 353.

Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental

See also Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight

Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Kahil El’Zabar,

against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

for instance, was also a member of the AACM. 88

108

Routledge, 2012), 162. Stein’s book does a remarkable job of narrating

Generative Systems Program at the School of the Art Institute of

the series of events nationally by various branches of ACT UP and

Chicago, 1970–­1980, Langlois Foundation, http://sonart.org/book/

other coalitions.

chapter01/page01.htm. 89

109

Mary Patten, “The Thrill Is Gone: An ACT-­UP Postmortem

Lucinda Furlong, “Tracking Video Art: ‘Image Processing as a Genre,”

(Confessions of a Former AIDS Activist),” in The Passionate

Art Journal 45, no. 3, “Video: The Reflexive Medium” (Autumn 1985):

Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright

233–­37.

(London: Routledge, 1998), 391–­92.

90 Peter Donebauer, “Electronic Painting,” Video & Audio-­Visual Review,

March 1975, 30–­34. 91

Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (London:

Sonia Sheridan, “Generative Systems statement” (undated),

110

Patten, “Thrill Is Gone,” 389.

111

Dawn Turner Trice, “Woodlawn’s Experimental Station Succeeds,”

This is the terminology introduced on the cover of the first issue of

Chicago Tribune, November 26, 2012.

Radical Software 1, no. 1 (Spring 1970).

112

See Experimental Station website, https://experimentalstation.org/

92

Furlong, “Tracking Video Art,” 234.

113

See Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art

93

Christine Tamblyn, “Image Processing in Chicago Video Art, 1970–­

(Seattle: Bay Press, 1994).

1980,” Leonardo 24, no. 3 (1991): 304–­5.

114

94 The author wishes to thank media historian Gloria Sutton for fruitful

Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-­Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 117.

dialogues on this history.

Most recently, Culture in Action is the subject of a volume in the

95

Carole Ann Klonarides, email to author, August 29, 2016.

Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall. See David

96

Faye Gleisser, “Kate Horsfield: The Early Years of the Video Data

Morris and Paul O’Neill, eds., Exhibition as Social Intervention:

Bank and On Art and Artists,” undated interview, Video Data Bank,

Culture in Action, 1993 (London: Afterall, 2013).

www.vdb.org.

115

Mary Jane Jacob, “Tele-­Vecindario: Iñigo Manglano-­Ovalle and

97

Klonarides, email to the author, August 29, 2016.

Street-­Level Video,” in Culture in Action: A Public Art Program

98

Video Data Bank Collection, http://www.vdb.org/content/

of Sculpture Chicago (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 84.

vdb-­collections-­0. 99

116

Rose Bouthillier, “Interview with Jae Jarrell: I Will Always Create,”

Jacob, “Haha and Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active Participation in Healthcare,” in Culture in Action, 90–91.

in How to Remain Human (Cleveland: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015), 64–­65.

396

CONTR IBUTORS

LARA ALLISON teaches design history at the School of the Art

ANTHONY ELMS is chief curator at the Institute of

Institute of Chicago.

Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

PAMELA BANNOS is professor of photography in Northwestern

JULIA FISH has lived and worked as an artist/painter in Chicago

University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice and the

since 1985, and is UIC Distinguished Professor Emerita of Art,

author of Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife.

School of Art and Art History. Her work can be characterized as site-­specific, in terms both of temporary projects/installations

DAWOUD BEY is the recipient of fellowships from the

and of the ongoing sequence of paintings and works on paper

Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the

generated from the experience of living and working within the

Arts, and holds an MFA from Yale University. He is currently

space of her 1922 brick storefront home/studio.

Distinguished College Artist and Professor of Art at Columbia

THEASTER GATES ’s practice includes sculpture, installation,

College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.

performance, and urban interventions that aim to bridge

GREGG BORDOWITZ is an artist and writer. He teaches in the

the gap between art and life. Gates works as an artist, curator,

Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department at the

urbanist, and facilitator. His projects attempt to instigate

School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is on the faculty of the

the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for

Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

social engagement that leads to political and spatial change.

NICK CAVE is a messenger, artist, and educator working

MICHELLE GRABNER works in a variety of mediums including

between the visual and performing arts through a wide range

drawing, painting, video, and sculpture, and incorporates

of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, sound,

writing, curating, and teaching with a studio practice grounded

and performance. He has been described as a Renaissance artist

in process and productivity. She joined the faculty of the

and says of himself, “I have found my middle and now . . . am

School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and became chair

working toward what I am leaving behind.”

of its Painting and Drawing Department in the fall of 2009.

JOHN CORBETT taught at the School of the Art Institute of

Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters,

Chicago from 1988 to 2013. He was artistic director of Berlin

Frieze, Art Press, and Art-­Agenda, among others.

JazzFest 2002, cocurated the Empty Bottle Jazz Series from 1996

WENDY GREENHOUSE is an independent art historian who has

to 2005, and was cocurator of Pathways to Unknown Worlds:

written extensively on Chicago’s historical artists and art.

Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-­Futurist Underground,

At the Chicago History Museum, where she served as curator

1954–­1968 (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 2006; Institute

of paintings and sculpture, she curated the first retrospective

of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2009; Durham [NC] Art

exhibition on Archibald J. Motley Jr. Among her many other

Guild, 2009).

publications are the coauthored Chicago Painting 1895 to

ROBERT COZZOLINO is the Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator

1945: The Bridges Collection, for the Illinois State Museum;

of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2004

the collection catalog of the Union League Club of Chicago;

to 2016 he was a curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the

Re: Chicago, for the DePaul Art Museum; and Chicago Modern,

Fine Arts in Philadelphia where he organized more than thirty

1893–­1945: Pursuit of the New, for the final exhibition at

exhibitions, including surveys of Peter Blume, David Lynch,

the Terra Museum of American Art. Greenhouse earned her

Elizabeth Osborne, Honoré Sharrer, and George Tooker, plus

PhD in the history of art at Yale.

thematic projects ranging from The Female Gaze: Women

STANISLAV GREZDO was born in 1972 in Czechoslovakia

Artists Making the World to World War I and American Art.

(now Slovakia). He studied at the Graphic School of Bratislava,

He has been called the “curator of the dispossessed” for champi-

1986–­1991, and in 1999 moved to the United States. Since

oning underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives

2007 he has been curator of the Ukrainian Institute of Modern

on well-­known artists.

Art in Chicago.

397

C ONTR I BUTORS

MAX GRINNELL is an urbanologist.

NATHAN LERNER (1913–1997) was a photographer and indus-

trial designer who trained at the New Bauhaus, taught at the

TEMPESTT HAZEL is a curator, writer, and director of Sixty

School of Design, and worked in Chicago.

Inches from Center, a Chicago-­based arts publication and archiving initiative. In addition to her contributions there,

VICTORIA SANCHO LOBIS is the Prince Trust Curator in

her writings and interviews have been published in Support

the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute

Networks: Chicago Social Practice History Series, Contact

of Chicago.

Sheet: Light Work Annual, Unfurling: Explorations In Art,

FAHEEM MAJEED is an artist, educator, curator, and community

Activism and Archiving, and catalogs for Prospect New Orleans,

facilitator. He blends his unique experience as an artist, non-

the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Broad Museum (Lansing, MI),

profit administrator, and curator to create works that focus on

as well as on Artslant and in various artist monographs.

institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration

KATHRYN HIXSON (1955–­2010) taught at the School of the

to engage both his immediate and the broader community in

Art Institute and was the editor of the New Art Examiner

meaningful dialogue.

from 1993 to 2002.

IÑIGO MANGLANO- ­OVALLE is professor and chair in the

LIN HIXSON directs Every house has a door, a group she

Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern

cofounded in 2008. Previously she directed the performance

University.

group Goat Island, from its founding in 1987 until it ended

JENNIFER JANE MARSHALL (associate professor, University

in 2009. She is full professor in the Performance Department

of Minnesota–­Twin Cities) specializes in American art and

at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

visual/material culture from the interwar period. She is the

RHONA HOFFMAN is the founder and owner of Rhona

author of numerous articles and Machine Art, 1934, chronicling

Hoffman Gallery.

the rise of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art (winner: Robert Motherwell Book Award, 2013). A recipient

ERIN HOGAN is a writer and editor in Chicago.

of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, she

MARY JANE JACOB is a curator who pioneered public, site-­

has lent her expertise to documentary film, podcast, and print

specific, and socially engaged art in the US. Her anthologies

journalism projects on topics including American folk art,

range from Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art to the Chicago

museum history, the gold standard, and popular art crazes of

Social Practice History Series. Professor at the School of

the Great Depression.

the Art Institute of Chicago, she also directs its Institute for

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL uses painting, sculptural installa-

Curatorial Research and Practice.

tions, collage, video, and photography to comment on the

TONY JONES was president of the School of the Art Institute

history of black identity in the United States and in Western

(1985–­1991, 1996–­2013) and currently holds the Nerman

art. He is well known for paintings that focus on black

Family Presidency at the Kansas City Art Institute.

subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery

JUDITH RUSSI KIRSHNER has been active as a critic, curator,

ranging from abstraction to comics.

and educator in the Chicago community for more than forty years. She has lectured and published widely on artists from

THOMAS MCCORMICK , an avid collector and art dealer for

Chicago and Italy and served as curator at the Museum of

forty-­five years, has a gallery in Chicago’s West Loop.

Contemporary Art and the Terra Museum of American Art;

MATTHEW METZGER is an artist based in Chicago, where he

as dean of the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at

received his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2009

the University of Illinois at Chicago; and most recently as

and is the founder of the Listening Center. Metzger is assistant

deputy director for education at the Art Institute of Chicago.

professor of art in the School of Art and Art History at the

JUDY LEDGERWOOD is the Alice Welsh Professor of Art in

University of Illinois at Chicago. He is represented by Regards

the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern

in Chicago and Arratia Beer in Berlin.

University. Born in 1959, Ledgerwood lives and works in Chicago.

398

C ONTR I BUTORS

CESÁREO MORENO joined the National Museum of Mexican

DIANE SIMPSON has, over her forty-­year career, exhibited

Art in 1992 and has been its visual arts director since 1995

her sculptures and drawings widely throughout the United

and chief curator since 2004.

States and more recently in Europe. She has been a visiting artist and has lectured at numerous schools, delivering the

LIESL OLSON is director of Chicago studies at the Newberry

Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the School of the Art Institute

Library and the author of Chicago Renaissance: Literature

of Chicago in 2016.

and Art in the Midwest Metropolis and Modernism and the

JENNI SORKIN is associate professor of contemporary art

Ordinary.

history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Since the 1980s Chicago-­based artist DAN PETERMAN has

She has published widely as an art critic and curator, and

worked at the intersection of art and ecology. Through the

is the author of Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community

creation of minimal sculptures, installations, and functional

(University of Chicago Press, 2016), which examines gender

objects that often rely upon reclaimed, reconfigured, or

and postwar ceramics practice at Black Mountain College

recycled materials, Peterman explores how art can be at once

and other utopian communities. She is a native of Chicago and

critical and poetic, socially engaged and subtly provocative.

an alumnus (BFA 1999) of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

CAROLINE PICARD is a writer, publisher, and curator. Her

writing has appeared in Artslant, Artforum, Flash Art

MAGGIE TAFT holds a PhD in art history from the University

International, and Paper Monument, among others. She is the

of Chicago. Her writings and reviews have appeared in

executive director of Green Lantern Press—­a nonprofit

many magazines and journals, including Artforum, The Point,

publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—­

Texte Zur Kunste, Design and Culture, and Journal of

and codirector of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/

Design History. She is founding director of the Haddon Avenue

bookstore in Chicago. Her fiction and comics appear under

Writing Institute, a community-based writing center for

the name Coco Picard.

teenage girls.

HEATHER RADKE is a writer and curator living in New York.

TONY TASSET ’s art is in private and public collections includ-

MICHAEL RAKOWITZ is an artist living and working in

ing the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum

Chicago. He teaches at Northwestern University.

of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum für Moderne Kunste in Frankfurt. He was selected

MICHAL RAZ-­R USSO is assistant curator of photography at

for the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is a professor emeritus at the

the Art Institute of Chicago.

University of Illinois at Chicago. Tasset is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery.

KAREN REIMER works at the intersection of domestic craft

and contemporary art, using their disjunctions to consider the

PETER TAUB works as a curator and arts administrator with an

sociopolitical values that underlie both. She is director of

emphasis on performance, crossdisciplinary, and collaborative

publications at the Renaissance Society at the University of

projects. He was the founding director of the performing

Chicago and an instructor in the Fiber and Material Studies

arts program at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,

Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

before which he directed Randolph Street Gallery.

Since arriving in Chicago in 1985, RICHARD REZAC has

TEMPORARY SERVICES is Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer.

primarily made object-­sculptures. He is adjunct full professor

The collective produces exhibitions, events, projects, and

at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received

publications.

fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome, among numerous others.

STUDS TERKEL (1912–2008) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning

SYLVIA RHOR is professor of art history at Carlow University

author, historian, and radio personality famous for his oral histo-

in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

ries of Chicago citizens.

KAY ROSEN is a painter who uses language as material.

TRAVIS VOGAN is associate professor in the School of

Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department

DONNA SEAMAN , adult books editor for Booklist, is the

of American Studies at the University of Iowa.

author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.

399

C ONTR I BUTORS

HAMZA WALKER joined the Renaissance Society in 1994, where

and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa,

he served as director of education and associate curator until

Japan. She is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery and is a

2016. He is currently executive director of LAXArt.

professor of art in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

CHRIS WARE is the author of Jimmy Corrigan—­the Smartest

Kid on Earth and Building Stories, which was selected as a

MATTHEW S. WITKOVSKY is the Richard and Ellen Sandor

Top Ten Fiction Book by the New York Times and Time magazine.

Chair and Curator of the Department of Photography at the Art

A regular contributor to the New Yorker, his work has been

Institute of Chicago.

exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the

JAMES YOOD (1952–2018) taught modern and contemporary

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Whitney

art criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where

Museum of American Art.

he also directed the MA program in New Arts Journalism.

LYNNE WARREN has been a curator at the Museum of

REBECCA ZORACH is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and

Contemporary Art Chicago since 1980.

Art History at Northwestern University. She teaches and

Awarded the Pulitzer Arts Foundation PXSTL Design-­Build

writes on early modern European art, contemporary activist art,

Award in St. Louis, AMANDA WILLIAMS has exhibited

and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include

work at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Arts Club of

print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation,

Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

the Black Arts Movement, and the multiple intersections of

She is represented by McCormick Gallery.

art and politics. Her books include The Passionate Triangle (2011) and Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the

A 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Fellow, ANNE

French Renaissance (2005). She coedited The Wall of Respect:

WILSON has work in permanent collections around the world,

Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (2017)

including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art

with Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford.

Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; Victoria and Albert Museum, London;

400

I L L U S T R AT I O N C R E D I T S

CREDITS FOR CHAPTERS 1 THROUGH 6, BY FIGURE NUMBER

3.3: University Archives and Special Collections, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, acc. no. 1998.31, box 7, folder 1

1.1: Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, 1949.6 1.2: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-168966. Photograph by Ted Williams 1.3: Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University. Gift of Percy H. Sloan, 53.01.070 1.4 (digital file 000000_170814-­001);

3.4: Art Institute of Chicago archives (digital

4.12: Estate of Ray Yoshida. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde 4.15: Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

file 000000_170629-­005). © 2018 Artists

Image source: Matthew Marks Gallery.

Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­

4.17a: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Kunst, Bonn

Gift of Dennis Adrian in honor of Claire B.

3.8: Chicago Public Library; William McBride Papers, box 6, folder 28 3.9a: Howard University Gallery of Art.

Zeisler, 1980.30.1. Photograph by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago 4.17b: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

2.1 (000000_170629-­004);

© 1939–1940 The Charles White Archives.

Gift of Dennis Adrian in honor of Claire

2.8 (000000_170629-­003);

Photograph by Gregory R. Staley

B. Zeisler, 1980.30.1. Photograph by James

4.13 (000000_170629-­001); 6.2 (198406_170629-­001);

3.10a: © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn

Isberner, © MCA Chicago 4.18: Courtesy of the artist and Corbett vs.

6.5a (200708_170629-­004);

3.10b: Photograph by P. Richard Eells. © 2017

6.5b (200708_170629-­012);

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/

4.19: Estate of Ed Paschke

VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn

4.20: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

6.5c (200708_170629-­002); 6.5d (200708_170629-­017): Art Institute of Chicago archives 1.6; 1.11: M. Christine Schwartz Collection 1.7; 1.10; 1.17; 2.16: Union League Club of Chicago 1.8; 1.12; 1.13: Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago 1.14, 2.5: Photograph by Katie Levi 1.16: Tuskegee University Legacy Museum 2.3: © University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Photograph © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund 2009.269 2.7; 3.16: Bernard Friedman Collection

3.11a: Estate of Keld Helmer-Petersen. Courtesy Rocket Gallery, London. 000000_170629003, Art Institute of Chicago Archives 3.11b: © Kochi Prefecture, Ishimoto Yasuhiro

Philadelphia. Joseph E. Temple Fund, 2010.10. Courtesy of Cheryl L. Cipriani 4.21: The Pauls Foundation. Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY 4.22a, 4.22b: © 2018 The Barnett Newman

Photo Center 3.12: © Ted Williams. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, ICHi-­168966 3.13: © Aaron Siskind Foundation 3.14; 3.15: © The Estate of Harry Callahan. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York 4.1: Courtesy of Judith and Rachel Siporin 4.4: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

2.9: Photograph by Doug Snower

Gift of Stuart Katz, 1996.31. Photograph by

2.10; 2.15; 3.1; 3.2b; 3.5; 3.6; 3.7; 3.10a; 3.11b;

Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

3.14; 4.9; 4.14; 4.16; 4.22a; 4.22b; 6.18:

Dempsey, Chicago

4.5: © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foun-

Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, NY 4.23: Courtesy of the Estate of Christina Ramberg 4.24: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Bequest of Ruth S. Nath, 1997.121. Photograph by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago 5.1; 5.2: Sengstacke Archive, University of Chicago Library

dation for the Arts. Licensed by VAGA, New

5.4: © Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

2.11: © Estate of Aaron Bohrod. Licensed by

York. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy

5.5: Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-­Grand

VAGA, New York. Private Collection/

of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Joseph E. Tem-

Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photograph by

Bridgeman Images

ple Art Fund, 2010.6.1

Philippe Migeat, courtesy of the Oldenburg

Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY

2.12; 4.8: © The Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY 2.13: © Eldzier Cortor. Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, NY 2.14: Hampton University Museum, Hampton,

4.6: © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., 4.7: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Funds provided

tory Museum/Bridgeman Images

by Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler,

2.18: Courtesy Heritage Auctions

2015.13, and courtesy of Evelyn Statsinger

2.19: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-­037872

Cohen Trust 4.10: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Susan and Lewis Manilow Collection of

LC-DIG-fsa-8d39489

Chicago Artists, 1993.34. Art © Dumbarton

graph by Jonathan Mathias 3.2b: The Estate of Arthur Siegel 3.2c: The Estate of Arthur Siegel. Paul Leicht, photographer/videographer

Dunitz 5.13; 5.14; 5.17; 5.19: Photograph: Georg Stahl Mural Collection, University of Chicago Library 5.15: Photograph by Harold Allen

graphs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, 3.2a; 3.2d: The Estate of Arthur Siegel. Photo-

Chicago 5.12: Photograph by James Prigoff and Robin J.

New York

VA. © Valerie Gerrard Browne/Chicago His-

2.20: Library of Congress, Prints and Photo-

van Bruggen Studio. © 1969 Claes Oldenburg. 5.6: The Pauls Foundation. Photograph © MCA

Arts, LLC/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photograph by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago 4.11: Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust, Jennifer

5.16: Photograph by Ted Lacey 5.21: Photograph: Public Art Workshop Mural Archive, University of Chicago Library 5.22: University of Chicago Library 5.23: EPA-­Documerica 5.25: Oakland Museum of California. All of Us or

Sabas & Shayle Miller Co-Trustees. Estate of

None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family,

Ray Yoshida

2010.54.469

401

I L LUSTRAT ION CRE DI T S

6.1: Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

and Myron La Ban, and Jean Sosin, 1995.36.

6.3: © Estate of Ellen Lanyon. Courtesy of the

Bridgeman Images. Courtesy of the artist

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

6.4: Image © the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank Chicago, www.vdb.org, School of the

Photograph by Ken Simpson

6.20: Photograph by Genyphyr Novak

288 Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter

Figures 5.7, 5.8, 5.11, 5.15, 5.16, 5.24, 5.26, 6.1, 6.7,

294 © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack

Philadelphia. Gift of the Estate of Ellen Lanyon, 2014.5.2

286 Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.

Gallery 6.10, 6.12a–b, 6.15, 6.16a–b, 6.17, and 6.21 appear courtesy of the respective artists.

Art Institute of Chicago

Shainman Gallery, New York 295 Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Photograph

6.6: Art Institute of Chicago archives (digital file

by Surabhi Ghosh

200708_170629-­001). Photograph by Carol

CREDITS FOR SIDEBARS AND

298 Courtesy Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art

Turchan

CHAPTER 7, BY PAGE

299 Courtesy Cesareo Moreno

6.8: Madison (WI) Museum of Contemporary

312 Photograph by Dan Peterman, 2017

Art. Purchase, through funds bequested by

26 Private collection. Photo courtesy

Elizabeth Harris, 1987.04. © Estate of Hollis

McCormick Gallery, Chicago

Sigler 6.9: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift

313 Photograph by James O. Jenkins, courtesy of the artist

38 Courtesy of the Field Museum, CSGEO3243

318 Courtesy of the artist

67 Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY

324 Photograph by Norman Nithman

of the Susan and Lewis Manilow Collection

67 Courtesy of Corinne May Botz

325 © The Renaissance Society at the University

of Chicago Artists, 1991.73.a–q. Estate of

123 © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

Margaret Wharton, courtesy of Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago. Photograph by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago 6.11: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY. Courtesy of Patricia Cruz 6.13: © The family of Dean Langworthy 6.18: Courtesy of Tom Florsheim 6.19: Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, Andrew L. and Gayle Shaw Camden Contemporary and Decorative Arts

York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY 130 Gertrude Abercrombie papers, 1880–1986, bulk, 1935–1977. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 154 Courtesy of the Estate of Vivian Maier. © 2017 The Estate of Vivian Maier. All

rights reserved

of Chicago. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde 349 Image courtesy of the artist and Regards, Chicago 353–354  Images courtesy of the artist and McCormick Gallery 356 Courtesy of the Suburban and Studio Lars Breuer/KANT Gallery–­Copenhagen 365 © Theaster Gates. Photograph © Sara Pooley, courtesy White Cube

228 © 2017 Kiyoko Lerner. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 284 © Karen Reimer. Courtesy of monique-

Fund, with funds from Byron and Dorothy

meloche, Chicago. Photograph by Tom Van

Gerson, Stephan and Marian Loginsky, Joyce

Eynde

402

367 © Theaster Gates. Photograph © White Cube (Ben Westoby) 369 Photograph by Nathan Mandell 371 Photograph by Katie Graves

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Alexandroff, Mirron, 203 Algren, Nelson, 134, 272, 302

AACM. See Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Abakanowicz, Magdalena, 269, 292 Abdul-­Jabbar, Fulla, 345

250, 253, 285–­86, 315, 331, 373, 393–­94n18, 394n31; Artemisia Fund, 243, 394n37

Alk, Howard, 201

A

Artemisia Gallery, 2, 4, 235, 238, 240, 244–­47,

Allan Frumkin Gallery, 127

Art Ensemble of Chicago, 142

Allen, Jane Addams, 195, 230

Art Expo, 347

Allerton, Robert, 71–­72

Arthur Jerome Eddy Collection, 71

Alley from 1121 N. Larrabee in Cabrini-­Green,

Art Institute of Chicago, 2–­3, 7, 12, 15–­19,

Chicago (Williams), 125

22, 27, 29–­31, 38–­39, 44, 46–­47, 49–­51,

Abe, Shuya, 266

Alloway, Lawrence, 159, 170

58–­60, 62–­65, 67–­68, 70–­71, 75, 83, 90,

Abel, Jessica, 330

All Souls Unitarian Church, 113

96, 99, 102, 117, 121, 138, 141, 151, 157, 182,

Abercrombie, Gertrude, 58, 85, 86, 100–­101,

Almond, Darren, 355

194, 201, 214, 221, 237, 255, 285, 306, 330,

Alonzo, Ricardo, 215

358, 381n64, 381n74, 385n38, 395n77;

Abernathy, Billy, 190, 220, 272

Altrua Library Association, 33

American exhibitions, 21, 42, 81, 166, 362;

Abernathy, Sylvia, 190, 218

Alvarado, David, 329

Chicago and Vicinity exhibitions, 20, 73,

Ablaze and Ajar (Brown), 184, 185

America Day by Day (de Beauvoir), 143, 388n73

100, 133, 136–­37, 140, 166, 170–­71, 239,

Abraham Lincoln Centre, 113

American Art-­Union, 11

250, 362, 388n13; Exhibition of Works by

Abrams, Muhal Richard, 142, 204

American Friends Service Committee, 189

Chicago Artists, 45; Friends of American

Abramson, Ben, 88

American Gothic (Wood), 81

Art, 33, 384n177; Watercolor exhibitions,

abstract expressionism, 118, 125, 127, 131,

American Jewish Artists Club, 388n7

130, 140, 166, 360

20, 362–­63

American Revolution (film), 201

Art in War (exhibition), 119

Amft, Robert, 360

Artistas Chicanos Independientes (ACI), 214

Anderson, Fred, 142, 262

Artistic Heritage Ensemble, 142, 203, 205

Acconci, Vito, 315

Anderson, Margaret, 64–­65, 72

Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Prinzhorn), 144, 168

Across the Land (Britton), 206

Anderson, Marian, 114

Artists Against the War in Vietnam, 174

ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power),

Anderson, Othello, 253, 393–­94n18

Artists Union of Chicago, 122

Anderson, Sherwood, 65, 79

Artner, Arthur, 195, 255, 320

Adams, Alice, 243

Anderson, Wes, 67

Art Nouveau, 38

Adams, Eddie, 179

Andreas, A. T., 9

Art of the Woman’s Building, The (exhibition),

Addams, Jane, 2, 23, 29, 31, 35, 77, 90,

Angel (Halkin), 145

146–­48, 151–­52, 247, 285, 318, 332, 362 Abstract Expressionism and Other Politics (Gibson), 362

274–­76, 396n108

188, 230

246–­47 Art Resources in Teaching, 33. See also Public

Angelo, Nancy, 246

Ade, George, 21

Angola’s Dreams Grasp Finger Tips (Cruz), 254

Adler, Dankmar, 23, 27

Animal Court (Miller), 88, 91

Adler, Mortimer, 118

Arbus, Diane, 154

Adrian, Dennis, 195

ARC Gallery, 4, 235, 238, 240, 250, 253, 260,

Afam Gallery, 191

School Art Society (PSAS) Arts Alliance Illinois, 393n6. See also Illinois Arts Advocates Arts and Crafts movement, 18–­19, 31, 36, 38, 49, 52, 68

315, 394n47

Affro-­Arts Theater, 142, 203, 205, 392n39

Arché Club, 30

Arts Block, 366

Africa West, 364

Archipenko, Alexander, 102, 104

Arts Club of Chicago, 3, 58, 68–­71, 72, 100,

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad

AREA Chicago, 346

110–­11, 114, 119, 142, 156, 171, 235

Relevant Artists), 2, 79, 190–­91, 205–­6,

Arenal, Luis, 122

Arts Crafts Guild, 75

226, 231, 267, 321

Arensberg, Louise, 136

Art Students’ League of Chicago, 18, 39

Agora (Abakanowicz), 269

Arensberg, Walter, 136

Art Students League of New York, 79, 155

Ahmadi, Pouya, 344

Armin, Emil, 68, 101

Art through the Ages (Gardner), 38, 155

AIR Gallery, 240

Armory Show (1913) (exhibition), 3, 46, 50,

Ashby, Cynthia, 263

Akerman, Chantal, 238

58–­60, 62–­63, 65, 68–­69, 71–­72, 81. See

Ashcan School, 42, 44, 79, 83

Akinlana, Marcus, 321

also International Exhibition of Modern Art

Asher, Michael, 315

Ala Shango (Donaldson), 206, 209

(exhibition)

Ashton, Dore, 394n43

Albers, Josef, 100, 140

Armour Institute, 17

Assigned Identities (Manglano-­Ovalle), 336

Albert Roullier Gallery, 122

Arnold, Ralph, 179, 181, 198, 200, 201

Association for the Advancement of Creative

Albright, Adam Emory, 50

Arnow, Jan, 394n47

Musicians (AACM), 142, 190, 203–­4, 218,

Albright, Ivan, 58, 79, 81–­83, 88, 99, 101, 121, 131,

Arredondo, Roberto, 392n55

258, 262, 364, 346

157, 158, 159, 205

Art & Soul, 215, 216, 223

Aldis, Arthur Taylor, 58–­59

Art by Telephone (exhibition), 221–­22, 373

Alekna, Dalia Reklys, 394n47

Art Directors Club of Chicago, 137

403

Association of American Painters and Sculptors, 58 Association of Arts and Industries, 102–­3

I N DE X

Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, 83

Bergman, Lindy, 319, 336 Berkman, Berenice, 88, 90

Both Sides Now: An International Exhibition Integrating Feminism and Leftist Politics (exhibition), 243

Athey, Ron, 370–­71

Berkman, Phil, 253

At Jennie Richee. 2 of Story to Evans. They

Berman, Josh, 262

Botz, Corinne, 67

attempt to get away by rolling themselves

Bermudez, José, 212

Bouras, Harry, 167, 195

in floor rugs (Darger), 228

Bernstein, Gerda Meyer, 250, 394n47

Bourdette, Christine, 395n75

Atkinson, Ti-­Grace, 242

Bertoia, Harry, 108

Boutwood, Charles E., 19, 22, 40

At Their Word (The Sick Woman) (Spero),

Better Homes Institute, 90, 110

Bowie, Joanne, 25–­26

Bey, Dawoud, 239, 288–­90, 288

Bowie, Lester, 142

Audible Gallery, 238

Beyond Green (exhibition), 310

Boy in a Blue Jacket (Sebree), 100

Auditorium Building, 23, 36, 72

Be Your Brother’s Keeper (Jones-­Hogu), 201, 202

Bracken, Julia, 27. See also Wendt, Julia

August in France (Harper), 51, 52

Bierstadt, Albert, 12

Brakhage, Stan, 238

Avery, Henry, 114

Biesel, Francis, 68

Bramson, Phyllis, 247, 250, 251, 331, 394n30

Axe Street Arena, 347

Biesel, Fred, 68

Brancusi, Constantin, 71

Aycock, Alice, 243

“Big Boy Leaves Home” (Wright), 55

Brand, Bill, 253

A-­Zone, 347

Bigelow, Daniel Folger, 12

Brandt, Henry George, 49, 50–­51

Big Picture: A New View of Painting in Chicago

Braxton, Anthony, 142

148, 150

Break the Grip of the Absentee Landlord

(exhibition), 360

B

Bike Ride for Survival, 231

Baby Heidi Chair (Bramson), 250, 251

Billy Club, The (Ginzel), 390n88

Breast Cancer Journal (Sigler), 247

Bacasa, Jason, 344

Binion, Sandra, 243, 263, 264

Bredendieck, Hin, 104, 113

Bacon, Francis, 147, 160

Black, Sara, 365

Breton, André, 182

Baczewska, Christine, 395n75

Black Arts Movement, 2, 187–­88, 190–­91, 203–­4,

Breuer, Lars, 356

Badgett, Steve, 324

221, 223, 229–­30, 267, 272

(Rogovin), 215, 217

Brice, Judy Lerner, 394n47

Baker, Elizabeth C., 253

Black Belt (Motley), 83, 85

Bricks and Siding: South Wall (Fish), 332

Baker, Martha Susan, 19, 23, 31, 32

Black Is, Black Ain’t (exhibition), 324–­25, 325

Bride Stripped Bare, The (film), 196, 391n24

Baker, Robb, 201

Black Man’s Dilemma (McIlvaine), 215

Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,

Bankston, John, 321

Black Monks of Mississippi, 364

Baraka, Amiri, 221

Black Mountain College, 121

Britton, Edgar, 61

Barazani, Morris, 143–­44, 360

Black Paintings (Spero), 148, 151

Britton, Sylvester, 206

Barber’s Shop, The (Copley), 198

Black Panther (Douglas), 226

Bronzeville (neighborhood), 58, 75, 83, 101, 110,

Barnes, Djuna, 57

Black Panther Leaders in Front of Chicago’s

Barnes, Robert, 389n23 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 140 Barrows, Marva Trotter, 114

City Hall (Kubota), 197 Black Panther Party, 182, 189, 193, 196–­97,

The (Duchamp), 196

113, 115, 191–­92, 203, 365 Brookes, Samuel Marsden, 9 Brooks, Adam, 335 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 186, 194, 203

201, 393n85

Barry, Lynda, 329

Blackshear, Kathleen, 71, 140, 144, 155, 174

Brötzmann, Peter, 262, 358

Barthé, Richmond, 385n38

Blackstone Bikes, 276

Brown, Dakota, 344

Bartlett, Florence Dibell, 68

Black Student Demonstration at Civic Center

Brown, Jeffrey, 330

Bartlett, Frederick Clay, 47, 49, 68, 71

Plaza (Dykinga), 197

Brown, Marion, 220

Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium, 47, 49

Blakk, Joan Jett, 370

Brown, Meredith, 240

Barton, Macena, 83, 85, 86, 87

Bliss, 355

Brown, Nancy Forest, 243

Bastida y Sorolla, Joaquin, 19

Blitzed British Architecture (exhibition), 119

Brown, Roger, 155, 162, 182, 184, 185

Baum, Don, 130, 140, 143, 155, 166–­67, 182, 327

Bloch, Sonia, 393n7

Brown, Trisha, 260, 316

Bay Area Video Coalition, 266

Blome, Erik, 1

Brown Berets, 214

Bayer, Herbert, 118

Bloom, Brett, 309, 341. See also Temporary

Browne, Charles Francis, 29, 36, 40, 382n101

Beall, DeWitt, 223

Browne, Francis Fisher, 72

Services

Beardsley, Aubrey, 85

Bloom, Janet, 226

Browne, Maurice, 72

Beaumont, Charles, 163

Blue Figure (Klement), 247, 248

Brundage, Margaret, 58, 88, 89

Beaux, Cecilia, 381n64

Blue Nude (Matisse), 60, 72

Brundage, Myron “Slim,” 88

Beck, Stephen, 266

Blum, Jerome, 53

Brunetti, Ivan, 329

Beetles, 51

Blumenthal, Lyn, 256, 260, 266–­67

Buckingham, Kate, 61

Bellows, George, 44, 83, 384n177

Blurred (Rosen), 318–­19, 318

Buehr, Karl, 50

Benedict, Enella, 31

Bock, Richard, 29, 382n101

Buffalo Fine Art Academy, 380n50

Bengtson, William H., 331

Bohrod, Aaron, 58, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83

Bughouse Square, 188

Bennett, Edward H., 117

Book, Lynn, 263

Bulliet, C. J., 85, 119, 138, 195, 386n18

Bennett, Eugene, 143

Bookspace, 238

Bunker, Dennis Miller, 39

Bennett, Rainey, 388n13

Bordowitz, Gregg, 2, 301–­4

Burbank, Elbridge Ayer, 29, 37

Beret International, 287

Borg Warner Gallery of Chicago Artists, 239

Burden, Chris, 260

Berger, Fred, 143

Born, Richard, 357

Burgess, Ida, 382n102

Bergman, Ed, 336

Boston, 8, 15, 21, 33, 262, 380n50, 381n77

Burgin, Christine, 317

404

I N DE X

Burgin, Victor, 322

Center for New Television, 238

Chicago—­The Pawnbroker (Nordfeldt), 44

Burnham, Daniel, 27, 30, 68, 117, 260

Center for the Book and Paper Arts, 272.

Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, 345

Burnham, Jack, 221–­22, 392n72

See also Paper Press

Chicago Woman’s Club, 19–­20, 33, 47, 61, 75 Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, 223,

Burnham, Linda, 243, 395n81

Central Art Association, 39–­41, 383–­84n166

Burroughs, Charles, 187, 229

Central Trust Bank, 47

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 38

Century of Progress, 1, 61, 81, 99–­100

Chicago Women’s Liberation, 240

Burroughs, Margaret, 75, 77, 91, 101, 114–­15,

Ceramics Workshop, 105

Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, 226, 240.

226, 227

See also Westside Group

122, 187, 194, 206, 210, 215, 222, 226, 229,

Chang, Jackie, 335

237, 306–­8, 321. See also Goss, Margaret

Chapin, Francis, 108

Chief Black Coyote (Burbank), 37

Bush, George W., 309, 314

Character Project (Bey), 288–­90

Childhood Is without Prejudice (Walker),

Butcher, Fanny, 72

Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 346–­47

Butler, Edward Burgess, 51

Chase, William Merritt, 19, 39

Childs, Lucinda, 316

Butler, Judith, 394n26

Chavannes, Puvis de, 50

Choy, Christine, 267

Butler Art Gallery, 31, 35, 51

Chermayeff, Serge, 104–­5, 108, 140

Chreptowsky, Achilles, 297

Chicago (Camera-­Movement on Neon Light

Chreptowsky, Vera, 297

at Night) (Callahan), 129

206, 210

Christ-­Janer, Albert, 136

C

Chicago (Siegel), 97

Christmas, Edward, 190

Cage, John, 71, 142, 260, 302–­3, 307

Chicago, Judy, 240, 243, 269

Christo, 223

Cahill, Zachary, 195

Chicago Academy of Design, 2, 14, 16, 18

Christopher, Karen, 263

Cain, Jackie, 130

Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, 16, 19, 25. See

Cincinnati, 9, 19, 36, 167, 302, 314

Calder, Alexander, 70

also School of the Art Institute of Chicago

City, The (Park), 79

California, 59, 73, 107, 155, 179, 213–­14, 300,

(SAIC)

City Walls, 223

Chicago Art Association, 30, 382n119

Civil Tapestry (Dirty Yellow) (Gates), 367

Callahan, Eleanor, 127

Chicago Art Club, 22

C. J. Bulliet (Barton), 86

Callahan, Harry, 121, 123, 127, 128, 129, 131, 144

Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), 214, 255,

Clark, Alson Skinner, 41–­42, 43

317, 344

Camera Movements (Callahan), 127

Clarke, Thomas B., 17

393n6

Clarkson, Ralph, 16, 29–­30, 46, 72

Cameron, Edgar S., 18, 30, 47, 382n101

Chicago Art League, 21, 22, 75, 235, 385n38

Cameron, Marie Gelon, 382n101

Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, 31

Cliff Dwellers, 36–­37, 47, 60, 68

Campbell, Joseph, 148

Chicago Art Union, 11

Cliff-­Dwellers, The (Fuller), 68

Campoli, Cosmo, 140–­41, 143, 146–­47, 152, 156,

Chicago: City on the Make (Algren), 134,

Cliff Dwellers series (Jonson), 68

389n23, 389n26

Close, Del, 368

272, 302

Canada, 90

Chicago Council on Fine Arts, 393n6

Clowes, Daniel, 329

Candy (Ormes), 329

Chicago Cultural Center, 262, 314

Club Lower Links, 372

Capone, Al, 101

Chicago Editing Center, 230, 238

Clusmann, William, 29

Care of the Cow, 395n75

Chicago Filmmakers, 238, 250

Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists

Carl, Elaine, 238, 395n75

Chicago Film Workshop, 230

Carlos, John, 392n50

Chicago 42 (Siskind), 126, 144

Cobra (Lanyon), 240, 241

Carlson, Cynthia, 243

Chicago Historical Society, 121. See also

Cocanig, Mitch, 262

Carl Street Studios, 75 Carmichael, Stokely, 203 Carnegie International (exhibition), 31

Chicago History Museum Chicago History Museum, 121, 360. See also Chicago Historical Society

Carol, Estelle, 223

Chicago Little Theatre, 53, 63–­64, 72

Carpenter, George B., 12, 14

Chicago Motor Club Building, 68–­69. See also

Carpenter, Rue Winterbotham, 69–­72

(COBRA), 204–­5

Coe, Ted, 171 Coen, Eleanor, 122, 137 Coffee House, The (Clark), 42, 43 Cohen, George, 135, 140, 144, 155–­56, 160, 389n23, 389n26 Cohran, Phil, 142, 203

Wacker Tower

Carré, Lilli, 330

Chicago Mural Group, 211, 214–­15

Coleman, Steve, 262

Carson Pirie Scott, 49, 163

Chicago New Art Association, 230

College Art Association, 214, 230

Carswell, Rodney, 331

Chicago No-­Jury Society of Artists, 73, 77,

College of Complexes, 88

Carter, William, 101

Collo-­Julin, Salem, 309, 341

83, 100, 388n7

Carver, George Washington, 114

Chicago Opera, 64

Color(ed) Theory Suite (Williams), 353–­54

Casa Aztlán murals (Raya), 213, 214, 392n55

Chicago Photographic Guild, 121

Colossal Figure (Golub), 146–­47

Cash, Lucy, 263

“Chicago Picasso” (Picasso), 4, 70, 190, 193–­96,

Comic Book Specimen #15 (Yoshida), 164–­65

Cassatt, Mary, 15, 27, 382n102

Committee in Solidarity with the People of

198, 201, 203, 231

El Salvador (CISPES), 368

Castillo, Mario, 212–­14

Chicago Plan Commission, 117

Castillo Optical Reader Synthesizer (CORS), 213

Chicago school of sociology, 79, 131

Cates, Jon, 231

Chicago series (Siskind), 126–­27

Community Arts Foundation (CAF), 210–­11

Cather, Willa, 56–­57, 68

Chicago Society of Artists (CSA), 22–­23, 39

Community Film Workshop Council, 230

Catlett, Elizabeth, 78, 115, 226, 305, 392n50

Chicago Society of Etchers, 77

Compton, Candace, 246

Caton, Mitchell, 218, 220

Chicago Surrealist Group, 182, 195

conceptualism, 235, 277, 287

Cave, Nick, 291–­96

Chicago: The City and Its Artists (exhibition),

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 193

Center for Creative Studies, 336

Communications for Change, 230

Conrad, Tony, 238

393n13

405

I N DE X

Dorchester Projects (Gates), 276, 347, 349,

Conservative Vice Lords, 215, 223

Damon, Betsy, 243

Constructed Drawings (Simpson), 286

Dandridge, Dorothy, 115

Container Corporation of America (CCA),

Darby, Golden B., 113

Dore, Lester, 182

364–­66

Darger, Henry, 2, 155, 228, 327

Doremus, Suzanne, 243

Contemporary Art Workshop, 143, 235, 237

Davey, Randall, 44

Douglas, Emory, 226

Contract Buyers’ League (CBL), 193, 196

Davidson, Anya, 329–­30

Douglas, Stephen A., 10

Cook, George Cram, 52

Davies, Arthur B., 19, 50, 59, 62

Douglass, Frederick, 114

Cool Morning on the Prairie (Sloan), 13

Davis, Angela, 206, 208, 215–­16

Dove, Arthur, 52, 62

Cooper, Dennis, 263

Davis, Charles, 75

Draftees of the World Unite! You Have Nothing

Copley, William N., 198, 201

Davis, Miles, 130, 142

Cor Ardens group, 64, 73, 77, 83

Davis, Richard, 218

Drawing Center, 295

3, 102–­3, 118

to Lose but Your Generals! (Cortéz), 226, 229

Corbett, John, 262, 348, 357–­63

Davis, Vaginal Crème, 371

Dreiser, Theodore, 44, 55, 79

Cortéz, Carlos, 214, 226, 229

Dawson, Charles, 76

Drnaso, Nick, 329

Cortor, Eldzier, 58, 71, 75, 83, 84, 88, 101, 137

Dawson, Manierre, 3, 53, 54, 62, 63, 385n38

Drury, John H., 12, 13

Corwin, Charles Abel, 19

Day without Art/Visual AIDS events, 371

Dry Cleaner (Siegel), 98

Cosby, Bill, 101

de Beauvoir, Simone, 143, 146, 388n73

Dubuffet, Jean, 81, 147, 156–­57, 159–­60,

Cosey, Pete, 142

DeCarava, Roy, 272

Cosmopolitan Art Club, 22–­23, 30, 39

Deer (Tasset), 316, 318

Council of Photographic and Art Studios, 121

Degas, Edgar, 71

Couple in the Cage, The (Fusco and Gómez-­

Deitz, Michael, 243

Dunham, Katherine, 204

Peña), 233, 393n3. See also Year of the White

DeJohnette, Jack, 142

Dunn, Ken, 310, 365, 372

Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians

de Kooning, Willem, 127, 148, 152, 247

Dunning, Jeanne, 277, 315, 318

Visit the West, The (Fusco and Gómez-­Peña)

Deleuze, Gilles, 355

Durand, Asher, 12

Cowherd, Darryl, 190, 272

Dell, Floyd, 56–­57, 65–­66, 204, 385n1

DuSable, Jean-­Baptiste, 1, 4, 194

Cozzolino, Robert, 357

Dell, Margery, 65

DuSable Museum, 187, 190, 206, 229, 237, 321.

Cranach, Lucas (the Elder), 115

Democratic National Convention (DNC),

Crane, Barbara, 122

255, 395n60 Duchamp, Marcel, 57–­58, 71–­72, 81, 159, 196, 318

176, 179, 188–­89, 198, 201

See also Ebony Museum of African History Duvall, Schlecter, 182

Crane, Michael, 253

Dempsey, Jim, 357–­60

Dyer, Herrmann, 137

Crane, Ross, 90

Denny, Margaret, 381n59

Dykinga, Jack, 197

Crawford, Bob, 205, 272

Denst, John, 106

Creative Audio Archive, 238

Department of Space and Land Reclamation,

Creative Photography (exhibition), 115

343

E

Crosby, Uranus, 12, 14

DePaul University, 300, 395n77

Eagle’s Nest, 49, 53

Crosby’s Opera House, 12, 14

deVallance, Brendan, 370

Ear Candy, 306

Crucifixion of Don Pedro Albizu Campos,

Devan, Justine, 392n60

Earle, Lawrence Carmichael “L. C.,” 21, 27, 47

The (Galan, Bermudez, Rosario), 212

DFBRL8R Gallery, 293

Earthkeeping (film), 223

Crumb, Robert, 329

Dial, The (magazine), 72

Earwax Café, 329

Cruz, Emilio, 253, 254

Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone), 242

Ebony Family (Jarrell), 206, 207

Cube (theater group), 204

Diaz, Aurelio, 214

Ebony Museum of African History, 187. See also

Cubism, 46, 63, 121

Dickerson, Amina, 321

Culberg, Maurice, 156, 389n48

Dickinson, Joan, 370

Eckerstrom, Ralph, 118

Culkin, Joyce, 395n75

Dickinson, Stirling, 122

Eckhardt, Mary, 243

Culture in Action (Sculpture Chicago), 276,

Dick Tracy (Gould), 327

Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 58–­59, 68, 81

Diebenkorn, Richard, 147

Edgewater (neighborhood), 238, 393n3

Cunningham, Charles, 179

Dil Pickle Club, 88, 346

Edwards, Hugh, 272

Curry, Margery. See Dell, Margery

Di Meo, Dominick, 140, 143, 174, 176, 178,

Egan, Charles, 140

278–­79, 336–­41

390n65

DuSable Museum

Egan Gallery, 127

Dinkins, Fitzhugh, 101

Ehrman, Marli, 102

Dion, Mark, 276

Eight, The, 42, 44, 46, 50

Dada, 155, 168

Disney, Walt, 88

Elastic Arts Foundation, 262

Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage

Documenta, 324

Electronic Arts Intermix, 266–­67

Documenta 14, 312–­13

Electronic Visualization Laboratory, 369

Documerica (EPA), 223

Elenhank Designers, 106, 108, 109

Dogmatic and Bodybuilder Gallery, 355

Elkins, Henry, 12

Dohn, Pauline, 19, 45, 382n102

Ellison, Walter, 83

Domesticates (Tasset), 315

El’Zabar, Kahil, 258, 395n70, 396n87

Daley’s Tomb (exhibition), 255

Donaldson, Jeff, 2, 190–­91, 204–­6, 208, 209, 226

Emerson House, 336

Dali, Salvador, 81

Donebauer, Peter, 266

Empty Bottle, 262, 348

Dallin, Cyrus, 36

Donley, Robert, 174

End of an Era (Siporin), 138, 139

Dalström, Gustaf, 135–­38, 140, 388n7, 388n13

Door with Couch Grass (Dubuffet), 159

Enemy Kitchen (Rakowitz), 309–­10

D

(exhibition), 179, 182 da Hairy Who Kamic Kamie Page (Hairy Who), 168 Daley, Richard J., 174, 176, 179, 182, 189, 198, 255

406

I N DE X

Englewood (neighborhood), 56, 83, 353

Field Museum of Natural History, 38, 71,

Frumkin, Allan, 166, 389n23

English, Darby, 349

95, 111, 144, 152, 155, 162, 233, 255,

Fuller, Astrid, 392n60

Environment, 221, 223

258, 335, 393n3

Fuller, Henry Blake, 16, 68, 72

Épicerie (Temporary Services), 343

57th Street Art Colony, 52–­53, 65, 75, 204

Fuller, Hoyt W., Jr., 188, 229

Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

57th Street Art Fair, 122, 187, 204

Furlong, Lucinda, 266

(Lautrec), 71

Figure in Motion (Henri), 72

Fursman, Frederick F., 382n102

Ericson, Kate, 276

Filmic Dance #2 (Siegel), 121

Fusco, Coco, 233, 234, 371, 393n3

Etra, Bill, 266

Fine Art Institute, 14

Futurism, 46, 60

Europe, 8–­10, 12, 19, 21–­22, 31, 35–­36, 47, 53, 65,

Fine Arts Building, 29, 47, 63–­64, 69; Little

99, 102, 131, 137–­38, 222, 255, 262, 296 Europe in the Seventies: Aspects of Recent Art (exhibition), 255 Evans, Dulah, 19, 20. See also Krehbiel, Dulah Evans Every house has a door, 370, 371

Room, 53, 72 Fink, Ray, 143

G

Finley, Karen, 371

Galán, Mario, 212

Firestone, Shulamith, 240, 242, 394n26

Gallery Bugs Bunny, 182

Fischer, Marc, 309, 341. See also Temporary

Gallery 2, 274

Services

Gamble, Allison, 320

Ewart, Douglas, 142

Fish, Julia, 330–­34, 348

Garage, The, 273

Ewing, Lauren, 243

Fisher, Ellen, 243

Garage, The (Ferrill), 273

Excavation (de Kooning), 152

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 56–­57

Garage, The (Solomon), 355

Exhibition Momentum, 3–­4, 133, 136–­37, 140–­

Five Great American Negroes (White),

Garcia, Eric, 123

43, 146–­47, 151, 160, 166–­67, 239, 388n13

114, 115

Garden Chair (Wharton), 249

existentialism, 143, 144, 146–­47, 151, 160, 170

Flamingo (Calder), 70

Gardner, Charlie, 337

Experimental Sound Studio, 238, 262, 393n3

Flavin, Dan, 221–­22

Gardner, Helen, 38, 71, 155

Experimental Station, 3, 276, 309–­10, 364–­65

Fleury, Albert, 8, 23, 36, 40–­41

Gardner-­Huggett, Joanna, 246

Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), 213

Floc’h, Nicolas, 343

Garland, Hamlin, 36, 39–­40, 72

Explaining Abstract Art (exhibition), 111

Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active

Garrard, Mary, 394n31

EXPO Chicago, 347

Participation in Healthcare (HAHA),

Garrison, Eve, 143–­44, 359

Expressionism, 170

278, 279

Gasoline Alley (King), 327

Eye (Tasset), 318

Flood, Edward, 179, 180, 390n99 Fluxus, 260

F

Façade (Sitwell), 155–­56 Fairweather Hardin Gallery, 3

Gates, Theaster, 2, 276, 296, 299, 309, 325, 347, 349, 363–­67

Ford, Robert, 274

Gauguin, Paul, 58, 71–­72

formalism, 127, 146, 148, 155

Gaulke, Cheri, 246

Form at Play: Abstraction in Various Materials

Geichman, Judy, 330–­31

by Chicago Artists (exhibition), 105–­6

Geller, Todros, 138

Falconer, James, 166–­67, 174, 176, 185, 390n65

Fort Dearborn Camera Club, 121

Gender Trouble (Butler), 394n26

Family (Britton), 206

40 Women Artists of ARC and Artemisia

Gentileschi, Artemisia, 243, 394n31

Family of Man (exhibition), 127 Farrow, William McKnight, 73–­75, 91, 385n38 Faust, Bob, 296

(exhibition), 250

Geoghegan, Chris, 395n75

FORUM (Full Opportunity Redirected to Uplift Mankind), 230–­31

George B. Armstrong School, 61 Gerber, Gaylen, 237, 277, 315, 318

Fauvism, 46

Fountain of the Great Lakes (Taft), 47, 48

German Expressionism, 155

Favors, Malachi, 142

4 Sculptors (exhibition), 298

Germany, 119, 319, 363

Feast (exhibition), 309

414 Workshop, 143

Gershuny, Phyllis, 266

Feature Gallery, 314–­15, 348

Fragments of a City: Chicago Photographs

Gerstenberg, Alice, 72

Federal Arts Project, 61, 88, 90, 113, 117,

(Helmer-­Petersen), 122, 124

“Gertrude’s Bounce” (Powell), 130

387n47. See also Works Progress

France, 25, 40, 53, 82, 154

Ghez, Susanne, 237, 247, 283, 322–­24, 331, 355

Administration (WPA)

Frankel, Marcia, 250

Giacometti, Alberto, 147

Federow, Shirley, 394n30

Frankenthaler, Helen, 152

Giannini, Orlando, 36

Feigen, Richard, 166, 179

Franklin Furnace, 258

Gibson, Ann Eden, 362

Feigen Gallery, 166, 182, 198, 391n29

Franklin Gallery, 347

Gierke, Sandra, 394n30

Feininger, Lyonel, 326–­27

Free Angela Davis float (Rogovin), 215, 217

Gillespie, Dizzy, 130

Feldman, Eugene, 187

Free Basin (exhibition), 324

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 65

Feldmann, Beverly, 395n75

Freedom Principle, The: Experiments in Art and

Ginzel, Roland, 140, 143–­44, 152, 166, 174,

Feminist Art Workers, 246

Music, 1965 to Now (exhibition), 262

390n88

Feminist Studio Workshop, 246

Freeman, Von, 262

Giverny (France), 49–­50

Ferar, Ellen, 394n47

Freer, Frederick W., 16, 27, 29

Glackens, William, 42

Ferguson, Benjamin, 47

French, Daniel Chester, 27

Glass, Henry P., 107

Ferguson Fund, 47

French, William M. R., 18–­19, 59–­60

Glueck, Grace, 240

Ferrill, Valeria “Mikki,” 272–­73, 273

Fried, Nancy, 243

Goat Island, 263, 368, 369

Ferris, Emil, 329–­30

Friends of American Art, 33, 46, 50–­51

Godie, Lee, 155

Field, Marshall, 2–­3

Friesenwall 120, 355

Go Fish (film), 276

Field, Marshall, III, 102

Frueh, Joanna, 243

Goldberg, Alan, 343

407

I N DE X

Gold Coast (neighborhood), 163

Guston, Philip, 136, 138, 140

Golden, Deven, 395n75

Guthman, Jack, 337

Hiawatha murals (Brandt), 49, 50–­51

Golden, Pam, 277

Guthrie, Derek, 195, 230, 253

Hicks, Sheila, 292 Hideout, 262

Golden, Thelma, 321 Goldenberg, Helyn, 337

Heun, Arthur, 70, 72

Higgens, Frances, 106

Golden Bird (Brancusi), 71

H

Goldman, Ikram, 296

Haggard, H. Rider, 38

High Performance (magazine), 243, 395n81

Goldwater, Robert, 140

HAHA, 278, 279

Highway Beautification Act, 176

Golub, Leon, 70, 127, 135, 138, 140–­41,

Haircut (Bohrod), 79, 80

Highways, 395–­96n81

Hairy Who, 166–­70, 174, 182, 195, 230,

Hileman, Jayne, 395n75

143–­44, 146–­48, 151–­52, 156, 174, 176, 256, 277, 389n23, 389n26 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 233, 234, 263, 371 González, José Gamaliel, 214–­15

Higgens, Michael, 106

Hixson, Kathryn, 195, 232, 263, 285, 315,

327, 330, 390n65 Hairy Who Sideshow, The (Hairy Who),

320, 396n82 “hobohemia,” 88

168, 170

Goodman Theater, 395n77

Half Letter Press, 343, 345

Ho Chi Minh, 179

Goodspeed, Elizabeth “Bobsy,” 71–­72

Halkin, Theodore (Ted), 134–­35, 140, 144,

Hodes, Barnet, 198, 391n28

Gookins, James Farrington, 16

145, 285, 389n23, 389n26

Hoeckner, Carl, 73, 77–­78, 78

Gordon, Ron, 395n75

Halleck, Dee Dee, 238

Hoffman, Abbie, 189

Gordon, Si, 77, 193

Hallowell, Sara, 15, 27

Hoffman, Rhona, 222, 260, 292, 294–­96,

Goss, Bernard, 77, 392n51

Halstead, Whitney, 140, 155, 167–­68, 195, 285

Goss, Margaret, 114, 392n51. See also

Hamill, Charles D., 2–­3

Hoffmann, Josef, 285

314–­15, 319, 331, 348

Hammerman, Carol, 395n75

Hofmann, Hans, 151, 389n37

Goto, Joseph, 140, 389n23

Hammond, Harmony, 240

Hogan, Irmfriede, 394n47

Gottlieb, Adolph, 140

Hampton, Fred, 193, 215, 226

Hogan, John, 238, 395n75

Gould, Chester, 327, 329

Handler, Deborah, 395n75

Holabird and Roche, 53, 62

Gould, Deborah, 274

Hansell, Freya, 256

Holden, Barry, 253–­56

Goulish, Matthew, 263, 368, 371

Hanson, Henry, 195

Holland, Frank, 105

Grabner, Michelle, 347, 355–­56

Hanson, Philip “Phil,” 314, 331, 389n42,

Holland, Richard, 195

Burroughs, Margaret

Grace Hokin Gallery, 222

Holloway, Charles, 23

390n99

Grad, Barbara, 394n30

Happenings, 193, 213, 218, 220–­21, 223, 260

Holocaust, 119, 138

Gray, Harold, 327

Harmon Foundation, 385n38

Holzer, Jenny, 317

Gray, Mike, 201

Harper, Margaret, 394n30

Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge)

Gray, Ted, 272

Harper, William A., 51, 52, 384n197

Great Books of the Western World

Harrison, Margaret, 243

Hopps, Walter, 167, 170

(Spero), 152, 153

Hart, Kathline, 258

Horberg, Marguerite, 262

Great Chicago Fire, 2, 8, 10, 14, 16, 26

Hartfield, Ronne, 321

Horner, George, 395n75

“Great Ideas” campaign, 118

Hartrath, Lucie, 50

Horsfield, Kate, 256, 266–­67

Green, Art, 166–­67, 173–­74

Hawkins, Margaret, 195

Horticultural Building, 27

Green, Gregory, 314–­15

Haydon, Harold, 58, 73, 111, 195, 206, 221,

Horwich, Leonard, 193

(Hutchins), 118

Green, Vanita, 392n60

Horwich, Ruth, 193, 319, 336

392n52

Greenberg, Clement, 131, 133, 140

Haymarket (neighborhood), 258

Hosking, Arthur, 46

Greene, Robert, 182

Haymarket Books, 346

HotHouse, 262

Green Lantern Press, 344, 347

Hazel, Tempestt, 319–­25

House, Richard, 278, 279

Green-­Mercier, Marie Zoe, 105, 193

Healy, George P. A., 10, 11

house music, 292–­93

Gregg, John, 72

Heartfield, John, 176

How Real Is Realism? (exhibition), 111

Gregory, Dick, 189, 201

Heartney, Eleanor, 195

Hudson, 258, 314–­15, 317, 348, 370

Greyed Rainbow (Pollock), 152

Heath, Percy, 130

Hudson River School, 10, 12, 15, 332

Grezdo, Stanislav, 297, 299–­301

Heaven Gallery, 293

Huettel Art School, 204

Griffin, Marion Mahony, 61

Hefner, Hugh, 163

Huff, Light Henry, 395n70

Griffith, L. O., 50

Heilbron, Kenneth, 95, 96

Hughes, Langston, 93, 138

Grigsby, James, 243, 395n75

Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 71

Hull-­House, 2, 23, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 44, 51,

Grosz, George, 176

Helguera, Pablo, 310, 393n3

Grover, Oliver Dennett, 19, 21–­23, 27,

Helmer-­Petersen, Keld, 122, 124

Humboldt Park (neighborhood), 212, 338

61, 75, 77, 78, 90, 93, 110, 188

Helms, Jesse, 274

Humeston, Dariel, 103

Groves (Rose), 108, 109, 127

Henes, Donna, 243

Hungry Brain, 262

Guattari, Félix, 355

Henri, Robert, 42, 72

Hunt, Richard, 101, 143, 159–­60, 161, 166,

Guernica (Picasso), 70

Heredia, Paula, 393n3

Gumps, The (Smith), 327

Hero Construction (Hunt), 159–­60, 161

Hunter, Alexis, 243

Gupta, Kavi, 347

Hero with a Thousand Faces, The

Hunter, Elliott, 190

28, 46, 382n101

Gussow, Roy, 140 Gustafsson, Mats, 262

304, 389n23

Hunter, Sam, 140

(Campbell), 148 Hess, Thomas, 391n32

408

Hutchinson, Charles L., 16, 21, 31

I N DE X

Hyde Park (neighborhood), 58, 65, 75, 77, 111, 130, 169, 187, 191, 201, 204, 206, 267, 272, 307–­9, 372 Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC), 111–­12, 143, 166, 168–­69, 204, 235, 238, 283, 285, 324

J

Kaprow, Allan, 193, 213, 222–­23, 260

Jack Shainman Gallery, 295

Kapsalis, Thomas, 140, 144

Jackson, David, 144

Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr., 106

Jackson, Milt, 130

Kaufmann and Fabry, 122

Jackson, Preston, 321 Jacob, Mary Jane, 269, 276, 278, 310, 336–­39, 341

I

Ibsen, Henrik, 72 Ice Cream Social (Robbins), 355 Illinois and Michigan Canal, 9, 47 Illinois Art Association, 21 Illinois Arts Advocates, 393n6. See also Arts Alliance Illinois Illinois Arts Council, 223, 258, 372 Illinois Building, 27 Illinois Club, 21 Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), 104–­5, 166, 190, 387n33. See also Institute of Design; New Bauhaus; School of Design Imagists, 38, 71, 121, 146, 160, 230, 239, 247, 250, 253, 277, 281, 285, 293, 311, 315, 317, 327, 330–­31, 348, 360–­61, 393n18 Impressionism, 15, 22, 25, 27, 39–­40, 45–­46, 50, 75 Improvisation with Green Center (Kandinsky), 71 In an Old Gown (Baker), 31, 32 Indiana, 39, 50, 214, 263, 317, 341 Indiana, Gary, 263 Ingot Project (copper) (Peterman), 312 Inness, George, 40, 50–­51 Institute for Positive Education, 229 Institute of Design, 95, 104, 106, 108, 110, 118, 121–­22, 131, 140–­41, 206, 226, 240. See also Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT); New Bauhaus; School of Design International Exhibition of Modern Art (exhibition), 58, 59. See also Armory Show (1913) (exhibition) International Municipal Congress and Exposition, 47 International Watercolor Exhibition, 362 International Workers of the World (IWW), 188, 195, 226. See also Wobblies Interstate Industrial Exposition (IIE), 15–­16, 21–­22, 380n34, 380n40 In the Penal Colony (Statsinger), 155, 156 Into the Mainstream (McIlvaine), 215, 216 Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida (Albright), 82 Invasion (Cave), 294 Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, The (Rakowitz), 309, 313, 314

Karmin, Tony, 347 Kartemquin, 215, 230

Jackson, Jay, 329

Jacob, Wendy, 278, 279 Jacobson, Egbert, 118 Jane Addams Homes, 88 Janis, Sidney, 140 Jansson, Alfred, 29, 382n101 Jantzen, Michael, 243 Jaremba, Tom, 260, 263, 293 Jarman, Joseph, 142 Jarrell, Jae, 191, 205, 207, 267, 269 Jarrell, Wadsworth, 190–­91, 205–­6, 208 Jeanette Rankin Brigade, 242 Jeanne-­Claude, 223 Jeffery, Mark, 263, 293 Jenkins, Leroy, 142 Jevne & Almini Gallery, 12 Jewell, Edward Alden, 81–­82 Jewett, Eleanor, 63, 69, 82, 85, 99, 137–­38, 195 Jimenez, José “Cha Cha,” 226 Jimmy Corrigan—­the Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), 328 Joan Flasch Collection, 347 Johansen, John, 46 Johnson, Johnnie, 394n47 Johnson, Lyndon B., 174, 176, 179, 390n94 Johnson, Rashid, 239 Jones, Calvin, 307, 392n60 Jones, Fred, 101

Keane, Richard, 329 Kearney, John, 143 Kearney, Lynn, 143 Kellogg, Alice, 18–­19, 23, 31, 382n102. See also Tyler, Alice Kellogg Kelly, Mary, 243 Kemeys, Edward, 29, 36 Kennedy, John F., 198 Kennedy, Robert F., 188, 198 Kenwood (neighborhood), 114, 193, 201 Kepes, Gyorgy, 102, 117 Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963–­1977 (exhibition), 336 Killam, Brad, 355 Kim, Jongock, 295 Kind, Joshua, 389n25 King, Devin, 345 King, Frank, 327 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 188, 193, 201, 203 Kinmont, Ben, 356 Kirkland, Joseph, 21 Kirshner, Judith Russi, 195, 260, 315, 331 Kitchen (from afar) (Botz), 67 Klee, Paul, 156 Klement, Vera, 247, 248, 394n30 Klick, Laurel, 246 Kline, Franz, 127, 140 Klio Club, 33 Klonarides, Carole Ann, 267

Jones, Kim, 243

Kluck, Eleanor, 106–­9, 109. See also McMaster,

Jones, Leigh, 372 Jones, Mark E., 193, 206 Jones, Quincy, 101 Jones-­Henderson, Napoleon, 267, 268, 269 Jones-­Hogu, Barbara, 2, 121, 190, 201, 202, 205–­6, 208, 218, 226, 392n50 Jonson, Raymond, 53, 62–­65, 68, 73 Jordon, Sandy, 395n75 Joseph, Daniel, 388n14 Josephson, Kenneth, 122, 144 Judson, Sylvia Shaw, 388n13 Judson Dance Theater, 260 Juergens, Alfred, 29 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 55 Justis, Gary, 395n75

Eleanor Kluck, Henry, 106, 109 Knodel, Gerhardt, 291 Knoll, Hans, 106, 108 Kohn, Misch, 121, 131, 226 Koons, Jeff, 315 Korot, Beryl, 266 Korsts, Anda, 230 Kosuth, Joseph, 237 Kral, Roy, 130 Kramer, Linda, 390n100, 394n30 Krantzen Studios, 122 Krasner, Lee, 267 Krehbiel, Dulah Evans, 19, 20 Kroll, Leon, 44

Justseeds, 347

Kruger, Barbara, 243, 317 Krumpholz, Leo, 262

Inwood, Reginald F., 107

K

Ishimoto, Yasuhiro, 122, 124

Kafka, Franz, 155–­56, 355

Kubota, Shigeko, 267

Iskin, Ruth, 246

Kahn, Max, 122

Kuennen, Robert, 140

Iswarutholkul, Santi, 392n60

Kalven, Jamie, 364

Kuh, Katherine, 2, 63, 72, 99–­100, 104, 110–­11,

Itatani, Michiko, 292, 330

Kandinsky, Wassily, 58, 62, 71, 100

Ito, Miyoko, 137, 140, 143, 166, 237, 267,

Kane, Mitchell, 277, 315, 318

Kuhlenschmidt, 317

Kansas City Art Institute, 293

Kuhn, Walt, 60

285, 388n13

Kubota, Hiroji, 197

409

119, 122, 131, 136, 156–­57, 166, 285, 388n13

I N DE X

Kusama, Yayoi, 260

Library Project, The (Temporary Services), 342

MacKenzie, Duncan, 195

Kuspit, Donald, 195

Lichtenstein, Roy, 170, 327

Mackey, Nathaniel, 345

Kuumba Theater, 190, 205

Liebling, A. J., 151

MacMillan, Kyle, 195

Kwon, Miwon, 278

Ligon, Glenn, 321

MacMonnies, Frederick, 27

Lincoln Park (neighborhood), 36, 215

MacMonnies, Mary Fairchild, 382n102

Lindsay, Vachel, 53

MacNeil, Hermon Atkins, 29, 36

Links Hall, 258, 262, 293, 372

Mad Bomber (Rogovin), 215

Labowitz, Leslie, 243

Lippard, Lucy, 240, 243, 267

Mad Housers, 371

Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (Newman),

Lipschutz, Peggy, 215

Madhubuti, Haki, 188, 229. See also Lee, Don L.

Little Man print (Testa), 106, 107

Magritte, René, 348

Lacy, Steve, 252

Little Orphan Annie (Gray), 327

Maier, Vivian, 154

Lacy, Suzanne, 243, 260, 276, 278

Little Review (magazine), 64, 72

Main, Don, 174

Lady in Green and Gray (Dewing), 384n177

Little Theater, 53, 72

Majeed, Faheem, 304–­8, 308

LaFreniere, Steve, 371

Litz, Katherine, 121

Malcolm X, 188, 191

Lake Meadows Fair, 187

Living Room (Fish), 333

Malcolm X College, 364

La Lime, Jean, 1

Livingstone, Joan, 269, 270, 272

Maldonado, Eduardo, 258

Lamantia, Paul, 390n100

Loan, Nguyen Ngoc, 179

Malozzi, Dawn, 238, 262, 393n3

Land, Owen, 264. See also Landow, George

Locke, Alain, 91

Malozzi, Lou, 238, 262, 393n3

Landow, George, 264. See also Land, Owen

Lockett, Robin, 315, 331–­32

Manet, Édouard, 71

Landscape Beautification Johnson Style

Loescher, Robert “Bob,” 291, 329

Manglano-­Ovalle, Iñigo, 239, 263, 278, 335–­40

Logan, Josephine Hancock, 83

Manhatta (film), 57

Lane Technical High School, 49, 61, 212

Logan Square (neighborhood), 240, 343–­44, 371

Manilow, Lewis, 222, 260, 336, 370

Langworthy, Dean, 258, 259

London, 1, 35, 42, 99, 233, 295, 302, 314, 317, 355

Manilow, Susan, 370

Lanitis, Thereza, 395n75

Long, Martin, 253

Manzu, Giacomo, 255

Lanyon, Ellen, 137, 140, 143, 166, 174, 240, 241

Loop (neighborhood), 40, 79, 151, 260

Maratta, Hardesty, 40, 50

Lapthisophon, Stephen, 395n75

Loop Show, The (exhibition), 260, 261

MARCH, 214–­15, 226

Lasansky, Mauricio, 136, 138

Lord, Chip, 238

Marioni, Tom, 260

Lash, Mike, 320

Lord Thing (documentary), 223

Marquette, Jacques, 47

Lassaw, Ibram, 152

Los Angeles, 58, 90, 163, 171, 243, 246, 263–­64,

Marquette Building, 36

L

182, 183, 198, 391n32

(Di Meo), 176, 178

266, 276–­78, 336, 347–­48, 358, 368, 395–­96n81

Lastmaker, The (Goat Island), 369 Latham, Barbara, 266

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), 395n81, 396n82, 396n84

Lauren (Bey), 288, 289–­90 Lausanne Biennial, 269

Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), 395n81

Lawler, Louise, 315

Marshall, Kerry James, 321, 330, 375 Marshall Field Mansion (Humeston), 103 Martin, Agnes, 267 Martinez, Daniel J., 276 Marvit, Moshe Zvi, 345

Lawndale (neighborhood), 343

Lostutter, Robert, 390n100

Mary Boone Gallery, 295

Lawrence, Annette, 348

Lounge Ax, 262

Mary Oshawnoshi Gallery, 292

Lawson, Adele, 73

Louvre, 46

Marziewski, Ed, 346

Lawyers for the Arts, 395n54

Love for Three Oranges, The (Prokofiev), 64

Massey, John, 118

Leaf, June, 148, 149, 160, 389n23, 389n26

Love of Winter (Bellows), 384n177

Masters, Edgar Lee, 204

Lebergott, Karen, 395n75

Lowe, Maxine, 394n47

Mastry (Marshall), 375

Le Corbusier, 63, 315

Lowell Art Company, 19

Material Exchange, 365

Ledgerwood, Judy, 277, 314–­15, 318, 330–­34, 334

Lowitz, Ted, 395n75

Matheson, Eric, 182

Lee, Don L., 188, 194. See also Madhubuti, Haki

Lucky Pierre, 345

Matisse, Henri, 58, 60, 72, 160

Lee, Frances Glessner, 67

Lucy Flower High School, 61

Matrix (Fish), 334

Léger, Fernand, 57

Luks, George, 42

Matson, Christy, 295

Leib, Gary, 329

Lumpen, 346

Matt’s Garage, 355

Leighton, Lucile, 131, 132

Lundy, Larry, 260, 395n75

Maxwell Street, 157, 162, 168, 174

Lennox, Karen, 285

Lusk, Marie Koupal, 382n102

Maya, Mirror of Illusions (Davies), 384n177

Leonardson, Eric, 238, 262

L Word, The (television series), 276

Mayer, Oscar F., 100

Leon Golub Painting in His Paris Studio

Lynch, Jay, 329

McAndrew, William, 61

Lynch, Matt, 324

McBain, Hughston M., 104

Lerner, Nathan, 113, 117, 155

Lyon, Christopher, 238

McBride, William, 101, 115

Lerner & Turner, 395n75

Lyon, Danny, 272, 273

McCagg, Eliza, 10

(Morain), 147

McCagg, Ezra, 10

Lesbian Avengers, 274 Levi, Lorraine, 243

McCain, Greg, 368

Levinsohn, Florence Hamlish, 130

M

Levy, Beatrice, 73, 74, 77

Macbeth Gallery, 42

McCall, Steve, 142

Lewis, George, 142, 264

MacDonald, Phyllis, 394n30

McCarthy, Paul, 243

Lewis, Roy, 190–­91, 192, 220, 272

Mace (Livingstone), 269, 271, 272

McCauley, Lena, 41, 44, 49

LeWitt, Sol, 314

Machin, Roger, 395n75

McCauley, Tom, 243

McCain, Timothy, 368

410

I N DE X

McCormick, Robert, 326

Mobile Sign Systems (Temporary Services), 343

N

McCracken, David, 263

Model, Lisette, 154

McEwen, Walter, 21–­22, 27

Moholy-­Nagy, László, 102–­5, 106, 117, 119, 120,

N.A.M.E. Gallery, 4, 235, 238, 250, 253–­55,

McIlvaine, Don, 206, 215, 216

121, 127, 137, 142, 222

McMaster, Eleanor, 106. See also Kluck, Eleanor

Moholy-­Nagy, Sibyl, 102

McNamara, Robert S., 174

MoMing, 258, 335–­36

McVicker, Julia, 106

Monet, Claude, 15, 39–­40, 46, 50, 71

McVicker Theater, 12

Monroe, Harriet, 44, 49, 51–­53, 72, 195

McWorter, Gerald, 188

Monroe, Lucy, 7, 8, 14, 17, 22, 27, 44, 53

Medina, Luis, 272–­73

Montano, Linda, 260, 267

Medium of Exchange (Peterman), 312

Monument with Standing Beast (Dubuffet),

Meeker, Arthur, 72

395n60

Meier, Eugene B., Jr., 381n69

Moon-­Calf (Dell), 56

Melchert, Jim, 237

Moore, Iris, 370

Melzer, Hildegarde, 105

Moore, Rachel, 295

Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea

Morain, André, 147

(Westermann), 160, 161

Moreno, Cesáreo, 297–­301

Mess Hall, 343

Morrissey, Judd, 263

Methven, Harry Wallace, 40

Morton, Phil, 231, 264, 266

Metropolis (Kluck), 108, 109

Morton, Ree, 247

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17, 121, 255

Moss, Lottie, 384n197. See also Wilson, Lottie

Metzger, Matthew, 348–­52

Mother, The (Tyler), 23, 24

Metzker, Ray K., 122

Mother Earth/La tierra madre (Vega), 223, 225

Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 123, 215,

Motherwell, Robert, 140, 152 Motley, Archibald, Jr., 57, 75, 79, 83, 85, 88, 114, 307 Mountain-­Moving Day: Yosano Akiko (poem) (Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective), 227

Michigan Square Building, 63

Moving (Kaprow), 193, 222–­23

Michod, Susan, 394n30

Moxie, Elizabeth, 253

Midway Gardens, 53

Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer Collection, 71

Midway Studios, 206

Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Collection, 71

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 71, 111, 140, 156,

Mucha, Alphonse, 19, 38 Mujeres Latinas en Acción, 214

Mildred B. Haessler’s Ballet Group, 101

Mulligan, Charles, 53

Miles, Charles, 306, 308

Multiple Exposure Tree, Chicago (Callahan), 127, 128 Mulvany, John, 393n7

Miller, Edgar, 58, 73, 75, 77, 88, 90, 91

Munch, Edvard, 46

Miller, Hermann, 106

Munich, 15, 21, 99

Miller, John, 143, 389n23

Municipal Art League, 30–­31, 33, 383n124.

Naz-­Dar, 108 Neal, Frank, 115 Neal, George, 75, 101 Needham, James Bolivar, 40–­41, 42, 383–­84n166 Neel, Alice, 243 Neff, John, 237, 336 Negro in Art Week brochure (Dawson), 75, 76 Neiman, LeRoy, 163 Nelson, Margaret, 263 Nelson, Solveig, 195 Nelson-­Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), 171 Nemser, Cindy, 246 Neoconceptualism, 277, 285, 315 N. E. Thing Co., 356 New Apartment Lounge, 262 New Art Examiner (magazine), 4, 195, 230, 235, 236, 247, 250, 253, 258, 277, 315, 320, 347, 396n82 New Bauhaus, 95, 102–­3, 105, 113, 118. See also

New Deal, 88, 91, 106, 305

See also Union League Club Municipal Art Society, 30

Millet, Frank D., 27, 38

“Mural Art and the Midwestern Myth” (Siporin), 94

Millman, Edward, 61, 138

Murals to the People (exhibition), 215, 218

Millon, Chris, 395n75

Murray, Elizabeth, 267

Milonadis, Konstantin, 297

Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), 193, 195,

Min, Mary, 258, 260, 394n47

198, 215, 218, 221–­23, 237, 239, 247, 250,

Minimalism, 277, 281, 287, 297, 316, 322

262–­63, 283, 285, 293, 305–­6, 311, 315, 321,

Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA), 215

330–­31, 333, 336, 348, 370, 372–­73

Mirror/Salt Works (Smithson), 237

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), 380n50

Miss E. Knows (Nutt), 171, 172

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 106, 108, 119,

Mitchell, CJ, 263

Navajo (Norton), 68

Newberry Library, 65, 72

Miller, Tim, 395n81 Millet, Kate, 242

Center Museum National Women’s Caucus, 274

Institute of Design; School of Design

Miller, Donald L., 1

Miller, Patricia “Tish,” 258, 260

235, 237, 258, 322, 372

Natkin, Robert, 140, 143–­44

Movimiento Artistico Chicano, 215

Miliotes, Diane, 123

of Colored People (NAACP), 385n11 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),

Native Son (Wright), 83

Meyers, Michael, 293

387n33

National Association for the Advancement

237, 297–­301. See also Mexican Fine Arts

Morris, Rebecca, 237

297, 300, 311, 392n50

National AIDS Actions for Health Care, 274

Vietnam (MOBE), 189

Morgan, Anna, 72

Mexico, 75, 78, 90, 121–­23, 215, 226, 233, 273,

National Academy of Design, 15

National Museum of Mexican Art, 123, 223,

Merchandise Mart, 108, 347

Mexican Art

393n18, 395n54, 395n69 Napoli, Alexander, 201

National Mobilization to End the War in

Méndez, Leopoldo, 122–­23, 123

237, 299. See also National Museum of

258, 260, 285, 287, 292, 315, 331, 373,

141, 147, 256, 362

New Dimensions: Volume and Space (exhibition), 285 New Images of Man (exhibition), 141, 147, 160 Newman, Barnett, 179, 182, 183, 198, 307, 391n32 New Mexico, 36, 64, 65, 68, 90 New [New] Corpse, The (exhibition, publication), 344, 346 New Orleans 2005 (Rosen), 318–­19 New Sculpture (Burgin), 322 New York, 1–­3, 6, 8–­11, 15, 17, 21, 23, 39, 42, 53, 57–­60, 62, 65, 69, 79, 83, 99–­100, 102, 106, 108, 127, 131, 133–­34, 140, 142, 146–­47, 151–­52, 154, 160, 162–­63, 170–­71, 174, 179, 212, 221–­23, 239–­40, 242–­43, 247, 256, 258, 260, 264, 266, 274, 277–­78, 285, 289, 293–­96,

Mitchell, Joan, 71, 137, 267

MWMWM, 287

Mitchell, Roscoe, 142

My Endless Set (Reimer), 284

Mitruk, Stanley, 137

Myopic Books, 329

301–­4, 309, 311, 315, 317, 321, 326, 330, 335, 340, 347, 358, 361, 363, 368 Nichols, Dale, 25–­26

411

I N DE X

Nichols, Laura, 25–­26

Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), 188, 190, 191, 192, 211, 229

Nickel, Richard, 123, 125

Pensato, Joyce, 359 People of Lakeview Together (Weber and Martínez), 211, 212

Nickle, Robert, 140–­41

Oriental Institute, 71, 155

Nicoloff, Alex, 140–­41, 389n23

Orlove, Michael, 262

Nilsson, Gladys, 166–­68, 170, 173, 174,

Ormes, Jackie, 329

Perkins, Marion, 93, 101, 193–­94

Ortega, Marguerite, 214

Perkins, Toussaint, 194

Ossorio, Alfonso, 156

Perkins, Useni Eugene, 194

Ostertag, Blanche, 19

Perlman, Bennard B., 381n69

9 Viewpoints (exhibition), 143

Oṣun Gallery, 191

Perlman, Hirsch, 277, 315, 317–­18

Ninth Street Show, The (exhibition), 127

outsider art, 38, 81

Perlow, Sandra, 394n30

Nixon, Richard M., 215

Owens, Matthew, 370–­71

Persistence of Memory (Dali), 81

182, 390n99 9 Beginnings: Chicago (Every house has a door), 371

Peoria Public Library, 50

Peterman, Dan, 3, 276, 309–­14, 364, 372

Nochlin, Linda, 253 Noguchi, Isamu, 63

Peters, Bob, 283

Nomads of Modern Music, 262

P

Nonnemacher, Gerhard, 198

Pach, Walter, 60, 62

Pettibon, Raymond, 315

No Noose Is Good News (Rosen), 315

Paepcke, Elizabeth “Pussy,” 103, 118

Peyraud, Frank, 18–­19, 40, 41, 50

Nordfeldt, B. J. O., 44, 53, 57, 65, 66, 68, 388n13

Paepcke, Walter, 102–­4, 110, 118

P-­Form (magazine), 263, 370

Nordiska Kompaniet, 108, 110

Paige, Robert, 205, 218

Phalanx, 166–­67

North Lawndale (neighborhood), 193, 215, 220

Paik, Nam June, 213, 266

Philadelphia, 8, 15, 142, 167, 330, 380n50, 381n77

Norton, John Warner, 46–­47, 51, 68, 69, 75

Palace of Fine Arts, 25, 27

Phillips, Bert, 215

Norton, Richard, 358

Palazzolo, Tom, 196, 198, 391n24

Phillips, Tony, 330

No Title (On Holiday) (Metzger), 349

Palette and Chisel Club, 18, 20–­23, 27, 39,

Philosophy of the Spiritual (Caton and Webber),

Novak, Linda, 243, 255, 258

Petlin, Irving, 142, 389n23

218, 220

41, 45, 49, 382n101

Now We Live on Clifton (film), 215

Palmer, Bertha Honoré, 15, 27, 39

Photo-­Secession, 53

NRG Ensemble, 262

Palmer, Laurie, 195, 278, 279

Phyllis Kind Gallery, 184, 250, 285, 331

Nuclear I, CH (Moholy-­Nagy), 119, 120

Palmer, Pauline, 50

Picard, Caroline, 341, 344–­47

Nuclear II (Moholy-­Nagy), 119, 120

Palmer, Potter, 27

Picasso, Pablo, 4, 58, 63, 69–­70, 90, 100, 193–­95,

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Paper Press, 272. See also Center for the

(Duchamp), 58, 72, 81 Nutt, Jim, 155, 166–­71, 172, 174, 176, 177, 182, 239, 327, 330, 390n65, 390n99

Book and Paper Arts Paris, 1, 10, 15, 19, 21–­23, 25, 27, 29, 33, 42,

198, 201, 348 Picasso Faces (Burroughs), 194, 206 Pickering, Elsie, 395n75

46, 62, 69, 83, 99–­100, 142, 182, 256, 293,

Picturesque Chicago (Fleury), 40–­41

302, 317, 380n40, 389n23

Pier (Fish), 331

Parish, Norman, 190, 210

Pieszak, Devonna, 250

Park, Laura, 330

Pillin, Galya, 137

O’Brien, Martin, 12, 49

Park, Robert, 79

Pilot TV, 343

O’Brien, William J., 237

Parker, Charlie, 130

Pilsen (neighborhood), 123, 212–­13, 215, 237,

Oehlen, Albert, 359

Parker, Lawton, 50

Offen, Ron, 130

Parks, Gordon, 92, 93, 115, 272, 305

Pinder, Kym, 384n197

Ogden, William B., 9–­10, 12

Parry, Amanda, 253, 255

Pinowski, Lee, 394n30

O’Higgins, Pablo, 122

Parsons, Betty, 133, 140

Piper, Adrian, 243, 371

O’Keeffe, Georgia, 2, 38, 68

Partch, Harry, 142

Piraino, Irene, 223

Oldenburg, Claes, 2, 156, 160, 162, 179, 198,

Participating Artists of Chicago (PAC), 166–­67

Pittsburgh, 8, 31, 341

Parton, James, 9

Plan of Chicago (Burnham), 30

Pascale, Mark, 357

Playboy (magazine), 163

Paschke, Ed, 166, 176, 178, 179, 182, 238, 292,

Ploof, John, 278, 279

O

199, 204 Old Town (neighborhood), 75, 182, 193, 204, 215, 223 Oliver, Maude, 51–­52

298, 305, 321

Poe, Joy, 240, 243, 393n18, 394n30

314, 384n99

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 10

Passlof, Pat, 253

Poetry (magazine), 49, 72

Olu, Yaoundé, 191

Patlán, Ray, 212–­15

Pointillism, 51, 205

Omaha, 8

Patten, Mary, 274, 275, 276

Policy Kings, 101

On Civil Disobedience (Abdul-­Jabbar, King,

Patterson, Joseph Medill, 326

Polish Arts Club of Chicago, 117

Paul, Sherman, 127

Pollock, Jackson, 127, 133, 140, 148, 151–­52,

Picard), 345

333, 389n37

100 Artists 100 Years (exhibition), 285

Paxton, Steve, 260

One Place after Another (Kwon), 278

Payne, Henry Charles, 45

Pollock, Peter, 113, 119

One Thing Leads to Another (Arnold), 179,

Peace (Metafisica) (Castillo), 212

Poor People’s Campaign, 189

Peace and Salvation, Wall of Understanding

Poor Room—­There Is No Time, No End, No

181, 198 One Way Ticket (Hughes), 93

(Walker), 210, 218, 219

On the Beach (arts festival), 203

Peace Museum, 215

Operation MARCH (Movimiento Artistico

Peattie, Ella W., 6

de la Raza Chicana), 214 Oppenheim, Dennis, 356

Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever without End (The Window) (Albright), 157, 158, 159

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Pop art, 160, 167, 170, 222, 327, 361 Pope.L, 371

(PAFA), 381n64

412

I N DE X

Porcellino, John, 330

Rath, Jessica, 324

Rogers Park (neighborhood), 343

Portable Hairy Who, The, 169

Raven, Arlene, 246, 267

Rogovin, Mark, 215, 217

Portable Store, The (Temporary Services), 343

Raw Space, 238

Rohn, Matthew, 250

Portrait of Floyd Dell (Nordfeldt), 65, 66

Ray, Charles, 315

Rojek, Christine, 395n75

“Portrait of Murray Swift, The” (Dell), 65

Raya, Marcos, 214, 392n55

Rollins, Sonny, 130

Posada, José Guadalupe, 111, 122–­23, 226

Ream, Cadurcis Plantagenet, 16

Rompiendo las Cadenas (Breaking the Chains)

Post-­Conceptual Pop Production

Rebuild Foundation, 2

(Weber), 211–­12

Red Fascia (Rath), 324

Rood, John, 136

Potter, Bessie, 27. See also Vonnoh, Bessie

Redmond, Nancy, 394n30

Room No. VI, The (Cortor), 83, 84

Powell, Richie, 130

Redon, Odilon, 331

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 91

Prada Foundation, 317

Red Painting (Leaf), 148, 149

Root, John, 95

Prestini, James, 106

Red Preview (Zeisler), 269, 270

Rorimer, Anne, 222

Preus, John, 365

Redstockings, 242

Rosario, Hector, 212

Prewitt, Archer, 329

Reed, Mike, 262

Rose, Ben, 106–­7, 108, 109, 127, 387n33

Price, Ramon, 215

Regensteiner, Else, 106

Rosemont, Franklin, 182, 195–­96

Prince, Richard, 315

reg/wick Hand Woven Originals, 106

Rosemont, Penelope, 182, 195

Printed Matter, 347

Reich, Steve, 316

Rosen, Kay, 250, 255, 256–­57, 263, 314–­19

Printmaker to the Mexican People

Reimer, Karen, 283–­88

Rosenberg, Civia, 394n47

Reinhardt, Ad, 140, 142

Rosenberg, Harold, 148, 221, 230, 392n72

Prinzhorn, Hans, 144, 168

Rempis, Dave, 262

Rosenblum, Regina, 394n47

Protect the People’s Homes (Rogovin), 215

Renaissance Society, 100–­101, 105, 111, 117,

Rosenthal, Rachel, 243

(exhibition), 315

(exhibition), 111

Provenance (Majeed), 307

206, 235, 237, 247, 283, 317, 321–­23,

Rosler, Martha, 243, 267

Provincetown, 65

349, 371, 388n7

Rosofsky, Seymour, 160, 389n23, 389n26

Provincetown Players, 65

Renier, Aaron, 330

Ross, E. W., 243

Prussian, Claire, 394n30

Resource Center, 310, 365, 372

Ross, Laurel M., 394n47

Public Art Workshop, 214–­15

Revolutionary (Angela Davis) (Jarrell),

Rossi, Barbara, 182, 285, 390n99

Public/Private (exhibition), 274 Public School Art Society (PSAS), 33, 47, 61. See also Art Resources in Teaching Public Sculpture Opinion Poll (Temporary Services), 341 Puerto Rican Arts Association, 212

Rothko, Mark, 152, 351

206, 208 Rezac, Richard, 283, 330, 348–­52

Roullier, Albert, 49

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 222, 294, 319, 334

Roullier, Alice, 69–­70, 72

Ribicoff, Abraham, 182

Roy Boyd Gallery, 294

Rich, Daniel Catton, 100, 110–­11, 136–­38,

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald), 45

140, 157, 386n9, 388n13

Rubin, Jerry, 189

Pullman, George, 30

Rich, John, 263

Running Table (Peterman), 276

Purvin, Jennie, 73

Rich, John Kellogg, 25

Rupert, Arthur J. “A. J.,” 16, 19

Puryear, Martin, 239, 292, 321, 348

Richard, Paul, 167

Russell, Hal, 262

Richard Gray Gallery, 179

Rutt, Steve, 266

Richard J. Daley (exhibition), 179, 198

Ruvolo, Felix, 137

Riggs, Elmer S., 38

Ryerson, Martin, 39

Rip-­Off Alley (Caton, Webber), 218

Rythm Mastr (Marshall), 330

Rival from the Grave, A (Brundage), 89

Rzewski, Frederic, 262

Q

Quimby’s Bookstore, 347

Rivera, Diego, 61, 78

R

River North (neighborhood), 222, 238, 292.

Rabb, Madeline Murphy, 321

See also Towertown (neighborhood)

S

Rabinowitz, Sara, 295

Rivers, Conrad Kent, 188

Saarinen, Eero, 108

Rago, Carmela, 243, 263

Riverview Amusement Park, 168, 174

Sadie Bruce Dancing School, 101

Railway Exchange Building, 47

Roach, Max, 130

Salavon, Jason, 349

Rainbow (Tasset), 318

Road to Victory (exhibition), 119

Saliga, Pauline, 285

Rainer, Yvonne, 260, 267

Robbins, David, 355

Salinas, Humberto, 392n55

Rakowitz, Michael, 309–­14

Robert Henry Adams Gallery, 358

Salome (Barton), 85, 87

Ramberg, Christina, 182, 184, 285, 330–­31,

Robinson, Theodore, 39

Salon de Refuse (exhibition), 45, 73, 239

Robot (Streat), 362

Saltz, Jerry, 253, 255–­56, 285

Rocca, Suellen, 166–­68, 170, 174

Sandburg, Carl, 44, 65, 195, 204

Rand, Sally, 99

Rock at Sea (Jonson), 64–­65, 64

Sandin, Dan, 231, 266, 369

Randall, Dudley, 229

Rocky Mountains (Bierstadt), 12

Saner, Bryan, 263

Randolph Street Gallery (RSG), 4, 258, 260,

Rocky Mountain Scenery (Drury), 13

San Francisco, 130, 267, 291–­92

263, 286–­87, 309, 315, 322–­23, 331, 335–­36,

Rodin, Pierre-­Auguste, 70–­71

San Francisco Museum of Art, 111

369, 370–­71, 373, 393n3, 395n81

Roecker, Leon, 40

Sargent, John Singer, 39

Rankin, Scott, 283

Roerich, Nicholas, 73

Savoy Ballroom, 114

Rapid Pulse Arts Festival, 293

Rogers, John, 10

Scala, Florence, 192

Rascovich, Roberto, 29

Rogers, Meyric, 108

Scan, The, 368

390n99, 393n18 Ramirez, Martin, 155

413

I N DE X

Scanlan, Joe, 283, 318

“Short Trip Home, A” (Fitzgerald), 56

Soto, Edra, 347

Schapiro, Miriam, 240, 250

Shuli (Subrin), 242

Southend Musicworks, 262

Schjeldahl, Peter, 195, 359

Sidewalk Merchandise on Chicago’s South

South Loop (neighborhood), 101, 191, 262

Schneeman, Carolee, 371 Schnell, Mary Jo, 370 Schniewind, Carl, 122, 388n13

South Shore (neighborhood), 191, 308

Side (White), 224 Siegel, Arthur, 95–­96, 97, 98, 108, 110, 121,

South Side Camera Club, 115 South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), 2,

123, 125

58, 75, 88, 91, 93, 101, 110, 113–­17, 187–­88, 194,

Schoenwetter, Frances, 394n47

Siegel, Beatrice, 140

Schofill, John, 264

Siegel, Irene, 140–­41, 240

School of Design, 103–­4, 106, 113, 117, 142.

Siegfried, Joan, 170

South Side Hub of Production, 307

See also Illinois Institute of Technology

Sifuentes, Roberto, 293

Souza, Jean, 258, 395n69

(IIT); Institute of Design; New Bauhaus

Sigler, Hollis, 247, 249, 393–­94n18

Spector, Buzz, 195, 292, 346

Signal of Peace, A (Dallin), 36

Spero, Nancy, 140, 143–­44, 148, 150, 151–­52, 153,

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC),

215, 218, 235, 237, 305–­8, 365, 388n7

174, 243, 256

2–­3, 17–­19, 25, 38, 44, 46–­47, 59, 61, 99,

Simmons, Gary, 321

101–­2, 106, 108, 113, 121, 131, 137–­38, 140–­41,

Simon, Pauline, 155

Spew festival, 371

144, 152, 155, 182, 198, 231, 235, 237–­40, 242,

Simparch, 324

Speyer, A. James, 170–­71, 222, 387n33

247, 250, 253, 256, 260, 262–­64, 266–­67,

Simpson, Arthur “Pops,” 273

Spiegelman, Art, 327

269, 274, 277–­78, 283, 285, 291, 293, 296,

Simpson, Diane, 283–­87

Spiggle, Gregory, 258, 395n75

300, 309–­10, 314–­15, 327, 329–­31, 335, 341,

Simpson, Lorna, 321

Spinella, Dan, 238

347, 357, 368–­69, 371, 373, 384n197. See also

Sinclair, Upton, 44, 55, 57

Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 365

Chicago Academy of Fine Arts

Sinsabaugh, Art, 122

Spirit of the Comics (exhibition), 167

Schreiber, George, 382n101

Siporin, Mitchell, 61, 94, 138, 139, 278

Sportsman Gallery, 355

Schubert, Karsten, 317

Siqueiros, David, 215

Spreen, Connie, 276, 364

Schulman, Daniel, 384n197

Siskind, Aaron, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 144–­45, 146

Starr, Ellen Gates, 2, 23, 31, 33, 35, 61, 188

Schulze, Franz, 65, 140, 143, 167, 169–­70, 195,

Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 55

“Statement” (Oldenburg), 160, 162

Sitting Figure (Perkins), 93

Statsinger, Evelyn, 140, 155–­56, 156, 389n23

Schwartz, Lester O., 137

Situationists, 195

Steele Life Gallery, 305

Schwartz, Ned, 287

Sitwell, Edith, 155–­56

Steerage, The (Stieglitz), 57

Schwartz, Sarah, 258

16 Americans (exhibition), 168

Steger, Lawrence, 274, 370

Scott, William Edouard, 61, 73, 385n38

Skolnik, Sara, 394n47

Stein, Gertrude, 57, 62, 71–­72, 303

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (Wirsum), 174, 175

Sleigh, Sylvia, 253

Stein, Marc, 274, 396n108

Sculpture Chicago, 276, 278, 336, 337, 341

Sloan, John, 42, 79

Steir, Pat, 243

Sears Tower, 70. See also Willis Tower

Sloan, Junius, 12, 13

Sterne, Hedda, 152

Sebree, Charles, 100–­101, 114, 362–­63

Small, Albion, 73

Stettheimer, Florine, 247

Sector 2337, 293, 344, 371

Smart, David A., 100

Steuben, Theodore, 334

Sedaris, David, 263, 315

Smart Museum, 100, 237, 305, 309

Stevens, Thomas Wood, 49

Seed (newspaper), 229

Smith, Roberta, 258

Stewart, Jimmy, 221

Seeker, The: I Sent My Soul through the

Smith, Stephanie, 309–­10

Stewart, John E., 137

Smith, Sydney, 327

Stieglitz, Arthur, 53, 57

Segalove, Ilene, 238

Smith, Tommie, 392n50

St. John, Allen, 38

Seidelhuber, Heidi, 394n30

Smith, Treasure, 335

St. Louis, 9, 33, 36, 131

Self-­Portrait (Healy), 10, 11

Smith, Wadada Leo, 142

Stockholder, Jessica, 371

Self-­Portrait of My Sister (Abercrombie), 86

Smithson, Robert, 237

Stone, Michelle, 395n75

Selz, Peter, 146–­48, 160

Snodgrass, Susan, 195

Stoppert, Mary, 394n30

Sengstacke, Robert A., 190, 217, 272

Snyder, Bob, 264

Store, The (Oldenburg), 162

Sensemann, Susan, 250

Soberscove Press, 346

Storr, Robert, 247, 256

Seurat, Georges, 51, 71, 331

Society for Contemporary Art, 137, 152

Story of the Vivian Girls, The (Darger), 327

Seymour, Ralph Fletcher, 8

Society for Sanity in Art, 83

Strand, Paul, 57

Shacks and Shanties (Majeed), 308

Society of American Artists, 15, 23, 39, 46

Stratton, William, 143

Shaddle, Alice, 394n30

Society of Western Artists, 40

Stray Show, 347

Shapiro, Joseph, 222, 336

Soderlund, Donald, 106

Streat, Thelma Johnson, 362–­63

Shaw, Annie C., 18

Soft Picasso (Oldenburg), 198, 199, 201

Street, The (Oldenburg), 160, 162

Shaw, George Bernard, 72

Software (exhibition), 392n72

Street-­Level Video (S-­LV), 278, 338

Shaw, Rue Winterbotham, 71

Solitude of the Soul, The (Taft), 33, 34, 46, 50

Stricklin, Jim, 272

Sheeler, Charles, 57

Solomon, Thomas, 355

Strobel, Margaret, 240

Sheridan, Sonia Landy, 231, 264, 265

Song and Dance, A (Rosen), 255, 256–­57

Studebaker Brothers, 29

Sherlock, Maureen, 335

Song of the Lark (Cather), 56

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 195

Sherman, Cindy, 314

Sonia Eyes (Sheridan), 265

Subrin, Elisabeth, 242, 394n27

Sherrell, Steve, 238

Sonneman, Eve, 243

Suburban, 347, 355–­56

Shoretime Spaceline (Reimer), 283, 284, 288

Sonnenzimmer, 344, 346

Suite for Bass and Ironing Bored (Binion),

Shorr, Ken, 330

Sorell, Victor, 214

253, 389n23, 389n26

Invisible (Donn), 45

263, 264

414

I N DE X

Sulfur Cycle (Peterman), 311–­12

threewalls, 341

Unite (Jones-­Hogu), 206, 208

Sullivan, Louis, 23, 27, 36, 38, 95, 123, 309

Threshold H. (Fish), 334

United States Map (Norton), 68, 69

Summer Fog (Ledgerwood), 332, 334

Thurber, W. Scott, 15, 49

Universal Alley (Caton, Webber), 218

Summer Salt (Nutt), 176, 177

Thurber’s Gallery, 44, 52, 62, 64

Universe (Calder), 70

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande

Thy Will Be Done (Grover), 27, 28

University Club, 49

Tiffany & Co., 38

University of Chicago, 71, 73, 79, 100, 140,

Sunlit Valley (Sunset) (Peyraud), 40, 41

Till, Emmett, 144

119, 155, 206, 221, 230, 237, 283, 299,

Sunny Corner of the Veranda, A (Tyler), 26

Times Square Show (exhibition), 260

309, 319–­20, 322, 329, 335, 341, 348–­49,

Sun Ra, 142, 185, 218

Timglas (Siegel), 110

Superior Street Gallery, 143

Tinder, Jeremy, 330

Untitled (Dawson), 54

super-­realism, 79, 83

Tobey, Mark, 303

Untitled (Ferrill), 273

Surrealism, 79, 155, 170, 182, 223, 360

Tolentino, Charissa, 263

Untitled (Ishimoto), 124

Sutton, Gloria, 396n94

Tonalism, 50

Untitled (Levy), 74

Svendsen, Svend, 40

Tony Wight Gallery, 349

Untitled (Siegel), 98

Sward, Marilyn, 272

Topchevsky, Morris “Toppy,” 90–­91, 101

Untitled (Yoshida), 164

Sweeney, James Johnson, 140

Torres, Jesus, 75, 77, 90

Untitled (Chicago River No. 2) (Needham), 42

Sweet, Frederick A., 137

Tortolero, Carlos, 237

Untitled (City Street) (Leighton), 131, 132

Sybaris Gallery, 292

Toth, Myra, 394n47

Untitled (Coal Yards on Chicago River at Lake

Symbolism, 46, 50, 75

Tough Gallery, 287

Jatte (Seurat), 71

T

352, 357, 366, 371, 388n7

Shore Drive) (Heilbron), 95, 96

Toulouse-­Lautrec, Henri, 71

Untitled (13-­06) (Rezac), 351

Towertown (neighborhood), 58, 75, 110.

Untitled (Wharf under Mountain) (Dawson),

See also River North (neighborhood)

Taft, Lorado, 2, 18–­19, 21, 25, 27, 29–­31, 33,

62, 63

Train Station (Ellison), 83

Upra, KeRa, 218

Transcendental Painting Group, 64

Uptown (neighborhood), 230, 272

Taft, Zulime, 18

Transportation Building, 27

Urban, Mychajlo, 297

Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), 121–­23, 226

Treasures of Tutankhamun (exhibition),

Urban Wall Suit (Jarrell), 269

34, 36, 38–­40, 46–­47, 48, 49–­50, 68, 72

255, 258

Tamarind Lithography Workshop, 90

US Farm Service Bureau, 95

Tamblyn, Christine, 260, 263, 266, 396n82

Tree, Anna Magie, 29

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 101

Tree, Lambert, 29, 36

Tasset, Tony, 277, 307, 314–­18, 331

Tree Studios, 29, 53, 382n110

Taub, Peter, 263, 309–­10, 315, 368–­73

Trieman, Joyce, 389n23

V

Tawney, Lenore, 104, 292

Troche, Rose, 276

Valverde, Georgina, 123

Taylor, Bert Leston, 62

Truth, Sojourner, 114

van der Marck, Jan, 222–­23

Taylor, Sue, 195

Tsatsos, Irene, 263, 396n82

Vandermark, Ken, 262, 348

TCB (Jones-­Henderson), 268, 269

Tucker, Marcia, 243

Vanderpoel, John, 22, 38, 40, 46

Teaching of the Arts, The (Siporin), 61

Turchan, Carol, 394n30

Van Gogh, Vincent, 348

Teall, Gardner, 53

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 36

Van Volkenburg, Ellen, 72

Teitelbaum, Richard, 262

Tuymans, Luc, 321, 323

Vaughan, Sarah, 130

Tele-­Vecindario (Manglano-­Ovalle), 338,

Twachtman, John, 19

Vavruska, Frank, 137

2-­Day Installation (Langworthy), 25, 259

Veblen, Thorstein, 53, 65, 204

2Day Installations (exhibition), 258

Veeder, Jane, 231

Tworkov, Jack, 140

Vega, Salvador, 214, 223, 225, 392n55

Tyler, Alice Kellogg, 18, 24, 25–­26, 26.

Velvet Lounge, 262, 348, 364

339, 340 Temporary Services, 309, 341–­47. See also Bloom, Brett; Fischer, Marc Ten in One, 287

See also Kellogg, Alice

Terkel, Studs, 93, 130, 144, 171 Testa, Angelo, 106, 107

US Sanitary Commission fairs, 11–­12, 15

Tyler, Anna, 305

Venson, Perry, 238, 262

Tet Inoffensive (Paschke), 176, 178, 179 Thater, Diana, 323 That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) (Albright), 121, 157 Theosophy, 73 Thiebaud, Wayne, 171 Third World Press, 229 Thorne, James Ward, 67

Venice Biennale (1956), 99, 131 Version Fest, 343 Very Worldly (Nilsson), 173

U

Vibrant Club, 39

Ukeles, Merle Laderman, 356

Video Data Bank, 231, 256, 266–­67, 394n41

Ukrainian Institute for Modern Art

Videofreex, 393n85

(UIMA), 297, 299–­301 Ukrainian Village (neighborhood), 299,

Vincennes Gallery, 12 Vincent Kling Studios, 107 Viola, Bill, 238

304, 338

Thorne, Narcissa Niblack, 67, 81

Unattended Lunches (Oldenburg), 198

Thorne Rooms, 67, 81

Uncomfortable Spaces, 287

Thorp, George, 113

Unfinished Collage 1968 (Arnold), 198, 200

Virginia Kitchen, 18th Century (Thorne), 67

Thorson, Alice, 237

Unidos para Triunfar (Together We

Vlack, Donald, 389n23

Threadgill, Henry, 142 Three Kingdoms: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (exhibition), 166

Overcome) (Weber), 211 Union League Club, 30, 40, 51, 383n124. See also Municipal Art League

415

Violence in Recent American Art (exhibition), 198

Volk, Leonard Wells, 10, 12 Vonnoh, Bessie, 27. See also Potter, Bessie von Zweck, Philip, 252

I N DE X

Westermann, H. C., 144, 147, 159–­60, 161,

W

Wabash Avenue YMCA, 73, 75, 113 Wacker Tower, 68. See also Chicago Motor Club Building Waddell, John, 140 Wade, Caroline, 382n102 Wade, Eugene “Eda,” 210–­11 Wahlberg, Ruth, 137 Waiting Lady (Ramberg), 182, 184 Waldeck, Steve, 264 Walker, Hamza, 195, 319–­25 Walker, William, 190, 205–­6, 210, 218, 219, 226 Walkey, Litó, 263 “Wall, The” (Brooks), 186, 194, 203 Walley, Jano, 105–­6 Walley, John, 61 Wall of Brotherhood (Castillo), 212–­13, 213 Wall of Choices (Weber), 211 Wall of Love (Walker), 218 Wall of Meditation (Wade), 211 Wall of Pride and Self-­Awareness (Caton), 220 Wall of Respect (OBAC), 190–­91, 191, 192, 193–­94, 203, 205, 210–­11, 211, 215, 218, 223, 278 Wall of Truth (Walker, Eda, et al.), 210, 218 Wall Painting (Breuer), 356 Walton, William, 156 Wang, Dan S., 309, 364 War Art (exhibition), 117 Ware, Chris, 326–­30 Warhol, Andy, 170, 222, 327, 361 Warren, Lynne, 237–­39, 254, 357, 393n13, 394n35 Washington, Booker T., 114 Waskow, Arthur, 189 Waters, Muddy, 83 Waters above the Firmament (Tawney), 104 Watson, Dudley Crafts, 99 Watson-­Schütze, Eva, 53, 237 Waxman, Lori, 195 Wayne, June, 58, 88, 90, 243, 246 Weather Underground, 393n85 Weaver, Myrna, 190 Webber, C. Siddha, 218, 220 Weber, John Pitman, 198, 210–­11, 212, 226 Weber, Max, 140 Weese, Marcia, 395n75 Wehrenberg, Monika, 394n47 Weiner, Egon, 193 Weininger, Susan, 357 Weisberg, Lois, 321 Weisenborn, Rudolph, 73, 239, 362 Weitzman, Lee, 395n75 Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, 368 Wells Street Gallery, 143 Wendt, Julia, 27. See also Bracken, Julia Wendt, William, 18–­19 West-­East Bag (WEB), 240

Women’s Art Resources of Minnesota (WARM), 250

239, 327, 389n23, 389n26 Western Art Association, 21–­22

Women’s Salon of Chicago, 388n7

West Hubbard Gallery, 238

Women Strike for Peace, 189

West Loop (neighborhood), 341

Wood, Grant, 81

Westside Group, 240. See also Chicago

Woodlawn (neighborhood), 276, 309, 312, 372

Women’s Liberation Union

Woodson, Susan, 305

West Town (neighborhood), 278, 338

Wool, Christopher, 359

West Town Community Art Center, 214–­15

Wooster Group, 256

We Too Look at America (exhibition), 113–­14

Works by Chicago Artists Loaned by Chicago Collectors (exhibition), 101

WHAM! Women’s Health Action

Works Progress Administration (WPA),

Mobilization, 274

3, 83, 88, 117, 138, 278, 359, 362, 365.

Wharton, Margaret, 247, 249, 250

See also Federal Arts Project

What May Come (Méndez), 123 Whistler, James McNeill, 45, 386n9

World’s Columbian Exposition, 3, 7, 23, 25–­26, 30, 36, 39, 46–­47, 52–­53, 204,

White, Alexander, 10

246–­47, 382n101, 382n102

White, Charles, 58, 75, 78, 91, 101, 114, 115,

Wormer, Mary Louise, 204

305, 307 White, John, 223, 224

Wrecked Building in Chicago, A (Siegel), 97

White City, 27, 30, 47, 100. See also World’s

Wright, Beryl, 321

Columbian Exposition

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 36, 38, 53, 61, 95, 355

WhiteWalls, 346

Wright, Jana, 263–­64

Whitney, Guy, 238, 253

Wright, Jimmy, 390n100

Who Is Posada? (exhibition), 111

Wright, Richard, 55, 57, 83

Wicker Park, 260, 262, 304, 329, 368

Wrigley Building, 69–­70

Wiens, Ann, 232, 320 Wilde, Oscar, 85 Wilder, Thornton, 72

Y

Wilding, Faith, 260, 269

Yamaguchi, Shoji, 363

Wilk, Deborah, 320

Yamashita, Sachio, 216, 223, 226

Wilkerson, Edward, 395n70

Yarbrough, Dan, 395n75

Williams, Amanda, 352–­53, 353–­54

Yasko, Caryl, 392n60

Williams, Gerald, 191, 205

Yates, Marie, 243

Williams, José, 191

Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered

Williams, Melissa, 25

Amerindians Visit the West, The (Fusco and

Williams, Ted, 125, 272–­73

Gómez-­Peña), 234

Willis, Benjamin, 391n11

Yerkes, Charles T., 22, 39

Willis, Thomas, 223

Yoakum, Joseph E., 155, 230

Willis Gallery, 336

Yoon, Sonia, 344

Willis Tower, 70. See also Sears Tower

Yoshida, Ray, 155, 159, 162, 164, 165, 285,

Wilson, Anne, 247, 250, 269, 272, 291–­96

314, 327, 330, 361

Wilson, Ellis, 385n38

Young, Donald, 222, 260, 314, 319, 348

Wilson, Lottie, 384n197. See also Moss, Lottie

Young Fortnightly Club, 30

Wilson, Robert Earl, 273

Young Hoffman Gallery, 222, 319

Winbush, LeRoy, 101

Young Lords, 201

Wind-­Up: Walking the Warp (Wilson), 294, 295

Young Patriots, 201

Wirsum, Karl, 166–­68, 174, 175, 327, 330,

Young Woman in Black (Henri), 384n177

390n87, 390n99

Youth International Party (Yippies), 189

Wislow, Bob, 336–­37

You Worry about Its Success (Sigler), 247, 249

With the Procession (Fuller), 16 Wobblies, 188, 346 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 335

Z

Woelffer, Emerson, 137

Zakari, Chantal, 263

Wojcik, Rick, 359

Zavala, Antonio, 392n55

Wolf, David, 365

Zeisler, Claire, 269, 270, 292

Woman’s Building, 246–­47, 266

Zeller, Kate, 310

Women Choose Men (exhibition), 253

Zerang, Michael, 372

Women Choose Women (exhibition), 253

Zero Dead Hero (Flood), 179, 180

Women’s Action Network, 371

Ziegler, Mel, 276

Women’s Art Coalition (WAC), 274

Zorach, Rebecca, 363–­67

416