Chicago’s Lost, Altered and Disfigured Public Art, #2

As we said in our first entry on this topic, “When we start telling the stories of our public art, the conversation inevitably turns to art that is gone. Where did it go? Why?”

The list of missing art is long and, at least to this observer, maddening. Herewith are some more stories of the missing.

William Walker

William Walker could be said to have started the community mural movement in the United States. As the long, very informative introduction to the Jeff Huebner and Olivia Gude book Urban Art Chicago tells us, the movement began in August, 1967 when 20 artists in the Organization for Black American Culture, known as OBAC, “pronounced obasi, the Yoruba word for ‘chieftain,’ “began painting the mural at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue that became known as The Wall of Respect. Huebner and Gude tell us that Walker, “the only group member who had been trained as a muralist and who was a key person in rallying community support, is often considered to be the wall’s originator.” The mural lasted only four years. A fire in the building on which it was painted resulted in the demolition of the building. But Wall of Respect became emblematic of black culture and of the spirit of community murals throughout the country and even in the world, living on initially in the photography of Robert Senstacke and celebrated on its 50th anniversary with academic recognition and numerous conferences about it in 2017.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of Wall of Respect portended the fate of many of Walker’s murals – a medium that is, we must admit, particularly subject to alteration, damage and disappearance, sometimes intentionally so. One of Walker’s murals, Peace and Salvation: Wall of Understanding was among more than sixty murals that many artists created by the end of 1971. Most of those murals have disappeared. Peace and Salvation was whitewashed in 1991, according to Huebner and Gude, an event that woke up mural lovers to the growing loss of cultural treasures and spurred them to try to protect the treasure. Groups formed to restore and protect murals, chief among them Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) under the guidance of Jon Pounds and John Pittman Weber. One prominent and important such restoration occurred in 1998, when “[Chicago Housing Authority’s Hayes Family Investment Center] commissioned CPAG artist Bernard Williams to restore” Walker’s 1974 mural, History of the Packinghouse Worker, which still shines out from the south wall of the Hayes building at 4859 South Wabash. (1)

Not so fortunate was one of Walker’s most evocative murals, All of Mankind, painted on the facade of what was then San Marcello Mission Church in the Cabrini-Green complex. More recently known as Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church, its mural “was radical in its day, a depiction of men and women as peers, members of different religions as allies, people of different races as friends.”

For reasons unclear to this day, the facade was whitewashed in 2015, as was another Walker mural inside the building.

William Walker, born in 1927 in Birmingham, Alabama, studied fine arts at the Columbus Gallery of Art in Chicago (now Columbia College Chicago). He died on September 12, 2011 in Chicago.

Stanley Tigerman
Louise Nevelson

Surprised? Yes. a Stanley Tigerman sculpture and one by Louise Nevelson have gone missing. These artists are paired here because each had a sculpture in the Illinois Center at some point.

You’ll pardon, I hope, my talking about art that you not only have likely never seen; you didn’t know it existed. But that’s kind of the point in this series of essays: to show how how ephemeral our public art heritage is and why. There will be more of this. I hope (probably foolishly) that it doesn’t make the outrage any the less when art disappears, but it does show why our dismay is a kind of raging against the darkness which must, of necessity, be merely a stage in grief.

Stanley Tigerman, the famed architect, created the sculpture Modsculp II for the 111 East Wacker Building in the center (now prominently the home of Chicago Architecture Center). It was, according to James L. Reidy, “composed of twenty-eight modules each one-eighth of an octahedron [which was] moved from one lobby space to another. From time to time the modules [were] relocated in varying configurations. . . . The red, blue, green, rose and cream forms isolate the construction from the environment and also relieve the austerity of the Miës van der Rohe-designed building.” The work was removed from the space in about 1981.

Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment IX, a sculptural construction that resided in Two Illinois Center (233 North Michigan) was designed for the lobby of 222 North Dearborn, the original Blue Cross – Blue Shield Building, a C. F. Murphy design constructed in 1968. The Nevelson and Tigerman sculptures were both owned by Blue Cross Blue Shield, part of their collection at that time of contemporary art. The Nevelson work was moved to Illinois Center when Blue Cross – Blue Shield took office space in there in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It was a “three-unit composition [consisting] of a simple frame at one end, an arrangement of open cylindrical and rectangular forms at the other, and between these an upright structure of fifteen partially open boxlike divisions that recall[ed] Nevelson’s earlier compartmentalized assemblages.” (3)

Blue Cross – Blue Shield moved from Illinois Center to its current building at 300 East Randolph Street in 1998. Around 2009 I read James L. Reidy’s account of the Tigerman and Nevelson sculptures and went looking for them. I discovered that upon moving to their new quarters, Blue Cross – Blue Shield sold the sculptures privately. I have found no extant photographs of the Tigerman sculpture. The story of their disappearance eerily mirrors that of Henry Moore’s Large Internal-External Form 3 First National (for more on this, see my blog entry at https://www.edmcdevitt.org/chicagos-lost-altered-and-disfigured-public-art-1/ )

Karl Wirsum

Many of Karl Wirsum’s distinctive paintings can be found in and around Chicago in such places as the Harold Washington Library and the Thompson Center. However, one of his largest public art projects, though it still exists, is obscured by a building whose troubled history makes the situation only that much more irritating.

“PlugBug,” Wirsum’s whimsical mural on the east side of the 1931 Holabird and Root ComEd Substation, was painted in 1989 when that side of the building was exposed above several lower buildings (later the empty Block 37 lot).

.Many viewers thought the mural just weird, some disliked it for being too cartoonish, but others thought it a fine example of a style of Chicago art that has now become very hip – the art of the Hairy Who and of the Chicago Imagists (who are, by the way, not necessarily related).

When the Block 37 Building finally was constructed, the ComEd substation building remained, a strange Art Deco statement in the middle of a glass and steel building of the 2000s. The front of the substation is decorated with a Sylvia Shaw Judson art deco relief that echoes the theme of PlugBug, the triumph of electricity.

While PlugBug is probably not a four-star piece of the city’s public art, its “entombment,” as one writer termed it, (5) is emblematic of the city’s frequent lack of caring for its art, whether the art is directly owned by the city or otherwise. Since the city was so closely involved in what finally got built on Block 37, I’m betting that had someone at a high level in the city who had a clue and who cared said to the developer that the design should include a way to keep PlugBug visible, they’d have found a way. But too often our city’s officials realize only too late that something is gone, or just as often don’t notice at all.

Could a design solution have been found? Such an effort was made when a new building was constructed just east of the MDA City Apartments (formerly the Medical Dental Arts Building on the southeast corner of Wabash and Lake). The designers provided a cutout that kept Joanna Poetig’s and Chicago Public Art Group’s remarkable Loop Tattoo exposed so that we could still view it. So yes, a solution probably was available. Ah, well.

That’s it for now. The next entry in this series about Lost, Altered and Disfigured Public Art will cover some more recent examples.

NOTES

(1) Much of the information in this section on the community mural movement and on William Walker (including the direct quotes) come from Olivia Gude and Jeff Huebner, Urban Art Chicago: A Guide to Community Murals, Mosaics and Sculptures. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.
(2) Mary Schmich, “Church’s historic mural whitewashed, to dismay of preservationists,” Chicago Tribune, December 20, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/schmich/ct-walker-church-mural-schmich-met-1220-20151218-column.html
(3) The information on the Tigerman and Nevelson sculptures (including the direct quotes) is drawn from James L. Reidy, Chicago Sculpture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 91-94. A rather indistinct photo of the Nevelson work can be found on p. 93.
(4) Photo from Arnold B. Glimcher, Louise Nevelson. New York: E.P. Dutton & Cos., Inc, 1976. This photo was among many thumbnails in the last section of the book entitled “Selected Works, 1930-1975. I have enlarged it as much as possible and apologize for its fuzziness.
(5) Lynn Becker used the term in his Architecture Chicago Plus blog entry of April 24, 2007. http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2007/04/entombment-of-plug-bug.html

© Edmund J. McDevitt
February, 2019