Chicago’s Public Art: A Paean and a Lament

About 20 years ago I got interested in Chicago’s public art. There seemed to be a lot of it downtown. I wondered both about the art itself and the quantity of it. The sequence of events in my evolving interest in the topic is murky now.

I looked for good information on the art I’d seen. I purchased James L. Reidy’s book Chicago Sculpture (1981) and Mary Lackritz Gray’s and Ira Bach’s A Guide to Chicago’s Public Sculpture (1983) to see what I could learn. What I learned was that very little information on the public art of the city had been published either before or after those two books.

In 2007 The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events published its first guide to art that had been enabled by the city’s 1978 Percent for Art program, The Chicago Public Art Guide. It was revised up until about 2015 and was available for free in what was then a Chicago Cultural Center room filled with various city-related brochures, maps and the like. While the title of the booklet implied that it covered all of the city’s public art, it was limited to the art owned by and administered by DCASE’s Department of Art.

I thought these publications were going to be wonderful resources, and to a large extent they were. But the Gray-Bach and Reidy books were, by the time I obtained them, about a quarter century out of date. I discovered how out of date they were when I photocopied the dot maps at the back of Reidy’s book and used them to go looking for the works he had enumerated. I went block by block in the Loop and in areas outside the Loop searching for sculptures, but also for works of other sorts that were mentioned in the books. I was to discover that in the intervening 25+ years since Chicago Sculpture’s publication, more than half of the documented works had disappeared. Some had been sold, a few had been moved to private collections, and others were simply gone without a trace.

I began a careful list of art works that were still present as well as many from the intervening years and I kept a loose record of the art that was gone. In the process the Chicago Public Art bug had bitten me. I had asked around, approaching anyone and everyone who might know about the public art in the city, and wondered aloud many times why what was proving to be a very large collection had not only not been documented; a major cultural resource, the envy  of every city in the U.S. (with the possible exception of Philadelphia), was not being broadcast to the world. In a city sensitive about its reputation, not crowing about such a resource seemed just odd.

I kept at this project on my own. In the meantime, I decided to train as a docent at what was then known as Chicago Architecture Foundation. I hoped not only to become versed in the city’s remarkable architectural history, about which the city certainly did crow, but also to connect with people in the cultural and arts communities. In the course of things, I learned how to put together walking tours and created a couple of public art tours for the Foundation as well as a number of private public art tours later.

At the same time, I talked to whoever would listen about my plan to identify and document Chicago’s public art. I surmised, based on the list I was accumulating, that the collection numbered at least in the high hundreds.

To get a better idea of the scope of identification and documentation, I met with the City of Chicago’s designated Cultural Historian, Tim Samuelson. In a rambling conversation we came to discuss how large the whole public art collection within the city’s boundaries might be. We agreed that the segment of the collection overseen by DCASE was but a small portion of the whole. Why? Because universities and other schools had their own collections, as did office buildings, medical associations, foundations, condominiums, private citizens, and the like. In fact, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Park District, and the Lincoln Park Zoo had and have their own separate collections that are not owned or managed by the DCASE Department of Art. And the State of Illinois had its own collection, mostly in the Thompson Center (now removed), as does the federal government. Never mind mural and other art funded by aldermen, business alliances and ethnic groups in many neighborhoods such as Pilsen, Rogers Park, Humboldt Park and others.

Tim and I concluded that the collection – not including art on the facades of buildings such as The Art Institute – numbered at least 4,000. That seemed right to me until I had a similar conversation with Julia Bachrach, who at the time oversaw the Park District’s art collection. I told her about Tim’s estimate. She immediately said, “No. That’s very low. It’s easily 5,000 or 6,000.”

Whatever the actual number (and remember, we were not including mural art, something that in subsequent years exploded all over the city), it was clear that the public art numbers in the City of Chicago were astonishing.

I got in touch with the person who directed the DCASE public art program and noted that no reliable list of the city’s total collection existed. I offered to join with that organization (as a volunteer) to get the collection documented. Unfortunately, my bona fides were, apparently, insufficient to consider. I made the offer twice and was unceremoniously dismissed both times.

At the end of December 2010, I attended a party at the lovely apartment of a docent classmate. I was full of excitement about what I then called my Chicago Public Art Mapping Project. I expressed my enthusiasm for my budding project to one of the party people. She pointed me in the direction of a couple who might be interested in helping with such a venture. I found them in the scrum of the party, introduced myself and told them of my idea. They were immediately excited about it and offered to help. He was an entrepreneurial sort, and she was a practicing fundraiser/development person.

In the subsequent months we set up a legal entity called Public Art Chicago, found a brand design firm willing to develop a logo pro bono, set up a governing board and set to work. In short order I was introduced to a recently retired physician who had cashed out of a radiology practice and who was partnered with a mobile app developer. The developer was looking for an augmented reality mobile app testbed that would pinpoint locations of a list of items. Our mapping project seemed perfect as that testbed.

The developer had office space which he generously offered to our new organization. While work progressed on the “geofencing” public art app, a small team I gathered started collecting public art details. We made a most important connection with a woman who had just finished identifying all the University of Chicago’s public art, an important and extensive collection. She joined us to write extended artist profiles and object descriptions for the U of C collection. By then we had decided that for the app, artist and object information would be carefully limited in verbiage and that an oral narrative would accompany each identified object. We created 3 potential walking tours for the 36 objects our U of C collaborator had described. They were among our first inclusions in the mobile app.

Over the next five years the app was tested and finally launched. With the help of volunteer interns from University of Chicago and DePaul University we had accumulated a significant amount of data on several hundred public art objects and their artists. I personally had found and interviewed multiple artists about whom little or nothing was known, including Kathleen McCullough, about whom Lincoln Park Zoo knew only her name prior to my interviewing her. In the cases of artists who were deceased, I found family members who gave me invaluable information.

We worked closely with Columbia College’s Wabash Arts Corridor mural project to document the murals in the program and to get those murals on the app.

We did a project for DePaul University which identified and documented all the University’s public art, all of which went on the mobile app. We had help from multiple people who were independently interested in Chicago’s public art, some of whom supplied invaluable research they had done.

In early 2018 we lost our office space. Up to the point of moving out, we had garnered small amounts of funding from DCASE and three foundations. Cumulatively it was not enough to support new office space or to continue paying Google and Apple to host our mobile app. In short order, our cultural enterprise had come to a halt.

In the intervening years I’ve tried to interest various art and city organizations in Chicago’s public art and in working with me not only to house the information our organization had found, but to carry on with collecting it and making it available to the public. I’ve had no takers, which is exasperating.

As I’ve already said, Chicago has a cultural resource it should be proud of, something that few if any cities in the United States can equal. But, for whatever reason, the city government itself does not get it. And arts organizations and foundations that support the arts seem uninterested in taking on what would be a long-term overall project. Most of them have their own private agendas; and most of them seek to fund or support short-term ventures, those that finish in a year or some other definable time.

I was sensitive to my personal lack of credentials in art history, something that seemed to lurk in the background of my attempts to connect with potential collaborators in the art world. While I tried to emphasize my very strong research experience and insistence on fact-checking, the lack of a bona fide art background seemed to dull interest in those whom I solicited.

Be that as it may, the information I continue to hold in store and to which I add frequently remains a unique goldmine of information. The research of many talented people not only located data previously unknown, but it also consolidated information on given artists and objects, information that was fragmented and scattered. It would be next to criminal for all this material to evaporate into the ether after I’m gone.

My hope now is that I can pull all the material together in one place and for the longer term create reasons for someone to want to preserve and grow it. In the short term I hope to launch a website with a map resource and extensive descriptive material, making all of the data I currently have freely available to the world. Chicago and the art world at large deserve at least that, despite the blithely maintained ignorance of the people in Chicago government and Chicago’s art world about the treasure in front of its collective noses.

Edmund J. McDevitt
©February 2025