Public Art – Chicago’s Hidden Treasure

This is an edited version of a “Maybe We’ll Talk About Public Art Too” podcast.

Hello, everyone.

My name is Ed McDevitt.

This blog episode is called “Public Art – Chicago’s Hidden Treasure.” My original intent was to devote an entire blog and podcast series to Chicago’s collection of public art. But then life intervened and I got distracted by a whole load of other things that I think are worth talking about. So we’re going to talk about them AND about Chicago’s public art.

First, some introductory information.

I love to talk and argue, to explain and illuminate, and to listen. I know a little about a lot of things and a lot about several things.At this stage of my life I want to – as we say these days – unpack some of that in many different ways.

Some of these blog entries will be me talking to you by myself, In others, you’ll be reading a transcript of a conversation in one of our podcasts in the “Maybe We’ll Talk About Public Art Too” series.

So what will the topics be? History, ancestry, music, the many drolleries I encounter in life, politics, baseball, the people I meet, architecture, beer, and yes, public art

A bit about me. I’m a senior citizen from a highly varied business and cultural background. My work life included software sales and marketing, software development, web development, information technology, business consulting, and many other things. I spent decades in health insurance and property and casualty insurance both for insurance companies and for software and web companies linked to the insurance industry. I’m a choral singer. I’m a docent at Chicago Architecture Center, where I’ve developed and lead multiple architectural walking tours and a bus tour. I have a Master’s degree in English, and  pursued doctoral studies in the discipline.

I have a tendency to get deeply interested in things, which is why, for example, I’m a beer geek.

But let’s start with Chicago’s public art and why I want to talk about it. I’ll try to lay out the landscape of public art in Chicago and its history and try to tell you why you should care.

Since its beginning 8 years ago I’ve been Executive Director of an organization called, fittingly, Public Art Chicago.

We have worked to document the city’s collection of public art. In the process we’ve accumulated quite a database of information on the remarkable treasure trove in our city. We’ve gathered in bits and pieces of information that are scattered all over the landscape. We work to verify what we find and to make the gathered material into a coherent story.

We knew from the beginning that to do this right, we had to dig into things to get the real story. Why? Because it became obvious that time had muddied the history, or had buried it, or, in some instances, had made it  unfindable. We’ve made it a point of practice to go back to the original commissions, to the newspaper accounts of unveilings, to artist biographies, to city agencies, to state archives, to university scholars.

As you might guess, lots of objects have very slim histories. Some objects, we’ve discovered, have very wrong histories. We have come up against total lack of information on artists. If those artists are alive, we have tried to locate them to interview them. More than once we were the first ever to ask them about their artistic selves – and not a few of them have been very touched to be asked. We’ve been able to track down family members of several deceased artists and to gain insight into the artists’ lives and work.

We have good information on 500 or so of the city’s public art works.

So that’s a bit of our background.

Now let’s get to some of the nitty gritty.

I mentioned what I call “wrong histories.” Let’s just say that some of the accepted stories about our public art works are, to be kind, flights of fancy or myths passed happily along without much checking. We hope to tell you what actually happened with these works of art. Along the way we might ruin some of your favorite stories. We apologize for the damage.

One of the things we know for sure is that there’s more to know about every artist and art work. That’s where you come in. We want you to respond to what we tell you. If you know something we don’t know, please do tell us. If you disagree with something we say, go right ahead. Disagree. No need to be disagreeable. We value civility. Use the “Comments” space at the end of our blog posts. If you do bring us new information, please tell us your sources so that we can follow up!

OK. Enough of that. Let’s get to today’s topic: what is this public art collection we have in our city?

A few years ago, we tried to determine the size of Chicago’s collection. So I talked with Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s historian. After batting some numbers around, Tim asked if I would include façade art –the art that has been applied to building surfaces. “Of course,” I said.“Then,” he said, “I’d guess 3,000 art works.”

A while later I talked with Julia Bachrach, then working at Chicago Park District. She was overall in charge of the Park District’s collection and she said, when I told her about Tim’s estimate, “Oh, no. It’s got to be more than 4,000.”

Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it shows the scope of the total collection. For another, it puts something in perspective: how important the collection is as a cultural resource for the city.

A bit of an aside. Were Chicago to focus on its public artcollection AS a collection, the city might realize that it HAS a huge cultural resource, a world-class art collection rivaled by few cities in the world. But the city’s interest in celebrating it seems not to exist. Every now and again a publication will talk about the collection, saying that it numbers 500 works.

It turns out that this oft-repeated number comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, DCASE, which repeats “500” while meaning to refer to the city’s “percent for art” collection. The total collection, including the percent for art works, is far in excess of 500. Worse, this isn’t even the correct number for DCASE’s collection. But I digress.

What the city – DCASE, Choose Chicago, the city’s tourism arm, the mayor’s office – is utterly blind to is the size, importance and quality of the total collection. We have thousands of stunning things that people from all over the world should be told about and should come to see. Chicago could credibly say that it has the largest public art collection in the United States, and the only city that could dispute this is Philadelphia – a city that DOES celebrate its wide range of public art – ALL of it. 

Sure, this sounds like pure boosterism. But that’s not my intention. Instead, it’s an attempt to show my dismay at the “so what?” attitude we’ve encountered in city officials who should be far more excited about what we and they have.

Our basic confusion about “public art” could well be that we don’t agree on what we mean by the term “public.” For our purposes, it’s any egitimate art (sometime we’ll define “legitimate,” but not right now) that you and I can walk up to and view without paying to see it and without having to go through a security station or have a minder with us. Yes, it does include Chicago Transit Authority art even if you pay to get into the CTA’s stations: you’re not, usually, paying to see the art. You’re paying to ride the train. It ncludes public spaces outside museums, office building lobbies, university buildings, and the like.

Which brings us to the question of who owns “public” art. We’ve already mentioned “the city,” (by which we mean the city’s percent for art program), the CTA and the Park District.

Besides those, public art owners include corporations, building owners, condominiums, universities, small businesses, museums, individuals, Cook County, the State of Illinois, the U.S. government, artists, local business groups and business alliances, community organizations, and, well, nobody at all (murals, street art, etc.). And that’s not even a complete list.

Now, where is the art? In some minds, our public art collection resides only in the downtown and near downtown, including the Museum Campus and Soldier Field area. But anyone who’s driven or walked around the city knows that our neighborhoods are filled with art, some neighborhoods more than others. Walk in Rogers Park, Bronzeville, Hyde Park, Pilsen, Humboldt Park and you’ll see remarkable sculptures, murals, and other art. Just about every one of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods has public art. Some of them have spectacularly decorated L, Metra and highway underpasses, with murals and mosaics that are, to say the least, amazing. These are frequently community projects, often heavily assisted by a great organization with a name similar to ours, Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG). Hang with us for future podcasts. We hope to get with some folks who are or who have been connected to CPAG in the future. A bit later in this podcast we’ll talk about our murals in general and about how they came about.

But let’s spend some time on history.

There is occasional disagreement on what the oldest object of public art in the city is. Some argue that it’s the Waubansee Stone, a controversial artifact attributed to all sorts of ancient cultures. However, we don’t include it in our discussion, if only because it’s not “public” as we define that term. The stone lives at the Chicago History Museum. You have to pay to get in there, as you do in most museums.

So we’ll stick with a Union Soldier statue in Oak Woods Cemetery. While we don’t know who created it, we do know that it’s been in the cemetery since just after the Civil War. 

That marble Union Soldier stands guard, slowly eroding, in the cemetery, which is, if you want to go there, at 1035 E 67th St, Chicago on the south side.

Another aside: I like to visit that cemetery for reasons other than that statue. I love to stand by Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe’s gravesite. “Double Duty” was a famed player in the Negro baseball league. His grave lies about a third baseman’s throw to first base away from that of Cap Anson, who,in the 19^th century, was instrumental in developing the ban on black ball players in major league baseball. I like to think of Radcliffe’s ghost rising up each night and thumbing his nose at Anson.

There I go again. Moving right along . . .

From the Civil War into the 1950s, just about all of Chicago’s public art was monumental. Statues of many soldiers, political figures, writers, classical figures and others – even a dentist! –  all of them white men, dominated the public art landscape. Occasionally a sculpture or fountain – always in classical form – would embody a symbolic concept. Few, if any, of these things was commissioned or paid for by any unit of government, though one or another such government unit might have had to grant permission or space. In the last quarter of the 19^th century the most common place for public art was parks.

I mentioned Julia Bachrach a while back. If you want to know about Chicago’s parks, nobody comes close to knowing what Julia knows. Julia’s web site tells us that she “served as historian and planning supervisor to the Chicago Park District for more than two decades.” She’s retired from that position and has her own consulting firm. She says about her new work that:

“I am a historian, preservation planner, and urban design professional who deeply believes that understanding the past can help us create a better future. I give presentations and tours; write articles and books; and create digital media projects for garden clubs, history groups, teachers, students, and the public. I also produce historic surveys, landmark nominations, and cultural resource documentation for professional preservation review processes.”

Everyone who cares about Chicago’s history and parks should have a copy of Julia’s book “The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago’s Parks.” Get the second edition of 2012. In it we learn that

“In the decade before the Civil War, a cemetery several miles north of the Chicago River became a flashpoint. Rainwater collecting in newly dug graves spilled out and contaminated the city’s drinking supply, which in turn spread disease. After much crusading, sixty acres of the cemetery became Lincoln Park in 1865. . . . In 1869 a skeletal plan – the bones of a new park system – load out a network of boulevards to connect parks throughout the city. . . .As far back as the 1880s, Lincoln Park became the center of a rich urban life with a zoo, conservatory, sculptures and lagoons.”

The park system developed quickly to include Garfield, Humboldt and Douglas Parks on the West Side, and Jackson Park on the South Side became the site of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

The earliest sculptures in Chicago, besides the few in cemeteries, popped up in the parks. The first one to show up was the Johann Freidrich Christoph von Schiller Monument. If you’ve been at the far end of the formal garden, south of the conservatory in Lincoln Park, you’ve seen this statue in a prime location, very near the west entrance to the Lincoln Park Zoo.

In the 1880s, Chicago’s German community had great enthusiasm for Schiller, a prime poet in the German Romantic era. A committee of German Citizens decided to raise money for a monument to their revered writer. In 1885, after a large group of German immigrants held a meeting in Chicago’s Turner Hall, a cornerstone and foundation were laid in Lincoln Park. The committee hired William Pelargus, an artist from Stuttgart, Germany, to use the original mold to recast the monument which was located in Schiller’s birthplace. The committee also contracted with Lake View marble cutter John Gall to create the monument’s granite base.

Delegates from sixty German societies planned elaborate ceremonies to unveil the Schiller Monument. Despite inclement May weather in Chicago, thousands of people attended the festivities in 1886. This proved to be the first of many donations made by immigrant groups to honor important historical figures from their homelands with statues in Chicago’s parks. The German community alone is responsible for at least four other monuments to their countrymen in Chicago: Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, Fritz Reuter, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gotthold Lessing.

Not to belabor the story of the Schiller statue – but you might ask, how did it come to be in this prime location in Lincoln Park?

Good question.

Schiller’s monument was, as I said, the first memorial portrait monument in Lincoln park. It was soon followed by the “Standing Lincoln” memorial and the Ulysses S. Grant memorial.  A committee of five was chosen to select a site in the park, “the Superintendent [of Lincoln Park] having stated they could have any place that suited them not designed for some other purpose.” They chose a flower garden in a prominent location in the park.

Think about that for a few seconds. You have a large monument you want to put up. So you’ve got a guy. He’s the park superintendent. He says, “put it wherever you want, except over there.” That’s how things worked in the beginning. Today you’d need to receive a commission to create the work, permits of all sorts, an environmental impact study, hearings, and a publicity campaign just to find a site. And don’t get me started on why the Grant monument is in Lincoln Park or why there’s a monument to a dentist there too. We’ll talk about those in future podcasts, possibly.

Anyway, monuments and statues to dead white men and classically themed fountains dominated the public art landscape until after World War II – until the 1950s, actually.

One of the most interesting things about many of those monuments is that they were truly “public” art. Several statues honoring national figures and people who were important to particular ethnic groups were funded by thousands of contributions from the public at large: I mentioned that Schiller’s was funded that way. So was, for example, the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Lincoln Park, a project of the Danish community. The Ulysses S. Grant memorial was funded by dimes, quarters and dollars donated by over 100,000 people. And the unveiling of such memorials was always a major public event, drawing huge crowds.

One of the last of the great gestures to public figures before the Depression was the 1928 Alexander Hamilton memorial, the money for which was given by Kate Sturges Buckingham, who had also memorialized her late brother with the Clarence Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park in 1927. As the Depression ensued, the enthusiasm for laying out money for such memorials disappeared. It actually never came back in any meaningful way.

By the 1950s, new public art became, for lack of a better term, architectural. After the 1934 Field Building, that great Art Deco masterpiece that sits on the block between Clark and LaSalle Streets on Adams, the city essentially went without new skyscrapers – and without memorial statues, The Depression and WWII kept interest in new buildings and memorial sculpture at a low ebb. So did the lack of materials caused by the War.

Something else was going on in the war years, though. Amanda Douberley, Assistant Curator and Academic Liaison at the William Benton Museum of Art at University of Connecticut says in her excellent 2015 University of Texas doctoral dissertation, TheCorporate Model: Sculpture, Architecture and the American City, that during WWII, corporations started collecting art for their buildings. IBM, Encyclopedia Britannica, the Miller Company and others acquired, she says, “tightly curated collections related to their products or industry that were circulated as exhibitions to educate the public and to demonstrate corporate support for the arts. Companies like the Container Corporation of America employed artists to create paintings for advertisements or used art from the open market in advertising campaigns. Pepsi-Cola sponsored art competitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which included prizes and a calendar featuring reproductions of winning paintings. These one-time projects had the feel of public relations stunts, and by the early 1950s critics encouraged corporations to use art in a more holistic manner.” The idea that companies should purchase art for the office grew out of this sentiment and developed over the course of the decade, in large part through Skidmore Owings Merrill’s example. SOM in their design for the 1954 Manufacturers Trust Company Bank Building in New York City had featured art purchased specifically for the executive offices in the building.

When SOM was engaged to design Inland Steel Company’s Headquarters Building in Chicago, their habit of including art in building designs met a ready audience. The executive of Inland who was in charge of getting the building done was Leigh Block. He and his wife Mary had an extensive collection of what was then called “Modern Art.” Amanda Douberley says, “As the only Big Steel firm headquartered in Chicago, Inland Steel aimed to create a symbol of the region’s rise as the center of U.S. steel production and of its own ambitions in the industry with a tall office building, the first to rise in the Loop, Chicago’s core business district, since the completion of the Field Building in 1934. In bringing the Loop’s construction lull to an end, Inland Steel also initiated the renewal of downtown Chicago, which would follow the corporation’s lead in combining first-class architecture and works of art.” Visual art was to be an integral part of the building’s design, and it included art on every floor of the building. Most important, though, Leigh and Mary Block chose not to fill the building with their own collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. Instead, they and a chosen art committee decided to assemble a new collection for the building. SOM and the art committee decided on an industrial theme for the collection. Even the wallpaper in the cafeteria had to be part of it. It was designed by Alexander Calder.

Bruce Graham was the lead architect for the building. But SOM’s William Hartmann was the project manager for the building. He was later to be the key person in convincing Pablo Picasso to create a sculpture for the Civic Center, now the Daley Center. Hartmann paid particular attention to the art that was to go in the lobby of the building. The committee, Hartmann and Block invited such artists as Harry Bertoia, Seymour Lipton, Theodore Roszak and Richard Lippold to submit ideas for a sculpture in the lobby of Inland Steel.

The very idea of sculpture had changed through the first half of the 20^th century, though you might not have known that from the public works of the first 3 decades of the century, which seemed not to have participated in the many modern art movements that began early in the 1900s: Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism, Surrealism. By the 1950s, architecture had changed, and artists were working in all sorts of media unknown before. The world of the machine had become pervasive and artists had adopted, among other things, geometric forms expressed in industrial materials.

Richard Lippold became the artist of choice for the Inland Steel Building, at least in part because his ideas fit what William Hartmann felt was appropriate for the Inland Steel lobby. Amanda Douberley points out that an earlier sculpture of Lippold, his Variation within a Sphere, No. 7: Full Moon (MOMA) were what she terms “spaceframes,” which also describes the lobby of Inland Steel. Lippold proposed the sculpture we see there now, named Radiant I (pronounced “eye”).  As Douberley conclusively notes, the “I” stands for “Inland.” The sculpture is not named “Radiant One” no matter what the placard on the piece says. We can hope that someone in building ownership – say, Frank Gehry – would see to it that this long-standing plaque error is corrected.

Radiant I is, as Douberley points out, a steel asterisk formed of wire and steel tubes.The work flows from the ceiling into a reflecting pool at its base, with a black onyx wall reflecting it.

To get this work done, Lippold worked closely with chief architect Bruce Graham, who actually made structural changes to the building to accommodate Lippold’s sculpture. This strongly demonstrates Skidmore’s commitment to the integration of art into its architectural designs. This development, while it wasn’t immediately widespread, finally did take off and changed where public art came from and what it looked like. Corporate public art became the major type of public art from the 1950s through at least the mid-1970s.

The period after WWII saw very little of the early 20^thcentury public campaigns for small contributions for a monument. In fact, few if any monuments showed up in Chicago after the Depression and WWII. Until “percent for art” programs came into being, the new art we saw, at least in our downtown, included no municipally financed art. We did see the rise of protest and ethnic pride murals in neighborhoods such as the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, where the now famous mural Wall of Respect was, and Pilsen. Those were true community expressions. The community mural movement began in the 1960s but took years to spread and to be recognized by the larger community of the city.

We have three percent for art programs that have provided public art in Chicago. The city’s own program began in 1978. The State of Illinois Art in Architecture program, which has provided the art in and around such buildings as the Thompson Center, had its beginning in 1977.

The history of the Federal government’s program is interesting. From 1934 to 1943, the Section of Painting and Sculpture in the United States Department of the Treasury required one percent of the cost of federal buildings to be applied toward art and decoration. This program paralleled what we call the WPA art program. The Treasury Section’s activities were responsible for the murals we see in Federal buildings, including post offices. After 1943 it was closed down. The WPA’s legacy includes murals in schools and other locations. Unfortunately, the murals that went up in schools are, for the most part, not viewable by the public because of contemporary school security concerns. Since 1963 the federal General Services Administration has maintained its Art in Architecture Program, which allocates one-half of one percent of construction costs for art projects. In Chicago this program did not come into play until 1974 with the placement of Calder’s Flamingo in the Federal Plaza.

The Richard Lippold sculpture was a ground-breaking change in public art in our city. That change reached its apotheosis with the installation and unveiling of The Picasso in 1967. From that point forward, we were in for public art that was fully divorced from figural, representative art. That wonderfully evocative, brash piece, so controversial at the beginning, has become emblematic of Chicago. That this is so tells us a lot about how and why our public art since The Picasso has been so distinctive. And in a way, that single sculpture encouraged an explosion in public art throughout the city that goes on to this day.

That’s enough history for one day. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. There’s more, and we’ll cover the period after The Picasso appeared in a later blog post.

As we go on we’ll talk more than once about missing, lost and altered public art in Chicago. The first one in that series will talk about some of the most prominent missing pieces, the ones people talk about the most.

We’ll also explore the inside stories of what we call “Chicago’s heavy hitters,” the most famous of our public art works, including the Marc Chagall Four Seasons, The Picasso, Alexander Calder’s Flamingo and other works just about everyone thinks they know about.

We will also take a look at Chicago’s community murals, those that are gone as well as the ones that remain or are new.

And you can expect interviews of artists, artists’ family members, and other movers and shakers in the Chicago Public Art world.

Those are just the possibilities for the Public Art topic! We’ll have much to say about things one discovers while doing ancestral history. We’ll be talking about some very interesting music. I hope you like baseball, because that will be the source of more than a few of our blog postings. And much more besides!

We’re also putting together some videos on our public art objects, exhibits, and other topics. We’ll let you know when they’re ready. They’ll get posted on our YouTube channel. Don’t go there yet. Nothing to see there. Move along.

Until next time, keep your eyes peeled! Look up! Find things! You’ll be surprised.

© Edmund J. McDevitt
December, 2018