p 47. Jane Wenger a. Untitled, 1970 4. X 3. in. Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago b. Untitled, 1970 3 3/4 X 2½ in.
Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago c. Untitled 1970 3 x 41/8 in.
Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago CHICAGO:
The City and Its Artists, 1945-1978 Roughly a year and a half ago, a group of graduate students approached me to suggest a seminar on contemporary art outside New York City. We were all aware of how skewed our perception of art in the United States was through art media concentration on the art scene in Manhattan. As pre-planning for the seminar progressed, we realized we couldn’t tackle the whole thing. We decided to focus on one art center. We chose Chicago because we felt we were close enough physically to explore the scene in person and to learn much firsthand, yet we were far enough away to cast upon it something of an objective eye.
Over the summer, we began assembling information. Each person chose an area of Chicago art for his or her investigation. We read and thought and shared information and insights. We were surprised and delighted at the diversity and richness of the Chicago art scene. We came to feel that much writing about Chicago art had an unfortunately narrow focus, concentrating primarily on Imagist painting and sculpture. We wished to share some of our own broader perspective with a wider audience. The result is this exhibition and catalogue, made possible by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. For the purposes of organizing the exhibition, the graduate students in the original History of Art seminar were joined by the students in this year’s Master of Museum Practice Program in the University Museum of Art.
The students have completed research, written essays, and selected works for the exhibition and catalogue in the areas we structured to provide a minor panorama of Chicago’s art scene. My personal contributions have been the entries connected with imaging and machines, which lie at the heart of my own current research. One of our original goals was to probe the role of Chicago in the art produced there. Many of the artists spoke about the ambience of the city. Often, they could not be precise about it, but for them, the city was a good place to be as artists. Certainly, Chicago has had an energetic history, culminating in a distinguished architectural tradition. Businessmen were important from the beginning. They controlled the city’s growth, and they favored a park system and wide avenues almost from the start. They also paid the best young architects of their day to build the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings and private dwellings with wide porches and big yards, which would create the city’s basic physical character. They sponsored the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which presented a vision of a totally planned community to the public.
In 1906, they went further by hiring Daniel H. Burnham to draw up a plan for the whole city of Chicago. His plan covered the Chicago of that day and of the future. He included in his thinking transportation and open spaces as well as buildings. “In the development of the Burnham Plan for the City of Chicago, the problem of traffic, of the city as community in motion, was faced in common by architects, engineers, sociologists, economists, civic officials, and representatives of the people.” But Chicagoans did more than pay for the plans; they enacted many of them, thus continuing what seems to be one Chicago trait: Chicagoans are people of action. If something needs doing, they do not rely on someone else to do it—they do it themselves. This independent spirit may have helped Chicagoans to become early collectors of important Impressionist paintings. It may allow current collectors to form strong collections of works selected with little reference to “official aesthetic taste.”
This independence of action may explain why Chicago artists can work persistently and productively far from what the international art world considers to be the center of the American art scene. Possibly this same self-reliance lies at the heart of the artists’ willingness to undertake the Momentum exhibitions in the face of official hostility, to start independent galleries when exhibition space is scarce, to seek out new stylistic sources which serve individual needs however far they may lie from established art traditions. And perhaps this focus on the individual fostered the breadth of the art activity in Chicago with its strong channels of creativity in the traditional fields of painting and sculpture and in the less established arts of photography, public murals, and interactive machine imaging.
There is keen activity in printmaking, advertising art, commercial design, film, and of course, architecture as well. These latter we have had to omit from our exhibition not because they are less important, but simply because it proved impossible for us to deal with every aspect of a vital art environment. The role in the Chicago art scene of the museums, commercial galleries, and art schools and universities with their galleries is impressive. The role of individual artists in shaping their own art worlds is equally important. Clearly, Chicago remains above all a democratic city, with a healthy creative spirit that continues to evolve with little regard for an established set of rules or tastes.
Diane Kirkpatrick