Art Worlds

a photograph of Lee Godie by Steven Kagan, from Carl Hammer Gallery

Thousands of ways to live a creative life are represented in the Chicago Artists' Archive, from outsider artists like Lee Godie to Grace Lai, the diminuitive painter of construction sites, to artist Jeff Whitfield, former facilitator of the Creative Arts Program at Statesville Prison in IL.

While not as prevalent a myth now as in years past, the notion of the individual artist working alone is a fallacy in the economy of creative practice. One of my standby art references, recently reissued in a 25th anniversary edition, is Art Worlds. Written by one of my husband's heroes, social scientist Howard Becker, it describes how artists are deeply embedded in distributed networks. Artists never go it alone: they work with clients, organizations, dealers, administrators, technicians and marketers.

Any one folder of the Chicago Artists' Archive contains tens to hundreds of different approaches to creative practice. (Check the last names to see how far I have gotten in my reading: I am at M--actually Mc!) Artists representing a wide range of art worlds include Barbara Cooper, sculptor and public artist, wallpaper artisans Koessel Studios, art critic CJ Bulliet, painter of war Tom Lea, funder Bertha Masor, restorer Lido Lippi,  Colin McFrangos, poster artist or Bill Lavicka, scavenger writ large. Documents about these artists in the Chicago Artists' Archive reveal the larger network each practitioner builds and participates in while maintaining a high level of individual creativity and craftsmanship.

Print by Roger Brown, Cole Taylor Collection, SAIC

 One entry in the CAA is an article on Sydney Taylor, a director of Cole Taylor Bank. The bank built a large and idiosyncratic art collection and held exhibitions in their downtown bank. Taylor is quoted in an article from the period as saying,

After Martin Luther King was killed, we thought we could use art as a way to calm things down. There had been rioting. Buildings were burned down. It was scary. We started holding exhibitions as a way to help people understand the cultural contributions each group was making because we all were there together in the heart of the city.

This quote reminds me of the gentle power of setting a precedent, of making the creative gesture. The layers of worlds in that simple quotation—nation, city, neighborhood, bank, workers, collectors, artists, citizens—represent the strength of recognizing and utilizing existing networks as contexts for art.

Art Leagues

Art Leagues are spread throughout suburban Chicago and show up frequently in the Chicago Artists' Archive.  The North Shore Art League, which serves the area where I live, seems to have been a vital place for making, seeing and presenting contemporary art by well known national artists from the 50s to the 70s. You can see by this current Google Maps search that the Art Leagues are alive and well:

Art Leagues in the Chicago area

There is very little history online about Art Leagues, but in general they are non-profit community based arts organizations that support, exhibition and teach visual arts. From what I can tell from the archive, local Leagues were inclusive and programming-oriented. An artist I am reminded of in this context is Eleanor King Hookham, an artist who had a dream to open a contemporary art museum in Elmhurst. She started by founding the Elmhurst Artist's Guild. After many years of community effort, she founded the Elmhurst Art Museum, one of our areas fine regional museums. (story from the Chicago Reader in the Chicago Artists' Archive).

Artists and Art Leagues included in this two week exhibition include:
North Shore Art League: for exhibitions and talks in the 1970s including Ben Mahmoud and Kwak Wai Lau
Oak Park Art League: for a 1980s exhibition of work by Ray Martin
Municipal Art League of Chicago: exhibition by Tom Lynch

Hidden Pages Brought to Light

My show at the CPL closed back in October, but I have continued to read the archive. I am now almost done with M so have a number of months left in my quest to read the entire collection. I am putting up bi-weekly exhibits of archival materials. I will post the artists and subject area of each exhibit here, plus any nuggets I find in a flat case on the 8th floor. Please come by and take a look!

mini exhibitions from the archive

Every couple weeks I am putting together a small show of work from the archive. The work is installed in a flat document case on the 8th floor entry of the Harold Washington Library Center.

Show One: Women:
Lillian Florsheim | Ruth Duckworth | Jeanne Dunning | Kathleen Blackshear | Mary Gehr Ray | Frances Badger | Eleanor Coen | Mary Arendt

women in the CAA: Ruth Duckworth's snapshots of an installation, handwritten prose by Mary Arendt
a show announcement for Jeanne Dunning, whose photographs are installed on the 8th floor.

Jeanne Dunning photograph permanently installed on the 8th floor.

Show Two: Men:
Leon Golub | Ted Gray | Joseph Goto | Tony Goskie | Patricia Green | Cosmo Campoli | Dan Grzeca |Bill Harding | Oliver Grover | John Rogers Cox

men in the CAA: Leon Golub wins a $100. purchase prize, flanked by
a baby blanket on the left, and a high school purchase prize on the right.

Show Three: Objets d'Art:
Beth Dunlap | William Jacobs | Kenneth Josephson | Karen Finley | AK Bilder | Robert Heinecken | Catherine Gass | Shmura Campbell | Paul Clark | Harold Haydon | Julian Harr | Mark Hauser | Inara Cedrins | Ike Heilbron | Alice Culbert

Show Four: N.A.M.E:
This exhibition includes reviews, announcements and ephemera from the early years of N.A.M.E., an influential artist-run gallery in Chicago.

why read the archive?

When I agreed to do the exhibition, the curator Leslie Patterson mentioned that the Chicago Artists' Archive is housed in the Visual and Performing Arts Library, where my show is installed. I am a recent transplant to Chicago, and I live about a half hour outside the city, so reading the Archive allows me to learn Chicago art history during the day. I come up with many reasons not to drive down to openings (why on Friday nights? when traffic is the worst?). I wrote this post about the archive in June, which lays out a bit about the Archive and what I have been looking at.

The real reason to read this archive is its unique status as a regional open and free artist archive. While my research is far from complete, a few hours of Google searches has unearthed many archives, but none quite so beautifully simple in its conception or as extensive in its scope. If you make or made art in Chicago or the Chicago area, or were born here and went on to have an artistic career by any definition, your work belongs in the Chicago Artists' Archive. There is no curator making selections for the archive or editing it in any way. If you submit, you are included. One artist made the CAA into a public archive for his work, sending 'archival' CDs with his photographs, inventory lists, regularly updated resumes, and statements.

I have learned an enormous amount already about Chicago's art scene. Of note are the longevity and significance of artist-run spaces and galleries, as well as the tremendous influence of the School of the Art Institute.  And I am only in the middle of the H's, a third of the way through.

When I am full of the archive, I walk out to see the city's public art, visit the SAIC or Columbia College student galleries, the Pop-Up Art Loop galleries, the shows at the Art Institute, and then stop at the MCA on the way back to the Northwestern shuttle bus. Every day is full of art these two months, and that is the best reason to read the archive.

Artists and Archives

Hal Foster wrote a great essay in 2004 called An Archival Impulse. He includes a lot of interesting artists, including Pierre Huyghe, showing at the MCA, and Tacita Dean.

Im going to include a longish quote here:

This last point might imply that the ideal medium of archival art is the mega-archive of the Internet, and over the last decade terms that evoke the electronic network, such as "platforms" and "stations," have appeared in art parlance, as has the Internet rhetoric of "interactivity." But in most archival art the actual means applied to these "relational" ends are far more tactile and face-to-face than any Web interface. The archives at issue here are not databases in this sense; they are recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing. Although the contents of this art are hardly indiscriminant, they remain indeterminant like the contents of any archive, and often they are presented in this fashion-as so many promissory notes for further elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios. In this regard archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps "anarchival impulse" is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects-in art and in history alike-that might offer points of departure again.

photo of file contents, Chicago Artists' Archive

I like that Foster discusses the physical tangibility of the archive, and the subjective, open eye with which the artist approaches it. They are these endless seas of material to reference and consider. I find myself drawn to stories about female artists with kids working from the suburbs, because that is me right now. I read it all, but I read those stories, the ones that reflect my experience, with a little more kinship.

I feel less inclined to make work about the artists in the archive and more inclined to build the archive. I've only been here for a year, but I can see gaps, for sure: artists or galleries who are not represented, or artists who are only represented by one show or one work. I want to go through newspaper archives, gallery files, all of it, to fill it out as a complete picture.

Installation

We installed the prints on September 5, a Sunday. Everyone got sick on the planned install day, so the whole family came as an installation team.

I saw the case before I made the work. As I got into reading the Archive, the work evolved as site specific drawings: about the Chicago Artists' Archive and in the Chicago Public Library. The 8th floor north case has rotating exhibits curated by the Visual Arts curator, Leslie Patterson. It is a large case with glass that reflects the many, many hanging fixtures in the hallway. 

The prints needed to be large and bold to compete with that reflection and draw viewers down the hallway. I even tried using photographs of the fixtures in the drawings. I am sure they influenced the content of the drawings: and I don't mind the way the two things interact in the final installation.

The pieces also picked up the palette of the library.

8th floor hallway with Jeanne Dunning print (north case at rear)

installing horizontal descent in north case

 Thanks to Roger, who curates and installs the exhibitions in the Performing Arts case at the opposite end of the hallway. He did the lighting and developed the hanging system for the case.