From the sundeck of Harold Gregor`s townhouse, the urban landscape here looks slightly European. Squinting a little, Gregor can pretend the courthouse rotunda on the horizon is attached to St. Peter`s in Rome. The rooftops of other downtown buildings evoke the crazy, poetic tangle of chimneys and dormers under Paris skies.
Just across Main Street from Gregor`s place, two men rest precariously upon a ledge four stories above the sidewalk. Although the men appear to be deeply engaged in conversation, they never move. The figures are life-size
(and lifelike) statues permanently affixed to the top of a building filled with artists` and musicians` studios.
Sculptor-landlord Larry Sylvester and his pal Rick Hardy constructed those two vertiginous self-portraits and in doing so made a sly proclamation that downtown Bloomington and neighboring Normal form an important Art Zone in this country.
Another subtle hint: That bicycle apparently leaning against a Monroe Street wall actually was painted there by illustrator John Hubbell, whose little trompe l`oeil jokes–an ”ivy”-covered building here, a ”man”
reading a ”book” near a parking lot there–announce that Bloomington (pop. 44,000) isn`t a typical Downstate burg.
Bloomington-Normal, without getting splashy about it, has become an unexpected touch of prairie panache, a burst of creative energy in the corn and soybean fields 130 miles from Chicago.
Townhouse-dweller Harold Gregor, for example, produces vivid, impressionistic ”flatscapes” depicting Central Illinois farm land. His paintings command up to $15,000 at galleries from coast to coast. He and Ken Holder, another nationally recognized painter, maintain studios in a Main Street building they own, right above the Soo Kim Tae Kwon Do and Karate School. Either artist, conceivably, could be working anywhere in the world.
”It`s really hard to say why I`m still here,” Gregor reflected last winter, shortly before opening a show at Chicago`s prestigious Richard Gray gallery.
”Maybe it`s because if you`re in Chicago, you feel you have to prove yourself in Chicago,” he said. ”If you`re down here, you can take on anything that comes along, and you can still easily visit Chicago, New York or anyplace else.”
Puckish statuary and wall paintings aside, the artists of Bloomington-Normal generally remain hidden from the public and isolated from one another and the day-to-day, big-city art scene. They, as Gregor suggested, do not feel compelled to pick up on whatever trends might be sweeping through the metropolitan salons. They innovate in their own way and at their own pace. But still their energy helps to fuel an area that otherwise might stall and choke on prevailing economic conditions.
Empty storefronts dot much of downtown Bloomington, indicating that the central city has been soundly whipped by outlying shopping centers. Yet, hidden in spaces over the karate schools, the religious bookstores, the resale shops, the cafeterias and the numerous shells of busted retail enterprises, seasoned artists are at work. They occupy an estimated 25 studios in the upper stories of the ornate, turn-of-the-century buildings. Even more artists have scattered themselves through former commercial buildings and residences both in Bloomington and in the neighboring university town of Normal (pop. 36,000). ”There was a time when we thought this would be the prime area in the country for artists to locate,” said photographer Robert Stefl, 45, acting chairman of the Illinois State University art department in Normal.
”We like to say it`s only two hours from New York City,” Stefl continued. ”You can get on a plane to Chicago, grab a flight from O`Hare to New York and get to Manhattan probably in less time than somebody driving in from Long Island. And imagine the difference in the cost of living.”
University officials once even considered placing ads in the art magazines: ”Locate in Bloomington-Normal, the heart of the country, the heart of the artistic life!” They decided, however, not to pursue that idea. ”It would have been self-defeating,” Stefl said. ”Rents would have gone up.”
Instead, Illinois State has spent the last couple of decades quietly luring accomplished working artists to the campus. In a fine-arts version of
”publish or perish,” the professors are expected to continue creating individual works.
”Most of us are here, first, as artists and, second, as teachers,” said 49-year-old Ken Holder, who fashions comic and sometimes rugged depictions of his native Texas one floor above Harold Gregor`s studio. Holder`s paintings have enchanted collectors in Dallas, Houston and Chicago (where he shows at the Zolla/Lieberman gallery). ”The university looks on what we do here as research,” Holder said. ”Technically, they call it `scholar productivity.`
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Joel Meyer, an internationally famous glass blower, turns out mystically beautiful objects in a storefront near the Normal water tower. Jim Butler creates intriguing pastel landscapes at his home on Lake Bloomington. Painter Harold Boyd and sculptor Herb Eaton occupy former dentists` offices and storerooms in a downtown building once owned by a printing company, the top floor of which swarms with paint-spattered ISU undergraduates.
Many of the 400 ISU art majors and 50 graduate students follow their mentors` example and rent studios of their own, rarely paying more than $200 a month.
Student painters Barb Burdett and Kay Seefeld, for example, can be found most days in long, bright quarters below a Main Street insurance office.
”It`s a reasonably priced working space,” Burdett told a visitor one day,
”and it`s close enough to Chicago so I can get up there frequently and look around.”
Seefeld, working on her canvases of dancing women, looked upon her move downtown as a logical step in her graduate work. ”Dr. Gregor told me that I should get down here where the action is,” she said.
The action is more artistic than social. Bloomington-Normal`s ”scene”
rarely spills over into public places. Even at the Lucca Grill in downtown Bloomington, a favorite local hangout, co-owner Chuck Williams seldom sees artists huddling around the battered tables. ”Most of them are broke,” he observed.
”We`ll see each other over coffee from time to time, and that`s about it,” said Dan Nardi, whose warehouse-size space near a Bloomington auto parts store contains Nardi`s large, but delicate, structural compositions. ”There`s a kind of silent support system around here,” he said. ”We always know when somebody leaves or arrives. Ken Holder, Harold Boyd and Harold Gregor have been working in town a long time. They serve as role models and give the place a sense of stability.”
Those who aren`t broke, the ones who have become darlings of international art circles, do not tend to coalesce into a definable Bloomington-Normal ”school” with distinguishing characteristics.
”A few years ago, California State University in Los Angeles tried to make something of our proximity,” recalled Harold Boyd, an artist-professor whose oeuvres include an intriguing series of drawings that celebrate the life and times of Bloomington native Adlai Stevenson II.
”The show at California State involved Harold Gregor and me and Ron Jackson and Rodney Carswell, who is now in Chicago,” Boyd said. ”The Los Angeles people called us the `Bloomington Group` and wrote a little blurb about us, but they couldn`t make it happen. There`s too much diversity.”
A few prominent artists make sacrifices to remain in the area, hanging on even when they no longer have formal ties with Illinois State and even though residency in Bloomington-Normal confers little cachet.
ISU alumnus Nick Africano, to name one, clings tenaciously, for no other reason than that he has affection for the smalltown atmosphere.
”I went to live in New York, briefly, in 1975, but I didn`t like the constant motion there,” said Africano, a 37-year-old native of Kankakee.
”Since then, I`ve been fortunate enough to be congenially busy in studios here.”
Africano certainly looks as if he could survive Manhattan motion sickness. His white sweatshirt, his baggy pants, his spiky black hair, the black cigarette holder always loaded with a Camel–all might bespeak an affinity for SoHo and the Madison Avenue gallery scene. Ceiling-height paintings–distorted male figures, vulnerable yet defiant, in his famous
”Lost Boy” series–surround Africano in his back yard studio and seem to beg for a sophisticated audience.
”I think it`s probably an unwise decision for one`s career to be living here, but for me it`s simply better,” he said. ”Not having a studio in New York diminishes my ability to communicate my views, to be accessible. But I just choose Bloomington and accept the consequences.”
Actually, Africano does spend much of his time in Manhattan, where his work is shown at the Holly Solomon gallery, and in Chicago, where he is represented by Dart.
”Living here requires a good deal of correspondence and an enormous telephone bill to satisfy my need to communicate,” Africano said. ”But I prefer sedentary living. And I do see most of the people I need to see. This has become sort of a stopping-off place for travelers from New York. When they come to the Midwest, naturally they think they`re supposed to go sit on a porch.”
Instead of rustic idlers, however, visitors from the East are more likely to find people in the throes of some kind of innovative frenzy.
Huge photographs in the lobby of ISU`s theater department attest to the dramatic ferment initiated in the early `70s by several university thespians. The pictures show Judith Ivey (now appearing in the Broadway hit ”Precious Sons”) and most founders of Chicago`s famed Steppenwolf Theatre: John Malkovich, Terry Kinney, Moira Harris, Laurie Metcalf, Jeff Perry, Rondi Reed. Steppenwolf is certainly another Bloomington-Normal ”claim to fame,” as a provincial newspaper might put it, but theater professors regard the founding of that red-hot repertory company as a symptom of their years of dedication and their diligent recruiting of talented high school seniors.
One of many big-city newspaper articles praising Steppenwolf`s founders noted that most of them had studied at ISU, ”hardly the Juilliard of the Midwest.” Alvin Goldfarb, chairman of the theater department, dashed off an indignant and pithy rejoinder. ”Why not?” Goldfarb wrote.
About 135 undergraduate theater majors and 30 candidates for a master of fine arts degree populate the theater program at any one time, and Goldfarb, judging by past performance, can expect 25 percent of the graduates to enter professional stage work or other areas of show business. Freshman enrollment in the department grew by 19 percent last year, compared with an average 2 percent increase in other major fields of study.
”They`re attracted by the fact that our graduates are now visible in the Chicago theater,” Goldfarb said. Added former chairman Calvin Pritner, now a drama teacher and director of Bloomington`s summer Shakespeare Festival: ”The international press is telling the public that the Steppenwolf people came from here, so that helps our credibility.”
Still, the creation of Steppenwolf in the early `70s was much like the rest of the artistic action in Bloomington-Normal. Nothing electrifying happened. Steppenwolf just quietly grew. ”It was kind of hallway-conversation stuff,” Pritner recalled. ”We would pick up a snatch of talk here or there that they wanted to form a company.”
The statement is typical of what can be heard in regional studios and rehearsal rooms. Chest-thumping is held to a minimum; no one seems compelled to elevate the area into a culture capital. ”This community is a well-kept secret,” offered Judy Spear, director of the McLean County Arts Center, and she seemed content to let it go at that.
”When I graduated from Illinois State eight years ago, there was a lot of pressure to move to New York,” said sculptor Dan Nagi. ”I was one of the few in my group who didn`t give it a shot. Now I think that pressure is off. It`s just very acceptable to be an artist, no matter where you`re at.”
