It`s noisy in the studio. There`s rock music blasting from the speakers, fine Eric Clapton guitar work from the classic ”Wheels of Fire” album, and every few minutes a CTA ”L” screeches through the Sedgwick station just outside the second-story window.
But Jerry Peart doesn`t seem to notice. He`s standing in front of a mass of welded aluminum on a workstand, the cap of a Sharpie pen protruding from a corner of his mouth. He`s studying his work, letting his eyes follow its curves, occasionally reaching out to trail his fingers along a newly polished edge.
The aluminum form, now about 3 feet high, is part of a series of
”personal-sized” sculptures Peart is making for a show later this year at the Richard Gray Gallery on Superior Street. Half of the piece is highly burnished; half is raw aluminum with rough bandsawed edges. From some angles, it looks like a huge silver tulip.
Peart wrinkles his nose; he`s seen something he doesn`t like. He unscrews a C-clamp holding a leaf-shaped sheet of aluminum in place, wiggles the piece slightly and squats down to see how its bottom edge meets the surface it`s
resting on. With the Sharpie, he draws a line on the aluminum, then trims away the excess metal at his bandsaw and smooths the edges with a heavy-duty grinder.
He fits the piece into position again, holds it with his left hand and aims a pistol-shaped arc welder at its base. Ignoring the welder`s hood on the workbench, he squints and turns his head away from the welder`s brief glare as he spot-welds the piece into place.
”That`s a no-no,” he admits with a grin. ”We must set an example for younger sculptors.” He puts the hood on later when he lays down the long bead that joins the reshaped leaf permanently to the rest of the work.
Someday, Jerry Peart admits, he`d like to see his face, and his art, on the cover of Time magazine. If that day arrives, it`ll mean he`s achieved the sort of international recognition accorded to Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Joan Miro , Jean Dubuffet and the handful of other sculptors whose names are as well-known as their works.
Rising to that level may take a while, but as a successful member of Chicago`s community of sculptors, Peart (an English name, it`s pronounced Peert) has helped build the city`s international reputation as a center for outdoor art. Though the Picasso on the Daley Plaza, now a Chicago trademark, and the Calder, Miro, Dubuffet and Marc Chagall pieces that dominate what`s been called the ”Dearborn Street Art Gallery” are all by outsiders, a growing
number of the city`s best-known works of contemporary sculpture were made right here.
And Jerry Peart has done his share. After nearly 20 years as an artist, he has completed and sold 20 large-scale pieces, has smaller works in the hands of more than a hundred private collectors and is wrestling with the challenges of an evolving style. He just turned 39.
His reputation got a boost in the last several years with the completion of two highly visible works in Chicago. The first is a 7,000-pound, 39-foot-tall sculpture named ”Blue Geisha”; it`s located at the Presidents Plaza Three office complex at Cumberland Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway. The second is a multicolored creation called ”Splash” that was installed in the Boulevard Towers Plaza on Michigan Avenue at Lake Street last October. Each work reportedly cost well over $200,000.
Since much of the cost of a large-scale work goes for materials and fabrication, such high-dollar figures should be used just to keep score. Jerry Peart is not getting rich as an artist, and he doesn`t expect to. What the big numbers do show is that he can be trusted with an important commission; he`s proved more than once that he can build a major sculpture on time and within budget. For a developer with several hundred thousand dollars to spend on public art, being able to rely on an artist`s experience and professional integrity is almost as important as trusting his esthetic sense.
Like a jazz musician improvising over the chord structure of a familiar song, Peart creates his abstract works in aluminum alloy using a vocabulary of shapes, including arcs, serpentine squiggles and perforated surfaces, that he has used throughout his career. Though he sometimes sketches a piece beforehand, most often his ideas come as he`s working with the metal itself.
”I`ll draw a shape and cut it out of aluminum, and all of a sudden I`ll see this piece of material in space,” he says. ”Maybe it has a curve in it, and I`ll build another one that`s connected to it, so the piece starts talking to itself, and each element relates.”
Once the metal is bent, welded, shaped and buffed, he spray-paints it with the bright polyurethane colors that have become his trademark
(”Splash,” for example, has nine colors).
If he`s working on a small piece, it will be ready to show as soon as he gives it one of the quirky names he often uses (one recent piece, originally called ”Don`t Be Afraid To Laugh; She Did When You Came In,” is now
”Nero”). But if he`s working on a larger sculpture, his small original serves as the three-dimensional blueprint, or maquette, for John Adduci and Dan Blue, two art-fabrication specialists who co-own his Sedgwick Street studio.
Though none of the three is an engineer, they know from experience how to build the big pieces with enough strength to withstand extreme wind loads. The key, Peart says, is to treat the aluminum skin as a structural part. ”Inside, there`s zigzag bracing that`s welded to the first skin, and then the second skin is folded around it, and it`s all clamped and welded together.” The technique, similar to the way monocoque race-car or airplane bodies are built, gives a bridgelike strength despite aluminum`s light weight.
Small or large, the finished work is unmistakably Jerry Peart`s. Though much abstract sculpture is controversial (sidewalk critics lined up to denounce our Picasso when it first appeared, and their New York cousins are still sniping at Richard Serra`s embattled ”Tilted Arc”), Peart`s colorful, whimsical sculptures tend to produce smiles and ready acceptance. Office workers use the base of ”Splash” as an impromptu lunch table in good weather, for example, although one recent passerby said she thought it ”looks like it belongs in Las Vegas.”
Growing up in Winslow, Ariz., Jerry Peart built model cars, developed a knack for putting things together and figured he`d become an architect. ”When I went to Arizona State University, I`d never been to an art museum,” he says. He lasted in architecture school for about two months, until he figured out what went on in the art department. ”I thought, `This is great! You build these things, you have fun building them and you can turn around and sell `em and make money.` ”
His first assignment, an exercise in three-dimensional forms, was to take apart and reassemble an object, and use color. ”I went to a junkyard–the first thing you did as an artist was go to a junkyard–and I took a transmission apart and had all these gears and housings and stuff.”
Switching from found objects, he began working with wood. ”Wood was something I knew about; I`d had a lot of woodworking classes in high school. And I continued to use color. I knew how to paint model cars with spray cans, so I started finishing these pieces of wood.”
Arizona State`s dean of sociology launched Peart`s professional art career by buying, at a student art exhibit, the second piece he ever made. The young artist finished his undergraduate studies in 1970, then moved east to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale with his wife and young daughter to work toward the Master of Fine Arts degree he received in 1972. Rather than heading back to Arizona, he moved to Chicago.
”I knew I didn`t want another small town, and Chicago was close,” he says. ”I wanted to live in a major artistic center. If you want to make your living from art, you have to be where there`s a market.”
Perhaps more important, a group of artists making large-scale works had already settled here. ”The only thing we had in public was the Picasso at that time,” he says, ”but we had John Henry and Steve Urry and Richard Hunt, who were making larger pieces.” They`d hold plaza shows to promote themselves, arranging for space in the Equitable Building`s Pioneer Court, for example, and hauling their works down in pickup trucks and vans.
”I`d made a couple of pieces in graduate school that were 10 feet high,” Peart says, ”and I was always interested in the public aspect of art. That was a real radical idea, to make art that didn`t fit in a gallery or a museum. It was right out there in the plazas with the people. There was none of the trappings of the museum and that sort of approval. As a child of the
`60s, I liked that.”
Peart began using aluminum shortly after moving to the city. He got some of it for nothing (Edwin Bergman, the late art collector and former president of the Museum of Contemporary art, headed an aluminum-recycling company, and for a while he supplied aluminum to several Chicago artists at no charge). It was light in weight and easier to haul upstairs to his studio over the Biograph Theatre than steel would have been.
Today, though he occasionally still works with other metals and woods, Peart specializes in aluminum. ”That`s my material,” he says, hefting a piece of quarter-inch alloy. ”It`s manmade, it`s light and it`s easy to work with.”
Peart eventually formed a partnership to buy the former CTA substation under the Sedgwick ”L” station; his current partners are fabricators Adduci and Blue and artist Tom Scarff, who specializes in large-scale metal and neon sculpture. The building`s 30-foot ceiling and 110-foot length is usually large enough for Peart`s biggest works, although he had to delay final assembly of the 39-foot-tall ”Blue Geisha” until the pieces were at the site.
He lived in his studio after his first marriage ended in the early 1970s, making sculpture and caring for his daughter, Ave, now a freshman at the University of Iowa. They moved to a nearby condominium several years ago after his marriage to artist Martha Phillips.
In the late 1970s Peart and his friend John Henry joined with sculptors Mark DiSuvero, Lyman Kipp, Linda Howard and Charles Ginnever to form a unique gallery, ConStruct, which specialized in the display and marketing of
large-scale abstract sculpture. Working from gallery space on Ontario Street, near the Museum of Contemporary Art, the founding artists (who were later joined by sculptors Frank McGuire and Kenneth Snelson) and the staff they hired developed a traveling exhibition of their works and quickly became experts at moving big, heavy sculpture and putting the pieces together at exhibits from New York to New Mexico, from Chicago to Miami.
ConStruct developed out of necessity, Peart says. The core group of sculptors had exhibited work with a Chicago gallery that was unable to provide the advertising support needed at the time. ”Very few of the artists had ever had a legitimate ad,” he recalls. ”We decided that one of the things we wanted was to make sure the artists all got properly advertised.”
ConStruct seemed successful; it moved to fancier quarters on Wacker Drive after several years, and its members even opened a second gallery in Miami in the early `80s. But Peart says that the artists, unable to move the business any further, decided to dissolve it in 1983. Still, he remembers those days with a smile.
”It really helped my career,” he says. He was the group`s youngest artist, and others were much better known; Mark DiSuvero had already had a retrospective at New York`s Whitney Museum, for example. ”Because of our advertising, I can go into galleries all over the world and mention ConStruct and they know what that means; it`s synonymous with large-scale sculpture.
”The timing was right for ConStruct,” he says. ”There was a void; the regular art galleries were not interested in large-scale work. They liked pictures they could put in the back of their station wagons and deliver. Sculpture`s a real pain in the butt; it`s big, it`s heavy, it`s hard to get through doors.
”Since we started ConStruct, the art market`s changed. Sculpture`s become fashionable. You look in big-gallery listings, and half the shows are sculpture. I think a lot of it had to do with ConStruct. We were able to deliver and make it known that it was possible for large-scale pieces to be commissioned. We showed that you didn`t have to go to Henry Moore, you didn`t have to have a half-million-dollar budget, that there were people right here in Chicago who were capable of producing this work.”
”ConStruct came into being on the basis of one simple reality,” says Richard Gray, whose Chicago gallery now represents Peart. ”There were a lot of sculptors out there producing work that were getting very little attention. Like artists of many stripes, their solution was to create a cooperative gallery. If they reach a point where independent galleries find them attractive, they tend to leave those cooperatives.”
Thanks to the ConStruct shows, Peart and the other artists began attracting attention from established galleries, he says. Though that attention ”pretty much let the air out of it,” by then ConStruct had served its purpose.
Even before the ConStruct years, Peart had sold a variety of large pieces, often financing them himself and selling them after an exhibit or two. His first large work, ”Falling Meteor,” was commissioned in 1975 and later donated to the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park at Governors State University in South Suburban University Park. A trio of pieces, ”Heading West,”
”Sunburst” and ”Devil`s Heart,” built on commission for a shopping-center developer, ended up in Las Vegas, North Dakota and Michigan.
Private collectors bought many of his ”human-scale” pieces, including sculptures in his informal ”Masquerade Ball” series, which, though abstract, depicts imaginary characters at a fancy dance. Large-scale works, either commissioned or sold after he exhibited them through ConStruct, were placed in Toledo; Albuquerque; Denver; Walnut Creek, Calif.; and in Arizona State University, the College of Du Page and the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.
The federal government`s Percent for Art program, which began in 1972, when Alexander Calder`s ”Flamingo” was commissioned for Chicago`s Federal Plaza, set the pattern for governmental art-acquisition programs throughout the country. That program sets aside 1 1/2 percent of the budget of each federal building project for artwork.
The State of Illinois` similar program, administered by its Capital Development Board, reserves half a percent of each public building budget for work by an Illinois artist. It began in 1978, as did Chicago`s, which is administered by the Chicago Office of Fine Arts and sets aside up to 1 percent of each public building budget for art.
Jerry Peart received the city`s first Percent for Art commission for his 1979 sculpture at Area 6 police headquarters at Belmont and Western Avenues. Called ”Riverview,” the piece stands on the site of the historic and now defunct amusement park of that name.
”Riverview” almost became as much a casualty of the Big Snow of 1979 as Mayor Michael Bilandic`s re-election hopes. ”My contract was in and approved, but it got lost in City Hall,” Peart says. ”I had to hire a woman who knew her way around down there to hunt for it.” She found it in the city`s purchasing department, lost in the piles of emergency snow-removal contracts. The delay allowed a work by Chicago sculptor Barry Tinsley to be the first installed under the city`s arts program, though ”Riverview” was the first commissioned.
Peart spent a lot of time researching the site before designing
”Riverview,” says James Futris, Chicago`s curator of public art. ”His work was really a model for the way artists approach a public-art proposal; he made a connection with the site and its history.” Pleased with the piece, Futris says its swirling shapes and bright colors contrast nicely with the serious purpose of a police headquarters and the Cook County Circuit courtrooms also located there. ”People need that kind of inspiration and delight,” he says. ”One of the interesting aspects of public art is that people don`t expect it.”
In 1984 Peart was assigned to create one of the 16 focus pieces by Illinois artists for each floor of Helmut Jahn`s new State of Illinois Center in Chicago. His piece, called ”Jellyroll Man,” greets visitors to the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs on the building`s third floor.
Michael Dunbar, who heads the state Capital Development Board`s art and architecture program, calls Peart ”one of the hottest young sculptors coming out of the Midwest.” Dunbar, a sculptor himself, is especially impressed with the quality of Peart`s work. ”He`s a terrific craftsman, very attentive to details,” he says. ”He`s got paint jobs that would embarrass most auto paint shops.”
In public sculpture, one successful commission often leads to another. The existence of the first work tends to certify the artist, making him more acceptable to the next client. As J. Paul Beitler tells it, that`s exactly what happened when he saw a photo of ”Jellyroll Man.”
