Many people contributed to Chicago’s rich tradition of arts. Here are 100 of the most notable:
Muhal Richard Abrams. Composer, bandleader, pianist was a founder of the world-renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, in 1965.
Steve Albini. Architect of noise-rock with Big Black in the ’80s, prominent engineer of alternative rock albums by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and countless others in the ’90s.
Ivan Albright. One of the most original painters of the 20th Century.
Gene Ammons. Prototypical Chicago saxophonist whose big, majestic sound epitomized Chicago tenordom.
Louis Armstrong. The first great soloist in jazz moved to Chicago in the 1920s, giving the music its first real star and establishing Chicago as one of its foremost centers.
Gerald Arpino. Co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet, which brought world-class works and revivals for years on tour and re-located here two years ago.
Daniel Barenboim. Ninth and current music director of the CSO; succeeded Solti in 1991.
Frederick Clay Bartlett. He gave about 150 post-Impressionist works to the Art Institute, including Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte.”
Louie Bellson. Brilliant jazz drummer who kept time for Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James and Duke Ellington.
Lester Bowie. Genre-breaking trumpeter, bandleader who, with Roscoe Mitchell and others, founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Maurice Browne. The founder, with his wife, actress Ellen Van Volkenburg, of the 91-seat Chicago Little Theatre in 1912 in the Fine Arts Building, an early, important playhouse of the “little theater” movement.
Kate, Clarence and Lucy Buckingham. Connoiseurs with depth as well as breadth; their gift to the institute of Asian art, Gothic furniture and Japanese prints and drawings numbers 9,500 (!) pieces.
Daniel Burnham. He arguably has had more influence on the American cityscape than any other Chicago architect, making City Beautiful plans for Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Cleveland and, of course, Chicago.
Jerry Butler. One of the great R&B singers of all time, including lead vocal on the seminal 1958 soul hit “For Your Precious Love.”
Harry Callahan. The most famous living photographer Chicago has produced; he’s 85 this year.
Leonard and Phil Chess. Founders of the most important and influential postwar blues label, home to artists ranging from Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
The Chicago Seven (Thomas Beeby, Laurence Booth, Stuart Cohen, James Ingo Freed, James Nagle, Stanley Tigerman, Ben Weese). This group of rebels opened the way for a more inclusive version of Chicago’s architectural history, including tradition-minded architects and unorthodox modernists left out of the standard modernist canon. That helped lead to the rise of postmodernism here, which produced decidedly mixed-results.
Lou Conte. Founder and artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, a uniquely Midwestern repository for contemporary dance.
Billy Corgan. Founder, singer, guitarist, songwriter of Smashing Pumpkins, one of the pre-eminent rock bands of the ’90s.
Willie Dixon. Master songwriter, bassist, talent scout, behind-the-scenes catalyst of Chicago blues.
Daniel Duell. Former New York City Ballet principal dancer, who remained here after the company he came to run abruptly disbanded in 1987, creating his own troupe, Ballet Chicago, and stoically fighting to maintain a classical ballet company here.
Carol Fox, Lawrence Kelly and Nicola Rescigno. Founders of Lyric Theatre of Chicago, later renamed Lyric Opera, in 1953. Fox went on to head the company until she retired in 1981.
Von Freeman. Septuagenarian saxophonist who today personifies Chicago tenor playing for listeners around the world.
Geraldine Freund. The still active, ambitious-thinking impresario who brought some of the world’s greatest dancers — including Mikhail Baryshnikov in his local premiere — to Chicago.
Rudolf Ganz. Talented and energetic composer, pianist, conductor, educator and inspirational force in the city’s cultural life for most of his life; director of Chicago Musical College, 1929 to 1954.
Mary Garden. Beloved Scottish opera soprano, for 20 years the leading soprano of the Chicago Grand Opera. She served one season, 1921-22, as director of the company.
Bertrand Goldberg. Goldberg championed curving concrete forms, most visibly in the corncob-shaped towers of his Marina City.
Benny Goodman. Reigning clarinetist whose spectacular solo gifts, developed in Chicago, made him the “King of Swing.”
Edward Gordon. Innovative, piano-playing executive director of the Ravinia Festival from 1967 to 1989.
Stuart Gordon. The founder-director of the Organic Theatre, a prime example of the vigorous, homemade, home-grown Off Loop theater that blossomed in the 1970s.
Johnny Griffin. One of the world’s top saxophonists, a bebop veteran who now lives in France but still sounds like the South Side of Chicago.
Buddy Guy. After decades of neglect, emerged in ’90s as perennial Grammy-winning blues guitar hero.
Herbie Hancock. Innovative pianist who was born in Chicago and played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was 11.
Earl “Fatha” Hines. Ground-breaking pianist who was in residence at the Grand Terrace Ballroom in late ’20s and ’30s.
Richard Hunt. One of the first black American sculptors to become nationally known.
Mahalia Jackson. Towering gospel singer who helped make a genre pioneered by Chicagoan Thomas A. Dorsey internationally famous.
Helmut Jahn. The heir to Chicago’s modernist tradition, at once infamous for his controversial James R. Thompson Center and celebrated for such brilliant commissions as the United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare International Airport.
Joseph Jefferson. The actor whose performances in his vehicle of “Rip Van Winkle” made him a favorite of Chicago audiences in the late 19th Century. The annual theater awards, the Jeffs, are named after him.
R. Kelly. South Side songwriter, producer and singer is arguably the dominant R&B performer of the ’90s.
Ardis Krainik. General director of Lyric Opera from 1981 to her death in 1997; respected and beloved figure in community and international arts circles.
Katharine Kuh. Opened the first important gallery for modern art in the city. Later became the first curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Assembled one of the first major corporate collections in town, for the First National Bank of Chicago.
William Le Baron Jenney. Often called the father of the skyscraper, he drew upon his Civil War engineering experience to design the Home Insurance Co. Building, the first major commercial building to be supported by a skeleton of metal rather than walls of masonry.
James Levine. Talented, energetic music director of the Ravinia Festival from 1973 to 1993.
David Mamet. A native son whose fame as the author of such gritty Chicago plays as “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1984) helped establish the city as an important center of American drama.
Curtis Mayfield. Wrote and sang the soundtrack for the civil-rights movement of the ’60s.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The undisputed leader of Chicago’s postwar modernists and perhaps the most important architect of the 20th Century, his steel-and-glass modernism, most memorably expressed in the 860 and 880 N. Lake Shore Drive apartments and at IIT’s S.R. Crown Hall, changed the look of skylines around the world.
Roscoe Mitchell. Multi-instrumentalist, musical innovator and co-founder of AACM.
Jelly Roll Morton. Self-proclaimed “inventor” of jazz whose most fertile period was in Chicago in the 1920s.
Jimmy McPartland. Bix Beiderbecke’s hand-picked successor in the Wolverines and leader of the fabled Austin High Gang.
Danny Newman. The enduring, effervescent press agent and pied piper whose 1977 “Subscribe Now!” became a bible for not-for-profit institutions across the country.
Ruth Page. A giant in Chicago and 20th-Century ballet in general, danced for a time with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and choreographed for a number of Chicago-based companies, including her now annual version of “The Nutcracker.”
Bertha Palmer. Doyenne of the great turn-of-the-century collectors whose gifts to the Art Institute helped set the pattern for distinguished giving in the city.
Ed Paschke. The one artist from the so-called Chicago School of contemporary painting who has achieved an international reputation.
Lawrence Perkins and Philip Will. Perkins and Will has done more than any other Chicago firm to shape humanistic elementary and high schools. Today, the firm’s Ralph Johnson continues this distinguished tradition.
William Pullinsi. The director-producer who originated the dinner-theater concept in 1959 while still a college student in Washington, D.C., and brought it home in 1961 with the founding of his Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Summit.
Sun Ra. Phenomenally prolific musical inventor whose Arkestra set the tone for all manner of jazz experimentation and multi-media pop events.
John Reich. The Vienna-born, now almost forgotten artistic director of Goodman Theatre who negotiated the transition of Chicago’s oldest, largest resident playhouse from student to professional production in 1969 and paved the way for the later, greater achievements of successors William Woodman, Gregory Mosher and Robert Falls.
Fritz Reiner. Sixth music director of the Chicago Symphony, from 1953 to 1963; brilliant, dictatorial genius of the baton under whom the orchestra never played better, according to some.
Artur Rodzinski. Flamboyant fourth music director of the Chicago Symphony, whose alleged arrogance made him the trustees’ bete noire and gave him the dubious distinction of being the shortest-tenured music director in CSO history, serving only one season, 1947-48.
John Wellborn Root. Daniel Burnham’s partner died at age 41, but not before playing the leading role in creating such late 19th Century masterpieces as the sloping-walled Monadnock Building and the fortress-like Rookery, with its sun-dappled light court.
Otis Rush. Massively influential blues guitarist has been a staple of the local scene since the ’50s.
Martin Ryerson. One of the choicest collections at the institute, including Old Masters, Asian decorative arts and Impressionism; 1,500 works given at his death, an equal number since.
Joseph Shapiro. Surrealist collector, founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Robert Sickinger. Director of the revitalized Hull House Theatre who in the 1960s began an era of home-grown creativity through his thrilling productions of off-Broadway, avant-garde and local dramatists.
Paul Sills. A seminal figure in the rise of indigenous theater who founded, with Bernard Sahlins and Howard Alk, The Second City cabaret in 1959 and influenced generations of Chicago artists through his director’s method of improvisational theater.
Aaron Siskind. The one great Abstract Expressionist photographer.
Louis Skidmore, Nathaniel Owings, and John Merrill. This trio founded postwar America’s most influential corporate architectural, engineering and urban planning firm. SOM’s Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan designed such structurally innovative skyscrapers as the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower.
Fred Solari. His enthusiastic administration of the old Civic Center for the Performing Arts and more lately his Athenaeum Theater center for dance brought top companies to Chicago and bolstered local troupes for most of the past decade.
Georg Solti. Eighth music director of the Chicago Symphony (1969 to 1991), fiery and dynamic, who did more than anyone to put the CSO on the international musical map.
Steppenwolf founders: Gary Sinise, Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney. They created the most celebrated Chicago theater in contemporary history.
Frederick Stock. Successor to Theodore Thomas at the helm of the CSO; longest-tenured music director in Chicago Symphony history (1905-42).
John Storrs. Sculptor and architect: Known for his “Ceres” on the top of the Board of Trade building and abstract “skyscraper” sculptures.
Louis Sudler. Chicago real estate man, professional singer and chairman emeritus of the Chicago Symphony whose leadership and money helped assure the CSO’s rise to fame, in Chicago and around the world, during the first decade of the Solti era.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. More than anyone else, they gave aesthetic expression to the verticality of the skyscraper. Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store on State Street testifies to his remarkable ability as an ornamentalist and to his quest for an architecture that was distinctly American.
Maria Tallchief. Prima ballerina and acclaimed disciple of former husband George Balanchine, founded the Chicago City Ballet and ran it from 1979 to 1987.
Theodore Thomas. Foremost conductor of his time in U.S.; founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from 1891 to 1905.
Jan van der Marck. Visionary first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Muddy Waters. The giant of the postwar urban blues.
Harry Weese. He, too, departed from Miesian orthodoxy, with his idiosyncratic buildings, usually sensitive to their surroundings. His legacy ranges from the great (Washington, D.C.’s Metro subway system) to the god-awful (the North Michigan Avenue Marriott).
Joe Williams. Sublime jazz-blues vocalist with Count Basie and others.
Norm Winer. Program director of WXRT (93.1 FM), for decades the last bastion of free-form commercial rock radio in the country.
James N. Wood. Current director of the Art Institute of Chicago who restored its faded glory with, among other things, the renovation and reinstallation of all the exhibition spaces in the building plus the addition of a new wing.
Frank Lloyd Wright. America’s greatest architect, leader of the Prairie School of Architecture, a prodigious talent whose form-making continued to evolve during an extraordinary life that began shortly after the Civil War and ended at the dawn of the Space Age.
