Most afternoons, medical student Beth Basola does her studying on a particular bench near Lake Michigan, occasionally lifting her head from her textbooks to admire the way the sailboats seem to glide through a screen of rustling grass.
As for what lies in that silvery stand of prairie that dips just below her, well, she knows there’s something in there. She’s just never taken a look.
Neither do many other people who pass through Jane Addams Memorial Park. They scarcely realize that this sliver of lakefront northwest of Navy Pier is home to the city’s first and only public memorial dedicated to a woman.
From the beginning, that distinction has created cracks in the sculpture’s public image. When the site was dedicated last year during the Democratic National Convention, some people grumbled that they didn’t understand why the abstract artwork portrayed a collection of hands instead of its subject, the renowned social reformer.
But now, an even greater indignity has since become apparent. Or, rather, not so apparent.
It’s hard to find the sculpture–and hard to see it even if you do find it.
Unlike the towering parade of men on horseback and men on columns that makes up much of the city’s other public sculpture, the monument honoring Addams sits below eye-level, in a planting of tall grasses, surrounded by a fence.
Now, in efforts due in part to the complaints of people who live near the sculpture, there is talk of redesigning the site so that more people will notice it.
The Chicago Park District is currently working on a plan to figure out what to do with the artwork. The most likely solution is to, quite literally, raise its profile by lifting the individual pieces and the area in which they sit. But this is not merely a matter of jacking up the foundation a bit.
The questions of whether the site can be changed, how it would be changed and who would pay for it touch upon some sticky issues concerning the nature of public art and just who, exactly, it belongs to.
The Chicago Park District may have installed the sculpture, but the Benjamin F. Ferguson Monument Fund, which is administered by the Art Institute of Chicago, commissioned it.
The artist has some say, too, and this sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, is already involved in a controversy in New York because one of her pieces was moved without her permission.
The public, at least in the guise of the neighborhood group that has been fighting for the redesign, just thinks Addams deserves a little more respect.
“If we have the one and only park dedicated to a woman, then it should be something people can see and understand what it is,” said Rosalind Keeling, with SOAR, the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents.
“She did so many wonderful things, and the park should show that. But most people don’t even know the sculpture is there.”
The artwork consists of six granite blocks that support hands in varying sizes and configurations. The arrangement, surrounded by dune and prairie grasses, is enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence and is viewed from above, at a short distance, from a walkway that circles it.
The idea behind this design grew out of several different–and conflicting–needs.
The first impulse was artistic. In creating a landmark monument to a woman, Bourgeois set out to do something different from the scores of heroic, oversize figures that commemorate the city’s famous men.
Addams once said she found nothing “so fraught with significance as the human hand,” and the depiction of hands, rather than of her, as well as the project’s small scale, reflect the Hull House founder’s own philosophy. She lived and worked among the poor, hunkering down in the heart of humanity.
But these small and rather fragile pieces had to settle along one of the busiest stretches of lakefront. The Jane Addams Memorial Park sits near the Ohio Street Beach, the entrance to Navy Pier and the lakefront bike path.
Amid all this human traffic, there was a need, said Ed Uhlir, the Park District’s director of research and planning, to establish a “contemplative area” for the sculpture. Plus, there were concerns about vandalism to the pieces, which cost $250,000.
Although the setting was laid out in the plans for the site and approved by the artist, the city and SOAR, hardly anyone seems happy with how it turned out.
“It just doesn’t work very well,” said Michael Lash, director of public art for the City of Chicago. “You have to search for the sculpture, even though the sidewalks lead to it. There needs to be some sense of proximity to the piece too. It’s beautifully carved, but you can’t see that. You can’t see the cuticles on the granite.”
Just how to get the public close enough to the public art to see the hands–without shaking them or, worse, breaking them off–remains one of the sticking points of any possible redesign.
While Lash and SOAR would like to see barriers to the sculpture removed, Robert Mars, the Art Institute’s executive vice president for administration, thinks some sort of fence should remain.
“It creates a sense that we don’t want people trampling through the ground cover and approaching the objects firsthand,” he said.
How all this fits in with the artist’s sensibilities is uncertain. Mars said the Art Institute wants to wait until plans are in hand to approach Bourgeois about redesigning the site, although several other sources said they thought “quiet talks” were already under way. Bourgeois could not be reached for comment.
In any event, most people involved with the project are hopeful she will endorse plans to change the setting because the idea is designed to increase the sculpture’s visibility.
The proposal, however, does come at a rather awkward juncture. Last month, officials with the Battery City Park Authority in Manhattan removed a set of Bourgeois sculptures without telling her because of concerns that they would offend visitors to a nearby Holocaust museum. Like the Chicago sculptures, these works depicted disembodied hands.
“That couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” Lash said. “It’s a delicate situation, and we’re trying to handle it with kid gloves.”
Nor is it clear who would foot the bill. The Park District is currently studying how much it would cost to redesign the site, and Uhlir said he hopes money would come from the Ferguson Fund. Mars said he “has no idea” who would pay for the project.
In the meantime, anyone passing through the park may encounter–along with the medical student studying her textbooks and the occasional person sleeping on a bench–Rosalind Keeling, from SOAR.
She periodically visits from her home at Lake Point Tower condominiums, just south of the park, to act as a tour guide of sorts.
“I go up to people,” she said, “and say, `Look at this lovely sculpture. Do you know what it is?’ “
