Chicago’s public art ranges from the sublime, such as the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, to the sublimely ridiculous, such as the artist-decorated fiberglass cows that took over the city last summer. This year, however, the Chicago Flower & Garden Show is offering some art of its own.
Led by Nathan Mason, special projects curator with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Art Program, 15 local artists were chosen to decorate large-scale urns that will be displayed at the flower show. Some of the selected artists also participated in the phenomenally successful “Cows on Parade.”
The idea for this new project came from Kenton Morris, show director, who procured the unadorned 51-inch-tall fiberglass urns and made them available to the artists.
“I was looking for something to put in the aisles so visitors would have an interesting view while they were strolling down the central promenade. I know the artists with (the public art department) do a good job, so I called them up and put my trust in them,” says Morris. The urns were donated by the flower show, relieving the city of the expense of providing the artists with materials.
The selected artists had free reign over how the urns were decorated. They could be treated as functional or purely sculptural. “We wanted to have a nice representation of different styles of creativity in Chicago,” says Mason of the participating artists, who include painters and sculptors. “The urns feature a simple undulating form, not a classical form, and there was a nice syncopation between simplicity and exaggeration in the resulting works.”
One of the artists participating in the project is sculptor Lucy Slivinski. “It was interesting for me to work with the urn as a form and see what I could do to change it into something of mine,” she says. “I work with a range of materials, not necessarily traditional ones, but my art is very much inspired by natural forms.”
Painter Emmett Kerrigan has been spending a lot of time recently looking at nature from an airplane, taking aerial photographs from which he creates large abstract shapes. He envisioned his urn as a giant tulip, painting it with Lascaux, a kind of acrylic.
Chris Silva is a muralist with the Chicago Public Art Group who calls himself a graphic urban expressionist. He describes his work as incorporating a sense of the calligraphic, in which he invents a kind of personal language using brush strokes and a minimal color palette. He applied these principles when painting his urn as well.
At the Chicago Flower & Garden Show’s opening night benefit, “A Night in Bloom,” there will be a silent auction at which the 15 urns will be sold. Auction proceeds will benefit the Chicago Gateway Green Committee, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the beautification of the Chicagoland area.
The urns will remain on display for the extent of the show.
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The sixth annual “Night in Bloom” benefit gala will take place at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $100. A post-gala party, “Midnight in Bloom,” is open to guests of the gala and others from 9 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Tickets for the party only are $50. For information and to purchase tickets, call 800-352-0066 or visit the Web site at www.gatewaygreen.org.
