Art — like the planter boxes Mayor Daley has decreed for many of the city’s major streets — is blossoming all over Chicago.
Late this summer at Midway Airport, the city is scheduled to dedicate a 35-foot-tall, brushed stainless steel paean to flight by sculptor Richard Hunt, one of Chicago’s premier artists. The towering piece, which will define the Gateway Terminal on Cicero Avenue near 59th Street, is one of eight original art works commissioned by the city to grace the newly rehabbed airport.
In March, the new Near North branch library on West Division Street, which serves a widely diverse community that includes both exclusive high-rises and public housing, received a portrait of the late Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. It joined 17 other caricatures of Illinois literary luminaries by Chicago artist Steve Musgrave.
On South Damen Avenue, a huge, outdoor mural depicting stuffed toy animals covers a concrete block wall at The Children’s Advocacy Center. The 2001 work by local artist Christine Tarkowski welcomes psychologically damaged children who desperately need the mural’s title, “Warm, Fuzzy Fun.”
Recent public commissions include not just works by Chicagoans but also artists from Ohio, California, New York, Canada and South Korea. Since the enactment in 1978 of the landmark Percent for Art Ordinance, Chicago’s Public Art Program has acquired more than 350 works of art worldwide for a total purchase price of roughly $4.5 million.
These public art pieces stand out in a snapshot of Chicago at a unique moment in its history. While images of broad shoulders and pinkie rings linger, Chicago is becoming ever more the international sophisticate, the Midwesterner assuming the ways of a Parisien.
Yet this snapshot of an aesthetically reborn Chicago is not without its warts.
In recent years, the Public Art Program, which commissions and finances much of the city’s civic art through the Percent for Art Ordinance, has been accused of the kind of backroom dealing, favoritism and financial flim-flam with which Chicago traditionally has been associated.
Charges against the program have included an alleged diversion of funds earmarked for art purchases to other uses, such as buying expensive lunches for influential art world people and funding staff trips. Critics speculate there may have been even greater mismanagement of funds because of habitually sloppy bookkeeping. There also have been allegations that the program has tended to consign works by local artists to the neighborhoods while big-name out-of-towners get the juicier downtown commissions.
Meanwhile, the program’s art selection committee is heavy on political appointees, who outnumber representatives of the art community by some 3 to 1. And at one point, a citizen intent on reforming the program says he even found himself the victim of a political double-cross by the program’s City Council overseer — an alderman now doing time in a federal facility for public corruption.
With the forces of government and art now converging, it seems an appropriate time to zero in on the complicated and, until recently, covert operations of the Public Art Program. In the weeks that the Tribune has been examining those operations, a picture has emerged of a program belatedly getting on the right track. But it is a picture as well of life in Chicago’s political and bureaucratic trenches and the convoluted way that things get done here.
At the heart of the matter has been a five-year battle between two tenacious champions.
One of them is attorney Scott Hodes. “There are a lot of similarities to Enron,” Hodes said recently in his office 26 floors above Michigan Avenue, pointing an accusatory finger south and down toward the nearby offices of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which oversees the Public Art Program.
Hodes maintains that, over the past several years, the Public Art Program has wrapped itself in secrecy, cloaking serious failures to live up to the requirements of the Percent for Art Ordinance. Those alleged failures include:
– An Andersen-like concealment of how the program’s not-inconsiderable funds, in the range of $500,000 a year, are spent. He says that the program’s books were either hidden or in such disarray as to be useless.
– Sloppy tracking of who created what artwork, what they were paid and where the pieces were installed.
– An evasion of the requirement that local artists get their ordinance-mandated share of the public art pie.
– A parallel inequity in which the city commissions that local artists do get tend to be buried in outlying locations.
Hodes’ charges have rankled Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.
“I wish Mr. Hodes would please stop harassing our department,” Weisberg told a reporter last year, referring to Hodes’ longtime bedevilment of her department. Throughout, she has maintained that the lawyer’s charges are unfounded.
“I have never been critical of Lois,” Hodes says. “It’s not personal.”
“Everything is personal,” Weisberg responds. “I’m not mad at him, but I’m suspicious of his motives.”
The ordinance-turned-battleground was passed unanimously by the City Council in 1978. Similar to legislation already on the books in Dade County (Miami), Minneapolis, San Francisco and other municipalities, the Percent for Art concept dictates that, whenever the city builds or renovates a city structure that has public access, a percentage of the construction contract is to be set aside to acquire art to enhance that space.
The Chicago ordinance originally called for a 1 percent set-aside. A 1999 amendment raised that percentage to 1.33. Subtracting the 20 percent that is allowed for administrative overhead leaves a little more than 1.06 percent for art purchases. Building the Children’s Advocacy Center, for example, created an art budget of $55,000. Subtracting the 20 percent for administration left $44,000 for art. Another, more costly, example was the Police Department Headquarters project that set aside $576,862 for art. When $115,372 was taken for administration, it left $461,490 for art purchases.
The ordinance stipulates that at least half of the Percent for Art purchases are to be made from local artists.
Government support of art through the Public Art Program brings the city’s bureaucrats into contact with its arts community, creating what one local gallery owner termed “a dangerous intersection.”
Artists here are aware of many a crash at that intersection. They recall the time that some aldermen forced police to remove a portrait of Mayor Harold Washington in ladies’ lingerie from an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute. They remember too that after the Picasso sculpture was unveiled in 1967, then-Ald. John Hoellen suggested sending it back where it came from and replacing it with a statue of Cubs star Ernie Banks.
It’s not surprising that artists tend to view bureaucrats as bent on restricting creative freedom. At the same time, bureaucrats are wary of people they see as loose cannons.
Michael Lash spends time in both camps. In addition to being director of the Public Art Program, he is an artist who does what he self-deprecatingly calls “insipid little autobiographical works, cartoonish pieces that sell well in Paris.” He says he is an “artocrat, a citizen of the Chicago city government.” From his twin perspectives, he observes that, “With artists, it’s ego issues; in government, it’s turf wars.”
In other words, while a public art project through an artist’s eyes is “my vision,” through the eyes of a bureaucrat, it’s “my space.”
Yet each camp has something the other wants. The Percent for Art ordinance gives the bureaucracy the power to dispense the money that most artists chronically lack. The artists create a product that City Hall currently craves.
Hodes and Weisberg seem to have been made generals for the wrong sides.
Hodes, who has taken the role of defender of the rights of the local arts community against the machinations of City Hall, is a child of the rulers of that Hall, the Democratic Party machine. His father was Barnet Hodes, a partner in the influential law firm of Arvey & Hodes, whose close colleague Jacob Arvey became Cook County Democratic Chairman and a huge political power broker. The senior Hodes also worked close to the throne. He founded the city’s Corporation Counsel Office and held that position under Mayor Edward Kelly from 1935 to 1947. He was the first campaign manager for the late mayor Richard J. Daley, father of now-mayor Richard M. Daley.
Scott Hodes, 64, was drawn to the law not so much to follow in his father’s footsteps as for the opportunity for intellectual pursuit.
“In the law you can focus on politics or on anything,” he says. That infinite possibility was focused for him in 1964 at a party in New York where he met Christo, the Bulgaria-born artist who later would wrap the Museum of Contemporary Art here, hang a curtain across a mountain gap in Colorado, and cover a California hillside with huge umbrellas.
At the party, Christo asked Hodes to clarify a legal issue. The two eventually became lawyer and client. Hodes travels to the sites of the artist’s installations and deals with issues such as property easements and liability.
His ties with Christo led Hodes to an interest in the relationship between law and artists.
“I discovered that artists had no idea how to protect themselves,” he says. “Look at Robert Indiana. His `Love’ paintings with the slanted `O’ have been ripped off in countless gift shop articles from which he made not a dime.”
Hodes wrote a book, “The Law of Art and Antiques: What Every Artist and Collector Should Know,” and decided as well to help artists in person, especially Chicago artists. Most of these issues are addressed on a pro bono basis in Hodes’ capacity as president and a co-founder of Lawyers for the Creative Arts.
Since 1994, Hodes has also been a partner in and lawyer for Expressions of Culture Inc., which develops and manages major art expositions.
Weisberg, meanwhile, was among the original Lakefront Liberals — political independents in the late ’60s and the ’70s who constantly challenged the ruling party headed by Richard J. Daley. She started The Paper, one of the nation’s first underground newspapers, and founded as well the watchdog group Friends of the Parks, of which she later said: “The motive . . . was to make the Park District — and it could have been any [city] agency — more accountable.”
In 1983, she was executive director of the gadflyesque Chicago Council of Lawyers. Though happy in the job, she had been there five years and had a history of not staying in one position for long. Her sister, publicist June Rosner, told her that Mayor Washington was looking for a director of special events. Weisberg wasn’t interested. Then one of the mayor’s staff contacted her to explain the job, and, she said, “I realized it could be really interesting. There’d be the challenge to outwit the bureaucracy, the chance to bring good, creative people into government and have those people and the people already there rub off on each other. There were things I wanted to accomplish, and I thought it might be easier from the inside, which it is.”
She took the offer and, when Richard M. Daley was elected mayor, he asked Weisberg to serve as his special assistant. She started to acquire projects, in a sense walking through the garden that is Chicago and filling her basket with tasty produce.
She took on the reorganization of the Sister Cities program, added the Department of Tourism, started Gallery 37 (a favorite project of first lady Maggie Daley) where, at 70 sites across the city, 2,000 youngsters work on arts projects. Weisberg turned the old public library site at Washington and Michigan into the Cultural Center, now the home of her department. Also falling within Weisberg’s domain is the Public Art Program.
As her basket filled with culturally related goodies, she was given — in 1989 — the title of Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, a cabinet-level post in Daley’s administration.
“Of all the different aspects of my job,” she says, “the public art part is by far the most difficult. If the various city departments don’t support what you’re trying to do, you can’t get it done. Some of the artists can be very difficult, so protective of their work, and I guess they have to be. As for the public, there are always people who say they don’t like something. You have to listen to the public. I don’t like some pieces myself, but I’m not qualified to pick the art, though I do think I have a feel for public art because I have a feel for the public.”
Scott Hodes and Lois Weisberg were on a collision course when an artist asked him a seemingly innocuous question.
In 1995, a call went out to artists soliciting submissions for art works for the Midway Airport rebuilding project. The art budget on the nearly $1 billion project totaled a little more than $1.6 million, to be paid out over several years beginning in 1997.
In that year, four artists who hoped to win airport commissions came to Hodes’ office to discuss legal aspects of signing up with the city. During the conversation, one asked the question that would propel Hodes into his confrontations with the Public Art Project: “With so much public building going on here, where does all the money earmarked for art go?”
Hodes didn’t know, but assumed a quick call would fix that. He got on the phone and was shuttled from bureaucrat to bureaucrat before ending up at the Department of Cultural Affairs. That information, he was told, was unavailable. What had been mild curiosity kicked up several notches.
“There seemed to be no records, no trail,” he says. “I was naive. I thought the information would be there. I thought they’d talk with me.”
In America, a fractious relationship between art and government began at the beginning, the 1787 Constitutional Convention. South Carolina representative Charles Pinckney stood to propose that the new government fund the arts. His proposal was voted down.
More recently, there was criticism of FDR’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration that put writers, musicians and artists on the federal payroll. Though beloved by the public then and now, WPA art early on was seen by some as being parochial, sentimental and having a political agenda. Others hammered the program as wasteful and mismanaged, charges that would sound familiar to observers of the Public Art Program in Chicago today.
In a model program, the U.S. General Services Administration began, in 1963, to set aside .5 percent of federal building budgets for commissions in its Art in Architecture program. But an abstract mural by Robert Motherwell commissioned for the Kennedy Federal building in Boston caused such virulent negative reaction that commissions were put on hold for more than six years.
The National Endowment for the Arts was established in 1965. It survives still — though sometimes on life support — as a financial backer of the arts. Critics of the Endowment, especially Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, have decried the use of taxpayer money to support work sometimes seen as irreligious or obscene. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle was the leading congressional supporter of the arts, Chicago Democratic Congressman Sidney Yates.
On the 35th anniversary of the NEA becoming a federal agency, former chairman John Frohnmayer confirmed bureaucrats’ worst fears about artists: “The Endowment will always be marginal if it is subject to the whims of representatives in Congress. Offense is our birthright in the U.S.” In a phone interview, Carol Becker, dean of faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of “Social Responsibility and the Place of the Artist in Society,” came down firmly in favor of “loose cannons” in public art.
“I think artists should sit on all city planning commissions,” she says. “These are people to suggest completely unusual things in spaces. When you put artists in the mix, you break through traditional thinking. The city hasn’t shown a confidence, a trust in artists. Get the best artists you can, give them spaces, even give them a theme, and you’ll wind up with something amazing.”
Time after time, Hodes felt that his search for information was hitting a wall the Department of Cultural Affairs had raised against him. His calls weren’t being answered. He — and the public at large — was barred from meetings of the Public Art Committee, the group that decides what public art is commissioned. Although he knew by reading the ordinance that four meetings a year were mandated, he couldn’t even get a schedule for them. He felt, he said, pausing to find just the right word, “rebuffed.”
Seeking to skirt that wall, he went to Percy Giles, then alderman of the 37th ward and chairman of the city council’s Committee on Special Events and Cultural Affairs. (This was eight months before Giles would be found guilty of corruption in the federal Silver Shovel investigation. He is serving his sentence in a facility in Terre Haute, Ind.)
Hodes lobbied Giles for an amendment to the ordinance that had established the Public Art Program 21 years earlier. The original ordinance had specified that: “There is hereby created an account to be used solely for the commissioning or purchase of art-work(s), administration of the Public Art Program, and maintenance of artwork in the Public Art Program. This account shall be referred to as the `Public Art Program fund.'”
Hodes argued that, in fact, no such fund had been established. He said the program was hidden from view by being “off-budget” with funds “out of their [the Public Art Program administrators] piggybank.” Giles was persuaded that an amendment was needed to assure accountability and asked Hodes to work with the alderman’s public relations man, Jerald Wilson, on the wording of the amendment. On the afternoon of March 7, 1999, Wilson handed City Hall reporters a press release saying that Giles’ committee would hear testimony on the proposed amendment at 1 p.m. the next day.
The release quoted Giles:
“I want a public accounting on the works in the collection on an annual basis; the funds generated by the program; the cost of art purchased and the artist; location of the artworks and their appraised value; what are the insurance policy limits and the annual operating expenses that are incurred to administer the program.” He also called for any new members of the Public Art Committee — the committee that makes the final decisions on purchases and commissions — to be people knowledgeable in the world of art, not just city department heads.
The Giles amendment was actually a sub-amendment intended to supplant one being proposed by Weisberg’s department. That amendment called for an expansion of the Public Art Committee from 9 to 17 members, with 13 of them representing various government interests and four speaking for the art community. (Some other cities with public art committees are far less government-dominated. For example, New York’s six-member committee is evenly divided between city and art community representatives. Hodes would like to see the Chicago committee constituted more along the lines of the Illinois Arts Council in which arts interests dominate.) Under the Cultural Department’s amendment, Weisberg would chair the committee and would choose the four public representatives.
Early on the morning of March 8, Wilson says, Giles was summoned to meet with the sponsors of the cultural department’s amendment. Later, during the hearing, (the only one the City Council committee would ever hold concerning the Public Art Program) Giles withdrew his sub-amendment, saying his concerns had been addressed.
“Most observers didn’t see it that way,” Wilson recalls now. “He [Giles] kind of caved in. All he got was for a copy of the financial report to be delivered to him as chair of the City Council’s committee. It was such an embarrassment. While I was asking how he could let this happen, he kept saying, `I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with it.'”
Committee member Carrie Austin, alderman of the 34th ward, did have a problem. She was so angered by what happened, she resigned from the committee. “We held out a $100 bill,” she said then, “and she [Weisberg] said, `Ooh, I’ll give you a quarter for that.’ That’s all we got.”
Austin says now: “Percy sold us out. I didn’t know what he was going to do until the hearing. The other amendment was passed the same day. It was a useless law. It was nothing.”
In defeat, Hodes had an epiphany that turned curiosity to crusade. “When Giles backed down,” he says, “I realized there was something there, that somebody wanted to protect something.”
He paid a call on the mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Sarah Pang. “She said the Mayor is for full disclosure and that she’d bring up my concerns in a staff meeting to see that the right thing gets done,” Hodes says. “But no one there ever met with me again. They didn’t want any part of me.”
Hodes began to barrage the department with requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (requests usually called “FOIAs”). He asked for financial records. He asked for minutes of the past four years’ meetings of the Public Arts Committee”I FOIA-ed them to death,” he says.
But he got little financial disclosure, and responses to his FOIA requests indicated that no minutes of meetings had been taken.
“All I got was attendance sheets and voting records,” he says. “The FOIAs gave me useless information.”
In the winter of 1999, tiring of the game, Hodes threatened the city: “If you won’t enforce the ordinance, I can and you can pay my fees.”
He had already filed a suit (Hodes vs. City of Chicago) aimed at forcing financial disclosure. He threatened to begin taking dispositions from top city officials on the matter. Hodes already knew from FOIA documents that the Public Art Program had set up separate accounts for each art project, which seemed to tell him that there had been little or no system of accounting. He also knew, from a conversation with a city financial expert, that reconstructing the muddled accounts for, say, the past 10 years, would be enormously expensive.
Hodes says that, two days after his threat, Andrew Mine, senior counsel in the Department of Law, called to say that if he would write an amendment to the ordinance “we will back it.”
Shortly thereafter, Hodes retracted his suit and, in exchange, the City Council quietly passed an amendment to the Percent for Art Ordinance. The amended ordinance calls for a written financial accounting to be made available each May 1 covering the previous year. The accounting is to be made available to the chair of the City Council Committee on Cultural Affairs and Special Events (currently, 2nd ward Ald. Madeline Haithcock) and to “the public at large” (though it doesn’t say how). It also requires the name and city of residence of each artist receiving a commission, information that, before, had not been public. “He made us the biggest little department in the city,” says Lash, referring to the new demands being pushed on his program, which, save for a few scattered newspaper articles and one TV report, had received almost no examination.
While viewing the amended ordinance as a triumph, Hodes admits that time had taken what would have been total victory.
“The money is gone, and no one is ever going to find it,” he says. As for how much money passed through the program unaccounted for in the 22 years prior to 2000, Hodes can only speculate that it cold be as much as $10 to $15 million, based on such big-ticket construction jobs as the O’Hare expansion, the Midway reconstruction, the Harold Washington Library. He was confident that the amendment he had forced would “prevent this from happening in the future. I think we’re going to get full disclosure from now on.”
Seven years ago, Claire McKinnon moved from suburban Atlanta to the Near North neighborhood around Division and Wells Streets, an area stretching between the wealth of the Gold Coast and the poverty of the Cabrini Green housing project.
She watched the two-year construction project, begun in 1997, as the city built the Near North branch library in her neighborhood. When it opened, she was charmed to the point of becoming a volunteer.
“There was nothing like it in the suburbs in Atlanta,” she says. “There, you’d zip in, get a book, zip out. In an urban library like this one, people spend hours. After school, kids from Cabrini come in and do their homework. It’s a safe place. There are adults who, especially when it’s cold, spend a lot of time. There are beat cops studying for the sergeants’ exam. In such a diverse community, the library may be the only place that some of us meet each other.”
She says that a major factor in the welcoming feel of this space comes from the art on display.
Hodes sometimes refers to the “Feel-good Department of Cultural Affairs.” He means it derisively, implying that public enjoyment of the department’s efforts allows it to gloss over fiscal and other responsibilities. But genuine good feelings are a major byproduct of the Public Art Program. The Near North branch library is an example.
Craig Davis, now head librarian at Near North, was on the advisory panel for the branch. Projects of more than $10,000 must have an advisory panel made up of community and city representatives. He and other panel members sifted through about 1,000 slides representing dozens of artists. (The Public Art Program keeps a slide registry that now numbers more than 3,000 slides.)
“Some panelists preferred more abstract works,” Davis says, “but I didn’t think that would be so appropriate for the branch. I hoped we could have something that would be pertinent to libraries and, especially, this branch, something realistic in style that still would elicit conversation and discussion.”
The panel decided it would like multiple works commissioned and offered three Chicago artists to the Public Art Committee for consideration. The committee agreed and offered the commissions, the artists accepted, and Davis’ wishes for the library came true.
“People would come in early on and look at the art and say, `Wow!’ They still are saying it.”
Jane Williams Ferris did a mural above the entryway that salutes the multicultural nature of the community with pleasant, positive images. Mat Barber-Kennedy depicted a block of now-bulldozed houses that stood near Cabrini, a memory of part of a neighborhood now rapidly gentrifying. That work hangs just inside the reading room.
Dominating the room are the caricatures of Illinois writers by Steve Musgrave. Seventeen in all, they include Ernest Hemingway, Edna Ferber, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren. Each represents two to three weeks of studio work after long hours spent in research. Musgrave donated the 17th portrait, that of Gwendolyn Brooks.
“I love having my work in a public space,” Musgrave says.
Weisberg is loving it too, not just Musgrave’s work, but all the art that has gone into the city’s neighborhoods through the Public Art Program.
“When you put art out in public, it brings people together,” she says. “They get to talking with each other, not like in a museum.”
At the art-filled offices of the Public Art Program on Michigan Avenue a bit south of the Cultural Center, Lash is talking about the good stuff of his job. “I get to see the backs of paintings, heft a sculpture,” he says. With degrees in painting, gallery installation and museum studies and a good deal of gallery experience, he also enjoys the nitty-gritty of art, from moving heavy works with a fork lift to pigeon-proofing some sculptures to blowing up a chunk of the material a piece was to be made from. (That last was for a large-scale laminated glass mural at Midway Airport. FAA regulations required that the work not become shrapnel in an explosion. The only way to know was to blow some of it up.)
But his favorite part of being director of the Public Art Program is in getting the work out there.
“You know that people always say, `I don’t know anything about art,’ but when I’m talking to a group I ask, `Who has blank walls at home?’ and no hands ever go up. Art seems to give pride to a community,” he says. “It makes people think, `My neighborhood matters.’ To see people out there enjoying these works, that’s my biggest jazz.”
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Friday: What the city gets from its artists. What Chicago artists get from the city.
