The suspicion is hard to shake.
While the City of Chicago channels something like $500,000 a year into new works of public art, and does so in a supposedly fair and equitable way, the feeling persists in the art community here that the process by which those commissions are doled out is secretive and politically manipulated.
There is the perception that Chicago artists get the short end of the stick.
“I’d like to see more communication,” says William Lieberman of the Zolla Lieberman Gallery. “Our artists have had no city commissions. Though some have submitted [proposals], to my disappointment nothing has gone to fruition. We were passed over at the [Harold Washington] library and at Midway and at police stations and at branch libraries. I wish I knew more about it.”
“The Public Art Program is our little baby,” complains Arlene Rakoncoy, head of the Chicago Artists Coalition, a group that lobbied strongly for the 1978 Percent for Art Ordinance, which mandates the setting aside of 1.33 percent of the budget for public building projects to commission art for those new or renovated sites. Having helped to breathe life into the concept, the group now feels it has been consigned to outsider status.
“The artists complain that they don’t know what’s going on,” Rakoncoy says. “They send in their slides and it’s like throwing them into a black hole.”
Carl Hammer, of the gallery of that name, says, “The process has a kind of political edge to it. The artists I represent have gotten no major commissions, though there were a few little ones for neighborhood libraries.”
A common complaint is that the prominent, downtown commissions tend to go to out-of-town artists, while local talent is relegated to the fringes. That charge has been most prominently voiced not by an artist, however, but by Chicago attorney Scott Hodes, who for the past five years has bedeviled the city’s Public Art Program, its director, Michael Lash, and Lash’s boss, Lois Weisberg, Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Hodes claims that voting records he obtained of deliberations by the Public Art Committee, the group charged with selecting which artists get commissions, show that such discrimination has taken place.
He cites as an example a public display space that was created in the middle of LaSalle Street south of Kinzie by the reconstruction of the entry to the lower street level there. The commission for art to go into that space went not to a Chicago artist, nor even an American artist, but to German sculptor Hubertus von der Goltz, who designed a human figure in silhouette.
Hodes says that the records, which he obtained through FOIA (the federal Freedom of Information Act) requests, show that the committee members cast more votes for the Chicago artists under consideration than they did for Von der Goltz, but that, apparently, the will of the committee was overturned.
Lash counters that the document Hodes has may have reflected only a preliminary vote.
Rolf Achilles, an art community representative on the committee, leaves open the possibility that Lash is right. He says Von der Goltz initially drew little interest, but the more the deliberations and voting went on, the stronger the case for the German became.
Meanwhile, Ingrid Fassbender of Fassbender Gallery, who represents the German artist here, says her client was uniquely suited to filling the commission.
“It seemed that the plaza had been built with a certain [kind of] sculpture in mind. I think there was a prior plan,” she says. “The piece couldn’t be more than 6 by 6. It couldn’t weigh more than a certain amount, and it had to happen fast.”
One art critic, pointing out that the site’s dimensions — rather than unfettered creativity — called the shots for this project, dubbed it “plop art.”
Another instance that raised suspicions among artists here was that of the 1998 commission for art to enhance the Riverwalk Gateway near where the Lake Shore Drive Bridge spans the Chicago River. Architects for the Transportation Department gave the commission to artist Mark McMahon. Though based in Lake Forest, McMahon long has made Chicago locales his subject matter. Assuming he had a deal, McMahon devoted himself full time to the project, a ceramic mural, and submitted a bill for the first third of what he had been told would be a $317,000 commission.
“Not so fast,” the Public Art Committee said, in effect, to McMahon when it asked him to submit his design proposals to the committee. Sometime later, McMahon got a letter from Lash saying, “I regret to inform you that your entry was not accepted for the commission.”
McMahon’s entry was a finalist — second place, in fact — but the Committee gave the commission to Ellen Lanyon, an artist greatly admired in the Chicago art community (the spelling of Ellen Lanyon’s name as published has been corrected in this sentence and the next sentence). Lanyon lived here from her birth in 1926 until 1985, when she moved to New York City.
McMahon sued the city for breach of contract, violation of the Consumer Fraud Act and Deceptive Trade Practices Act and defamation/commercial disparagement. The city countered that McMahon had no prior contract.
Rick Harris, McMahon’s lawyer, says, “It was a tunnel under a bridge, clearly a Department of Transportation issue, not a concern of the Public Art Program.” McMahon says, “If I had a jury trial, they would carry me out on their shoulders.”
Instead, after a series of legal maneuvers, on Oct.18, 2001, Lash and Weisberg were informed by Marc Odier, the city’s chief assistant corporation counsel, that the Circuit Court of Cook County had granted the city its motion to dismiss all counts of the suit on grounds that no valid contract had existed. The decision left open the possibility of further action on McMahon’s part, and an appeal has been filed.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the three-year legal hassle was Lash’s deposition in the case. Harris was able to obtain minutes of Lash’s remarks at the Public Art Committee meeting of July 24, 1998, and he quoted from those minutes in deposing Lash.
In the minutes, Lash says: “There’s a lot of bad press that we could gain by putting a second-rate white male artist in this site.”
At the deposition, Harris asked of Lash, “Is that what you said, sir?”
Lash responded, “That is correct.”
Later, when interviewed about the suit, Lash said, “That was an unhappy time for all of us. We’ll look at Mark again. In considering his work and that of other artists who submitted for that commission, we were looking at apples versus apples,” meaning McMahon was not considered second-rate.
Lash stood by the white male comment and said he was speaking generally, not about McMahon. He remains pleased that a woman got the commission: “At the time, there were only about four downtown works by women artists including — if you stretch the definition of downtown way out to Logan Square — the eagle atop the monument there.”
Lash readily concedes that considerations of gender, race and ethnicity play a role in the selection of public art, and that they should. It is no coincidence that a branch library (the Legler branch) which is used almost entirely by African-Americans, houses works by black artists. He could have added this is not just due to modern concerns over political correctness but is part of the tradition of public art in the city.
Long before there was a Percent for Art Ordinance, there was public art in Chicago, much of it — before the Picasso changed everything — men on pedestals or on horses or both. Many early monuments were sponsored by ethnic communities: Christopher Columbus commissioned by the city’s Italians, Nicholas Copernicus, erected in part by the Polish American Congress, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, sponsored by, as it says on the plaque on the base, “The Germans of Chicago.”
The changing nature of the city can have newer residents befuddled by the public art in their neighborhoods. The largely Hispanic community that has moved in around Humboldt Park might well look at the statues there of Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt and the Norse Viking Leif Ericson and shrug.
One of the reasons Chicago artists feel they have been left out of the process is that the powerful Public Art Committee, which calls the shots on who gets commissions, has done its work largely behind closed doors. Until April of this year, all committee meetings — held four times a year — were, in fact, shuttered to the public.
Early on in his five-year beleaguering of the Public Art Program, Scott Hodes learned that the meetings were closed. The knowledge did not sit well with him. A word often used to describe him is “tenacious.” He makes points close to a listener’s face, his index finger jabbing like a baseball manager arguing with an ump. Not one to avoid confrontation, Hodes now turned his attention to breaking open the Public Art Committee.
“I realized that my whole purpose in going after these people was to make sure the art community here was getting its fair share,” he says. The ordinance states that half the Percent for Art commissions are to go to Chicago artists. It only made sense to him that artists should be present when those commissions are awarded. Opening the meetings would let artists, gallery owners and collectors see the selection process in action, watch over their interests and learn how the game is played. To that end, Hodes brought out some heavy legal artillery — the state’s Open Meetings Act, enacted in 1957.
“The Open Meetings Act is a law with real teeth in it,” Hodes says. “It provides that any decisions made at meetings in violation can be set aside.”
In autumn 2001, with this hefty monkey wrench poised over the workings of the Program, the meetings were at last supposedly opened. Those who opened the doors don’t credit Hodes for the change.
“They had been closed,” Lash says, “because we were considering the purchase of real property [artwork] and were concerned that someone finding out about our interest in a piece might beat us to it. We also worried that someone might speculate on an artist’s value increasing with a prominent commission. Then we thought, we don’t do a lot of direct purchases [of existing works] from artists or galleries and maybe it’s a good thing if artists make more money, so we opened them.”
Notice of when those meeting were to be held, however, remained scant.
Hodes took advantage of the fact that his office is near the Cultural Center, where the meetings are held, and where, two days prior to a meeting, notice was to be posted.
“Every day for three months I’d go to the building to look at the bulletin board. The guards got to know me. I never saw a posting. I know from the FOIAs I filed later that meetings were held during that time.”
In what may have been the first truly open meeting on April 23d, there was a sign that old habits die hard. The posted notice still identified it as a “private meeting.”
At that meeting, five members of the public showed up. A woman recently relocated to Chicago was interested because she had been on a similar committee in Seattle. A man named Stan was there because he thought it would be interesting. There was this reporter. There was Hodes. And there was Chicago artist Lois Keller, who came to see if she might garner some ideas on how to get commissions.
Lash chaired the April Public Art Committee meeting in Weisberg’s stead, as he often does. She was laid up with a broken foot.
There were 12 voting members in attendance, among them representatives from the Department of Transportation, the Public Building Commission, the Mayor’s Landscape Committee, the Park District, the Transit Authority, the Department of Aviation. Hodes says documents he has indicate that attendance is up since the meetings became public. Before the meeting began, Hodes took an information packet from a stack intended for committee members. Lash asked for it back, pointing out that it contained minutes of the previous meeting that had not yet been approved by the committee and, hence, were not official. Hodes objected, but — after a brief stare-down — relented. He was sent a copy later.
That was the dramatic highlight. The meeting itself saw a new committee member introduced, another new member selected. Two artworks, a painting and some large steel sculptures that were prospective donations from private parties, were rejected, as are most such offers. When the city accepts a work, it accepts as well what can be a costly commitment to keep and maintain that work forever. Such responsibility is deemed undesirable.
Two projects under the Percent for Art Ordinance, each involving two artists, were considered, and all four were given the go-ahead to prepare designs. Those artists were to return to the next meeting this month to make individual 15-minute presentations supporting their design proposals. Some issues of conservation were addressed. The fiscal report for 2001 was presented, and, after a few quick questions, passed. Some possible upcoming projects were discussed, including reconditioned cigarette vending machines, which, for $5, dispense small original art works.
Though several members representing city departments sat around the table, their questions focused on installation, site information, materials and costs rather than artistic merit. One of Hodes’ concerns was that people more concerned with asphalt road patches or airport noise abatement would be making the decisions about what art the public gets to see.
The committee has four art community representatives. One of them, art historian Rolf Achilles, didn’t attend that meeting but later noted, “Typically the department people offer their expertise, which generally doesn’t include artistic merit. They might ask if a piece would cause a traffic hazard or if the material it’s made of might not hold up, but they don’t discuss the quality of the work or the reputation of the artist. The discussions are a pretty democratic give and take.”
Also missing that day was Lynne Warren, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and another spot was vacant but filled at the meeting with artist Jacqueline Terrasa. That left quality issues to Daniel Schulman, a curator of contemporary and modern art at the Art Institute.
“When Rolf and Lynne are here, the discussion gets pretty lively, though not as frank as it was before the meetings were opened,” Lash notes, somewhat wistfully.
Another Hodes charge against the Public Art Program was that many pieces in the city’s collection have been lost. The most often cited example is that of “Chicago Rising from the Lake,” a three-ton bronze by an important artist, Milton Horn. The sculpture was created in 1954 to adorn a downtown city parking structure. It was removed from its site in 1983, when the structure was demolished.
Though the art was lost, that happened when the Public Art Program came under the department of Public Works, years before Weisberg’s and Lash’s watch.
In fact, Lash says, long lost art gives him an opportunity to experience one of the great rushes of his post, finding it.
“It’s totally elating — is that a word — when we find something,” he says, mentioning the Horn sculpture that was found in a Transportation Department dump on the southwest side. It is, he said, “a great, beautiful piece that now, $60,000 later, is up on the Columbus Street bridge.”
He noted also that, “We recently found two columns from the 1893 World’s Fair in the lake. They were whitewashed stucco, never intended to last and were just pushed into the water when the fair ended.”
Not long ago, Weisberg hired Timothy Samuelson away from the Chicago Historical Society to work in the Department of Cultural Affairs as city historian. Samuelson is building a database of all art that is or was in public spaces here, whether city-owned or not and no matter how or when it was acquired. He hopes to track down some pieces gone missing (corporate-owned pieces, for instance, sold and moved) so the database can hold that information.
When May 2001 rolled around, and the first-ever report of the fiscal life of the Public Art Program for the previous year was released, Hodes was surprised to find that full disclosure remained elusive.
The first thing that jumped to his attention from the report was the second entry under expenditures. It was headed Special Projects and it commanded $240,603, nearly as much as the $298,542 spent on art commissions and purchases. Hodes knew that the funds of the Percent for Art Program were supposed to be dedicated to commissions and purchases (minus the allowed 20 percent for administrative costs, which, on the statement for 2000, were $58,840). So what was Special Projects?
The statement didn’t say, so Hodes turned to his old friend, the FOIA. “They are supposed to answer in 7 days, but they usually stall,” he said. On June 1, Hodes got a letter from Andrew S. Mine, a senior counsel in the city’s law department.
“It is my understanding,” Mine wrote, “that the `Special Projects’ items reflect activities and transactions that involve public art generally (and thus serve the interests of the arts and the arts community) but fall outside the ambit of the Percent for Art Program, and that these funds were merely allocated temporarily from the Percent for Art funding stream for reasons of budgetary timing.”
Enclosed was a breakdown of items encompassed by Special Projects. They included: Conservation expenses, a translator for an art show catalog, travel and other staff expenses, hardware for a booth at Art Chicago, salaries in the Department of Tourism, rental of a forklift, and three expense items that especially galled Hodes.
“They spent almost $2,000 on business meals at Smith and Wollensky (an upscale downtown restaurant.) Hodes says. Lash would later note that these entertainments of local corporate leaders (including executives from the Swedish chain IKEA) brought many thousands of dollars worth of donations to city arts programs. “Beside the point,” Hodes says. “All the money is supposed to go to buy art.”
Shortly after the release of the 2000 statement and two Tribune articles critical of the program, Weisberg wrote a letter to the Tribune. Her letter defended the program, noting: “OBM (the city’s Office of Budget and Management) found that some expenditures were improperly coded, leaving the program’s books inaccurate and unclear.”
Lash has been criticized as being over his head in managing the finances of a program that has taken fiscal bounds during his decade in the job. An artist educated in art administration, Lash stepped into the director’s office during a time when many post-war municipal buildings needed replacement and a good economy allowed the city to replace them, thus adding funds to the Public Art Program.
In defense of his fiscal management, in a conference room in the offices of the Public Art Program, Lash opened the books, binders actually, in various colors. Black binders hold the percent for art projects.
“The records used to be in files in cabinets,” Lash says. “Keep in mind that, during my time here, we’ve changed offices four times. The system was in disarray. And the records we got from the days when the Department of Public Works ran the program were non-existent.”
In news stories about questionable Special Projects funding, Lash’s dry sense of humor did him no favors when it appeared in print. Kidding or not, he was quoted as saying, “It’s just like your own finances. Sometimes you have to borrow from your savings to cover your checking,” and “you have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.” He gave assurances that, in time, all the funds would be back where they belonged.
Hodes, of course, fumed over those statements, but he wasn’t alone. Surprisingly, there was smoke rising within the Department of Cultural Affairs.
“When I saw that Peter and Paul stuff, it made my skin crawl,” says Tim Thomas, Deputy Commissioner [for finance] of the Department of Cultural Affairs. Thomas had worked in the department since 1987 and was elevated by Weisberg last year to this new title, putting the financial affairs of the Public Art Project into his hands.
In his new job and in the wake of the flap over the program’s accounts, Thomas, who works closely with a representative of the OBM assigned to the Cultural Affairs Department, prepared a revised 2000 statement in which the category of Special Projects is gone. Where did it go? Of the $240,603 designated for Special Projects, General Administrative and Maintenance got $54,444 to raise that category’s total to $113,284, still within the 20 percent allowed (the total revenues were $589,479).That money covered expenses deemed appropriate to fulfilling the Percent for Art Ordinance, things like postal expenses, framing costs, photography, etc. The remaining $186,159 from Special Projects was added to the closing fund balance for the year. This money represents expenses deemed not to be legitimate under the ordinance. Those were things like travel expenses, entertaining, salaries (the salaries for Lash and a staff of six come from the city’s hotel tax). Conservation, $75,000, was removed from the Public Art Project in a planned shift to what now is a $150,000 line item in the city budget.
When the $186,159 was restored to the budget for art acquisition, those funds carried forward to Jan. 1, 2001, giving an opening fund balance of $1,665,832.
On May 2 of this year, the financial report for 2001 was released. It is a simpler, clearer document than the 2000 report. Revenues total $497,995. Subtract expenditures of $668,703 for purchases and commissions for a deficit for the year of $190,180. This figure is subtracted from the 2001 fund opening balance of $1,665,832 yielding $1,475,652 to carry into 2002.
Also clearly spelled out is how much of the pie local artists are getting. Of 47 projects, 30 went to Chicago artists, about 64 percent, which is 13 percent over the percentage demanded by the ordinance. These artists got $425,127.26 of the $668,703 spent for purchases and commissions, again about 64 percent.
“I can assure you,” Thomas says, “that the funds are back where they should be. Mike will be restricted to handling artwork, which is what he should be doing.”
The Cultural Affairs Department faxed Hodes a copy of the report the day it came out.
“I read it, and I was touched,” he says. “This is light-years ahead of anything they have done. Two years ago, you wouldn’t know anything. This is good. This is full disclosure.”
Though Hodes was satisfied that the funds for art are properly allocated and that local artists are getting their due, questions remain about the relationship of the city to its arts community. First, what is a local artist in an era of international and Internet sales?
“An alderman asked me how I defined a local artist,” Lash says. “I asked how long does someone have to live in the city to vote in municipal elections. He said, `three months.’ I said, `same for artists.'”
Asked if the term implied second-rate, Carol Becker at the School of the Art Institute, said it might. She noted that young artists could be expected to be confined to the local stage, “But what would you say about a 45-year-old artist who has not sold outside Chicago? Maybe if an artist can’t compete on a national or international level, that’s a wake-up call.”
She says that at some point in an artist’s career here, it’s time to court other markets. “There’s plenty of money here and collectors who buy emerging artists, but there also are a lot of collectors who won’t buy an artist until he or she is represented in New York. They’ll even fly to New York to buy a Chicago artist.”
Such flights are part of the reason that respected dealer Richard Feigan closed his gallery here in 1997 and now operates in New York.
“There are a number of internationally significant artists working in Chicago,” Feigan says. “It is not a creative backwater. It also has the money and the collectors. But the city doesn’t pay attention to what it has until the world pays attention.”
That international attention is what City Hall wants — for the prestige and the tourist dollars that a lovely, art-filled city can attract. The Department of Tourism estimated that Cows on Parade had a $200 million impact on the economy here, fueling high hopes for the future drawing power of Millennium Park studded with works by internationally known artists.
That’s what artists can do for the city. What can the city do for them?
Some say a lot more than it does now.
Paul Sierra, an artist known for canvases painted in vivid, tropical colors, testified in one of Hodes’ attempts to raise the percentage of ordinance-mandated projects going to Chicago artists.
“The art business is difficult in tough economic times, like a canary in a mine shaft,” he says. “The city has to do everything it can to keep artists here. The Art Institute graduates hundreds each year, but few stay here. They are going to New York and L.A.
“In addition to buying and commissioning art, the city could offer opportunities for live-in studio space [in fact, the city is considering subsidizing such spaces]. It could find a way to buy art supplies, which are very expensive, in volume and pass the savings to artists.”
Rakoncoy at the Chicago Artists Coalition agreed that the city can make a difference. “There was no city government program for the arts when we were founded 26 years ago,” she says. “Now the city is a large force in helping artists. When a city is good to its artists, art will thrive there.”
Ed Paschke is among the city’s best-known artists, with pieces in the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art here, the Brooklyn Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. After years of working in Chicago, he moved his studio to Evanston, though just the width of Howard Street out of the city limits. He was reached as he was leaving for a show in Paris.
“Every artist has to be based somewhere. If it’s here in Chicago, you tend to be pegged as a local artist, but most artists here would like to be perceived as playing on the international stage. I think the goal should be to get the best art, otherwise it’s a downward spiral. Set the bar high. If local artists can get over that bar, fine
“My concern about government funding of the arts is that it could become sort of a welfare state. Artists could develop a welfare mentality and never get off it. If government is to fund the arts, it has to be accountable. At the same time, any panel that tries to decide what is good art and what is bad will be criticized. Artists who are rejected will be critical. All the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts raises a question as to what extent does government support art and to what extent does it discourage it?”
Lash and others question the wisdom of fostering a local art community if it meant ignoring artists of global stature.
“If we were to become a purely regional collection,” he says, “if we became a cloistered community of artists, are we either expanding or elevating the possibilities for artists, even for local artists? Do we then lose our favored-nation status in the world art community? We certainly don’t want to do that.”
He says that, “No matter how much we spend, the Public Art Program won’t make a marked monetary difference in the lifestyle of artists. What we can do for them is that, by putting works before the public, people gain a respect for the arts.”
Lash has gotten slide submissions from overseas artists who have been to Chicago and marveled at vast visual treasure on view not just downtown but throughout the city. “Some of those artists have written notes,” he says. “They say, `I visited your city, and I have fallen in love.'”
Last month, Weisberg turned 77. “I’m not thinking of retiring,” she says. “My doctor said it would be fatal. I’ve been in government since 1983, longer than any job I’ve ever had. I’m not going anywhere.”
Hodes says, “I’d be happy to move on to other things. Maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll be an investigative reporter. Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping an eye on the department. There are a few things I’d like to clear up with some FOIAs.”
