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Chicago Tribune
May 2, 1993 Art out of bounds Sculpture welcomed with open spaces Author: Paula Lauer. Edition: FINAL EDITION Section: TEMPO NORTHWEST Page: 1 Index Terms: SUBURB ART INTERVIEW ANALYSIS Estimated printed pages: 8 Article Text: Mike Lash, Chicago's curator of public sculpture, calls the city's wealth of works a ``museum without walls.'' Indeed, the city's collection of public sculpture boasts almost 300 pieces of outdoor art, according to a recent inventory by the Chicago Park District. They range from religious statues and war memorials to contemporary works with titles such as ``I Will,'' ``Being Born'' and ``Flamingo'' that can be as esoteric as the pieces themselves. Although sometimes less celebrated, the story of outdoor sculpture is much the same in the northwest suburbs. Here, the pieces may be fewer and farther between, but they are no less significant to the locals who associate them with home. From the colorful, abstract lyricism of ``Tornado'' at One Schaumburg Place to the stony stare of Elgin's World War I Doughboy at Villa and Gifford Streets-his grenade was stolen years ago, but his spirit seems undaunted-to the small town pride associated with Harmilda the cow in the center of Harvard, these pieces also provide an instant identity, a heartbeat of history and a constant reminder of objects and events that form the fabric of a community's heritage. ``Whether people like or hate the Picasso or any sculpture in their neighborhood, the real objective is to open doors and avenues for exploration,'' curator Lash said, ``and that's what sculpture and public art does. It's a means of self discovery, and it offers opportunities for people to evaluate their own personal tastes.'' As Jerry Peart, a Chicago-based sculptor and the creator of ``Tornado'' pointed out, public art is also being championed by westward-moving corporations as a way to create an image and give something back to the community. One of Peart's earlier pieces, ``AbbraCadabra,'' a multicolored sculpture with a fan-like finger movement stretching to the sky, is nestled among the lakes, trees and jogging trails of The Levy Organization's Woodfield Lake office campus in Schaumburg. All told, the Woodfield Lake campus at 1000 Woodfield Road is home to five abstract sculptures. In addition to Peart's ``AbbraCadabra,'' there is ``Bridging and Branching'' by Richard Hunt, a huge silvery stretch of metal that echoes the natural landscapes as well as the man-made structures around it. A whimsical, geometrical and brightly colored weightlifter called ``Eddyfist'' was created by Chicago Imagist Karl Wirsum. ``Stars Arch'' by Mary Ann Davis features a black-and-purple striped arch, and an untitled piece is a gathering of assorted columns and platforms by Carolann Haggard. ``The entire development is designed to make people enjoy their workplace more and be more productive,'' said Larry Levy, chairman and CEO. ``We think the art is a definite enhancement for that. . . . The Peart is also furniture, and one of the funnest things for me is to see people eating lunch in the sculpture . . . the sculpture kind of envelops the people. I can tell you not everyone likes the sculptures, but they like having them there.'' Hunt, who maintains a studio in Chicago and a home in Ringwood in McHenry County, estimates he has some 20 pieces of outdoor sculpture scattered throughout the Chicagoland area. He sees public art as a way to provide a free, albeit subtle, art experience for the viewer. ``People can see outdoor sculpture without the kind of effort that's required of going to a gallery or a museum,'' Hunt said. ``They get used to it; they become sort of familiar with what sculpture does and is, so that whether they see other public sculpture or if they end up going to a museum, there's a degree of familiarity with art forms that develops from this daily exposure.'' Daily exposure is exactly what Martin Ryan, former dean of liberal arts and now an English professor at William Rainey Harper College, had in mind when he began in the early 1980s to amass a sculpture collection for the college's 200-acre campus at 1200 W. Algonquin Road in Palatine. ``The philosophy was to have art everywhere, so students had to react to it,'' said Ryan, during a personal tour of the collection one recent spring morning. ``Art has always been associated with civilization and learning and culture. To the extent that we expose our students to this, we expose them to one other element of sophistication and the world outside the school world.'' Pieces in Harper's outdoor collection of nine sculptures range from rough industrial-looking steel and concrete works such as ``Low Water Bridge 6'' by West Chicagoan Mike Bauer to an earthy environmental piece one art critic described as ``a primordial landscape'' by Gerard Singer of Paris, to more whimsical creations like the multicolored ``Steel Watercolor No. 69'' by Californian Fletcher Benton. ``I don't believe that art is an intellectual process,'' Benton said from his San Francisco studio. ``Art really isn't highfalutin. It's a very basic, primitive social need. For the artist, it's the childlike experience of doing it; art is a very childlike experience; it's special. Hopefully, the people who see a painting or sculpture will have a reaction, and that reaction is not intellectual, it's pretty basic.'' Moving on past ``Airslot VI,'' a thin, vertical, painted steel structure by San Francisco sculptor William Wareham, Ryan said the college owns a few of the pieces and others are on loan from the artists, all of whom are represented by major galleries around the country. According to Ryan, the collection is unmatched by any other community college in the U.S. in size and quality of works. Ryan pointed to a dark green tower off in the distance that looks like a mailbox on growth hormones. ``We won't walk all the way out there,'' he said, ``but two people can enter at each side, climb up a ladder and sit there and look out. Tom Stancliffe (the artist) calls it `Lessons in Diplomacy' because you must face each other when you're sitting in there. ``Different years, students either take to it or they don't,'' he added. ``One year they were leaving messages to each other.'' Ryan paused before an angular oak-and-walnut sculpture that, when given a gentle shove, spins like a lazy merry-go-round (students have been spotted riding it on more than a few occasions). ``From the art department's perspective, the fact that art is noticed and dealt with, that people have to react to it and so forth, that's part of the whole aesthetic, and it doesn't mean you have to like it, but that you deal with it,'' he said. ``The act of dealing with it and trying to relate to it in some way and understand it is in fact for some people what art is all about.'' Terry Karpowicz, Chicago sculptor and creator of the spinning wooden structure called ``From Time to Time,'' agreed, noting that sculpture is an art form that lends itself well to interaction with the viewer. ``If you want to enhance the piece with your energy, you can go up and spin it,'' he said of his piece, ``but it's also about an overall philosophy about getting involved. We've grown up learning `look but don't touch,' and I think that's permeated our society.'' Indeed, whether you embrace a piece of sculpture by playing on it, eating your lunch in it or just scratching your head and looking at it, sculptors agree outdoor sculpture offers a bridge between the art world and the rest of us and creates an environment that's ideal for creative thought, philosophical pondering or just daydreams. Of course, to do that in the northwest suburbs, you have to know where to find them. Here are a few more out-of-the-way favorites located throughout the northwest suburbs. ``Dual Orbit,'' another one of Karpowicz's pieces, is located in front of the employee entrance at Pioneer Screw and Nut, at 2700 York Road in Elk Grove Village. It was installed in the mid-1980s by Howard Hirsch, founder of the Hirsch Foundation, a not-for-profit arts organization, and owner of Pioneer at the time. Consisting of two eight-foot wood and steel rings that intertwine and rock, the sculpture ``is about two opposing energies that are combining,'' said Karpowicz. ``Howard Hirsch wanted to give his employees something to look at and think about, that this wasn't just a job, but it's also an education.'' ``People form opinions about art whether they know it or not,'' explained Hirsch. ``It just happens. Like advertising, we're not aware of it affecting us, but it does.'' A shiny abstract stainless steel piece called ``Bridge 1'' at The Moorings, a retirement community at 811 E. Central Road in Arlington Heights, was the winning piece for a contest in 1983 sponsored by Augustana Hospital in Chicago. When the hospital closed, president and CEO Robert Shaner, current vice president of Lutheran General Senior Services, moved it to its present location just inside the main entrance in 1991. According to Shaner, the sculptures in the contest were to either commemorate the 500th birthday of Martin Luther or represent a connection between healing and the church. ``He did both,'' Shaner said of the Kankakee-area sculptor, Ed McCollough. For Luther, his faith was a bridge, Shaner explained, and ``for people who are hurting, there needs to be a bridge to help them arrive at a new state of meaning or definition of purpose. ``The value of that piece in this setting is enormous in terms of meaning. One of our 80-plus-year-old residents told me, `This is so important for a retirement community because it indicates we are a people of the future.' '' ``A blessing of peace on the world'' is the underlying theme of ``Mary, Queen of Peace,'' a 12-foot shrine located behind St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church at 111 S. Hubbard in Algonquin. Created in 1989 by Arlington Heights sculptor Joseph Burlini, the image of the Virgin Mary floating above clouds is a representation of how she first appeared in 1981 to six children in Medjugorje, a small mountain village in former Yugoslavia. ``They told me the whole story of Medjugorje, and I came up with this idea of making something that was there but not there,'' Burlini recalled. Carved in Plexiglas and encased in a limestone shrine, the image is edge lit with white neon. ``Just the carving lights up, so she just appears there at night on these clouds,'' Burlini said. Burlini, whose work can be found in corporate collections across the country as well as in the homes of Studs Terkel, Mrs. Ray Kroc and Michael Jordan, has a few other works in the area including functioning clock sculptures for Arlington Heights and Rosemont, an 11-foot fountain of offset sweeping bronze planes at the Rosemont Expo center and an untitled 12-foot stainless steel abstract piece in front of Barrington High School that he created with the help of eight students in 1989. For fans of figurative works and historic statuary, rest assured not all the outdoor sculpture out there is abstract. According to Julie Hulvey, Illinois' project coordinator for Save Our Sculpture!, a national inventory and protection program sponsored by the National Museum of American Art and the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Properties, of the 600 or so outdoor sculptures found so far in Illinois, only about a third of them are abstract. ``There's something for everyone out there,'' she said from her Springfield office. ``No matter what kind of art you like, they are all artistic tributes to a particular period in time.'' Nancy Fike, director of the McHenry County Historic Museum in Union, said one type of tribute that became popular after the Civil War was monument building. ``Particularly popular were monuments for Lincoln and Grant,'' she said, ``and that carried over into small towns with soldier memorials.'' Fike pointed to Woodstock's Civil War memorial, which stands in the center of the town square as testimony. Created by Zoia monument company of Woodstock in 1909 and dedicated in November of that year, the monument was presented to Woodstock by the Women's Relief Corps as a memorial to McHenry County soldiers. Fike said there used to be four small cannons surrounding the 30-foot soldier statue, but they were replaced some time ago by concrete flower pots. ``Community sculpture can be seen as kind of a symbol of that community's identity, and also a sense of history and continuity,'' noted Hulvey. ``It's subjective, and that there can be humor in it is good; it doesn't all have to be the mayor from 1900 in the town square.'' Indeed. Take Algonquin's ``Shooting Star,'' the Indian princess perched atop the fountain adjacent to the Village Hall at 2 S. Main Street since 1935. On second thought, don't even try it. She was already stolen once (found later hanging from a construction crane), and, according to Deputy Village Clerk Sue Jolitz, the residents were not amused. The artist, Cary resident George Suchy, who died two years ago, created a similar fountain for Cary called ``Dazzle,'' which stands in the community park off U.S. Highway 14. ``I guess he just thought it would look good there, and it does,'' resident historian Betty Freeman said of the three-tiered piece. ``We have it going all summer.'' And then there's Harmilda. Donated by Jones Packing company in 1965, the slightly smaller-than-life-size cow in downtown Harvard has withstood assaults from Mother Nature, vandals and even IDOT's attempt to remove her as part of a road project. The town has since erected cow-crossing signs to warn motorists of her staunch presence. Mayor Robert Iftner says there's not much more to tell. ``I've been through the mill with the old gal,'' he said with a laugh. ``She's just a part of our community.'' Caption: PHOTO (color): ``Eddyfist,'' a whimsical sculpture by Chicago Imagist Karl Wirsum, is among the abstract works at the Levy Organization's Woodfield Lake office campus in Schaumburg. Tribune photo by Jim Prisching. PHOTO (color): Chicagoan Terry Karpowicz's ``From Time to Time'' graces Harper College in Palatine. Tribune photo by Jim Prisching. PHOTO (color): Though loosely artistic, Harvard's Harmilda has had impact. Tribune photo by Jerry Tomaselli. PHOTO: On the Harper College campus, an untitled work by Bill Gilbert features red cedar stretching 25 feet high. Tribune photos by Jim Prisching. PHOTO: Called ``Airslot VI,'' this painted steel piece by William Wareham is on the Harper campus PHOTOS 5 COPYRIGHT 1993, CHICAGO TRIBUNE Record Number: 05*02*0\93050000.993 |
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